07-16-2022, 08:46 AM
Republicans need to ditch Donald Trump the person, the ideology, and the attitude. This 4T will soon be over, and Americans will have a taste for the politics of the Mature Reactive (Washington, J. Adams, Grant, Cleveland, Truman, Eisenhower, Obama) that exercises cautious pragmatism. Obama showed the style during a 4T, and it is effective in a Crisis. The style is better for defusing danger than for finishing it off, but sometimes defusing a bad situation is best. Putting an end to the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression may have saved much grief in America... and elsewhere. If you wish to know what an "immature Reactive" is, then think of the fellow that Germany ended up with because the Great Depression overpowered the shaky institutions of the Weimar Republic. Think also of most of Hitler's henchmen in Germany and most of the puppet leaders in the Nazi Empire, Stalin's brutal enforcers and post-WWII puppets, and Capone-era gangsters. Most are egocentric, intellectually-hollow, amoral figures clinging onto early resentments into and through midlife. Adding Heinrich Himmler (Reichsfuhrer of the SS) and propaganda chief Josef Goebbels who committed suicide rather than face Allied retribution, Otto Pohl (head of the economic office of the concentration camps and of a slavery that makes all other slavery look gentle by contrast) -- he was not caught until the Nuremberg Trials were well underway but ended up dying for his monstrous crimes, the Minister of (In)justice Otto Thierack (suicide), and "hanging judge" Roland Freisler (killed in an air raid) who among other things participated with 'legal' advice for the Wannsee Conference that decided how Jews would be exterminated, and nine of twelve men convicted of major war crimes at the main Nuremberg tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging you have a general illustration of one manifestation of the Immature Reactive at its worst.
The Mature Reactive is conventional, cautious, and pragmatic. That is Obama, and that is the sort of leader that America usually gets during a 1T. It may not be as visionary as the Idealist dream of a Lincoln or FDR, but is adequately moral.
I have described the assassination of Osama bin Laden as an "underworld hit" in style. That is all that would have worked, and even if Obama seems to have the temperament of a rackets-busting prosecutor or no-nonsense (Do the crime and do the time!) judge, he could learn something from Chicago gangsters that he despised and use it against the worst terrorist of all time.
The Mature Reactive is conventional, cautious, and pragmatic. That is Obama, and that is the sort of leader that America usually gets during a 1T. It may not be as visionary as the Idealist dream of a Lincoln or FDR, but is adequately moral.
I have described the assassination of Osama bin Laden as an "underworld hit" in style. That is all that would have worked, and even if Obama seems to have the temperament of a rackets-busting prosecutor or no-nonsense (Do the crime and do the time!) judge, he could learn something from Chicago gangsters that he despised and use it against the worst terrorist of all time.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.