Trump isn’t the leader of a movement. But there’s probably someone out there now taking note of his success, and this someone, whoever it is, could be very dangerous in a few years.
I as referring there to what Hague said; followed to what the rapper did say. Hank here is trying to make it sound as if both Hague and the rapper are on the same side, not so; but I can see how my wording there can confuse others. Sorry.
In any case, I do know what Hague point was. That Trump is a dangerous man that should never had been considered for higher office.
Others like the rapper do think that Trump is the shitty candidate that America deserves. Not a ringing endorsement either, so who knows then where Hank Beecher’s position is.
OK, that’s a good point, and I was possibly wrong. I do agree that Sanders is more in the mold of the kind of Leftists the Red Scares were trying to weed out, the people who were more concerned with income inequality and standards of living than how one race was doing relative to another.
If Sanders were politically more of a true Socialist as opposed to a Social Democrat, and politically arguing from a position of strength, I think he might even denounce BLM for playing into a Bourgeois racial narrative which serves to divide the working class against itself instead of uniting against the property-owning class and yadda yadda yadda piles of skulls yadda yadda yadda seventy-year dictatorship of the oligarchs.
My point is, both Sanders and Trump have legitimate appeal to poor whites. The problem Sanders faces are, first, he’s not going to win the primary and, second, he has to tie the legitimacy of his candidacy to the BLM crowd, which is immediately off-putting to poor whites. The problem Trump presents (Trump not being self-aware enough to face any problems) is that all of his solutions are tied up with the racist, violent, misogynistic culture the GOP has cozied up to ever since it inaugurated the Southern Strategy, and thus represents the worst aspects of nationalism, which is to say it’s ethnic nationalism.
Ethnic nationalism is a hold-over from the Old World, something which Europe has almost beaten out of itself through a series of bloody wars but which still resurfaces whenever Roma and/or Arabs dare poke their heads up. As terrible as it is in Europe, it’s even worse in the New World, where all of the currently dominant cultures are immigrant cultures, and so can only claim an ethnic nationalist heritage all the way back to Last Thursday, in a broad historical sense. Civic nationalism, the nationalism of shared values without regard for ethnicity or country of origin or anything else, is what American nationalism should be about. It, ideally, entails a deemphasis of any aspect of the culture which would make members of that culture unable to live peacefully in a diverse society; not a melting pot, not homogenization, but no excessively rough edges, either. Trump’s emphasis of racist solutions is a big fucking rough edge to put on a whole class of people.
The best lubricant is making sure everyone feels like they have a stable economic basis in society, and that nobody else is getting anything they’re not getting. There’s that word “fair” again, and, once again, Trump whines about “unfairness” because it resonates with his base: Poor whites who feel everyone but them is getting special hand-outs and hand-ups, such as Affirmative Action. As long as they think that, the idea of them making common cause with BLM or anything like it is a pipe dream, and the GOP will be able to race-bait them until the cows come home. Psychological experiments verify that people will screw themselves over to hurt someone who was unfair; this apparently extends to voting for mainstream Republicans. Being able to do it by voting for Trump is just icing on the cake.
So I go back to what I’ve been saying for a little while now: Trump is a symptom. The cause is income inequality combined with the race-baiting the GOP has been doing for decades, which has convinced poor whites they’re being left behind while poor blacks and poor everyone-not-white are getting special treatment. When, as is looking increasingly likely, Trump just barely misses winning the Republican nomination, the GOP will be punished severely by that demographic. It might even form a third party, an American version of the BNP, and keep the Republicans out of office until and unless the GOP dumps Norquist and his band of idiots and grows an economic policy somewhat more advanced than reducing the top marginal income tax rate and screeching about U-Haul and Socialism and Bootstraps whenever someone other than the Koch Brothers wants something.
On the one hand, I agree with you that Trump is not just a joke candidate who isn’t serious about running. I agree with you that Trump’s candidacy and campaign is focused on a serious shake up of the Republican party.
However, I disagree that there’s any coherent visioncoming out of Trump, much less one that’s been consistent since the 1980s. For Pete’s sake, he’s changed his position on abortion, he used to support the Clintons, he was in favor of universal health care in 1999, but now wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a free market system, except with insurance mandates. In 1990, Trump advocated legalizing drugs because the War on Drugs was “a joke”, but in 2015 he opposed legalizing marijuana.
