03-12-2021, 10:12 AM
(03-12-2021, 07:37 AM)HealthyDebate Wrote: Trump's legacy: A more divided America, a more unsettled world
https://ph.news.yahoo.com/analysis-trump...48500.html
So the American Right has learned that Big Government can serve it as an enforcer of abuse of working people and a conduit for easy profits from war, repression, and sweetheart deals. At the least the old small-government types who pushed austerity fostered thrift that creates genuine wealth and promoted self-reliance. The newer sorts of right-wingers, Dubya with kitten-like steps and Trump with cougar-like steps, offer the worst of both worlds. The tiger-like steps are by someone like Benito Mussolini, who proclaimed that the twentieth century would be the age of Big Government.
It's one way or the other: a government that goes into the background and lets the markets perform its miracles or a government that serves as a welfare state that smooths the gaps between deprivation and crass indulgence of economic elites.
Trump causes me to miss the old liberal-conservative debate. It is now a debate between fascists and liberals. Donald Trump is neither a conservative nor a free-market advocate: he is a full-blown corporatist.
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.