No, I just see no reason to legitimatize a hack like Ben Stein in doing so. It’d be like me quoting Josef Stalin to condemn the Nazis.
Don’t be absurd. As long as the savage war by the plutocrats who pimped out fair Columbia for Mammon continues to be waged against the white working-class and indeed grows worse, there will be newer, younger, smarter, more ideological, and crueler TRUMPs waiting in the wings. Consider how the German nationalist right in the Weimar-era evolved from reactionary, pseudo-populist monarchists like Von Hugenburg to the totalitarian anti-Semitism of the National Socialists. If TRUMP falters and current trends are not at least stopped, we are going to see genuine authoritarians. Instead of a billionaire Baby Boomer celebrity with a toupee it will be a genuinely angry Iraq War veteran who realized his buddies died on the battlefield and are committing suicide from PTSD for a small cabal of foreign policy experts. Instead of trivial, bourgeois measures like deporting illegal immigrants or slapping on tariffs, he will demand real action like greasing the bayonets with the fat of the Wall Street bankers. I can easily imagine an American NKVD-recruited from her white, black, and brown sons-and the lusty sounds of Appalachia and the Bronx will mix together in rage-filled whelps as we see a “dekulakization” of American upper-middle class suburbia.
I’m amused by the picture you’ve drawn of me, considering I do plenty of “normal” things as well as my political theorizing. But as I’ve said elsewhere on the forum, TRUMP isn’t even my first choice for President (considering I favour Sanders in the primaries and intend to support Clinton when she wins the Democratic nomination contest). I essentially see the Donald the same way FDR and Churchill saw the Red Army in World War II-a great colossus that beat back the initial assaults of reactionaries in the debates which were TRUMP’s Leningrad and Stalingrad before breaking the back of the neoconservative establishment by forcing Rubio and Jeb! out of the race in the Donald’s own Kursk and Operation Bagration and now is marching triumphantly on to the final target of Berlin, where Ted Cruz and the armies of pseudo-intellectual yes-men still delude themselves with a belief that a victory over the great populist forces are possible.
At any rate, TRUMP has a coherent vision if people would actually bother listening to or reading his past statements. Has he flip-flopped on issues? Sure, but so has virtually every politician in American history and nobody claimed Romney had no coherent ideology simply because of his numerous “evolutions”. Consider this article from 1987 which talks about TRUMP’s call for protecting American industry from unfair foreign competition and having American allies pay for their own defense, just as he advocates those positions now. TRUMP’s 1999 book America We Deserve shows that he supported a hardline stance on illegal immigration well before the current election cycle. If this isn’t proof of a consistent political ideology of populist nationalism, I don’t know what is.
I know that you already did this simple test and then you clarified that indeed you will not vote for Trump, but that test has to be changed a little, because Trump is not really coherent:
Who is being coherent? As it was pointed before the professional climate change deniers do tell us that indeed global warming is happening, it is impossible to deny thermometers (although some loopy ones do try) so they keep their justifications for inaction on controlling emissions coherent by explaining that they think that the warming will not increase more or reach the levels that most experts think it can be reached by not controlling emissions.
Trump and followers in the town hall incoherently did go for the 100% denial and not the plausible talking point that more sophisticated climate change deniers use.
That’s the best you’ve got, huh? I do happen to like Ben Stein. However, that doesn’t mean I think of him as an expert on anything. Nevertheless, that ‘hack’ was right, now, wasn’t he?
I just can’t even read any of the rest of your stuff anymore unless it’s in common English. I understand the highfalootin’ terms you use. But if you held the political wisdom of the ages I wouldn’t waste the time decoding your posts. Truth be told, it makes you look a little like you’re trying to look educated and supah-genius. Try talking like normal people.
Will Trump run as an independent if he loses the Nomination? An independent run would make more sense for him than a run as GOP nominee: he could continue his madcap cheap campaign without responsibilities.
As an independent, Trump would get votes from both Republicans and Democrats. He’d take more votes away from Cruz than from Hillary, but still might swing the election to the GOP. If he was able to win a few big states — Florida, Ohio?, Pennsylvania?? New York??? :smack: — neither Clinton nor Cruz would get 270 e.v., and the election would be decided, for Cruz, in the House.
Trump (as an “Independent” or otherwise) wouldn’t win New York even if he gave out bagels and lox and floppy pizza and … uh … Genessee Ale to every voter.
This is the result of an understanding of the world that has in no way digested current realities. Like, it’s at least twenty years out of date. You are projecting a racial component that doesn’t exist. There aren’t too many issues anymore that appeal to middle and lower class whites that do not also appeal to middle and lower class blacks and Hispanics. That’s what happens after fifty years of integration.
