(07-28-2016, 07:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-28-2016, 12:43 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: The same basic meme that still holds true today, despite all the liberal memes that place government, it's bureaucrats and their knowledge above all else. The same liberal memes that lent to rise folks like Hitler and the Nazi's who supported him, reinforced the power of Stalin and the Bolshevik's who supported him and a former King of Great Britain and the aristocracy that supported him. America doesn't work that way.
Hmm... We're dancing with Goodwin here. I don't know that this election or any election ought to be framed by the question... "Which candidate is more like Hitler?"
Considering that Donald Trump has made a thinly-veiled reference to something that Hillary Clinton does not have (a penis)...
I once discussed the superficial similarities of some of Adolf Hitler's nemeses and antitheses.
Abraham Lincoln wrote much about politics. So do I.
Sir Winston Churchill painted (and he was apparently good at it). So do I, even if I am not yet good at it.
FDR and Harry S. Truman were very affectionate toward dogs. So am I.
David Ben-Gurion was very much a patriot. So am I at times.
Many of the July 20 plotters, and many of the Jews that he exterminated, loved classical music, as I do.
Dwight Eisenhower had much origin in German-speaking countries and advocated superhighways. (I'm about half German and Swiss and I would like to see some Blood Alleys replaced).
Mohandas Gandhi was a vegetarian, as (really a myth) was Hitler. OK, I'm not a vegetarian.
Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Vaclav Havel were spell-binding speakers who got in trouble with the law for their politics. (OK, I have never been in trouble with the law for anything other than traffic-law violations, and I am a very bland speaker).
So I don't smoke, and Hitler didn't either...
Am I like Hitler? Let me count the ways...
Quote:I see Hitler and the other dictators you mention as the (hopefully) last great examples of Agricultural Age thinking. Before democracy made its comeback with the Enlightenment, the best times for the cultures that had good times came with really strong rulers... Fill-in-the-blank the Great. Only if you had someone who could really intimidate everyone else within the culture into submission could one wield the full and effective force of one's people, one's nation. During the Agricultural Age, use of military force to acquire territory was pretty much cost effective... at least for the winners. When agriculture is the driving force in the economy, more land is more power. The sort of strong men that might acquire more land and power strove to do so. Stalin, Saddam and now Assad and ISIS still embrace this meme... only a dominant personality who can successfully bully and intimidate can achieve enough power to absolutely control a country and then expand it.
Add the Kim dynasty in the odd merger of absolute monarchy with Marxism in the alleged Democratic People's Republic of Korea (it is one of the least democratic political orders in the world, it does not serve the Korean people well, and it is no Republic)...
The world is now too small for their type.
Quote:The Enlightenment and Industrial values work for the benefit of the common man. Autocratic demagogues are viewed as dangerous threats rather than being considered great. One wants balance of power to check the demagog rather than seeking out the strong man. One gets power by helping the common man and hoping the common man approves enough to vote one back into power. The Whig tradition that shifted into the progressive tradition still tries to embrace this approach.
Modernity in culture begins with the Renaissance, modernity in thought begins with the Enlightenment, and real modernity in economics begins when capitalists recognize that working people need a stake in the system. An attempt to bring back the labor-management relations associated with Henry Clay Frick is a reversion to the Marxist stereotype of early-industrial capitalism that few people want. The privileged elites of contemporary America might want it just as the industrialists and financiers of the doomed Weimar Republic wanted (and got!) such a reversion... tough luck to them!
Quote:Anyway, Hillary isn’t the candidate who endorses Saddam, Putin and Assad. She doesn’t endorse Autocratic Age tyranny and intimidation. From the way I look at the conflict between Industrial and Agricultural Age values, it is Trump who is trying to embrace the old ways represented by Hitler and his ilk, and Hillary who is trying to continue the Whig tradition of government working for the common man.
A basic rule in life: even if one can deal with flawed people one cannot deal with pure evil except through overpowering force. One cannot deal with the Devil (metaphoric or theological) without becoming ethically soiled.
Quote:(07-28-2016, 12:43 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You and any other lib who believes they know what's best for all of us or a larger segment of us or their so-called own better rethink your importance beyond yourself or your own so to speak. Whether Trump wins or looses doesn't matter, Trump is now a powerful voice that will hamper Hillary from day one. A voice that Hillary can't control. A voice that will rip on her and weaken her every day she's in office. A voice that will give way to a stronger voice and equally committed voice reminding Democrats that they used to represent the workingman. Whether you realize it or not, the Democrats lost the working man to the Republicans in this election cycle. A trend that will continue to grow in the future.
Somebody lost something all right. To my mind, the Republican establishment lost the Republican base. For years the Republican base has been told that the government is corrupt and inefficient, that you can’t trust politicians. They’ve got so cynical and disillusioned that they have come to recognize that Republican politicians are politicians.
The Republicans abandoned rationality to cultivate the votes of the most gullible and least-sophisticated of voters. In doing so they offended and old part of their coalition, the successful and well-educated people who distrust superstition, bigotry, unreason, and ignorance. One's level of formal education was once a good proxy for Republican voting. That's over. That proxy worked for Dwight Eisenhower -- and Barack Obama. Should the High Plains states reject Donald Trump in November, then the electoral map for Hillary Clinton will look like an Eisenhower victory.
Quote:The emphasis at the Democratic convention is on how Hillary has tried to help people, tried and to a great degree succeeded. The girl in a wheelchair who couldn’t get an education. The parent who couldn’t get health insurance, who knew a major health problem would bankrupt his family and shorten a family member’s life. The black deep south families who saw tax breaks going to segregated schools their children could not access. The migrant farm worker who needed a little help in the deep south to register to vote. The occupants of a small planet being threatened by climate change. The residents of Gaza who were about to be immersed in war.
