09-15-2016, 01:19 AM
(09-14-2016, 01:10 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(09-14-2016, 12:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Even if Donald Trump isn't a bigot, he can't see anything wrong with his voters being bigots.
It is time for Republicans to recognize that Barack Obama is a well-meaning American... sure, he could be wrong, but he has not sold out. They need to recognize that Islam is not the enemy, but that psychopathic leadership in Daesh and the Syrian government are. We might as well condemn the Korean people (including South Koreans) for the North Korean government as blame ISIS upon Islam.
Donald Trump will be a horrible leader because he lacks the guts to tell people the inconvenient, unpleasant truth. Does anyone think that Abraham Lincoln told Americans that the Civil War would be easy? Does anyone think that Sir Winston Churchill won the Battle of Britain by sugar-coating the reality of the Nazi menace? Lincoln and Churchill were honest. The war is not over until the shooting stops. I contrast Benito Mussolini who claimed that his personality would itself insure victory and of course Adolf Hitler who said that the 'racial' superiority of the German people would bring victory.
We are in a Crisis Era. Even if we evade a major war we will have a need for huge changes in the way that we do things as a nation. We will need major reforms of our political order just to sew shut the seams in our Constitutional system of government, seams that ruthless people have seen fit to exploit.
We can end up with our democracy gutted, with the effective government by lobbyists that we now have made even more rigorous and intractable. I question whether our democratic tradition will survive Donald Trump. Sure, there will be elections and a two-Party system... but one side will have every advantage where it counts.
Do we get our new Birth of Freedom, as Lincoln promised in his Gettysburg Address, or do we get an economic order in which the secret to success is to be born into or marry into the right family, and a political system that represnets wealth and economic power instead of the People?
It's our choice this year. That is one possible explanation of the word "Crisis".
This will be a Total War 4T (at least the latter portion). The enemies of egalitarianism and freedom have deemed the US and our allies to be "The Great Satan." I use this term not in the restrictive sense of Revolutionary Iran. I use it to characterize the attitude of all fiends arrayed against us. Even if we dropped the "neocon" stuff that Rags and some others here have hairs up their butts about, it wouldn't matter. The enemies of egalitarianism and freedom will still hate us. They hate us for being us. They hate us for our NGOs. They hate us for promoting the original vision of the UN. They hate us for promoting the vision of a future world in which all peoples are given universal human rights, in which we have a pluralistic egalitarian framework. A world of rule of law.
Our enemies hate such a future vision. They seek the old concept of a carve up into spheres of influence. They seek demolition of concepts of right of free passage, the Law of the Sea, of just international law. We see it in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, Crimea, Donbas, parts of the Middle East, and who knows where next. This cannot be resolved through negotiation, the two sides have irreconcilable differences. For our enemies, the only way forward, and, the master plan, is liquidation of us (at least, liquidation of our institutions and current governing structures). We will have no choice but to fight for our lives.
We have plenty of enemies of freedom right here in the Good Old U.S. of A, as the Trump campaign so manifestly shows. Demagogues with as wide support as Trump has indicate serious weaknesses in the fundamental decencies that underpin a workable democracy. Are we truly a democracy? Not when the lobbyists really control both Houses of Congress -- and most state legislatures. It's not that I dislike the result; almost every issue is split 53-47 with little overlap on big issues.
Corporate America seems to act as if no human suffering is in excess so long as such turns a profit or enforces its dominion. Groups like the John Birch Society that used to be jokes for their reactionary ideology are just as crazy today -- but they are now in the mainstream! We need to remember that the economic elites of America see themselves as our benefactors and so that they can best take care of us they need to get everything that they want. Sure. Slave-owning planters saw themselves as benefactors to the slaves that they exploited, and expected other Americans to so see them.
Democracy as envisioned by the Founding Fathers depended upon people operating upo0n the principle of 'enlightened self interest' (well, they did miss slavery and women's rights, but we eventually solved those) ... millions of Americans lack the 'enlightened' part and probably have no idea of what their self interest is. White people living in places that will surely be inundated in the American South vote for politicians who tell them that global warming isn't happening and will be of no harm if it happens.
Above all, democracy is incompatible with political violence, much of which occurs at Trump rallies. Show opposition to Donald Trump and you may be beaten. If Donald Trump should be elected, that lesson might be extended beyond rallies for the President.
Just imagine how nasty an America with Donald Trump and Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress will look, especially from some dreary hick town in which I will almost certainly be a prisoner of poverty. I see no quick fix for that. Nothing would make me happier in the wake of a full consolidation of power by the Republican Party this November than a terminal diagnosis from a physician.
May God have mercy upon my soul. Plutocracy certainly has shown none.
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.