The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(06-08-2021, 09:11 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Some of the recent blue pundits are playing the theme that Trump has lost it.  Less energy.  Signs of senility.  Pants on backwards.  Now is seems the Republicans base has been riding on Trump, and the establishment Republicans are following suit.  The wannabe future candidates don't dare cross Trump lest he shoot them down in the primary.  Trump is pushing the big lie to keep this control.  The loss of his internet entity and the circling legal vulture makes me doubt his hanging on to the base.

This happens with a cult-like leader. For those taken in he is beyond rational assessment. He has inspired a huge personal investment of time, money, and identity for many, and any erratic behavior must be understood in the context of His Personal Greatness. The Leader becomes the focus irrespective of his questionable or limited achievements. An intellectual attack on the person is an attack upon the followers. 

We know of course to whom one most often associates the Big Lie. and we all know what he and his minions were able to do with it: the replacement of a responsible government with a syndicate of organized crime, transformation of the working class into serfs, removal of political dissent, elimination of people whom he considered unworthy of life including a religion long considered "major". His name need not be mentioned. That monster was able to make his Big Lie the only 'safe' viewpoint within his empire, and any exercise of conscience was successful only if protected or well-hidden. 

A hint: all that has kept Dietrich Bonhoeffer from canonization in the Roman Catholic Church is that he was not a Catholic. A second hint: the Big Lie disintegrates only with the disintegration of the hideous regime, and we all know how that ended.

 

Brute force and heroism, from Stalingrad to Berlin. Nobody could lie himself out of that reality by early May 1945. That's the only way to put an end to the Big Lie that has a military Great Power, torture chambers, slave-labor camps, a secret police, and complete control of the media to enforce the lie. Accept the lie or at least pretend to... or die.  
 

Quote:But as yet only Trump and Palin were able to work their magic with the Republican base.  We shall have to see if someone else can conjure the magic.  Meanwhile Trump seems to be stuck on Trump rather than the GOP or the country.  That seems unlikely to change among Trump and the GOP base.

Intellectually-hollow as Palin and Trump are, they succeeded to the extent that they did with dishonesty among the gullible. Many people believe whatever is convenient for them at the time, which explains the knack of confidence artists for flattering their marks. That could be at the most genteel the "hot stock tip" that usually is a means of disposing a troubled stock that huge investors want to divest themselves of.  A stockbroker that I trust told me what I suspected -- that there are no special tips except of that type. At the worst are demagogues telling people that those "other people" are getting the special breaks that the rest of us are denied. We all know who gets those special breaks. 

No, it's not hard work, scrupulous investment, honing the talents of entrepreneurialism, dedication to excellence at the expense of instant gratification, or shrewd management of valuable assets. It's nothing like Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours" necessary for performance of professional-level activity of law or medicine, excellence in classical or popular music that ensures a high level of refinement (Beatles or the Berlin Philharmonic alike), refinement in writing, painting, composition, or acting... even so banal an activity as the sale of life insurance is trying to go that route. 

Falling short of 10,000 hours? You will not achieve your dreams of success... but you may have a more balanced life. Maybe you are a great repository of sports trivia or know the plot of every episode of Star Trek.  You probably do work of limited skill, but you never miss a family reunion. You may be broke, but your wardrobe or electronics are all up to date. You might have a nice collection of rocks that is a local legend. Maybe you aren't Hollywood material, but your local performance of a Shakespeare  soliloquy is a legend for your high school when you perform it every year. 

I know, I know, I know. It takes family support. With a personality like mine I might be a concert pianist if I had gotten the encouragement to do so (and the piano) for developing the muscle memory from playi9ng hours of scales that my relatives could have never tolerated. "Fambly togetherness is happiness", I heard... sure. We all ended up wasting time watching the idiot screen when the conversation stopped because nobody had anything left to say. OK, one needs some encouragement to play 5000 hours of dry exercises before being able to make the most of attendance at the Conservatory. 

But just remember: many Hollywood actors have messed-up lives. The rap on classical musicians is that they are completely incompetent as lovers. The brilliant nuclear physicist might be completely helpless should his car break down. On the other hand we need far more people to milk cows, pack deceased poultry for grocery stores, do oil changes and tune-ups, sell underwear, or deliver newspapers. Far more people are in the "movie business" selling tickets in movie theater than are involved in any way in cinematic production. 

Our economic system has done little to promote the dignity of work in recent decades. It's all about ensuring that most jobs can be done by anyone, and that anyone not part of the elite can find himself in a position in which he has no choice except to take some horrible job with abysmal pay. Many of us are obliged to show the huge, theatrical "Happy to serve you!" smile even if one hates the job that one does for the suffering and poverty that such work mandates. The stupider that one is  down to the level of "dull normal" -- one is just smart enough to know enough to not take money from the till or to contradict the Boss -- the happier one is. 

Trump supporters seem to be white people holding those miserable jobs, distressed by the fact that people not white are getting paid just as well (and at the same time, poorly) -- and perpetrators of the economic order. Along comes a demagogue like Trump to flatter them. People transfer their contempt from their exploiters to those that the demagogue presents as pariahs. In a way "Radical Islam" becomes much what "Dirty Jews" used to be. Or (it rhymes with either "snags" or "triggers").  

Before anyone compares contemporary America to Weimar Germany... sure, our mass culture is just as depraved, and we have much racism just beneath the surface. One big difference applies: Weimar Germany had one model minority (the Jews) identifiable readily by religion but nothing else. America has plenty of model minorities -- the black bourgeoisie, middle-class Hispanics, Arab-Americans, every imaginable Asian-American group from Iranian-Americans to Filipino-Americans and Japanese-Americans, LGBT people, and of course Jews. On the whole such people may have saved America from a second term of Donald Quisling Trump and, in view of the degradation of American political discourse under him, a dictatorship.