He’s an idiot, but he’s an extremely effective one. It wasn’t by accident that he had thousands of people, many with jobs, families and a lot to lose, willing to come to DC and stage an insurrection at his behest. That’s not being a fuck-up, that’s an example of an incredibly effective use of persuasion. There are dozens of other examples.
The left and the establishment want to continue minimizing because the alternative is uncomfortable. This is why I’m so certain that the next 4 years will be horrifying and the results in 2024 may bring us to complete ruin. We’ve learned absolutely nothing. If our only defense mechanism is to point and laugh, well…we deserve what we get.
I think that is hinting towards blaming the left and the media for what the republican party does, and I think that’s a lot of how we got here in the first place. Ridiculing ridiculous ideas is the right response, and in most democracies that would be the end of it.
I don’t know what the solution in the US is though – there’s a cynicism deep in the shared consciousness that means it was always possible to spread bullshit, Trump is just the first to really weaponize it.
No, it’s blaming the left and the media for losing to the Republican party over and over again. They are despicable, beating them in the court of public opinion ought to be easy. It’s a pretty damning indictment of the orthodoxy.
The media … which is almost entirely controlled by antique, white, male billionaires? The media is a tool of the Conservatives both in the US & abroad. They don’t lose to Republicans; they promote Republicans.
Blaming the Left for this, and acting like mass media is an ally of the Left is … pretty SOP for Republicans, really.
Personally, I’m grateful that NATO hasn’t collapsed and that the US’s allies still talk to us.
I’m also grateful that maybe I can face reality for a few months, anyway.
Two weeks ago, the Republican Party conducted a terrorist attack in Washington DC, elected members of Congress assisted this attack. We already have people trying to minimize the attack’s severity and write it off as some nuts. It was an attack called for by a Republican president and supported by Republican members of Congress. That all doesn’t simply go away.
I totally agree: that all doesn’t simply go away – and it never will. That’s the lesson we should all take away from this: in a democracy, even in strong and stable ones, there are probably always anti-democratic forces trying to undermine the system. It’s just that in stronger democracies, the institutions are successful at suppressing those forces so that they remain small, ineffectual, and on the fringes. After significant progress between the late 19th Century and the much of the 20th Century, we’ve been gradually back sliding, particularly in the last 20 years. The Capitol Hill insurrection was the culmination of that back sliding.
Like you, I am seriously concerned. I don’t want to hear “But the system worked” even once more - and yet I keep seeing pundits and pols alike saying that, and it’s frightening, because that should not be the takeaway. We got lucky. We need to ditch the usual American self-confidence and acknowledge our system needs major overhaul. I don’t know whether we turn the corner or not, but I do think that the insurrection is a potentially significant event that makes us capable of realizing just how fragile we are. Perhaps we’re now capable of an honest conversation about the strength of our system. I hope we are because as I posted on another thread, I think the next 4 to 8 years in this country will determine the next 40 to 80.
Yeah the idea that the media are a bunch of left wing pansies is silly. The mainstream capitalist media needs to manufacture tension and conflict, which is why they’ve treated politics like WWE all of these years. I honestly don’t know how we fix that other than having “craft brew” media that, bit by bit, take viewership monopolies away from these companies and put more power into the hands of individual consumers and producers.
But there’s a dark side to that trend: for every legit ‘micro brew’ publication like The Verge, Vox, or ProPublica, there are others like Breitbart, OANN, and Newsmax, and the conservatives typically have better funding than edgy start-ups and non-profits. Nazi propaganda actually thrived in an era of de-massified media.
Let’s not forget that some Americans make the case that the civil war was not about slavery and that confederate statues aren’t racist, including people on this board. We will do what we always do, ignore white terrorism and freak out when a black,person jay walks, meanwhile the tension will build and build.
I heard Van Jones say today that democracy had a near death experience. I thought that was very well said. Over 70 million people voted for a fascist. I dare say a majority of them fully supported the insurrection of January 6. The system held… barely. Another attack by a demagogue with more intelligence might succeed. We can be relieved that this attack failed. But we can’t become complacent because there’s a very good chance that another will come.
But the Republican party doesn’t need Trump. Even as a figurehead, he was a liability rather than an asset.
I agree with you. To me the Republican party supported Trump election because he is worldwide famous. Republicans thought they could control him, and found out later that it was impossible to control his actions in some way.
Agreed, but I think fewer and fewer feel that way - maybe we’ve gone from having 30% of whites believing police brutality is a serious issue to having just 33%. I’ll take it - it’s progress. Keep exposing the truth. I think, and have thought, that the civil rights struggle(s) both here and worldwide can teach complacent white Americans a LOT about what freedom really is. It’s something we take for granted because we are in the majority; minorities have a much, much, much better understanding of what freedom and oppression truly are than most of us posting here for that reason.
