The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-14-2020, 04:15 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-13-2020, 10:09 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-13-2020, 09:15 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-13-2020, 03:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I read an article that described people in southern Missouri and their addiction to Trump. It said that people support Trump because they hate liberals and they hate weakness. This reminds me of Classic Xer. I mean, I admire strength and ability too, I'm thinking. But I also admire giving to help others in need. And I recognize that private giving has never been enough; that all people in a just society need to contribute something if they can, and that society needs to make sure all people are included. People in the deep red areas of our country are just focused on their hatred for liberals. They stay misinformed about anything else. They swallow any ideology that supports their hatred. They don't want to give to help those in need when liberals require them to do so. They think everyone should be strong and do for themselves. "Those were the days" when "girls were girls and men were men" and "everybody pulls his weight" as Archie and Edith sang.

I understand. This hatred for liberals they also project onto us, and say they hate us because liberals hate them or put them down. It's not really true. But they are blinded by their own hatred into supporting their guy, no matter how many lies he tells, how much deadly incompetence he shows, and how corrupt, how unjust and destructive, how undemocratic and tyrannical, and how harmful to their own interests he really is. So they have saddled us with the worst possible president, whose only ability is to arouse and entertain people who hate liberals and rally them around him.

So, the polls continue to be uncertain, giving Biden a precarious lead in a country where almost half the people don't give a damn about others because they are blinded by their hatred for liberals.



I also observe the following. If the polls shift and Trump wins, this could be the final election in which polls have any meaning, because Trump and the Republicans will see to it that elections are undemocratic, rigged and restricted enough so that enough people always vote for them. They already are rigged for them to an extent.

I've heard that the Democrats are over represented in most of today's polls.

 
At this point the difference between pollsters is their model for the electorate. An electorate like those of 2010, 2014, or 2016 allows Trump to win. An electorate like those of 2006, 2008, 2018, or maybe 2012 takes down Trump and gives the Democrats a majority in the Senate. 


Eric's liberal concern about the survival of the American political heritage that includes rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and free and competitive elections is legitimate.  But that is also becoming a concern among conservatives who have their own trepidation about the despotic tendencies of Donald Trump. The best arguments against re-electing Trump are now often conservative arguments.  

Donald Trump has even created a secret police so secret that it does not yet have a name... but it is all too visible harassing dissidents. I can give it a nickname: the Trump-Trump Macoutes.

A Trump supporter should be mode concerned about the genuine conservatives voting for Joe Biden.

A genuine conservative wouldn't waste their vote on Biden/Gumby.

A genuine liberal would vote for someone like Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan over an out-and-out Commie. 

Donald Trump is a fascist. He simply forgot to read the fascist playbook and started going after backsliders and milquetoasts in his own Party before outlawing or co-opting the Opposition. He was even late in establishing a Secret Police. He did get the Newspeak and the Personality Cult right.

Don't worry, Classic X'er; if something goes really wrong in America, like a Great Depression that gets blamed on Democrats or some huge military or diplomatic debacle, then someone from the Hard Right will achieve your dream of 95% of the people suffering for 2%, people compelled to adopt 'American' culture instead of 'foreign' influences such as Bach, Dostoevsky, and Cezanne, all political life 'coordinated' along the ideas of the Great and Infallible Leader, education dedicated to conformity and obedience instead of intellectual inquiry, and a narrower definition of what it means to be an American. Who needs culture when one works two jobs just to pay loansharks and landlords and struggles with food?  

Of course there will be some inconveniences. People that you know might disappear into the Night and Fog after being accused of a smarmy joke against the Great and Infallible Leader. Culture will be numbing in awfulness. The ability of people to express complex thoughts that make life rich will erode (George Orwell had 'Winston' and 'Julia" struggle with love in the most incompetent expression of romance ever in Nineteen Eighty-Four... because if people cannot love, then all that one has is a crush that either ends in a marriage of convenience that goes stale fast, a fling that goes nowhere, or becomes rape -- now you know!) Life will be impoverished  in many ways that you think impossible, and not only economic. Because 95% will be living in abject poverty within twenty years if the dreadful system is not overthrown by them (elections will be as meaningless as those in the old USSR)...  You will be treated like a galley slave and you will be expected to express how great it is to be a galley slave and how horrible it would be to live under the confusion that is necessary for liberty as I know it. 

Know well that the Nazis and the Stalinists both spoke of their infernal systems as definitive expressions of freedom and the truest form of democracy as opposed to the "plutocracies".