Trump is not Pat Buchanan. Hell, even Pat Buchanan isn’t the Pat Buchanan that he was twenty and forty years ago, when he had leadership roles in political movements who’s constituency the above post describes.
Your demand that American nationalism be entirely free of “regard for ethnicity or country of origin or anything else” leaves, without reason, no room whatsoever for multi-racial nativism.
Multi-racial nativist sentiment is extremely popular among Americans. It is way less popular among establishment politicians, the media, and academia. It is this wide gulf between the views of normal Americans and their representatives that Trump recognizes and is exploiting. If it really gets rolling, the world as both the GOP and DNC know it is ended.
As pointed many times before, that is not working with the whole electorate, once gain you continue to look just at the popularity of that among Republicans.
It has the potential to work with the whole electorate, during this cycle and in the future, because it is a wildly popular sentiment, especially in the parts of the country other than college towns.
What does that prove? That’s just shows the level of support for Trump’s wall. It doesn’t show the level of support for a border wall generally (which even Hillary brags about voting for). And it sure doesn’t refute the point that multi-racial nativist sentiment is very common among Americans.
Again I did not say TRUMP never flip-flopped (consider how even the “respectable” GOP candidates have “evolved” their views on climate change) but merely that there was a continuity of political views even from the days of the late Cold War to the present.
Not really, since his ideology would worsen America’s debt even more then the Donald would.
I’m not using “highfalootin’ terms” as you claim, I’m just using words that are necessary if one is to discuss politics and words which anyone who reads newspapers semi-regularly would recognize. It’s like expecting someone to be able to discuss Star Wars but then complaining words like “lightsabre” or “Death Star” or “Jedi knights” are too difficult to understand. If you want to actually read verbose ideological jargon, try opening a book by Zizek or Carl Schmitt. That said, I find your sudden, newfound conversion to anti-intellectual faux-populism amusing, since it really shows the philistinism of the American bourgeoisie which makes it particularly detestable. If you are, at going to be an elite and lord over the masses at least behave like one and embrace true high culture as the European aristocrats, the Southern planters, and the Chinese mandarins of old did. But the new American elites, in their desperate attempt to keep up an appearance of “republican virtue” are instead fake cosmopolitans whose idea of culture is patronizing a few degenerate artists and attending yoga sessions, and utterly unrooted in national history and culture. It is instead, the common people of America who have faithfully maintained our traditions which moor one in a chaotic and uncertain world. Yet despite your attempt to align yourself with the “normal people”, you aspire to fashionable pseudo-feminism of the SJWs while dismissing the reality of social disaster of the American working-class in the past generation, claiming they have it better then in Bangladesh thus showing your utter disconnect from the mainstream of America. Contrary to your insinuations, “real America” are not in the upper-middle suburbs of the metropolises-they are not Westchester and Fairfax counties. Once again your posts thoroughly embodies the evils of neoliberalism in their attempt to de-ideologicize politics (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one!) and instead turn it into simply a question of personalities and “respectability” where politicians are judged not on the bases of their views but on how “serious” they seem and their “tones” so that types like Lieberman or Chafee are considered sages while populists who have a coherent Weltanschauung like Sanders and TRUMP are dismissed as “extreme” or “not serious”.
Please. When you have 90 word sentences literally chock full with jargon adjectives for the people you’re talking about, it’s gone WAY too far. Are you seriously trying to sell that that is necessary to discuss the issue that you finally get around to at the end of it?
And then you go and prove my point.
By the way, you really know jackshit about me, so you’d really better dial it back with your booklearned prejudgment of who you think I am and what I believe in. I’ve been an adult for quite a bit longer than you’ve been alive, and I know just a bit more about how the world really works than you do. Hint: I’m not impressed.
To the rest of you, sorry, I gave it the old college try, not that I expected it to succeed.
Yes you could say my post just now was perhaps “excessive” but it was in reaction to your posts basically discussing politics the way people discuss celebrities rather then from any ideological lens.
I never said anything about "who you are and any judgement I made about your views were based on posts that you made on this subforum. And literally anybody of a certain age can say that about themselves including TRUMP supporters, orthodox Trotskyites etc. Nor was it ever my intention to “impress” anybody.
You know more about how the world has worked during the time that you have presided over, which has been a period of cultural stagnation and strategic atrophy. This, against a backdrop of an accelerating degree of connectivity, and more accessible information available to more people than ever before. Something was bound to give, sooner rather than later.
Charles Stross predicted it, and it’s happening. More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants aren’t really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.
Even Blomberg had to acknowledge that the survey was at odds with other ones. And it is becoming clear that you skipped even the rest of the quote I made it is not only the wall, Trump is not expected by even the Republicans to get the support of most Republicans in the general election.