For this thread – take every quality of Trump and try to find the most exact analogue/parallel/equivalent characteristic for a “liberal” (or at least a liberal in the same sense that Trump is a conservative).
For example: the Republican party typically has billed itself as the party of family values (or at least the conservative definition of family values) – marriage for life, fidelity, religious Christianity, etc. Trump’s life seems completely counter to these values, and he’s never renounced such behavior in any way at all.
What is the equivalent for the Democratic party? I don’t think it’s hedonism – the party doesn’t celebrate or elevate the qualities of unfaithfulness, blasphemy, or divorce. Perhaps it’s an embrace of ethnic/religious/LGBTQ diversity? IMO, that’s at least as important to the Democratic party that family values are to the Republican party. If so, then a “liberal” Trump might have lived a life full of bigoted and misogynistic behavior (much like Trump himself, perhaps), but Democratic voters and lawmakers would still largely have embraced and supported him.
I’m sure there are a million other Trumpian characteristics that we could find a mirror or equivalent to… any thoughts?
Trump just revealed that the conservatives don’t really care about the “family values” type stuff, that’s just something for the rubes to talk about.
So for the liberals, you’d have to have some stuff that liberals talk about a lot, but both the establishment and the base don’t really care about, not really.
So…President Obama: closet smoker! Smoking is bad m’kay, but the President needs his medicine. But at least Obama tried to hide it from the kids rather than bragging about it.
I had been musing about this during the election cycle last year and the hypothetical liberal candidate I came up with was Rosie O’Donnell. Except that she needs a few more billion dollars, and also is indeed quite genuinely liberal (as opposed to Trump, who postured for the right but isn’t really conservative.)
There isn’t really anyone famous on the left, a celebrity, who isn’t quite truly liberal. Folks like Stephen Colbert, Michael Moore, Oprah Winfrey, etc. are all truly liberal to the core. Same for almost every A-List actor or actress in Hollywood.
I’m not so much looking for real-people examples, but rather characteristics and qualities. Then we can put it all together and see if anyone is even remotely close to having all of the characteristics and qualities we’ve come up with.
He would have grown up in a small town in the midwest (Kansas would be best), and been very active in his fundamentalist Christian Church where he led the effort to prevent SSM.
I don’t think you want to go *opposite *to find an analogue but rather extreme. Like a Democratic president who starts every speech by thanking the holy earth mother for her positive energy and who refuses to appoint any white male for any cabinet position.
I actually know a company exactly like that. They’re a fund-raising hub, and bring in a LOT of pledges for liberal/Democratic/labor causes. But their actual operation is a boiler-room/sweat-shop. The workers tried to join the Telecommunication Workers Union, and there were retaliations. The place is a hell-hole…and does a lot of good work for liberal causes.
Maybe a younger, loudmouthed version of Bernie Sanders, with little or no political experience, but with tens of millions of subscribers on the Internet and a YouTube celebrity. Could be either a man or woman. Maybe exceptionally young, a 35+ year old president, rather than Trump’s exceptionally old age.
And promises free healthcare, free education, drastic cuts in military spending, immediate confiscation of all guns, free abortions for all, and other pie in the sky, and then gets to Congress and finds - hey, it isn’t actually that easy.
Oh, and owns multiple mansions and has a private jet despite railing against the wealthy.
Where can we find someone similar to a NYC billionaire with thinning hair, media magnate, historically nebulous political affiliation and changing opinions, who uses his money to influence opinion outside of his local scope? Perhaps one who now happens to be leaning towards the opposite, yet similar policies?
Has to be a controversial and shameless self-promoter who never held office but is the kind of guy who’d head up his own TV show and host SNL; and he’d keep getting put in movie after movie after movie – not because folks want him as an actor, but because he’s instantly recognizable as the stock character that he simply is, such that mentioning him being president is an obvious we’re-in-the-wrong-timeline gag.
And, for the icing on the cake, I guess he’d pretty much have to have been dead wrong about some wrongfully-accused New Yorkers back in the 1980s.
She’s not into trade agreements. There’s the distrust of government bought out by corruption. Her vice Presidential candidate last year thought what was going on in Ukraine has a lot to do with Zionists paying neo-nazis to cause trouble in the streets so we can probably check an anti-semitism box. She didn’t seem to concern herself with well sourced facts although I never quite saw her go full “I’m basically citing chain emails.” She’s an anti-vaxxer. Although she is different from Trumjp on immigration the rise in undocumented immigrants she put dow as one of the failures of NAFTA. She wanted to reevaluate our role in NATO and get out of being the world cop. She’s profoundly lacking in experience.
The opposite of Trump would have to be someone without ego. He or she would have to spend all their time worrying about other people. They would have to keep their promises even at considerable cost to themselves. Such a person might not survive to adulthood.
But they would genuinely favor diversity and live by their beliefs. And want to eliminate extremes of poverty and wealth, believe that the government has the duty to attend to health care, try to encourage labor unions and a few dozen other things I can’t think of at the moment. And they would really mean it.
Yeah, these are good points. There are some on the left who embody them.
There is a book called ‘do as I say’ about liberal hypocrisy on these issues.
Michael Moore lives in an all white enclave.
Al gore lives in a mansion with large energy requirements and he got rich selling his TV channel to an oil exporter.
Ralph Nader engaged in union busting techniques when his employees tried to unionize. He also used tax havens.
Noam Chomsky had investments in companies that supply the military industrial complex.
Etc.
But to me Trump goes beyond that. He isn’t just a hypocrite, he is deranged, unstable, unqualified and mentally ill. I don’t know who on the left fits that category who the democrats would happily vote for. I can’t think of anyone on the left who is a national figure who is unstable and irrational like Trump.
That parenthetical remark is the reason this thread is not getting anywhere IMHO.
The thing about Trump is that he didn’t espouse the standard conservative values while personally violating those same values. He was kind of orthogonal, in that he said many things that were aligned with conservatives, some that tended more liberal, and some that crossed all lines. But he had a big edge in that he was the only prominent candidate saying the things he said, at least to the extent that he said them. So if his message spoke to you, he was your option.
If Trump would have been a run-of-the-mill conservative ideologically, then he would have been competing against others of that same stripe who didn’t have the disadvantage of being conservative heretics, which would have been a huge obstacle for him. But that’s pretty much what people are trying to conjure up on the liberal side - a run-of-the-mill liberal and personal hypocrite - and that theoretical candidate would have a hard time against run-of-the-mill liberals who were not personal hypocrites. The only way to think of it is if someone managed to put together some unique set of positions that no other major candidate was putting forth, and think about whether perhaps the voters would overlook his personal heresies in order to get the one guy they wanted.
Beyond all that, I think (or at least hope) Trump’s election is kind of a unique event, unlikely to be repeated on either side. So if you’re asking “how likely is it that this unique event would be repeated in a slightly different circumstance?”, you need to consider that it’s very unlikely to be repeated in the exact same circumstance as well.