Politicallyinsane
Gold Member
- Oct 6, 2019
- 254
- 211
- 195
- Banned
- #1
We all recognize President Trump as unique in the American political heritage. There are no obvious rules. America has never before had so blatant a demagogue become President, so analogies are to elsewhere for his personality. He is more like the late Hugo Chavez than like Dwight Eisenhower in style, berating elites (in Chavez' case, economic; in Trump's case, intellectual), Can Trump succeed? He certainly has generated much hatred for him.
Trump succeeded in part in 2016 by debasing the political discourse, finding the mental gutter in America. I expect him to do much the same this year because such is his character. He numbed millions of Americans in the right places to his vileness as a person while attacking his opponent for modest or controversial shortcomings. Besides, if he is close to getting re-elected, then the super-rich Americans who believe that the rest of Humanity exists only as their rightful thralls will open the spigots to support both direct and through front groups. Should he be an abject failure, then those super-rich Americans will not waste their money this time; they will be back on the scene when they have more of a chance. On the other hand such people dream of an America in which workers are serfs whose lives are expendable if such makes command-and-control of a fascistic style possible. I see such American elites no better than those German elites who backed Hitler because Hitler promised to crush industrial unions and the dissidence among farm laborers. As events showed, those backers had no qualms about using slave labor and treating it with brutality that would have made a Simon Legree cringe.
I have no residual illusion that people are better because they are to rich and powerful to be swine. I have no remaining belief in any exceptionalism about America whose basis is any moral culture or religious heritage.
Trump succeeded in part in 2016 by debasing the political discourse, finding the mental gutter in America. I expect him to do much the same this year because such is his character. He numbed millions of Americans in the right places to his vileness as a person while attacking his opponent for modest or controversial shortcomings. Besides, if he is close to getting re-elected, then the super-rich Americans who believe that the rest of Humanity exists only as their rightful thralls will open the spigots to support both direct and through front groups. Should he be an abject failure, then those super-rich Americans will not waste their money this time; they will be back on the scene when they have more of a chance. On the other hand such people dream of an America in which workers are serfs whose lives are expendable if such makes command-and-control of a fascistic style possible. I see such American elites no better than those German elites who backed Hitler because Hitler promised to crush industrial unions and the dissidence among farm laborers. As events showed, those backers had no qualms about using slave labor and treating it with brutality that would have made a Simon Legree cringe.
I have no residual illusion that people are better because they are to rich and powerful to be swine. I have no remaining belief in any exceptionalism about America whose basis is any moral culture or religious heritage.