08-01-2020, 12:09 AM
(07-31-2020, 12:37 AM)Einzige Wrote: Did you guys even watch the documentary? It's not that long.
I did watch it long ago... although I thought it had more to do with media manipulation than with anything else.
All attempts at cultural change have effects, including reaction by people who do not want the change. Reagan is a reaction by people who believe that we all owe something to the capitalism for such freedom and prosperity as we have. Such people won, and America has taken three steps into and one step back from what culminated in the inhuman plutocracy that Donald Trump offers.
It may be difficult for people on the Left side of the spectrum to recognize a difference between Reagan and Trump aside from their quirks of personality and that even in intellectual decay Reagan was more coherent (Reagan was a trained actor playing a role, and Trump assumes the role of a studio boss, which makes a huge difference -- and Trump plays his role badly!), but the generational cycle suggests that while Reagan tried to unite Americans through the mindless vulgarity of the shopping mall, Trump does much to splinter us into hostile mobs at odds with each other.
I see Donald Trump as someone who did not participate in any way in the Boom Awakening except to indulge himself in new and unprecedented ways -- at least sexually, materially, and in his bloated ego. As I have often seen, irrespective of time and place, the hollower the personality, the more flamboyant the excesses; think of German air ace turned major Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. People of genuine philosophical substance and cultural richness do not need flamboyant gestures to express themselves. I say this as someone who well knows the severe gaps in his personality.
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.