I saw some interview with Trump’s (main?) economic policy advisor, who was talking about how for decades, the establishment had introduced economic policies that were creating increasing income inequality. How was Trump going to change things? Well, by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, just like the Republican establishment has been doing for decades… I literally screamed.
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Well, whoever said that was a fucking idiot. Trump is - as has been remarked many, many times before - the perfect distillation of the Republican party and the result of the type of voters the party has been incubating. Trump is their Frankenstein’s monster - he owes his life to them, with all his parts being very familiar, having been seen many times before, just not all at once in this particular configuration. For the Republican party, racism has been a core issue, with homophobia and sexism added on, there’s a strong Christian theocratic urge (a majority of Republicans would like to see the constitution thrown out in favor of a Christian theocracy, according to polls), they’ve cultivated an anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment that has distain for even basic facts, they have a paradoxical distrust of government while also appealing to authoritarianism, have a pro-amateur approach to governance (that empowers lobbyists), push economic policies that favor the wealthy while trying to give them a populist spin… Democrats have their own set of problems, but Trump is 100% the Republicans’ ugly baby.
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The Democrat version of trump and his supporters would be the “regressive left”, but they simply can’t get power within the party because they are far too prescriptive of human behavior.
Both parties want control, but they have different values. The republicans are all about purity and falling in line (traditionally), while the democrats highly value diversity of opinion and action and are generally anti-authoritarian (traditionally).
The anti-authoritarian bent saves democrats from worshipping demigogues.
It’s certainly not perfect, but someone like trump can’t gain power in the democrat party. They’d have to be more than a blowhard. They’d have to appeal to the poor and minorities both urban and rural, both white and people of color. All of that is of no concern to Republicans and they’re suffering for it due to their leadership being unempathetic sociopaths who don’t seem to understand that they need more than the white authoritarian vote to win now.
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It’s only occurred to me what a daft name ‘regressive left’ is. The legislated-politeness dystopia people fear from the social authoritarians never really existed, so you can’t exactly roll back towards it.
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I guess it doesn’t help when gerrymandering means, you’ll probably not be able to affect the Republican hold on the houses either.
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There’s all sort of diversity in the Democratic party, including religion, and that really is a defense against authoritarian demagogues. This election has made one thing abundantly clear - the Republican party is the party for white, Christian, cis-het men. Other types of conservatives may vote for it, but only despite the fact that the party is actively hostile to them.
Don’t you remember the bad old days when saying the “n-word” would get you hung? Oh, right…
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I think there can be a Democratic Trump. Until 2009, it was Trump himself.
True, the Republican party is more outwardly authoritarian than the Democratic party, but an authoritarian doesn’t need to be outwardly authoritarian. If they really wanted to, they could exploit the Democratic party almost as well as they could the Republican party.
Read It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Lewis lays out some talking points that seem centrist and inoffensive individually, but as a whole serve to destabilize the government and set up an authoritarian strongman. It absolutely can happen here, and that’s how it’s going to happen if it does.
It’s interesting that you say the Democratic Party shows strength in diversity. The Republican Party has like five different factions (Libertarians, Evangelicals, Moderates, Tea Party, and Establishment), and after all the infighting, the Moderates leave town and then everyone else converges toward the establishment. The Democrats just have the one party line. Not as much room for infighting and petty squabbling, just toe the line. The Democratic party is strong in its lack of ideological diversity, if anything else.
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The Democratic electorate is a miscellaneous bin and not without its hypocrites. During the primaries, a few Sanders supporters went on record advocating gerrymandering districts blue and deregistering Republican voters.* A small minority? You bet. But recall that we had another thread in which many contended that the handful of Trump supporters earnestly advocating repealing the nineteenth amendment were a microcosm of Trump’s electorate.
An anti-democratic minority can do great damage to the cause of their apparent fellow activists, progressive or otherwise.
*I can’t recall who specifically published this story (I know, I know, cite one’s sources, sorry) but it wasn’t the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard. Slate, Salon, Daily Beast—I think it was one of those.
