Even if he’s right, there are plenty of other candidates who can be right without being vulgar assholes about it.
I love that analogy and I just may steal it for future use.
I see that point. I just feel that we should keep in mind that he is merely a symptom. His vulgarity, etc. are but distractions. The conditions from which he arises aren’t new, and talk radio has been exploiting them for a while now. What’s new is only that a much larger number of people are falling for it, courtesy of the electoral-media complex.
Exacty. Lakai’s post #16 & the WSJ article he references makes the same point.
“Trumpism” for lack of a better current term, will survive both this election and whatever happens to Trump.
Right now the major obstacle to an aggressive populist succeeding in this country is racial. As long as the working-class, working-poor, and truly poor white folks think the Rs (or a Trump-like character) are their savior while the working-class, working-poor, and truly poor non-white folks think the Ds (or some yet-to-be seen ethnic demagogue) are their savior, AND both groups think the other group of poor-ish folks is more their enemy than the better-off mainstream is, they’ll never coalesce around a single populist leader.
If somebody can sell the less-well-off on the idea that they’re all, regardless of skin tone, being played by the upper-middle and higher classes, then we’ll see a populist revolution in politics. They’ll have the anger, the impetus, and the numbers to upend the current arrangements.
I think the depth of racial animus in the lower economic classes is enough to prevent this for another 10 or 15 years. After that, though, look out.
Trump himself isn’t a “symptom” as he’s been around in previous election cycles and has been more or less a standing joke. The fact that he’s got traction this time is indeed a symptom, but the way I chose to describe it is that the phenomena of how and why he’s got traction, among what groups and what issues, constitutes a body of evidence that can be analyzed, much like the decay products of a particle collision, to tell us about its inner composition. In this case, what some significant portion of the electorate is thinking – or perhaps more accurately, not thinking and reacting viscerally to. And also, not to belabor a point I’ve been making in other threads, but it highlights the extent to which voters can be manipulated in the contemporary electoral climate. Trump is the perfect con-man, a born seller of snake oil, and they’re buying it. No wonder the Kochs’ multi-billion dollar empire of persuasion has been so successful.
I don’t know–I have yet to see any of the other candidates’ followers demonstrate this kind of stupidity (2:00 minutes into the clip).