And nothing he espouses is “radical centrist”. He’s a protectionist and isolationist, he wants to make abortion illegal (except possibly rape and incest), he wants to bring back and increase the use of capital punishment, he wants mass arrest of protesters and to loosen defamation laws, thereby weakening the First Amendment protections on free speech. He supports “traditional marriage” and says he would consider appointing Supreme Court justices that would overturn the one that made gay marriage legal. He wants to reinstate the use of waterboarding and even stronger unspecified tactics, i.e. torture. He’s a science idiot, supporting claims that vaccination causes autism and doesn’t believe in climate change.
Both of them think there is already a lot of pain and suffering, so while there would be some pain during the shake up, their hope is that in the rebuilding on the other side, things would be more equitable, and the resulting situation would be a net reduction in pain.
It’s funny, that link also has her saying:
And thinking Trump is going to bust up big business is just stupid. Trump is big business. He’s a billionaire who earned his money on the backs of the working class. He got rich in real estate and casinos and hotels, then by branding his name and licensing it out to other ventures. Trump’s number one and only care is Trump.
She said nothing about the “best leader”. She said she wants the most transparent evil piece of shit, because at least we know he’s a piece of shit, whereas all the other politicians we seem to think aren’t pieces of shit, but they are, too, so why not get the biggest piece of shit there is. She doesn’t want a leader, she wants a mess.
More like Justin Beiber.
Many of his stated positions do sound like he puts national interest first. His wall is to stop illegal immigration. His ban on Muslims is to prevent importing terrorists. But his idea of fixing Obamacare is a free market insurance, except with mandates and possibly with a catastrophic care plan for the poor, but citizens only. Poor illegals can suck ass. He wants to loosen defamation laws so he can sue reporters who say bad things about him that he claims are lies. He wants to shut down protests by having mass arrests. He says he’s for campaign finance reform, but hasn’t given any specifics on how that would work. He wants a higher ethanol mandate - that means more ethanol in gasoline, which will tear up older cars. He called for a boycott on Apple because they wouldn’t help the FBI hack the iPhone used by the San Bernadino terrorists. He opposes increasing the minimum wage.
Well, see, the first thing you do is you take out a small $19T loan.
This is it, in a nutshell. To see coherency in Trump’s position, vision, or even *speech *from day to day, for God’s sake, requires more naked projection than a peep show booth. On one end of the spectrum, you have Mr. and Mrs. Angry Voter who can’t quite articulate exactly what they think Trump is going to do to fix what ails us, but have a pretty good feeling that he’s the man, and that’s good enough. At the distant other end, someone like Qin, who has (when most others his age are focused on Xbox, beer, getting laid and maybe a march or two to protest something-or-other if it’s convenient) spent untold hours constructing an elaborate fantasy-prophecy of an avenging Overman, a messianic political figure who’s going to roll in and turn the nation on its ear, and then take an unapologetic leak in the other ear. And whattaya know? Along comes Trump, just as it was foretold. Hallelujah. Okay, so he doesn’t quite fit, but… the time is nigh, so he’ll have to do.
People see in Trump exactly what they want to see. It’s Being There, if Chance had a hideous comb-over and logorrhea.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that Ms. Banks doesn’t have the USA’s best interest at heart.
I don’t see it.
Following a Trump loss, a guy who tries to duplicate his act will be called out on it; it’ll be obvious, and he’ll get hit with quick and easy comparisons to the laughingstock he’s clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of – the difference being, nobody’s going to make the mistake they made this time, of underestimating a ‘Trump’ type early on; that worked once, so I can’t imagine it working again “in a few years”.
They’re going to come after him hard and fast from Day One; from before Day One. They’ll spend much of their efforts taking down whoever comes closest to bearing a passing resemblance to Trump – and spending much of what’s left trying to paint themselves as the anti-Trump, to avoid being the Trump-esque target.
Trump won’t be a model; he’ll be a cautionary tale, a boogeyman: something you try to prove you’re not, after someone strikes a low blow by comparing you to him.
Truly a beautiful post from end to end. My thoughts on Trump exactly.
