(09-03-2016, 05:09 PM)Einzige Wrote: All I'm proposing is that Trump might pull out a surprise nailbiter, flail around in office for four years and get punted by a True Progressive like a Republican Jimmy Carter. The 2020 election would then be the climax, with everything else a descending action. Vóila, James II/Glorious Revolution analogue.
He would fail catastrophically as President and create an opening for someone even worse -- maybe someone unafraid to say that blacks are subhuman, that Jews are a conspiracy for world domination, and that America needs a war with Islam to settle things once and for all. I can see Donald Trump so bumbling in economic stewardship that America finds itself in an economic meltdown that begins like that of 2007-2009 and festers into one like the one beginning in the autumn of 1929. Meanwhile his people have ensured that no liberal solutions are possible even through the electoral process, so people must turn to extreme-right solutions. If people dislike having to work to exhaustion for near-starvation pay, then it is their fault that they dislike it, and they might as well be sent to a 'corrective' labor camp for readjustment of their attitudes.
By the way -- the first year and a half of the 1929-1933 meltdown and the year-and-a-half meltdown beginning in the autumn of 2007 were at the same point about a year and a half later.
Donald Trump has introduced a sickness into American political discourse, an equivalent of syphilis that can appear once as an inconvenient but survivable illness but that then re-emerges to do even greater harm. I was tempted to say venom, but once one is cured of the venom from a snakebite that has not caused gangrene or necrosis one has no recurrences of the envenomation.
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.