The GOP has collected the bulk of the authoritarians and a motley crew they are. Oh, there is a cohort of them on the Democratic side of the fence too, the Far Left has those elements, but not enough to reach a critical mass.
The Trumpeters are not cleaving to any view of the how the world works other than two items: 1) the things wrong with it are not their fault; it is the fault of those “others” ethnic and religious groups, and 2) nothing that a authoritarian leader can’t fix and we don’t need to know how.
The American Far Left side does cleave to a worldview and it in general does not include a faith in authoritarian leadership. If they mirror anything in the GOP it is more Cruz and his will not compromise ideologic movement Conservative schtick, not Trump.
Be fair. In many ways, it’s not their fault. They do not have real power; they do not set economic policy.
“They voted for the people who set economic policy.” Not really; they are facing the results of policies set in motion before they ever voted, if not before they were born.
Why don’t they rent a U-Haul and move to a place with jobs? Probably the same reason poor people of color don’t - they can’t afford it, even if they could face leaving the one thing they have left, family, and friends. It’s not an option.
They are not flocking to Trump out of racism and other bigotry; they are flocking to him because he as a simple slogan promising a brighter future. It worked before. People keep comparing Trump to Hilter, but I see very frightening parallels to Reagan.
So they’re going to eat worms now because they can’t get themselves to think to the next level, logically. It might mean voting progressive or for a black person or something, so they can’t do it. They all deserve each other.
If Trump doesn’t consume and envelope the entire political spectrum like a black hole, and if anyone is the natural lefty-Trump, it is Jon Stewart. Stewart is just as talented as Trump at using derision and memes to destroy targeted figures and purge all nuance from complicated subjects.
It is pointed out how Fox News and talk radio have paved the way for Trump. But there is usually a big blind spot, and failure to realize the similarities elsewhere. People have gotten used to being entertained nightly by news and politics, and conditioned to being most influenced through meme, zinger, and verbal kill-shot. Dennis Miller not withstanding, this sort of biting satire has been most effectively used to express lefty points of view, and to vilify conservative politicians and causes, since before Lorne Michaels was making people laugh. Then along comes Trump and turns that all inside out, and there is no going back.
Well, I appreciate all the praise but I’m not going to pretend that I have the answer. I’m not sure there is an answer. The racial components of the situation are beyond help, I fear.
If you pressed me for suggestions that aren’t pie-in-the-sky or mere pieties, I’d offer variations on the theme of finding jobs for Americans that do not involve trade barriers or restricting immigration. Ways of doing this exist and would fit nicely into traditional Democratic ideals.
We don’t need to have 60% of the population attend standard liberal arts colleges, as is now the case. It was about 5% in 1950 and below a quarter for the Boomer generation. A quarter of the college-bound population could be shifted into a variety of hands-on trade schools. We’re heading into a service economy. We forget that being a plumber or electrician is a type of service job. Make the definition fit the need, which is both broad and deep. This follows from the original purpose of land grant universities, which taught advanced skills rather than the liberal arts. (A&M colleges meant Agriculture and Manufacturing.) Schools for everybody, but not college as we know it.
Similarly, the need for infrastructure maintenance, repair, and replacement is staggering. Trillions of dollars should be spent. The results would be money spent in America for jobs that go to Americans and help Americans, not to mention literally save American lives. It should be an easy sell, and again follows directly from earlier programs, especially the New Deal.
Environmental repair and reclamation would be an ironic solution for the huge percentage of Appalachia that is polluted by decades of mining and manufacturing waste. These jobs are as literally earth-moving as the ones earlier generations had, and don’t allow for easy technological solutions. They require time, effort, and personal labor.
Climate change is already upon us and the coastlines are already suffering. We need to redo virtually every coastal area in fundamental ways. Sea walls, dikes, artificial harbors and islands, drainage, elevation. Calls for all of the above: money, expertise, labor, every bit of it aimed at improving America.
All these would change the Democratic image from latte-swilling, electric-car-driving, pale-indoor-techno elitists to the party of the people and the land. That admittedly might be a tough sell to both sides. So would the amount of governmental funding required. All I can say is there’s nothing utopian about these plans. They are feasible, build on one another, economic stimulants, absolutely utterly necessary, and both conservative and progressive. None of them are original to me, so a foundation already exists of proponents.
How to get people to think about them is the big question. I think we’re heading for a crunch. It took a Great Depression to change attitudes last time. I’d love to see us get ahead of the next one before the bottom drops out.
In many way it’s not; in some ways it is. Reality is that the many of the problems they face are no one’s fault. The world is simply not a static thing. Coal cannot compete with natural gas. Those with poor High School educations are ill equipped for the current job marketplace. A new economy has winners and losers and those who are most reluctant to adapt are more likely to be among the losers. But their blaming their problems on the easily identified “other” of the moment (today the Muslim, tomorrow the Jew; today the Mexican, tomorrow maybe you)? That is their fault. And that is not just a simple slogan promising a brighter future. It is also the part that makes them the so difficult to want to help.