One corollary of democracy is that people expect democratically-elected politicians to be problem-solvers. There have been political figures (Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Gottwald in Czechoslovakia, Peron in Argentina, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Chavez in Venezuela) who have disrupted a flawed democratic order with demagogic promises and taken over, only to gut democracy and the responsibility of leadership to the people. It is far easier to enrich one's cronies and punish rivals and opponents than to solve problems.
Donald Trump is a demagogue exploiting a flawed democracy -- ours. America doesn't have much of a political center that puts quality over ideology. I doubt that we have a truly representative legislature, unelected lobbyists responsible to their paymasters having hooks in politicians who pay more attention to economic interests than to constituents. Add to that we have an educational system that fosters irresponsible narcissism in potential leaders.
Quote:(In contrast to Donald Trump) is the rejection of the idea that government can’t help people. It can, it does, and Hillary has been doing it all her life. She has been fighting the Reagan mind set of people who have never needed help and thus don’t want to see people helped. Her foes are those who can’t imagine themselves needing help, who thus work hard to leave folks in misery.
And that leaves aside what Trump is… someone who has looked out first and foremost for himself, and has left behind a trail of people who have felt scammed and used.
America needs pervasive change, part of it educational (think of how often I call for the return to the liberal arts as the objective of undergraduate education instead of as a watered-down grad school), part of it economic (strengthen labor unions, the only institutions that can protect workers from the exploitation of workers by owners and bosses), and partly political (tighten the checks and balances so that unelected Party bosses cannot control the system). The culture will go along.
Quote:I of course see the long term dynamics between the parties differently (from Classic X'er). The more the Republicans push a government that doesn’t help the People, the more the People will need help, the more they will turn to the party that will help them. I also don’t anticipate Trump as the candidate who lost will be any more an influence than McCain, Romney or other recent Republican losers. Heck, the last closest thing to a Republican winner was Bush 43, and nobody wants to be associated with the disasters he created. The best thing he can do to help his party is to avoid associating himself with it.
The battle for ideas depends on whether the People recognize that the government can improve life in these United States. The Democrats are trying to prove that it can. The Republicans are trying to prove that it can’t. I know who I’m rooting for.
Donald Trump mandates that the vast majority will be consigned to failure. Just think of it: much of his success is from getting people to be irrational actors in the economy. That's the gambling casino. I can look at a casino and see the glitz and recognize who pays for it. Contrast a cereal processor for which I have much respect; its plant is strictly functional in design. But those who go in as workers generally have middle incomes because of their jobs in that plant. The cereal processor makes its money offering a tangible product that I find useful, and it doesn't need to entice me to buy its wares with wild promises that I could be a big winner.
Quote:Note that we’re due for a realignment. The Republicans are clearly a party in flux. They need to reinvent themselves. I don’t think Trump represents the best model for them to build on. Meanwhile, the Democrats are a party that has been filibustered into impotence. Crisis magnitude transformation has been out of reach, and might well remain out of reach. Change will remain a struggle. The struggle will have to continue. Successes must be made visible. A good size dent has to be made in the notion that everything the government tries to do is a failure. For Democrats, success will come with programs that work. I don’t see any other approaches, no easy short cuts.
The Crisis will pull us Americans, perhaps kicking and screaming, into a new era that fits the economic realities. It will compel rational solutions. In the last Crisis one part of the losing side convinced many of its young men that glory came from flying a doomed, bomb-laden aircraft into an American war ship. Another part of the losing side saw an ancient-but-vibrant religion as a nemesis to be exterminated instead of to be recognized for its competence as entrepreneurs and scientists. America and Britain resolved to finish off the nasty war against vile enemies. America and Britain got the benefits of having some of the finest entrepreneurs and scientists, many of them of an ancient-but-vibrant religion, and both valued its soldiers enough to save them with antibiotics. In the end many Germans got guided tours of slave-labor camps courtesy of the British and American armies with loaded weapons, and Japanese military forces that had depended upon rice looted from occupied countries got sent to Japanese rice paddies that needed harvesting while they were enforcing the looting of occupied countries.
Quote:Grumble. I don't usually like to go all partisan. We have enough blue partisans on the board without me beating yet another blue drum. I'd rather push the notion that there are real reasons the red values came into being, real reasons they aren't going away trivially. Reagan really did have his finger on the pulse of the country in his time, and really did try to take it where it had to go. His ideas in moderation do make a reasonable check on big government. One party, either party, any party, will take its ideas way to far if left in control too long.
Maybe if the American educational and political systems weren't so broken, we wouldn't have the polarization of the political sphere that now bedevils America.
Quote:But at the moment we have two choices. It may be that the country would have been better served by two different choices. Still, Trump isn't a choice. We've had a former CIA chief and a current Supreme Court justice among others flat out say he isn't qualified for the job. This is bad form, against all tradition, true and necessary to say. I guess I've got to say it too.
Democracy is not a suicide pact. And, yes, Donald Trump is singularly unqualified to be president. He has the wrong education (law is ideal); his problem-solving has been simply to fire people or abandon a failing enterprise; he plays fast and loose with words and promises; he is either grossly dishonest or out of touch with logical reality (one cannot reconcile opposite sides of a logical contradiction); he shows little respect for precedent; he is reckless; he is narcissistic in the extreme; he even seems to lack fundamental decency. He will make George W Bush look good by contrast. After a short experience with President Donald Trump (pardon me if I vomit!) we might want to dispense with or modify the 22nd Amendment to accommodate a third term by you-know-who.
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.