That’s why I added the part about picking up more of the center that over the years has been alienated by that bunch of yahoos.
If Sanders is elected and tries to govern even as remotely to the left as he would like to, there is about 40% of the electorate that could be persuaded to join a less-crazy GOP. Add to those the non-crazy conservatives and moderates already in the GOP and you could conceivably build a new coalition.
If Hillary is elected… Who knows? If she governs like her husband did in his last six years in office, as a moderate triangulator and centrist, then the Republicans will have a tough time of it. If she governs as a shrill left-wing firebrand, then there will be a similar opening to steal disaffected voters.
I keep going back to a quote by Marx; you probably know the one, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” This, then, is a double-reflection, Trump as a farcical Hitler while the modern GOP is a farcical version of the DNC of 1968. Once again we have a party in distress spiraling towards an election it can’t win, and there are people who want to worsen the situation with a violent demonstration. As Marx said in the same piece, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Recall that the beer hall putsch was a failure although it did cause some reconfiguration of German party politics at the time. As we all know, Hitler never was much of a force in world events after that.
So naturally there’s nothing to be concerned about in watching Trump, Stone, & Arpaio’s machinations today. Nor the future machinations of those silently watching and learning now while forming their plans for 2018 and beyond.
I’d be willing to entertain the thought that modern America is similar to Weimar Germany when someone points out the devastating war we just lost, the revolution we underwent as a result, and the far-right and far-left street gangs engaging in open warfare.
Because otherwise, it’s turning a strained metaphor into outright historical illiteracy.
'Twas half a joke. Trump’s no Hitler. 2016 America is no late 1930s Germany. Nevertheless it has always disturbed me how many closet authoritarians seem to lurk in the ranks of folks who self identify as patriots.
Between modern conventional media and modern social media the ability to rouse the rabble has never been greater for any given degree and quantity of the disaffected. As such the tipping point may be much closer to the surface than a direct comparison with 20th Century history would indicate.
It’s for darn sure that widespread civil violence would have a bigger impact on daily life, the economy, etc. than it did then. And that the risk of a very hard to reverse techno-police state is much greater in our connected world.
This is nothing new. Their effective influence waxes and wanes, but somehow we muddle through regardless.
(People underestimate the power of muddling through. It isn’t a plan, so it can’t be foiled: if something stops working, it flows into a workaround, like water finding a new channel; it isn’t an explicit philosophy, so it’s hard to counter: it has no tenets which can be analyzed and attacked, no slogans which can be subverted, no figureheads who can be literally or figuratively pantsed, painted orange, and left disoriented on the public square. It’s perfectly Daoist, and in fact is so Yin it’s hard to see as a separate entity. Yet a well-executed muddle-through is the ultimate way to subvert any explicit policy. Because, after all, most of us are Bozos on this bus… )
All this is true as well, but the tools to expose and to fight it are easier to use as well, and have been (and are being) used in places much worse off than America.
Granted, the circumstances are nowhere near as dire as they were in Weimar Germany, but there’s a far more relevant parallel here: people in perceived economic and political distress reaching out for whoever they believe offers very significant change in the system, without regard to the fact that that change could be far worse.
Doubtful. More likely the Dems pick up a good chunk of Trump’s base. Not all of it, of course, but a good chunk. As previously discussed, there is actually some overlap between the constituencies to whom Trump and Sanders appeal, and some voters have been wavering as to which of the two to back.
What distinguishes Trump’s angry-white-working-class-male base from the rest of the Pub base is that these people are sick and tired of what the GOP Establishment selling since 1980, the whole bizcon/neoliberal/economic-libertarian/supply-side economics orthodoxy, it’s just not working for them and they are beginning to realize it never will – and Sanders rejects all of that too, which Clinton does not; so a Sanders-progressive-dominated Democratic Party would have considerable appeal to them, or at least to those of them who can overcome or learn to overlook the racial/social/cultural fixations that have kept them in the GOP this long. (And they had to overlook a lot of that to get behind a shameless irreligious womanizer like Trump, anyway.) And, the Democratic Party can become that and remain – or, rather, become once again – the Democratic Party.
But if the GOP Establishment and the non-crazy part of the base try to recapture that AWWCM base by repudiating the supply-side orthodoxy . . . then, what is the GOP, any more? What has it got left? Bowties?
Granted, yes, there are some interesting parallels, and were more of the country like where Trump supporters tend to hail from, we’d be in serious danger of electing a new Hitler.
My prediction is that if your plausible scenario comes to pass, the powers that be will spin it that Trump is not a true conservative, and if the base were not misled by this liberal in conservative colors they could have won. Definitely if a relative moderate is nominated, if Cruz is nominated it was because they were stabbed in the back.
When you consider that a substantial number of Republican voters still think Obama was born in Kenya you’ll see that yahoos are their base. Sanders maybe but Clinton is not going to cause moderates to desert the democrats, Not to mention the Republican platform is going to have to move to the center which is unlikely since they’ve driven so many moderates out. 30 years ago they had a moderate base which could have taken over, but the few remaining of those are either in the Northeast or get wiped out in primaries by Tea Party candidates.
