Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[pbrower2a]

(10-07-2022, 04:10 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(10-07-2022, 11:47 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I laugh about you guys and the Left's obsession with Trump all the time.

For me the conflict is more about ideas than a person, but Trump’s and the conservative policy exemplify the wrong ideas.  At the highest level, the wrong sort of people seek to control others.  The opposite is obviously independence from that control, as exemplified be equality and freedom.

The issues?  Abortion, in not having the religious enforce their belief on those with different values.  Racism.  Criminality.  Containment.  Elites.  None of these issues are particularly new, invented by Trump, or apt to disappear with Trump.  But he sure makes a nice symbol of what has been perpetually wrong with America, has been wrong since the founder’s time.  He has sure tried to take various aspects of the conservative movement down the wrong path.  I consider taking down Trump as less important than taking down the wrong parts of America.

The good part I suppose is giving the crisis a focus.  By being the obvious ideal of what is wrong, it makes true Americans ready to move to what is correct.

It's Trumpism that must die. Trump believes in nothing other than himself. He would offer boilerplate liberalism if it got him elected. The problem is that  liberals are fussy about morality and ideological consistency and moral conduct. Right-wing authoritarians are not. 

Paraphrasing Bob Altmeyer on right-wing authoritarians and their tolerance for people who tell them what they want to hear yet have done evil:

Suppose you are a slime-ball politician with far more ambition than conviction. You plotted and participated in a coup against the democratically-elected government of the second-largest subdivision (by population) in your country. So what do you do? You offer a law-and-order campaign in which miscreants and pariahs are to be punished severely for national hardships. You align yourself with people delighted to strip freedom from others who resist your beloved near-monopoly and super-cheap labor. You appeal to nationalist resentments and seek to restore a former glory. 

Here is the slime-ball politician:


     

Yes, Hitler was an extreme example of a right-wing authoritarian, a cruel and unprincipled opportunist, and we know his worst from his deeds as Fuehrer. Once in power he committed his country to monumental risks, severe and pointless injustice, and extreme suffering on behalf of his glorification in historical achievements.  

In setting up an experiment to see how right-wing authoritarians (RWA)  behaved, so that it wasn't simply an assessment of a few pathological figures of history Altmeyer set up a Risk-like game in which players exposed their character in simulations of international policies. The non-RWA solved their problems with calm and moderate diplomacy. With some of the RWA players one had nuclear blackmail that culminated in nuclear war. RWA types have an extreme "us and them" view of the world.

Someone like me might resolve the threat of global warming with worldwide ZPG, reformed policies of land use and heavy taxes on energy use. I have no desire to consign tens of millions of Bangladeshi peasant farmers to inundation or to let southeastern Europe go from rich grain country (like central Illinois) to   not-so-rich rangeland with a huge reduction of the world's crop production. I recognize politics as give-and-take. As I see it there is no techno-fix for mass hunger; all the technological wonders and cultural richness of our world mean nothing to those starving to death.  

I wonder what Classic X'er thinks of this.