Is Trump the next Nixon?

[nebraska]

Is Trump the next Nixon?

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/.../97331162/

[Bob Butler 54]

February 1 2017? What, you are spamming ancient history now?

[nebraska]

You know the US is doomed when Americans would rather attack those who defend freedom instead of criticizing the government that is enslaving them.

[Bob Butler 54]

I just happen not to be a slave. I just happen to dislike spammers. Freedom to do what? Spam?

[nebraska]

Americans used to believe in free speech.

[Bob Butler 54]

No one has interfered or censored my speech, thus I still speak freely. It is you that have the delusion that you are shackled as a slave and gagged without free speech. As you promote violence, I doubt both. What you say often just is not pertinent or relevant.

There are many extreme partisans here. I have often said this site attracts those who wish to see a radical change, who want to impose their world views and values on others. This is hard to do. Lotsa luck. But most do not have to lie as much. It is really a good idea to have your propaganda backed by truth. Repeating obvious falsehoods gets you where?

[pbrower2a]

We have over two hundred years of consistent respect by federal officials for the freedom of political and religious expression. In one day anyone who suggested curtailing speech hostile to his political agenda to George III; more recently we compare someone like that to Hitler or Stalin. What we cannot do is to advocate violence or a forcible overthrow of the government. Expression that leads to the formation of a lynch mob would not be protected under the First Amendment; it would be evidence of a crime, either conspiracy to violate civil rights or the violation of such civil rights if there were to be a lynch mob formed.

I am probably as sharp a partisan as anyone here, but even I have my limits. I would oppose what Donald Trump were doing if allegedly on my side or on behalf of my agenda. The essence of democracy is not that people participate in elections; it is that they are willing to lose elections. By losing, some people find themselves inadequate for their quest for elective office and go on to something else, including what they had been doing before then -- or finding out how to better play the game. And, yes, electoral politics is a game.

I see this time as particularly dangerous because many things are possible, and most of them horrible. If there is ever an opportunity to replace a heritage of liberal democracy with entrenched terror it is a Crisis Era. Just think of the most blatant example of the last completed Crisis Era -- the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Figuring that the German pattern of generations was close to ours (the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War) around 1932, Hitler could have never have risen to power without:

1. a war that scarred millions of soldiers and, if the cannon fodder of WWI died in a war whose purpose nobody can yet explain, their families; many saw defeat as shame to be avenged

2. hyperinflation that wasted the savings of the middle class; small savers, unlike debtors and big creditors, form the bulk of sane conservative movements and parties instead of extremist causes of the Right and Left

3. extreme inequality -- Germany may have had among the highest measures of GDP per capita, yet it also had among the lowest wages for industrial workers

4. the mass perception of people that believers in a religion that most Germans did not understand were more a conspiracy than a faith, and that had profiteered from all that went badly for most Germans

5. the discreditation of the Idealist generation for its role in WWI, leaving a gap for perverse moralizing by the Reactive generation

6. a vehement anti-capitalist movement that scared millions

7. the celebration of crank pseudoscience and pseudohistory because it soothed hurt national pride

8. an economic meltdown that hit just as Germany seemed to be recovering from the hyperinflation of the early 1920s

We are nowhere near that. We have not been defeated in a meat-grinder war; we have no experience with hyperinflation; there are plenty of potential Boomer leaders available should something go wrong with the Trump agenda and the Boom-led Religious Right; we have no Communists calling for violent revolution. (Indeed, an article on the website of the Communist Party of the USA reads "Do you want to slug a Nazi? Don't!", with a warning that violence that American KKK and neo-Nazi fascists get becomes a pretext for the violence that those fascists want to inflict).

Donald Trump is a nasty piece of work, but our heritage so far thwarts the worst aspects of his agenda. Of course this is a Crisis Era, and what can happen in such a time includes bad stuff impossible in other times. If there is ever an opportunity for a scenario  resembling Seven Days in May or The Manchurian Candidate, it is now. If there is ever a time for political leadership to think that it can do thermonuclear warfare it is now. If any President could go down in a military coup, it is paradoxically the Chickenhawk who flatters the generals and admirals.