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Except: No and No. He may have considered himself a Democrat (though, given his views, I’m not sure how or why), but there was zero chance he was going to be taken seriously as a Democratic candidate, and certainly not with any of the positions that have put him where he is now. (This also ignores his flirtation with the reform party in 2000, so no, it happened long before 2009.)
Ideological diversity in those factions? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
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Unfortunately lacking in spine, too.
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We still kicking that falsehood around?
http://www.jill2016.com/baseless_anti_vax_attacks_against_dr_jill_stein_distract_from_concerns
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Your argument would work a bit better, if the US wasn’t literally funding (and often directly arming) literally all sides in the Syrian conflict. Sorry, you can’t blame THAT on “previous empires”.
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[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:48, topic:87502”]
It’s interesting that you say the Democratic Party shows strength in diversity. The Republican Party has like five different factions (Libertarians, Evangelicals, Moderates, Tea Party, and Establishment), and after all the infighting, the Moderates leave town and then everyone else converges toward the establishment. The Democrats just have the one party line. Not as much room for infighting and petty squabbling, just toe the line. The Democratic party is strong in its lack of ideological diversity, if anything else.
[/quote]Not true, although there are fewer groups. The Progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been at increasing odds with the Party leadership for at least a generation, now.
The “diversity” you are referring to is meant to illustrate the importance of women and minorities, as well, not ideological viewpoints.
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He was a Democrat until 2009, although he was in the Reform Party from 1999-2001. If he says he’s a Democrat, he’s a Democrat, end of story. Fortunately, the Democratic Party machine would never allow him to run as a Democrat. As I’ve said, their strength is in their strict adherence to the party line.
Yes, the Republicans are more ideologically diverse than the Democrats. They are less a political party and more a sock drawer of political odd socks. Evangelicals want to ban abortion, Libertarians don’t. Libertarians are against the drug war, all the other factions are for it. Evangelicals don’t actively want to screw people over, but everyone else except maybe the one Moderate left in existence does. How else do you explain 17 different primary candidates? They will all eventually coalesce to an Establishment position, but before they do, there’s a lot of petty squabbling between them.
Hypothetically, as I said before, someone could run for President using centrist talking points, and then turn out to be an autocrat. It wouldn’t be someone like Trump, who is the dictionary definition of unsubtle. It will be someone nobody would see coming. Don’t rule out the possibility of a Democrat autocrat, even if this autocrat won’t resemble Donald Trump.
I wish the Progressive wing had more of a presence, but they keep getting shut down.
Considering where the Overton window is in the US, it would be easy. US Moderates are very right wing when compared to Marx, and very authoritarian when compared to Proudhon.
Not that over here in the UK is much better.
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Vox, of all places, just belatedly published an article talking honestly about the nature of Trump’s support and how the rest of the world has been compulsively apologising for it. The short version: no, it is not about left-behind working-class white people. It is about white people who openly want to reinforce their unearned privilege. That’s what the evidence shows, and it’s what Trump supporters are clearly saying.
The “tuk err jerbs” theory lets metropolitan liberals feel like they’re down with rural salt-of-the-earth types, while pretending that Trump supporters (as working-class folk) are ripe for conversion to the Left. But Trump supporters have jobs; what they specifically want is to hang on to their advantages, and never have the unfairness of those advantages pointed out.
In the 1950s, white supremacism was at the core of millions of people’s political beliefs; it shouldn’t be this hard to believe that something very similar is still a major force today. It’s almost like, now that Republican efforts to dress it up as something else have collapsed, liberal commentators are rushing to take over the task. Which is silly.
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The argument isn’t that the US is blameless, only that people in other countries should stop getting all self-righteous. As for arms, the arms industry practice of selling weapons to both sides (or to middleman countries, like Qatar in the case of Syria) is a time-honored tradition, and every arms-dealing country in Europe is guilty of it, and was guilty of it long before the US was an international power.
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Good read, thanks. Here’s a statistic I hadn’t seen before:
There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.
A major study from Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.
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Sorry, but no. The actions of the US in the Middle East for the past 20 years, if not more, have been nothing BUT destabilizing; excuse fail.
Past wrongs simply do not excuse current ones.
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