Except that Jon Stewart is FAR more intelligent than the Donald, and probably would have nothing to do with campaigning for the Presidency if it was offered to him on a silver platter.
I’ll see your Dennis Miller and raise you Louis Black.
Those few opinions actually sound relatively reasonable, once you get past the conservative dogma and patent falsehoods (a record number of people out of work with the jobless rate at the lowest it’s been in over a decade? Really?).
If you’re going to pull in a lefty comedian news guy, then I would got with Bill Maher. Stewart is at least a nice guy. Maher is not. While he’s much more open to rationality than Trump, he’s got his liberal bugaboos, like health woo and the vaccine/autism nonsense. And he and Trump have the same basic personality.
But, the thing is, neither he nor Stewart are trying to run for President. I’d have no problem with Trump if he weren’t running for President. I’ve said he acts like a cartoon villain, and he was a quite entertaining one. As a character on the show, I actually was okay with him (at least, until it became a celebrity show). I’m actually less okay with Maher than I was of Trump on his show.
Unfortunately, he decided to take that character and have him run for president. And we started to see that maybe it wasn’t just a character after all.
So your “example” that he appeals to the Liberal intelligensia (rather than the Liberal rabble) is that you’re just darn sure he’s more popular here than the general population. That’s idiotic in at least 3 distinct ways.
You support the efforts of the Brookings Institute, the Urban Institute and the Economic Policy Institute. You don’t automatically laugh when somebody tries something innovative like, oh, cloth structures for the homeless in mild climates. Or bans of 72 oz., 840 calorie containers of sugar water. You apply the best scholarship to the problem and you keep your eyes peeled for bait and switch.
Bait and switch. Textbook economics says that expanded trade will create people who gain and people who lose. But the gains will outweigh the losses. So there is scope to have a rising tide lift all boats with the proper policies. Modern conservatism, which ideologically opposes income transfers by the government, destroys the textbook case for free trade. It no longer exists.
You support candidates in swing districts. You listen to their residents’ reasonable concerns about guns and small business regs. You try to point out things that work and things that don’t.
Then you try to think of something else if that doesn’t work. Then you throw up your hands: fuck them if they can’t take a joke.
a) Populist and popular are two different words and I shouldn’t have used populist in my original post as it’s easy to mistake my meaning. I meant someone who holds views that are popular with the people, rather than someone who believes in populism. I don’t know much about Huey Long, but I’d venture to guess that he’s the latter, not the former.
b) Despite that you are a populist, I suspect that you’d discover a hate for any liberal politician who was popular with the liberal masses, if it looked like they were going to be running the nation. They would be far more Kevin Smith than they would be Huey Long/Bernie Sanders.
This seems to be a quirk of the human brain: the most-successful despots always seem to be the goofy ones (think Putin, bare-chested on horseback; fat, self-important Mussolini; and ratty little Hitler).
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Other than the cartoon American thinking about funny foreigners ( see any comforting view on this board of the present despot of North Korea as a ridiculous little fattie ), these characterisations apply equally to elected non-despotic American presidents: was not Teddy Roosevelt the original ‘bare-chested on horseback’ fake action-man ? was not Taft self-important and fat ? was not Nixon ‘ratty’ ?
And they don’t really apply to the despots so-called:
Putin is not a despot, but unfortunately a chosen man selected by the rabble;
Mussolini was not that fat, but looked that way because of his shaven head;
Hitler was 5’ 9" and alarmingly regular in physique outside propagandist imagination. Certainly taller than either Stalin and Churchill, who each made up for the shortfall sideways.
Anyway, no matter how deficient the Republican capitalist prescriptions of hard work and low wages being the cure for the lower classes — and this is purely self-serving nonsense — what exactly are the Democrats offering ( certainly in the last 3 decades ) that is markedly different and bound to make such voters’ lives better ?
Other than additional blame for being racist and genderist etc. etc. and all the rest of reproach for glop that means nothing to the working-classes and naturally turns into just static noise.
I’m glad someone pointed this out. It was my one quibble with Exapno’s otherwise illuminating post, that a pox be on their house as well. Not so long ago, we were slamming conservatives for saying those lazy bastards just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and now some of us are suggesting the same thing. What happened?
Why do you assume it is not me? That’s not a “gotcha”, it’s a serious question - why do you assume that I do not belong to a group that has been blamed for the economic losses of white blue collar workers?
As for “difficult to help”, that sounds a bit like the concept of the “deserving poor” to me. I don’t have to invite them to my home; I don’t have to like them; all I have to do is vote for people with sound fiscal policies who are willing to increase taxes to invest in infrastructure. And education. By all the gods, education.
(And “tomorrow the Jew”?)
Well, for one thing, they have challenged the notion that white and male is the standard. That racist and genderist static noise is reflective of many workers’ realities, their experiences, and their very existence.
(Stalin was short?)
We cannot resist the temptation to hoist them with their own petard?