11-11-2020, 08:48 AM
(11-11-2020, 01:19 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(11-10-2020, 10:18 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-10-2020, 10:04 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(11-10-2020, 07:48 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: All Presidencies are pigs in the poke. About 51% of the electorate saw Donald Trump as a failure.You forgot about Ford. Ford was a half term President like Biden and Harris. I don't see Biden making it a full term.
50.71% (as of the current count) of the electorate voted for Joe Biden.
Reagan got 50.75% in 1980.
Biden and Reagan ran similar campaigns in trying to make people feel good about themselves despite some ugly realities of the time. The last two Presidents to defeat a one-term President after one term for that Party's hold of the White House are Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden.
Amazing coincidence? I hope not
Ford was an untended continuation of Nixon because (1) Spiro T. Agnew proved himself a crook, and (2) Nixon resigned.
Biden pretty ran as a continuation of the Obama Administration. Other than COVID, there's nothing new that distinguishes him from the Obama Administration. So, we are pretty much in for a repeat of the Obama years which America is going to get tired of pretty quick and cut short. Like I said, I don't see Biden making it through full term. As far I'm concerned, the Democrats pulled off a classic bait and switch that should please a bunch of giddy Liberal women who view a woman as President as being more important than anything else these days.
Trump makes Obama look better every day. I prefer virtuous leaders, and Obama has his virtues. He trusts protocol and precedent more than the craze of the day as the appropriate wisdom for a leader. We have a Constitution in effect for 231 years already despite changes in culture, demographics, population size, and technology. Our Constitution arises from a pre-industrial time and stands the test of time. I'm not saying that age itself proves something right, but one can still learn much from the classical Greek philosophers, Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. If you don't think that one can't derive a solid set of moral values from such ancient sources, then consider the viability of Judaism. A hint: between 1933 and 1945 there was nothing wrong with the German people that Judaism would not have solved.
Well-established truth or some craze appealing to the intellectual or moral gutter? The gutter can always pay well (with the delights of depravity as well as the usual reward of economic gain as if from honest entrepreneurship and work) to its exemplary exponents. Some Trashy, Ruthless, Unscrupulous, Malignant Poltroon can serve that depravity well. Maybe economic distress and the perception of neglect by intellectual elites makes someone like a trashy, ruthless, malignant poltroon able to express the resentments by people who think that technological, demographic, and economic realities have left them behind.
We have big problems. One is oppression, and one can be white and oppressed in America -- as if they were on the Reservation. or in the ghetto or barrio. There are lily-white parts of America, like much of Appalachia and the Ozarks as well as the industrial wreck of parts of the Rust Belt are becoming places of grinding poverty. The descendants of people who may have gotten away with limited formal education but a solid work ethic cannot get away with that anymore. We will need some sort of technical training to do the job -- and liberal education so that people will know what to do with more leisure time. If it took forty hours of work a week to meet basic human needs in 1935, much of which was industrial output, then it might take much less. The old saying that the idle hand is the Devil's playground is a bit wrong: the idle mind is the real playground of the Devil. I have better things to do with my time and funds than to visit a strip club. (Primal delights are intense, easy and swift to achieve, and predictable; over-indulgence in those is costly in funds, health, reputation, development as a person, and perhaps freedom. Ask about Bill Cosby's sex drive as an illustration or the liver of an uncle by marriage*. In contrast, the opera and symphony, the nature hike, the great book, the great theatrical or cinematic performance, or the great collection of art that one enjoys without owning take time and knowledge to know about but they can offer more repeatable ecstasy without damaging one's blessings. Will
Oppression does not discriminate. At the least middle-class Mexican-Americans seem to care about the not-so-well-off Mexican-Americans who are their brethren... and such is the same about the Talented Tenth among African-Americans whom the American Dream has left behind. What do we middle-class and upper-class whites do for poor whites in what used to be coal country but is now an economic wreck? Not enough!
Trump may have caught onto something, but only superficially. He has appealed at times to righteous anger, but he has offered no solutions. I am tempted to compare him to "Professor Henry Hill" in The Music Man , a con man who unlike the others in his scam (who took the money as deposits for band instruments and uniforms, only to abscond with them and leave the communities without the money, instruments, band uniforms, and children learning music) found that he really could teach music and be happy doing it. Except that Trump has sold people lots of expensive caps and banners with his name or the vapid slogan "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" at what (at least in the last six months) have become super-spreader events for COVID-19.
In case you wonder what to do with those TRUMP banners that aren't going to have any use as such:
1. Give them to an animal shelter. Puppy-dogs and kitty-cats won't care about the politics of Trump.
2. Cut them up into masks. Masks save lives, and those banners can be useful for people who can't afford masks or who get caught without one.
Any others?
To solve the problems of the large mass of poor white people (and poor white people need exactly the same things that poor blacks and Hispanics need) we are going to need a New Deal-style program that outdoes the original. Can Biden do that? Perhaps. He will be the last President to ever be able to draw upon the experience of political figures who participated in the original New Deal. Trump had his chance but failed because he failed to learn anything other than how to indulge himself. Perhaps Biden gets us on a wholesome start, as there are young adults with predictable similarities of attitudes to the GI Generation so receptive to the New Deal.
*As he lay dying of cirrhosis and unconscious, medical students were getting a mocking lesson about him. He had one of the most cirrhotic livers that the instructor had ever seen, and that instructor told the medical students that such is the result of alcoholism. I had heard his stories, and if they talked about his travels to a place they might begin "I went to Chicago... and oh, did I get drunk". If I have anything to brag about a trip to Chicago, it is about seeing some museum... and the story might end "I figured out the Chicago transit system". Get drunk in a strange city? Me? No way!
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.