07-28-2021, 07:59 AM
(07-27-2021, 09:00 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-26-2021, 05:18 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-11-2021, 06:34 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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.
I just have the feeling that the what is left of the Republican base cares more about having a racist president than it d does about democracy. It isn't that they are being dishonest to themselves, but they are ashamed of their true motivations.
I think it's even simpler: they just want to win. Many in the Trump circle have had lives of quiet desparation or disappointmnt, and Trump offered them a chance to stick it their enemies. They don't have to win as long as you lose (ha-ha-ha).
Obviously, "sticking it to" others as a salve for personal disappointments has never done those who do it any tangible good. It's an effective way of making enemies out of people whom one would more wisely treat as allies. At the extreme one has the fraud of modern antisemitism which typically sees Jews as menaces for their achievements instead of generators of prosperity and culture. The viler sorts of bigotry demand either oppression of those seen as in all ways inferior (blacks in the American South) or successful due to purported vices (Jews typically fill that role, but other model minorities can fit that role).
The best way in which to deal with envy is to imitate those that one envies (unless their cause of success is something clearly harmful, which is the case with criminal cliques such as Mafia-like organizations or with monopolists). The second-best way is to seek dignity for ways of life that can offer at best modest rewards for one's toil. To that end, fair pay for honest toil (capitalists can enforce honest toil, but they can often compel one to assume sub-standard pay) may require strong and militant, responsible labor unions. The steady erosion of real wages despite rising productivity in the last forty years has reflected the neoliberal objective of ensuring that elites get what they want of they have the political means of enforcing such. Neoliberal economics and politics operate on the assumption that profit for the Right People is the measure of prosperity, and if people must work harder and longer under harsher conditions to generate more profits, then such is wonderful.
Eventually something demonstrates the folly of enforcing inequity. It can be social unrest; it can be a War for Profits that turns into a military calamity; it can be a technological disaster; it can be an environmental disaster. Such a demonstration of systematic failure need not be a shooting war; it could be an epidemic (as was the Black Death) or mass famine. This time we do not need a shooting war and unambiguous genocide defining a time as a Crisis. The next time, should Humanity be reckless, will be global warming that causes inundations and desertification that compel great movements of populations or violent resistance to such. Incompetence and perverse values can make an ecological disaster more catastrophic than necessary.
Should a heat wave of the sort that recently gave Seattle and Portland weather conditions more typical of Saudi Arabia than of Ireland become the norm, then we have a huge change to which to adapt. Maybe we will be better off if we abandon the car culture and eat much less meat.
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.