Jason Stanley is correct, I believe, in defining corruption in Trumpian far right base terms.
The Trump voter is not worried about law but rather about our traditional national identify argues an article in The Atlantic.
Why Trump Supporters Don’t Care About Cohen’s Admission - The Atlantic
"In a forthcoming book titled
How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. 'Corruption, to the fascist politician,' he suggests, 'is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.'”
IOW, Trump calls to the "good old days," evokes images of the fifties, he denounces peoples of color, he calls women dogs and says he can grab them by the pussies.
The quickly changing demography of the electorate, and the outrageous talk and behavior by the President this week and last, and the blows delivered by Mueller in the Manafort and Cohen cases, may end any effective Presidency by the midterms in ten weeks.
Read it all, please. I promise it's not entirely hostile.
Despite your professor's reassurance that morality can be dissected, catalogued historically in situ and endlessly analyzed for infinite interpretations, he or she mislead you from the path of primeval normative human nature. Humans
can pull themselves up out of the primordial swamp, not by the hair of our heads, (sorry Nietzsche), but rather damn well for sure by exercising personal responsibility.
Right and wrong--morality--
is self evident and wholly without the need for further interpretation than observable in primal human nature and instinct (Perspectivism working against civilization) . Now, when moral reasoning is applied by political theory within the borders of any nation, the waters become murkier than the fundamental moral fact of good or bad self-applicable to individual human behavior without inane epistemological loops of infinite skepticism. Enter laws to assist us oh so gently in editing our own behaviors to fit within their legal limitations.
Question, Jake. Are laws always moral? In my opinion and in that of many others, the answer is: no. See, my recently unignored fellow USMB forum member, the law (by adjudication, mostly) is where the radicalized, cultural revolutionary Left is able to redefine what
is right, what is wrong for the rest of America without their due suffrage or permission; and further-- what is natural and what is unnatural, morally acceptable.
Through legal decisions your "evolved" radical pals and you have even begun to redefine human nature through its ideological designation as a social construct. Right? Well hell. If human nature is a social construct, and can be socially reconstructed to suit any ideology or political-cultural cause--like you might wrongly blame the Western patriarchies for doing all along, then what else can be reconstructed? Redefine any fact you need to. Right? That, Jake, is the ethos of your ideology and the postmodern Age into which your ilk wants to transition America.
If you're a student of distant history, then you're aware of a very ancient civilizational cycle cycling over and over--down through the Ages since, well, since human forever. The cycle is as follows. A civilization--through governmental and religious and epistemological interpretive hells in every form imagined--oppresses the shit of its citizens. The citizens reaction is then to breed philosophers and professors and artists and counter-dogmacists who first, challenge intellectually the traditional, iron fisted ruling class, and then, form small revolutionary groups seeking to liberate the people morally and legally from associated societal restrictions and burgeoning cultural taboos. They succeed eventually in either cultural or full scale civilizational revolution, to a much freer, morally liberated state of individual and societal existence.
What happens next is, the revolutionaries (who think their ideas are unique in human history) take their relaxed moral, cultural and social freedom too far out onto the brink where
anything goes and the practice of ultimate freedom removes freedom from fellow citizens who want no part in their debauchery and destruction of tradition.
Next up, the rest of the citizenry
voluntarily call for and put into place an authoritarian regime which promises to
force a return to the "old ways". And then, the new authoritarian regime (much like the one which originally existed in the cycle's first phase earlier generations of citizens revolted against to escape) does just that. It stamps out by sword point the revolutionary element. Finally, the people realize what ancient oppressive horror they have welcomed back into their lives. Now, they are stuck--once again, as were their ancestors--living life under totalitarian rule.
The cycle begins anew.
Listen, Jake, regardless of what you might think, fellow Americans like myself and others do not hate Americans such as yourself who seek ultimate freedom from the shackles of ancient tradition. Not at all. What we do think about you is, is we wonder how in the hell the thirst for unlimited individual moral freedom has made you so drunk on the idea of it, that you can no longer see the obvious danger of its unrestricted practice or historical implications.
Truth is, out of respect for the possibility of a
real Aristotelian dialectic with you, none of the cultural or sexual revolution based "social evolutions" you seem to define as such--as an escape from 1950's moral codes and taboos, are historically
new. They have all been seen and practiced before in human history by ancestors near and far.
Let's talk further specifics in euphemisms-- in the spirit of PG-13 political forum posting guidelines. Your "people" want to have their
cake, dig? Even though they want to have their cake more than anything else in the whole damn world, and having said cake
is perfectly acceptable culturally and legally, well, they want to eat their cake too, in front of everyone else. Having and eating their cake publicly is legally questionable
and morally and culturally and socially unacceptable for the rest of us.
Final question.
Is having
and eating your cake so very important to you, that you would risk the destruction of our country, and civil war with your fellow countrymen, or, can we agree that you can have your cake, okay have it,
but, if we concede to you that if we cannot regress America back to the 1950's (I do not desire such anyway) and will stop efforts to do so, you must then agree to have your cake in private, far from the sight of our children's minds eyes, and you will stop trying to eat it in public?
Thanks
Night_Son