The “good” news about Trump is that as reprehensible as he is, as an individual he seems less coldly bloodthirsty than most would-be authoritarians.
The next guy to take up Trumpism’s mantle may be (will probably be) much more of a professional authoritarian in the model of a Chavez or a Fujimori. Or, heaven forfend, a Putin.
You have to be joking about that Red Scare thing. They were trying to weed out the social justice types?? Are you talking about the red scare of the 50s? Distinctions were not on the agenda. Race? You think they cared?
Trump is comedy gold. The rest of the world seems to think so, too.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160408-how-comics-around-the-world-view-trump
I especially liked Clisare’s take.
Trump surrogate Roger Stone incites mob violence against delegates who flip against Trump on the second ballot.
A look into a future - who knew the Globe has a sense of humor 
(PDF) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf
We have two starkly different predictions here. It would be foolish to be sure of either.
I lean towards The Other Waldo Pepper, partly because US demographics are healthier (which to me means closer to replacement fertility) than most other westernized countries. More babies, more optimism about the future. Also, the US system of government structurally favors the two party system, so it is harder to have a strong US equivalent of UKIP or BNP.
OK, I have to thank you now. I’m watching the wonderful snarky review of Lady in the Water by The Nostalgia Critic (YouTube link to Part 1) and this post just made me laugh more than Paul Giamatti screaming his way past a swimming pool and a steroidal Chia Pet.
You’re asking if the politically-active section of the American populace cared about race in the 1950s. I, briefly dazed by the question, almost attempted a straight answer to that. I almost missed how you completely misread a good fraction of my post, but the fact you leveraged that fundamental misunderstanding into revealing an even deeper ignorance of one of the major political movements of the past century or so makes your post a thing of beauty. Against such magnificence, the Gods contend in vain.
If anyone else has a problem with my post, I’ll explain it further.
Nobody will try to emulate Trump’s buffoonery. But there’s a toxic brand of populism that’s waiting to be co-opted and nuanced by an opportunistic center-right nationalist. Trump was destined to fail because he was never truly serious about running a serious political campaign in the first place. Trump doesn’t care and probably doesn’t really want to be president. But someone out who does is watching this and taking note of Trump’s successes.
I agree with you, with an expansion and a caveat:
The expansion is that the US is taking on a substantial number of Hispanics, who will alter the calculus for any future politician who hopes to mount a race-centric campaign in the future. This is close to the demographic now-or-never time for the old-fashioned angry white guy party to win at the national level.
The caveat is that the US has had some fairly successful regional third parties. Minnesota is famous for this, with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the Independence Party of Minnesota (the Reform Party of Minnesota when I lived there) winning fair numbers of elections, including governorships and House and Senate seats. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is still fairly successful, by which I mean wildly successful when compared to other American third parties. An American BNP or UKIP equivalent could well infest some states for a while after it becomes demographically impossible for a white-centric party to succeed at the national level.
Keyword there is nuanced. It’ll have to be someone much more experienced in politics than Trump, and who has some substantial (i.e. nonimaginary) policies and plans, again, unlike Trump.
Only one of Trump’s voting age children is registered to vote for him in the upcoming New York primary.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2016/04/09/trumps-own-children-wont-be-voting-for-him-heres-why/
Hahaha that’s funny. One wonders if they’d want to anyway.
Here’s something interesting about the CO delegate fight. Could we be looking at an upcoming Trump-Kasich ticket?
Agree. We see evidence of this every time we see the national presidential vote coming out 51/49 but at the same time there are hard red counties in hard red states electing hard red congressmen and hard red state legislators and in many places hard red complete legislatures and governors.
IMO it’s a virtual certainty that we’ll see hard red splinter parties appear in the bastions. In another thread our own dear adaher pointed out a similar idea and IIRC included links to some regional demographics showing we’re 50+ years from seeing the end of some of the *all white all the time * areas.
Right now the rising water is at their knees. When it gets to their chest they’re gonna be *real *interested in fighting a rear guard action to hold onto the heritage as long as possible. Heck, the Confederacy fell 150 years ago and it’s still darn popular in many such circles despite all the cultural dilution they suffered not only in the immediate aftermath, but also in the rest of the intervening 150 years.
Brainfart…it’s the MI delegate fight.