This is such an odd campaign that I doubt they will learn from it. Sure, they’ll issue a report about what they should do going forward, like they did four years ago, but acting on it is doubtful. And the demographics are not working in their favor.
Your scenario will come to pass eventually - maybe after they lose Texas. Or when the Supremes declare the gerrymandering which has helped them stay in control of Congress unconstitutional.
Yeah. I made my comparison to Weimar because that’s more well-know to most folks here. And the specific campaign goon Stone was mostly threatening street violence reminiscent of Rohm’s best tactics.
A better comparison is probably Syriza in current and immediately past Greece. The angry populists successfully threw the ruling clientelist class out of (most of) national politics. And were promptly rewarded with a depression and massive unemployment. To be sure they were already going that way, but bringing in Syriza put the whole crash into overdrive.
Since then things have begun to return slightly towards normal both politically and economically.
As much as the angry crew in the US today thinks they have nothing left to lose they are vastly hugely wrong in how much more they have to lose if they really kick over the apple cart. The problem is they’ll take a lot of the rest of us with them.
Yeah, I know this has been said before, likely by multiple people, but most of the poorer class have it one helluva lot better here than in most any third- (or even second-) world country, but all they see are the relative differences here.
In the last few weeks we all here have become more hostile to the tactics of Trump and the dangerous subset of his angry supporters. But that should take nothing away from the legitimacy of their grievances. I’ve written about that here, as have most of the rest of us.
The nation will not endure when it’s a game rigged against any sizeable fraction of its populace. That was true back when it was the blacks who were utterly and incontrovertibly screwed. It is now true when it’s the working class regardless of race.
Those folks have to participate fully in our collective prosperity. A country that really works awesome for 0.1%, works pretty good for another 10%, works barely sorta for the next 20%, and that’s about it has no staying power.
Trump has no solutions. Not one. But that doesn’t detract from the reality of the problems his followers have. And even if Trump disappears from the political scene, others will follow because the need to propose solutions, good or bad, that address these folks’ issues is not going away. Because they’re not going away.
This is naturally the province of the Democratic party. I said a couple weeks ago that the central question is whether racial animus can be quieted enough for economic solidarity to prevail and permit a party of, by, and for the working & middle class.
The opportunity is here to be grasped. We just need the bravery to call a spade a spade and then go for it.
The Democratic Problem; or, how racist is it to say “Hispanic Lives Matter”?
Nobody dares say “White Lives Matter”. Saying “All Lives Matter” already means you’re a troglodyte. The Democratic Party has to make pleasant sounds towards Black Lives Matter, and the problem is that BLM is inherently a mass protest movement. Mass protest movements are great for on-the-scene activism and terrible for long-term coalition-building for the same reason: Strong in-group affiliation necessarily leads to strong out-group Othering. It can be Blues versus Greens, Catholics versus Protestants, Protestants versus Protestants, it doesn’t really matter: What keeps people together on the line when the tear gas comes out and billy clubs are raised is the same kind of psychology which makes compromise look like betrayal.
The Democrats have been here before. It was what destroyed the New Left when Vietnam ended and a dozen little identity-politics Liberation movements fragmented before the might of the unified Conservative Movement. The Democrats found the White House again after they abandoned most progressivism and ran someone who would have been a fairly solid Republican prior to Nixon. That gets you measured change and compromise, which pisses protest movements off more than a reactionary would, because the reactionary never pretended to be on your side.
The only possible solution is to somehow convince all of the groups that it isn’t a competition, that policies are going to benefit everyone, and then make good on it. Give the majority something to point to as a solid improvement over what they had, and let the radicals on both sides marginalize themselves by screaming how terrible it all is they didn’t get everything they demanded in the first hundred minutes. Leverage the fact most people don’t want to be radicals. Radicalism is tiring. You’re angry all the time. It isn’t a good way to live. There’s a reason most radicals are young: The old are no wiser, they’re just more likely to have coronaries.
Well said. But most of that can be applied *mutatis mutandis *to the Rs as well.
Intra-party conflict between subgroups is inherent in big-tent politics. And if a large diverse country is stuck with a two party system, they’re both going to have to be big tents to get anywhere close to 50% support.
BLM *and *the dangerous section of Trumpists are both saying effectively the same thing: We have to get this in-your-face to get any attention from the lazy mostly-content mainstream who not only don’t share our problems, they don’t even see our problems.
To be successful in the long term big-tent politics needs a big-tent citizenry. When segmented advertising, assortative mating, racial- and economically-separated housing, urban / suburban / rural culture gaps and such maximize the ability of dividers to divide it’s darn hard for the uniters to unite.
I can imagine that GWB thought himself a uniter when he said that. IMO he was mistaken, which just indicates how un-united the United States had/has become and how blinkered and defective his points of reference were.