We also have big problems to solve. One is that manufacturing is in severe decline as a share of national output that the covenant between manufacturer and industrial worker ("You make the stuff; we pay you well; we expect you to buy it as if you were middle class") is over. Perhaps the great devaluation is of labor, and such will result in an economic meltdown as severe and as difficult to meet as the three-year meltdown that began with the 1929 Stock Market Crash. It could take a depression to rectify the inequality in America today as one rectified the inequality of the 1920s. A President who seeks to treat his demographic opponents as ungrateful enemies and tries to hurt them with questionable reforms of the economy may find centripetal and even secessionist trends.

[nebraska]

The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.

[pbrower2a]

(01-24-2018, 10:21 PM)nebraska Wrote: The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.

Liberty depends upon the rule of law. The alternative to rational justice is vendettas and lynchings which are local displays of power over people. Evil is usually quite unpopular when it is exposed, whether it be despotism, cruelty, or corruption.

OK, few people want the government micro-managing every aspect of life. But that is not to say that we want people driving northbound on the southbound lanes of a freeway.

The complexity of life relates closely to population density. If you take your dog for a walk and it craps on a cornfield or a cattle pasture, you likely dace few consequences. If you let your dog crap on a sidewalk, then there might be consequences.  There is much more regulation in New York City than there is in the thinly -inhabited steppes of Wyoming, and this is reflected in political life.

[nebraska]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

[pbrower2a]

(01-25-2018, 10:31 PM)nebraska Wrote: I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

I prefer to not encounter drunk drivers, machine guns, meth labs, dioxin, lead paint, and 'pet' tigers.

[Bob Butler 54]

Nebraska...

Just out of curiosity, what violence has the government committed against you, what freedom were you attempting to exercise, and what prison have you been committed to as a result?  You talk big.

[nebraska]

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking is freedom.

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-26-2018, 05:43 AM)nebraska Wrote: If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking is freedom.

That does not answer my question.  I asked what violence has the government committed against you, what freedom were you attempting to exercise, and what prison have you been committed to as a result?

I will acknowledge you have principles, if not thought them through.  I suspect you are one to yammer without thinking.

[pbrower2a]

(01-26-2018, 05:43 AM)nebraska Wrote: If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking is freedom.

Prison as a place of safety? Little is more dangerous than being around people who have proved themselves dangerous -- people who have already done violent acts, people who have already snapped, people with hair-trigger tempers, people who develop ideologies that laud group hatred...

[nebraska]

Trump isn't keeping his campaign promises to prosecute Hillary, kick out the illegal immigrants,
reduce the debt, repeal Obamacare, drain the swamp, or end the wars, but he's working overtime to expand the police state.

[David Horn]

(01-26-2018, 10:27 AM)nebraska Wrote: Trump isn't keeping his campaign promises to prosecute Hillary, kick out the illegal immigrants,
reduce the debt, repeal Obamacare, drain the swamp, or end the wars, but he's working overtime to expand the police state.

Trump's #1 priority: make the Donald even richer than he already is.  Anything else is coincidence.

[nebraska]

Not only do Americans have to worry about getting older, have their teeth rot, hair fall out, hair turn gray, and their eyes fail, Americans now get to enjoy watching their economy implode, the government go bankrupt, the USA turn into a hardcore police state, a civil war start, and WWIII break out.

Isn't life great?

[pbrower2a]

Elections have consequences, and when we elect politicians devoid of kindness, caution, and conscience, we put ourselves at far greater risk of catastrophe. Cruelty is the cornerstone of most evil and never a contributor to good results. Reckless people tend to start wars for profit that do not go well. Those with a lack of conscience abuse such power as they get.

Donald Trump is the worst President that we have ever had.

[nebraska]

The new boss is the same as the old boss.

Every country has the government it deserves.