Anyhoo, the real wildcard isn’t even Trump himself - it’s how long his supporters can maintain their starry-eyed fantasies of Trump and what he’ll do. When it turns out that he can’t deliver on, and indeed when it becomes clear he has no intention of even trying to deliver on his nuttier promises and can’t “drain the swamp” or “burn the system” or whatever, will they cling to their fantasies with pathetic hope, or turn on him in savage fury?
I’m personally hoping for a fury quick enough to affect the 2018 midterms, blunting any (further) damage he can do, then a solid defeat in 2020 to President-Elect Warren. Of course, that’s dependent on sanity coming to America, which I’ll cheerfully admit is my own starry-eyed fantasy.
We’re talking about fundamentalist, evangelical Christians. It should go without saying that if anyone is prepared to not only retain and maintain, but vociferously defend a delusion in the face of overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary, it’s them.
I know a guy who is a True Believer. I asked him this: ‘Suppose Donald Trump walked up to Hillary Clinton on live TV, and shot her in the back of the head. Would you convict him of murder?’
His reply: ‘No – and I bet 70% of the world would rejoice!’
And this guy’s followers are just as rabid. No matter how badly Trump fails, no matter how many promises he reneges on, no matter how many blatant lies he’s caught in, no matter how unethical he acts or how many times he violates the Constitution, his followers will blame Obama, blame Clinton, blame liberals, blame everyone except Trump. If they would not convict him of murder-one, they’re not going to hold him responsible for anything.
**What will Trump do when he starts to face the fact that there are no easy answers to our problems **
Trump smash!
But, yeah: martial law.
As we have seen over and over again, Trump cannot abide even the least hint of criticism. And there’s only one way to stop critical remarks from being made on television, radio, print media, and the internet: outlaw them.
He can’t do it alone, of course. But we’ve seen the people he’s planning to install in the Executive branch: “hardliners” who think democracy and the rule of law are for sissies. Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and those who will join them are ready to do the Hard Work of Keeping America Safe. You’d better believe they can justify it to themselves. All they need is a precipitating event–mass casualties from one or more attacks by Islamic Extremists–to get started.
It will be just until We Can Figure Out What’s Going On, of course.
Those folks will be 100% behind the new regime; they will see the scapegoats (Muslim-Americans to start) rounded up and their property confiscated and cheer, cheer, cheer.
And of course no one can expect Trump to bring back factories with high-paying jobs while he’s dealing with the Terrorist Threat. Trump fans will be happy to see even the low-paying jobs provided by the string of privatized prisons that will be build around the country, and will forgive their hero his promises to bring them financial security.
There’s no solution that can’t be made simple by subtraction. Subtract millions of innocent casualties from the equation and poof, nuking the Middle East is easy. Want to grab pussies? Subtract morality and it’s easy to do.
Censorship and imprisonment is most always a result of the oppressive and elitist position of cultural marxism not free market capitalism. Morality? It’s a card played only when it seems convenient. I have never seen secular progressives with any form of conclusive morality, they begin with the idea that no one can define it.
My Family of origin: Cultural Marxism, Semite, Son of Holocaust Survivor, 1st Gen Immigrant.
This. There’s a reason we have at least three threads going on the subject of fake news. Fake news got Trump elected, and fake news might even get him re-elected. Facts don’t seem to matter any more. It’s all reality TV. It will matter only when the impact is so large that it’s undeniable – when the actual Trump acolyte himself has lost his job and his house, and so have his neighbors in plain sight and in large numbers. The less immediately visible catastrophes can be spun and denied, like regressive tax policies, a weakening economy, increasing fossil fuel pollution and climate change, or a growing national debt. To the rubes, those are just numbers out of the elitist media. The rubes don’t do numbers, they do fake news on Facebook feeds.
In practice, it appears destroyculturalmarxism blogspot. has a better handle on the term, at least in terms of what it has either morphed into or been intended to be from the beginning.
As to the RationalWiky definition #2, it errs only in that an organized, concerted conspiracy is the reason media and academia have become disproportionately loaded with left-wingers (I’ll omit science here but include lower level education all the way down to elementary school, and I’ll add entertainment media to the mix as well. There’s no question that liberals have come to predominate in every way that Americans get information.) But as I said, I don’t think this is necessarily a pre-determined goal on the part of the individual players - more like a loose-knit gathering of those of similar mind coming together to promote left-wing beliefs and point of view, and, increasingly, to browbeat, intimidate or simply overwhelm through superior numbers, those with opposing points of view.
Fromthat site, here are Concepts to Oppose Cultural Marxism
Starving–do you agree?
“Identitarianism” is an awkward word used by Richard Spencer, alt-right leaderwho recently gathered 300 of his ilk in DC; it’s still a small movement but Trump’s win has energized them.
Starving, you live in a fantasy of “The 1950’s”. We’re contemporaries and i know how wrong you are; but I do remember being proud of my father & his generation, who did defeat Nazism. Are you joining with this traitorous minority in “partying like it’s 1933”?
It’s a reasonable subjective opinion to think those who voted for Trump on average really think the answers to the country’s problems (as they see them) are any easier than say those who voted for Obama or Clinton, on average. Those voters saw different answers, different questions to some degree, but it’s just an opinion IMO how much more or less realistic voters on either side actually are on average. Trump himself is distinctly less well informed than Obama or Clinton, that’s a clear fact and difference. However again as to whether Trump is really a lot more basically naive about the solubility of national problems than either of the others, harder to say IMO.
We’ll find out if Trump is actually held to a different standard by those who voted for him to some degree as approval rating evolves over his term, and more concretely when/if he runs for re-election. Right now it’s pretty much projection IMO.
Say the economy improves some (even not provably due to Trump), including in terms of wage growth at the median, some measures have been taken to tighten immigration enforcement, at least some play has been made at modifying trade relations (though probably superficial), etc. Then Trump is rejected because ‘he didn’t do all we he promised, he didn’t solve all our problems’? I doubt it.
Say there’s a significant recession (even not provably due to Trump), let alone some obvious serious misstep in foreign policy, etc. He’ll probably be quite unpopular.
And in either case the conventional GOP conservative policies likely to be applied in many areas, via a conventional GOP Congress and conventional GOP appointees Trump is already naming for the most part, will be unpopular with liberals and popular with conventional conservatives (though latter is only a part of Trump’s support, and a relatively grudging part).
IOW I doubt all around how unique Trump is. Somewhat so, but it can easily be exaggerated. Voters will mainly react to a) how things are generally going economically as well as reacting badly to major foreign policy failures (like Iraq War major, US failure to positively influence the situation in Syria for example isn’t really a core concern of most voters IMO) and b) a fair proportion of voters (though ideologues tend to assume it’s all voters) are ideological. The ones on the left are very unlikely to be pleased with Trump, unless he reverses field to the being the liberal Democrat he used to be according to his public statements years ago…in which case the ideologues on the right will be very displeased.
