01-01-2020, 04:49 PM
(01-01-2020, 12:02 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-01-2020, 09:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...But Donald Trump has expressed his values well when he said "I love low-information voters" without recognizing a problem in such.
There is a big difference between American and European racism. We are bad enough. Preventing Chinese women from immigration, pushing Native Americans onto reservations whenever lands promised forever are discovered to hold valued resources, the traditional slavery and lynching of blacks, or the idea that no Irish need apply gives the US little excuse to call itself a city on a hill.
But the Europeans would build gas chambers, or ruffle an area’s entire population off to Siberia in order to make room for more approved populations. We go retail. They wait until a war can be declared then step in with government scale efficiency. This makes calling a Democrat a communist or a Republican a Communist inappropriate.
The difference between us and the Germans in the last Crisis is that the 1915 Klan never took national power. The hatreds of the Klan and the Nazis were much the same, and I can easily imagine a Klan-dominated America setting up concentration camps complete with gas chambers. It is telling that some Germans established their own KKK.... and they disbanded it. All of the members became Nazis.
After the Second World War, many of the KKK were WWII veterans, and they wanted nothing to do with Germany. They still hated blacks and Jews, but they had no tolerance for anything exotic -- even German. Once the WWII veterans started to die off, some Klansmen started adopting Nazi stuff, including swastikas and Nazi racial theories. There is a group called "Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". Malign intentions get evil results. We are just lucky that the Klan imploded before the Great Depression began.
Trump may have coined the phrase Fake News. He did not originate the concept of the political lie, of vastly exaggerating what people want to believe in order to achieve a political end. The mislabeling of the red and blue ideas is far older than Trump’s interest in politics.
Quote:But he seems to be a fast learner. He uses falsehood to demonize the other culture. He makes active use of one culture’s readiness to hate the other rather than understand how and why the differences exist. We used to have to do that, to demonize the enemy, to justify the organized murder of other peoples.
Fast learner? Trump is a pathological liar on other things, and for a habitual liar like Trump (the real estate business is full of the hard-sell type whose truthfulness is always in question) who believes in nothing but himself, his image, his economic gain, and his personal indulgence, a convenient lie is preferable to an uncomfortable or counter-intuitive truth. Trump is no deep thinker; he never has been. People do not need to do careful analysis to see fault in other classes, ethnic groups, and religions. Indeed, the more intellectually cautious one is the less likely one is to become a bigot or even to think that bigotry has a desirable result.
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That is what we have to grow beyond. That is one of the memes that we have to build up, a respect for the truth, a readiness to understand. In the Industrial Age, wars were necessary to transform the culture. Nukes and trust in democracy has begun to make the crisis war obsolete. But for the trust in democracy to work we have to learn to respect other cultures and people, to cease the temptation to try to export our cultures by force. There are reasons cultures exist. It is expected that they will be stubborn, that they will not change. We have to have less reason to hate, less need to cling to the past, less need to force unnecessary cultural change, and a great deal more listening and respect.
If you have ever read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer , then you will have seen that extremist ideologies compete for the same character, one extant in all cultures: someone intellectually and morally empty, rich in grievances but unlikely to show solidarity with the victims, utterly ruthless yet desperately in search of a cause. The more vicious the cause the more attractive it is. ISIS attracted recent members of the thuggish cause of secular, totalitarian Ba'athism of Saddam Hussein... and neo-Nazis.
Nukes may have made the Crisis war obsolete. Another factor is the absolute monarch who could start a war over a personal affront (as long as Wilhelm II faced a system with enough democracy to keep him from doing something really stupid, there would be no war, but once he eliminated such constraints, World War I was possible, and it began because of monarchs waging war out of personal anger); that is largely over.
...There is no single American culture, and anyone who proclaims the supremacy of his culture against another finds himself with strong opposition. There is more gain to be had by marketing a culture, most likely in cuisine or music, and that mandates some respect for the cultures of others. We have much assimilation, and not all of it goes toward the once-dominant WASP culture of any region of American. Note well: Mexican-Americans can assimilate WASPs. Most of us end up picking and choosing, but we also drop things that are difficult and absurd.
Trump did badly among every non-Anglo ethnic group except perhaps for Cuban-Americans of the flight from Castro and their progeny. Economic assimilation did not help Trump win votes among any non-white or Hispanic group other than aforesaid Cuban-Americans. It may be that Trump better fits one ethnic pattern over all others... but that that was not enough to achieve even a plurality of the popular vote.
Trump is a cruel man, and cruelty is the purest fount of evil that has ever existed. Greed at least encourages people to invest, to develop rare skills, to work horrible jobs that simply pay a little more, and to work second jobs. The sex drive creates profits for the floral and jewelry businesses which would disintegrate without the romantic element in life. Envy drives the acquisitive impulse that makes a consumer society possible, and I would rather have a consumer society than any feudal or socialist alternative. Take away narcissism and both elective politics and the entertainment industry would all but vanish. Gluttony is not so much eating too many potatoes as it is eating overpriced stuff these days. Wrath was an appropriate response to the Pear Harbor attack and 9/11. When cruelty and opportunity meet, Hell breaks loose of its usual constraints, including our assumptions of civilized decency.
Americans need to grow up some in their politics... but Donald Trump has appealed more to the worst in human nature. Getting away with bad deeds is not competence; it is luck. Luck is not a tangible quality to be earned, bought, or sold.
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.