I just read that an anti-Putin activist Konstantin Sinitsyn was found murdered. Apparently he had his head smashed in.
Putin opponents have a strange habit of finding themselves at the wrong place (like their own doorstep) at the wrong time and ending up being murdered.
Authorities say they believe the motive was robbery. Of course they do. I say “bullshit”.
Navalny is very lucky that he was ONLY arrested. Putin’s body count keeps climbing.
And this goon Putin is the guy Trump worships, the guy that OWNS Trump.
Well, Trumpism certainly has nothing to do with populism. Populism redistributes income from the top downwards, mobilizes electoral majorities, and has mixed technocratic merits. We saw pushes for that in the US during the late 1800s and in Latin America in the mid 20th century.
Trumpism sets aside class issues in favor of pushing real folks, decent folks, hard working folks to center. Not Those People. Internal enemies must be purged in one way or another: they include foreigners and cosmopolitan latte sippers. Meanwhile plutocrats underwrite this political program. This is fascism, soft fascism in the case of Trumpism.
Warning: while Trump is clearly an instinctive racist, and technically runs a fascist program, these terms are ineffective and counterproductive epithets, because it sounds like we’re calling the GOP a Nazi Party. Which they are not. Liberals need to think strategically. Analytically though, these terms are helpful. Just remember that soft fascism was practiced by Napoleon Bonaparte, and that Mussolini is a better example than Hitler.
For general usage, better terms are white nationalist, white supremacist, authoritarian, self-dealer, and Putin supporter. They keep the conversation on track. Even emolument is a decent word, though it is challenging to pronounce.
Liberals need to figure things like this out. How would we summarize Pence?
Pence is political mediocrity. Not especially bright, though smarter than Trump. Lacks Dan Quayle’s self-awareness. A far weaker electoral candidate at the Presidential level than average. The most theocratic person to sit in the top 2 slots.
The latter is what worries people. I think those worries are overblown and that Pence would represent several steps towards normal politics. Pence cares about the GOP as an institution. There are no signs of abnormal narcissism or personality defect. That’s unsurprising: holding a previous electoral office is a good test and filter for managerial dysfunction.
Most importantly, after businesses start boycotting the state of Indiana for a discriminatory anti-LGBT law that Pence signed, he backed off. Within a fortnight, he signed follow up legislation which smoothed the rough edges of the law. Pence might be an American theocrat, but he’s not a true believer. His behavior is that of a normal American politician and frankly a normal human being, albeit a conservative one.
Would Pence be a stronger GOP candidate in 2020 than Trump? Quite possibly. Could Pence start a pointless war like GWBush? Sure. But is he a far more conventional and therefore trustworthy steward of the nuclear codes than Trump? Very much, yes.
What worries me about the mid-terms (or possibly 2020) is the possibility of a last-minute event that the people will only have time to react to viscerally. I’m not talking about an “October surprise”, I’m talking about an “Early November surprise”. The electorate has shown itself vulnerable to such; The Comey announcement of 2016, the Bin Laden tape of 2004 stand as examples.
All the planning and preparation and organizing will be for naught if there is such an event, perpetrated by (or at least seeming to be) someone on trump and the rightie villain parade. Terrorists, illegal immigrant, or the latest boogeyman, Antifa.
And if you think that trump isn’t capable of something like that, he doesn’t have to be. Just a group of his more unhinged supporters, who are certainly not in short supply. And just to make it clear, I’m talking about a mass casualty event, on the order of Oklahoma City, or Las Vegas. Am I nuts for even considering this possibility? Or just putting myself into the heads of people who would be nuts enough to do it?
I agree with this, and disagree with those claiming we should support Trump because ‘Pence would be worse.’ Pence would not be worse. It’s true that he would work harder than Trump has to make the lives of gay Americans miserable, but he might not get particularly far with that project because he completely lacks Trump’s base of rabid fans.
No thinking progressive should support keeping Trump in place as a means of heading off Pence. Pence would not be good for America (or the world), but he’ll be less horrifically awful than Trump.
Continuing the thought experiment, Pence would be a more effective enabler of Ryan and McConnell, because he has sufficient cognitive capacities so as to not contradict his administration’s policies in interviews. Unlike Trump, who ironically is an awful political negotiator. So we’d expect somewhat more effective attacks on social security and medicare aka “Entitlements”, following December’s passage of massive plutocrat-style tax cuts.
So we’d want to keep the pressure up, emphasizing the growing divisions between the GOP and upper middle class, who have high voting participation rates. But on the plus side, risks of terrorism catalyzed authoritarianism and nuclear war would diminish. Public bigotry would subside more towards dog-whistling levels. Essentially, Gingrich’s GOP would be favored less than McConnell’s. I’ll take that trade.
We’ll need to recall these years though: the right wing will try to re-write history. And it’s increasingly clear to me, that efforts to expand the day to day freedoms of women and minorities aren’t mere posturing and virtue signalling. Blacks should be able to drive across our country without entirely valid fear of hassle; married women shouldn’t be pressured to have sex with their boss. Establishing these freedoms will require a tough fight with modern conservatives. But it would have wide benefits: basic fairness to all is an essential prop for our democratic superstructure. We have a full plate now; we’ll have a full plate later.
Do we know whether or not Pence is as enthusiastic as Ryan (and his plutocrat owners) about eliminating the social safety net? Obviously most Republicans are at least partially in on the project—but they do differ in their degree of fervor.
Too true.
Nor single women, neither! (As I’m guessing you believe.)
But as for convincing conservatives that abandoning their ‘white straight Christian males must rule’ hierarchical beliefs, will actually improve their lives: that will indeed be a task. A difficult and demanding one, I suspect.
Sherrerd wrote: “But as for convincing conservatives that abandoning their ‘white straight Christian males must rule’ hierarchical beliefs, will actually improve their lives: that will indeed be a task. A difficult and demanding one, I suspect.”
Well, economies are not supposed to be a zero-sum game, but as today’s economy is constructed, with the vast amount of new wealth accruing to the top one percent, it might as well be. Therefore, any gains by minorities, women, etc. do come at the expense of white straight Christian males, and they know this. It is, after all, the way the game is played.
I’m not buying the ‘it might as well be.’ I can’t see simply accepting that our economy is, much less ‘must be,’ a zero-sum game.
That’s fear-based, tribal thinking. And that’s not the kind of thinking that’s brought our species from hunter-gatherer societies, to being able to travel around the globe in mere hours.
I agree with that, but don’t think it’s necessarily the case that false beliefs (about the way economies work, in this case) can’t be publicly and repeatedly corrected. Some will still go on believing whatever justifies their worldview, of course. But repeated corrections will have an effect on many.
(As I’m guessing you believe.)