01-14-2021, 08:49 AM
(01-13-2021, 01:15 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-13-2021, 01:03 PM)David Horn Wrote: And the paranoia of the right is truly baffling. You are the guys with the guns. The fearmongering is not a leftwing product either. Tell the RW media to stop it, because that's the source. I'm sorry you're afraid of your own shadows, but that seems to be your problem to fix.
The paranoia is the result of tribal thinking. You divide everything into us and them, get xenophobic about them, and use violence to gain an advantage for your 'tribe'. It was cost effective through much of history, but not so much today in the US.
Trump is a tribal politician. On a national scale, the only pols who can win tribal politics play up "whiteness", especially of the ill-educated. The well-educated can see through the Trump scam and vote against him unless they find him useful for economic gain. That is good for winning statewide elections mostly in god-awful places where religion is indistinguishable from superstition, where educational achievement is generally below average by national standards, and economic opportunity is limited.
Non-whites cannot get away with tribal politics except in communities in which one non-white community dominates local (machine) politics. Tribal politics often become incompetent and corrupt because electoral politics divide predictably on ethnic lines. Example: Mississippi has the highest proportion of its former elected officials in prison. The community often divides even on commercial lines so that a town has two car dealerships, grocery stores (unless Wal*Mart has undercut them both into oblivion), funeral parlors, barber shops... maybe the divide is not so clear in a restaurant or a cinema, but churches are very different in ethnic mix. You can easily predict which business someone patronizes by ethnicity. You can also predict that if the local machine is white and the GM dealership is owned by a white fellow, and the Ford dealership is owned by a black fellow, that the sorts of cars used in public work will depend upon which community has the majority of the vote.
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.