Why Donald Trump Got Elected

[JasonBlack]

(03-18-2022, 01:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(03-17-2022, 09:08 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(03-17-2022, 05:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(03-13-2022, 09:10 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: fwiw, I did not vote for him either time (in 2020 for example, I voted for Edward Snowden), but the vast majority of anyone to the left of Ted Cruise seems completely out of touch with why the American public voted him in. 

The reason is glaringly obvious: we need something to feel good about. It's true that any intellectually honest, independent thinking person should be able to look the problems of their country in the face, it's true that that we have some major issues that we can no longer continue to ignore, and it's true that deriving your entire self-worth from some sort of ethno-collectivist identity is kinda pathetic. Nonetheless, the simple truth is that you need to boost morale in order to get through a crisis, and at the moment we don't have that. Instead, we've been 
- spitting on masculinity for the better part of 30 years
- guilt tripping parents over concerns for overpopulation (actually, even before that. lots of Xers are justifiably salty over a childhood where they were treated like carbon machines of whom less should have been born)
- guilt tripping normal Americans for their "materialistic western lifestyle" for something as innocuous as driving to work. not all of us want cheaper oil so we can afford another voyage around the world in our yacht.
- focusing only on how we enslaved free people rather than how we freed enslaved people. we need to focus on both, not just one or the other.
- telling people they're "racist Nazis" for being nationalistic or patriotic 
- talking about who "greedy and selfish" it is to have any ambition past having enough to be barely comfortable. 

Seriously, everyone talks about all this "compassion" this, "empathy" that, but....no one actually shows any. 90% of the time, when you hear this term being thrown around, it's done in a bitchy, condescending tone and used to browbeat people with legitimate self-interests into shutting up because they aren't the hot cause at the moment (ex: as a gay millennial, it's hilarious to watch people from around my graduating class admonish people over absurd claims of "homophobia", after being a largely homophobic generation themselves until only a decade or so ago).

Does anyone unironically think sanctimonious college students, soccer moms and vegans are going to get us out of a crisis era? Where is the motivation? Where is the vigor, the pride, the confident pursuit of victory? Say what you will about Donald Trump, he was willing to offer these. Sure, he was cocky, braggadocios, crude, etc, but if you pay attention to his more important speeches, most of them were about reminding Americans about what we have done well, what we can continue to achieve (and yes, he includes several example of blacks, hispanics, immigrants, etc. not just WASP from the ol' boy's club). 


I'm not asking for a return to the naïve days where people glorified war and impulsively charged into battle over causes they knew nothing about. That kind of unbridled emotionalism is not what we need right now. What we do need, desperately, is leadership that can boost our morale and restore some feeling of power and vitality. At this point, I don't know who it's going to be, but there is a reason America has never made it through a 4th turning without a Grey Champion, and the longer we put off looking for one who has the necessary constitution, the worse off we will be.

Donald Trump has a horoscope score of 9-4.

https://philosopherswheel.com/presidenti...ScoredWhat

Considering the score of her opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, 7-12 with (I think) Jupiter rising (J) which can confer maybe 5-10 extra points, Hillary was fairly easy to beat, considering our electoral college system which currently provides an advantage for small, rural, conservative states and disenfranchises larger liberal ones. But Joe was equal or superior to him as a candidate.

Your male worship and capitalist/money-making orientation is not likely to lead us to who would be a suitable president in our crisis era. But not everything you mentioned is wrong, in my opinion. We do need a leader who can make us feel good about ourselves, and not always focus on how bad things are or have been, but offers hope and a pathway, and gives the impression of being a strong, confident and capable leader. The college students, soccor moms and vegans can be part of his or her support team, but no-one is expecting one of them to run for president anytime soon. Trump by the way also focused too much on how bad things were, and that made him vulnerable to defeat by a genial guy who touted American greatness and abilities (Joe Biden).