Like the Russian dissident Navalny (not a minority but definitely living in an oppressed society). He faces certain death with each video he makes, and he says “Fuck it, I’m showing this anyway.” Why? Because he knows that relentless truth is the way you beat these fuckers.
I wish I had a link, but the most encouraging thing I’ve read in the last 24 hours is what’s going on with online QAnon behavior. After their major prophecy was derailed at noon yesterday, a substantial number of them basically said goodbye to their online friends and said “I’m out!”. Maybe now they’ll just go back to more benign activities like denying the moon landings.
My concern is that a lot of people are minimizing the real threat by focusing so much attention on Trump. The conservative movement was happy to use Trump when he stumbled into power. They got a lot done while everyone was screaming at Trump. And they had no problem throwing Trump out when he caused too many problems. Trump never had a say in the decisions that were being made.
The same is true about Trump’s base. Sure the deplorables make headlines when they riot. But they’re not a serious threat. The real conservative program is being conducted by men in suits and ties.
Trump and the rioters are what the conservative movement is throwing in our faces to distract us away from the real damage they’re doing.
Not only is Trump not playing six dimensional chess, he isn’t capable of a level of strategy sufficient to beat a six year old playing Chutes & Ladders. His ‘genius’, such as it is, is a bare-assed willingness to just not give a fuck about how saying and doing opprobrious things will reflect on his reputation with the general public; as a public figure he exists specifically to pander to the base of people–his MAGA zealots–and responds pretty much exclusively to their adoration.
Whereas Barack Obama would often pause for what seemed like eons to select just the right words or turn of phrase to express his exact intent, Trump doesn’t even put enough thought into what is coming from his mouth to construct complete sentences or utilize even his limited vocabulary clearly and correctly. And his base loves him for it because it makes him seem like one of them done good, even though Trump has spent his entire career largely squandering the benefits of his privileged upbringing and inherited wealth through poor business decisions, alliances with people who have even fewer scruples than himself, and generally attaining what success he has enjoyed through scamming other people and inflating his clownish appearance.
That so many people have fallen for this to the tune of 73 million votes after a term of the presidency marred by more corruption and ineptitude since any in living memory speaks to a more dangerous mentality in the American public that utterly distrusts government and social responsibility. This isn’t about “small government vs big government” or personal liberties or any other legitimate rationale for political conservatism; it is the cynicism, divisiveness, and barely concealed bigotry that the Republican party has been actively fostering since at least Newt Gingrich’s turn at the wheel, and arguably going back to before Nixon.
Trump has been especially successful at this because he has no use for strategic maneuvering to couch racism in a “war on drugs” or to make any pretense that he cares for any institutions of democracy, and while he might not be a slavering white nationalist himself, he has zero compunction about pandering to them in order to invigorate his base into a fascistic frenzy of anger and violence. Although he was too inept to effectively organize and focus this angst into a sustained movement to overturn the election or permanently damage the institutions of American democracy, he has shown the way for people who are smarter and more capable in marshaling the resources to do so.
Trump was a useful idiot and a distracting clown figure that the media spent four years trying to dissect and interpret when he had as much depth as the cardboard figurine that ‘students’ of his eponymous university would pose with, but the real forces beyond the modern ‘conservative’ movement have used him as a stalking horse to test the waters for an actual elimination of democratic norms in service of their own agenda of permanent and uncompetitive control of American government and society, to the extent that a few are already questioning the reason for having competitive elections, and many others openly continue to do all they can to make sure that participation in voting is as restrictive as possible with the clear intent of ensuring that elections are not fair and representative of the public as a whole. The broad support for Trump’s brazen efforts to challenge election results that had been repeatedly verified tells you everything you need to know about their true intent regardless of mealy-mouthing slogans of ‘protecting democracy’.
You want to imprison 75 million people? And keep them there, presumably, until they die of old age (since we’d have confirmed all their worst beliefs by locking them up, so they’d be really unlikely to change them)?
There had better be another way out of this; because that certainly isn’t a way out of it. That would only be a way deeper in.
Do you mean that you were only recommending imprisoning Trump’s family?
If the second sentence you quoted had followed immediately upon the first, I would indeed have read it that way. But your “-snip” includes three sentences, all of them referring to other people.
Thank you for the clarification, however. I agree that any member of the Trump family who can be legitimately convicted of an offense carrying a prison term should be imprisoned. I think that the damage that would be done by locking them up purely for being related to Donald, however, would be greater than the potential damage prevented.