(01-28-2017, 07:52 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: What happened to those Trump rallies in Chicago and San Jose? Who shot those cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge? How many people were arrested in those DC protests just past? How about violence associated with some of the BLM protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere?
I agree that that sort of thing is foolish and counterproductive (and in some cases downright evil), just as the Weathermen, Eldridge Cleaver, and the like were back in their day. That doesn't mean they don't happen.
The US government is pretty good at riddling radical movements with informants and provocateurs, and there is yet little real desire among the mass of people for violent revolution. So I agree that things will ultimately be decided at the ballot box.
Trump and the Republicans just won a major battle. In remains to be seen whether they can consolidate their position, and how the left responds.
He will find it far easier to implement his plutocratic agenda than what he won on -- his populist appeal. Indeed it will be far easier, ironically, for this godless man to implement the fundamentalist agenda of the VP.
It will not make him more popular. It could cause many of the sorts of people who might have voted for Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton but also Donald Trump to reassess whether they are in line with the GOP. Democrats need to quit looking down upon the folk culture of disadvantaged white people in the Mountain and Deep South; that culture is as valid as, for example, Japanese-American culture or the culture of Ashkenazim.
Addendum: Americans seem to loathe political chaos.
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.