Thes traits do not necessarily mean a macho leader like Reagan, necessarily, or even the Bush's (who were actually better athletes than even lifeguard Reagan), because Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were enormously-talented candidates and good leaders who were not of the macho Republican brand, but were very articulate speakers and had hipness/cool, gentle confidence, great smarts, geniality and likability, and who also had very high horoscope scores--- as did Reagan and the Bush's.

What you call "worship of masculinity" is actually much closer to "equality" than what we've seen in the previous decades. It's just that we are fish swimming in the waters of feminism to the extent we cannot recognize it for what it is. Likewise, "giving us something to feel good about" doesn't mean telling us we're doing correctly what we're actually doing wrong. That's called delusion, and precisely what 4Ts are there to cure us of via the school of hard knocks. What we need is something motivating to rally behind, to inspire confidence, triumph, and a tendency to look out for our own rather than everyone else but ourselves.

Quite the opposite of your last sentence is what we need. We need confidence that we can accomplish things for each other, through our institutions again as well as in our communities. We've had 40 years of individualism; during the 3T I think that has not been in balance. Neoliberal dominance has been extreme for 40 years. We need much less of it, not more. In 4T we are supposed to recover our ability to function as a nation collectively and care for others. Obama spoke about that, but did not really fully switch us to the 4T track. I agree that feeling good is not feeling what we are doing wrong is OK. There's a long list I have already mentioned to you of what is needed. Biden is pretty good at reminding people that we can meet the challenges, even though he has missed some big chances to anticipate problems recently that has brought his approval rating down. But for Trump to have the highest approval rating (about 43%) of any of the main public figures, I diagnose as severe mental illness in our society. We desperately need a cure, but it's hard to conceive how it can happen now. The challenges are getting more severe though every year, and opposing a common enemy or set of enemies and challenges is easier to rally around.

you may have missed my point. "looking out for our own" means looking out for our country as opposed to fixated on global politics, not looking out for only our close kin and ignoring the rest of society. And we come full circle: in order to get people to look out fore the country overall, we need to promote a positive self-image that...actually gets people to want to give a shit in the first place. If you don't start by facilitating a gut-level nationalism and positive association with one's country, the actual work of bringing people together and making things better won't happen because people will have no motivation to start in the first place.

Quote:To have the main genders in balance in culture and society is always best. I don't observe that women are dominant, as you do. You may have some personal problems with women, but that's not my business. You also admitted that you are gay. This may also affect your views. I consider the categories of LGBTQ as new gender categories. The diametrical opposition of extreme M and F is not so clear as it was 50-100 years ago. That takes some getting used to, but we need to cultivate respect for all genders and all categories of people.

cultivating respect for different types of people is completely different than fixating on every civil rights issue like it's a crisis. I think transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they want and black people should be allowed to wear their natural, wiry hair to work, that doesn't mean either of those issues remotely resemble the urgent, big picture issues we need to be trying to tackle. the problem isn't that we over-value civil rights, but that we put so much energy into the most pedantic and myopic aspects of them.

in any event, masculine/feminine polarity does not simply go away because of political fads. they are parts of nature. are there naturally masculine women and feminine men? of course there are, and that's none of my business. the point is that we shouldn't be trying to squash the natural average differences between men and women into an unnaturally androgynous society. we need both masculinity and femininity, and at times, we need the extremes of both.

Quote:You may have some personal problems with women, but that's not my business

I have no problems with human beings with XX chromosomes. I have serious problems with feminists and their repressive views, demeanor and actions. As a millennial, one of the reasons I know contempt for them is legitimate is the number of liberal friends I have who have switched to some right wing ideology on account of being mistreated by millennial feminists. We all have biases, and you are perfectly justified in doubting my conclusions based on what biases are, but it's a different story when multiple people end up condemning a certain ideology in spite of a bias of wanting to be in favor of it. Observational patterns agreed upon by multiple people of wide ranging ideologies have a credibility not present in points made by party-toing pundits with no incentive to question their beliefs.