To paraphrase Dirty Harry: Nuthin’ wrong with democracy being harmed as long as the right people’s freedoms are the ones being eliminated.
Authoritarians in all cultures and in all times blithely assume they’ll be on the winning side of the Big Man’s depradations. In many cases they’re right, at least at first.
As we saw in Venezuela, at least at first populist economics delivers the goods to the adoring masses. it’s the longer term where stuff goes to hell.
Massive tax cuts for corps & fatcats, and rampant corruption in government also produce a fillip for the middle- and working- class economy. For awhile … then the problems arrive and there’s no ability to influence government to care even a smidgen.
There’s a line delivered by a narrator in one of the Star Wars movies as the Emperor is giving his “I’m now in charge here” speech to the massive legislative hall. The line goes something like “And now we see how democracy dies; to applause, not screaming.”
We’re living through that right now. And I fully expect a lot of applause if Trump succeeds in delivering Putin’s hostile takeover of the US government.
I agree, they are not scared about harming our democracy because Trumpism is an authoritarian, white nationalist movement. They don’t value inclusive democracy and are clearly hostile to it. I was confused that some people seemed to be answering a completely different question than the one posed by the OP.
In answer to the OP, of course Trumpists are scared, but they’re scared of conspiracy theories they’ve heard on FOX and on social media; not real threats.
There are some Trump supporters who, outside of politics, are capable of intelligent reasoning, being objective etc etc. But when you ask them about their support of Trump, IME it’s more emotional; they will often immediately talk about some scary threat, usually either imaginary or overbaked, that we need Trump to protect us from. Open borders, massive deficits (yes, I know), antifa terrorism, being forced to use different gender pronouns, doing China’s bidding etc etc.
Trump is giving them exactly what they want, someone to fight against progressivism and equality. A compliant Senate and bureaucracies stacked with Trump sycophants is a good thing in that fight. If it means millions losing health care options and the Trump circle grifting a few odd billion for their personal use, well, that’s still cheaper and better for the country than allowing the “socialists” to tax us into oblivion and outlaw hate speech. Plus we need the police to have a freer rein to crack a few skulls and stop the lawlessness in our streets.
Exactly, their biggest fear is that they lose power and relevance to people outside their tribe. Trumpism is a bulwark against power sharing with other segments of society and against having to listen to other points of view.
I was thinking about this earlier today. America didn’t do too bad standing up to authoritarianism, in retrospect. We have reason to be proud, we marched, he never got the majority of the vote and lots of people pushed back. It was too little too late, but a slim majority of Americans were on the right side of history. It’s cold comfort, but it’s not nothing.
I took the time to find the clip from Ep3 Revenge of the Sith.
Palpatine is going on about ensuring safety and security by replacing the Republic with the Empire (under him of course), and the punchline comment from one of the legislators in the mass audience is “So this is how liberty dies … to thunderous applause.”
I had to listen to this recording about 10 times to make out the word “liberty”, but that’s what she says.
YouTube has made it harder to link to the vid alone with the desired start & stop times; that interferes with them showing advertising. You might have to click twice to get it to play. Once it does start, if it starts at time 00:00 just jump ahead to 3:20 to hear the culmination of the speech. The punchline reaction ends at 3:58.
Tell me - how often do you consider the Germans who opposed Hitler’s rise to power? Do you give them credit for what they did, or say they should have done more? Or do they tend to get lumped in with the Bad Guys?
It will not be exactly the same team, for one of them the cognitive dissonance was too much. He is in custody in the Broward Health Medical Center, Florida’s Baker Law allows for that when there people are deemed a risk to themselves. He went screaming that he ain’t done nothing. From the article:
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, promptly blamed the president’s political opponents for the incident on Sunday.
“The disgusting, personal attacks from Democrats and disgruntled RINOs have gone too far, and they should be ashamed of themselves for what they’ve done to this man and his family,” Murtaugh said in a statement.
I give them credit, I’m not sure why what I wrote upset you, but whatever.
My point is that there were decent Americans who did not go along. For them their biggest sin was kind of a smug naivete. They were told all their lives that America was different than any other nation and they believed it. As a result, they were slow to realize the depth of the threat.
