05-22-2017, 12:47 PM
(05-22-2017, 11:20 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(05-20-2017, 02:09 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Gallup approval today (5-20):
37% approve, 56% disapprove.
Late in March he had approval ratings just below this, reaching 35% on March 28.
At this point, I question whether Trump support can get much lower. Figuring that 37% is a good estimate of how well he would fare in match-ups against Democratic challengers of average abilities as campaigners against him about three years from now at the start of the campaign season, and adding 6% on the assumption that he would be about as effective as the usual incumbent running for re-election in 'normal' times -- that is, no sudden economic downturn or international kerfluffle.
Appreciably beyond the 35% range of approval on the downside, people who support him might even be unable to see anything wrong with such wrongdoing as leaking classified data or with obstruction of justice so long as their Leader does it, barring something personally catastrophic.
That 30something% core are completely illiberal people. Some of them are totalitarians. These are people who are way more radical then those who simply react against the 60s and 70s. These are people who opine that the entire "Progressive" (e.g. classical Progressive stemming from 1900AD GOPers / Bull Moose / etc) program was evil, or more radically, that Western cultural development since the end of the Middle Ages was evil.
Anyone who wants a return to the Middle Ages, with the cultural staleness, the grinding poverty, the horrific wars, the economic subjection, the plagues, the superstition, the powerless of the masses against feudal lords, is insane. Anyone who wants a return to medieval norms of economics, culture, and social organization except with better technology might deserve the label 'fascist'.
Donald Trump is the most illiberal President since at least McKinley on economics. I'm not saying that he would return to Jim Crow norms of the South.
Modernity begins with the Renaissance, with which there is no obvious break. It's in the Renaissance that the art begins to look realistic enough for my taste (although I appreciate Greco-Roman sculpture for its realism and Chinese painting for its two-dimensional delicacy). The medieval stuff is amateurish by contrast. It took the Protestant Reformation to shake up the complacency about morals and political reality. I'll take the pointillistic painting of Georges Seurat to the medieval arguments on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
(Really -- do angels exist? Do they dance? Are they material enough that they would be able to treat the head of a pin as a surface? Who cares?)
As far as that goes, the concept "Make America Great Again" is reactionary in the sense of suggesting that something noble has been lost. All that I see worse about America since the 1920s is that America is more crowded and that real estate is much more expensive in real terms. But go back to the era of 120 years ago -- I don't want elixirs of opiates and liquor sold as alternatives to seeing a physician. I don't want children then seen as trash (then Irish-Americans, largely) being run over by trolleys. I don't want black people being consigned to conditions reminiscent of serfdom. I don't want children drinking booze or toiling in mines and factories. The forty-year lifespan and seventy-hour workweek for workingmen as a norm is something to avoid -- not to recover.
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.