11-05-2020, 03:35 PM
(11-05-2020, 01:10 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-04-2020, 10:19 AM)David Horn Wrote: As long as dog whistles still work, we're changing nothing. Trump ran up a huge Latinx vote in Miami-Dade county Florida, by screaming SOCIALISM! It worked, and will continue to work on the fearful many who still remain -- mostly older folks, though not all. Socialism has been used as a battle cry for over a century, and it still has that old magic for enough to make it useful.
Indeed, along with slogans about guns and abortion. It would be good to get the Cuba issue off the table. If Biden and maybe Secretary of State Rice (?) can open up to Cuba again, and nudge them to at least gradually respect human rights and democracy more, if not the greedy capitalism many of those refugees favored and miss, they will be ameliorated and maybe they will go home again. Many of them are already young people who were never in Cuba, and yet they can be hypnotized and deceived by that slogan.
Only in the USA is socialism such a dirty word. It is the heritage of our red scares, principally at 30-year intervals in the 1920s, 50s and 80s and the tea-party 2010s too. The USA led the Cold War, and socialism and communism was the enemy. But socialism brought good government to Milwaukee, as a PBS doc showed. It can be a mixed economy and a democracy and it does not lead to tyranny. Many governments have been socialist to a degree, including ours from 1933 to 1981. Socialism is part of our revolutionary heritage that has liberated humanity to some degree since 1789, in the three great phases of which it was the second. It is essential, if not sufficient, to progress.
Trump runs on fear. The economic orthodoxy in America is now absolute plutocracy -- or at lest as absolute that is just short of causing ugly consequences in plain sight, like children with distended bellies. Trump is highly reflective of his class except for a proletarian vulgarity that is his supposed ability to relate to the common man. The Koch brothers at the least sponsored classical music -- something that I hardly expect Trump's supporters to find compatible with their tastes.
Trump appeals to mass ignorance as if such is benefice. (It would be better if people had more learning so that they would be more competent, independent, and economically viable, but that is itself a different story).
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.