I think that when you do the autopsy of America, the one big finding is that again and again, we let the most violent, anti-intellectual and racist element of society have their way in the interest of just getting along. This manifested itself in a few American phenomena that are bizarre in hindsight:
We let the losers of the civil war re-write history and mainstream white supremacy into American doctrine, now even moderate whites are looking around and asking WTF is with all these confederate statues?;
Electoral college, we never addressed the fact that an antiquated system gave way too much power to the least populous states, resulting in the election of presidents who did not win the popular vote and the tyranny of the perpetually aggrieved rural whites; but most importantly,
Climate change, we did nothing on it. We let the plutocracy mobilize a rapid anti-intellectual mob to oppose addressing the problem and the GOP in essence, adopted a pro-pollution stance. Now that we have passed the climate change tipping point, it will produce tensions that are far beyond the tensions that produced Trump and we don’t have any means to oppose it because we didn’t address the first two problems on this list.
I recall a brief period in 2016 where a poll or two showed Clinton creeping to within a percent or two of Trump in Texas. My recollection may not be accurate, but I believe Hillary never led. I also recall her campaign did boost their effort in Texas for a time and some people here criticized that move as wasted effort. And they were correct.
The Republicans in Texas will probably be able to pull Trump across the line to once again win the state, but they’re starting to run out of gimmicks to use.
He went around the rust belt saying he’ll bring everybody’s jobs back.
That he’ll reopen the factories, plants, steel mills and so on.
So America’s forgotten former middle class voted for him. There’s a shit ton of these people.
He didn’t waste his time campaigning in states he knew he would lose like California. He was great at picking up swing states.
The media never talks about it, but there’s a lot of places in USA that are financially wrecked from bad trade deals and globalization. My dad lost his job because of NAFTA. Our whole town did.
My whole town voted Trump in 2016 as a big Fuck You to the establishment who forgotten about us. It’s not that we’re stupid and racist. It’s just that Trump is the only human who actually acknowledged our pain. Obama never visited my town.
To use an analogy, it’s like when you’re homeless and everyone ignores you. Then finally some skin headed weirdo walks up and says “hey bud I know you’re hungry. I’m going to the ATM to take out a few hundo to help you.”
It doesn’t matter if I like or trust the guy, he’s the only human who’s acknowledged me so I quickly say “Okay you have my vote man! I’m starving.”
People in pain don’t think rationally. Some people in pain just want to see the whole god damned system burn to the ground.
I think being a hardcore Trump supporter requires gullibility and ignorance.
The ignorance means that they aren’t aware of what’s going on with the election. They haven’t heard the poll results.
The gullibility means that Trump can tell them he’s going to win and they believe him.
The fact that most hardcore Trump supporters probably live in a community of other hardcore Trump supporters reinforces this. The majority of people they personally know are going to vote for Trump, so they assume that the rest of the country is the same way.
So the MAGAs aren’t scared because they don’t know they should be scared. They’re confident of a Trump victory.
They’re going to be stunned on November 4 if Biden wins. Which will make them easy prey for the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen.
The problem with that post is that it was not a skin head going to the ATM and getting a few hundo to help, it was someone who has been shown repeatedly to be an untrustworthy liar “promising” to get you those hundo’s in two weeks, if they vote for him today.
This is opposed to voting for the person who has a track record of helping the poor, and is promising to put in homeless shelters and job training programs.
But it is correct that they don’t think rationally.
A longer answer is a comparison I’ve made before. The Trump presidency is the equivalent of a pigeon drop.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a pigeon drop is a classic con. The basic outline of the con is a person encounters a situation with two other people and a sum of found money. There is a suggestion of dividing up the money equally among the three of them.
The con man then secretly talks to the person. He suggests they work together to cheat the third guy out of his share. The person agrees to the plan, which is complicated and involves the person putting up some of his own money.
The secret of the con is that both of the other two people are con men and they are working together. The target of the con was actually the original person, who mistakenly thought he was in on the con.
The reason this con works is because of that mistaken belief. By convincing the target that he is part of the con, he doesn’t have his usual suspicions about the con man. If a person you just met an hour ago suggested that you should withdraw five thousand dollars form your savings account and wrap it up in a handkerchief, you’d suspect it was a con game and refuse. But in a pigeon drop, you know it’s a con game and the guy talking to you is a con man - you just think he’s on your side and the two of you are working together to screw over somebody else.
This is what Trump is doing. He’s got a lot of people convinced that he’s on their side and together they’re screwing over the liberals. So when those liberals try to warn those people about Trump and say he can’t be trusted, the people smile and ignore the warnings - because they think they’re in on the game. They don’t understand that Trump isn’t really screwing over the liberals - he’s really screwing over his own supporters. They’re the suckers in Trump’s con.