Jeez I wish Liberals wouldn’t keep focusing on Trump himself and look into why folks vote for him. Because they’re going to again.
Focusing on Trump’s outrageous BS is the exact response the Bannons & Rudolph Hess type of folks want from you : they want(ed) you to complain and scream into the streets so they can eventually claim you’re just violent protesters and wouldn’t the electorate ‘prefer law and order’ instead? They’re baiting you is all.
If you react, you either waste effort on today’s hot button Trumpian issue, or get so angry and demonstrable, they can claim umbrage and change laws to stop your menace (as they see it, not you).
This form of outrageous baiting worked in Germany in the 1930s, it worked in Italy and Hungary too. Why not elsewhere as well? Many liberals from 1932 Germany blame the left not the right for enabling Hitler. Why do you think far right-wing groups cause so much violence? They’re looking for Liberals to fall into a trap so “both sides” can be construed as being violent. IT IS A TRAP.
So far Liberals have jumped into all of the alt-right’s traps. Every time. Like lemming idiots. Boing Boing seems to love jumping into their traps too alas. I mean, they really seem like to dance to Trumps tune. Everyday alas. Cha cha cha.
Hopefully Bannon/Trump/Farage et al have jumped into this behavior too early. Charlottesville is the ultimate goal for fascists and neo-nazis - right wing clan rallies with violent clashes against ‘the left’. It hasn’t been repeated so badly thank goodness. This form of liberal baiting worked in Germany/Italy/Hungary in the 1930s. It worked in Russia in the 1910s. It’s been perfected in South America thanks to the School of The Americas. It failed in London in the same period (Oswald Mosley’s black shirts and The Battle of Cable Street was its end). This trick can work anywhere that vast regions of blue collar workers have been abandoned. [Aside : Oswald Mosley is the villain in Season 5 of Peaky Blinders]
Liberals have bungled peoples lives into ruin over the last 40 years. Republicans and conservatives have actively plotted it at the same time. Both groups are responsible. There’s the obvious fact that Reagan’s deregulated “free market” dream has failed and center-liberals have done nothing about it (the exact opposite in fact). Sell sell sell those families and their futures. Reagan’s dream has only, as predicted before it started, moved money towards the already wealthy at the expense of the poorest among us. It has privatized profits and socialized losses. That is irrefutable. Like a horrific reverse Robin Hood.
Free-market zealots seem to think that their ideology is the only form of capitalism, everything else is ‘socialism as the boogeyman’ (which is obvious junk). Liberals ‘didn’t make it worse’ at best. At worst they’ve abandoned the structures that gave their voters power (government backed unionized workforces) and allowed off-shoring of too much of the backbone of the employment sector.
Subsequent Republican governments have made it worse (and worse) than before, since 1980. Subsequent Liberal ones haven’t done enough to re-regulate. Look at freaking Detroit. That’s what happens when you deregulate and out source without giving a damn for families. A major city dies on its ass, along with all the people in the economic area and chain depending on it, except for the minority of investors who had riches already.
Liberals had two long chances to swing Reagan’s swingeing cuts back but didn’t [Clinton/Obama]. This has allowed the gutting of blue collar heartlands into utter damnation. Liberals don’t listen to their core audience at their peril. Heck, Liberals have accused poor families of being racists because that family doesn’t like competing with pre-prepared immigrants for less money and security than they had before. Along comes an unscrupulous politician who’s only too happy to divert reality into blaming those poor immigrants [they’re a symptom, not a cause].
Liberals are missing the point. Their only salvation is to swing to the left and restore communities to functioning order. Begging Wall St to do this is only folly [Clinton/Obama].
Imagine : After 30 years of watching every generation in your family lose their securities in life and complaining to Liberals who only claim you’re being racist when you point out there’s no affirmative action for poor white folks (“where’s our grant? we’re just as poor”), who do you think those people are going to vote for? That’s right : The one person who seems to upset both liberals and republicans equally. Trump may have stood under the republican umbrella, but he’s annoying them as much as liberals. He’s perfect for the forgotten to angrily and justifiably reach out to Molotov society as much as their own dreams have been shattered. In the UK we call that same reaction : Brexit.
Imagine you’re poor. You have a manual labor job. You watch liberals following suite from Republicans who have passed laws that deregulated various markets (jobs, banking, farming etc). The net effect of this is that you find yourself without any guaranteed work. Worse still, you’re now having to compete with hungry immigrants who are prepared more than you to work terrible hours and conditions for low pay. The new conditions are a total surprise to you and yours and now you’re below the poverty line but still have a vote. You will be just as happy throwing rocks as seeing any improvements because it cannot get any worse.
They listened to liberals for 20+ years. They sound like they care. In practice they do not care at all. Your job has still gone. Your children’s future looks worse than your teenage dreams did back in the day. It’s grim, with no discernibly clear future. You’re fully aware one or two people got very very rich as your whole county was stripped of its future.
Liberals have drifted from socialism to sociology and become undone as a potent force for positive social changes in the process. Protests are as much about Instagram as they are about politics. Liberals are more concerned about how people think and behave than how they live. They squawk about what you can and cannot say [endlessly], whilst watching whole communities wither and die. They seem to have forgotten that strong unions are important for stitching the fabric of sociability together. They are simply BS.
Boing Boing writers are guilty of confusing sociology with socialism too, but they do try harder than most too. They give fair voice to the whole gamut of left : from Communist (crap) to Socialist (yay) to center-right Liberals (normally fine, but what have yee done recently?). Liberals for the last 40 years? Meh.
Liberals : please stop jumping into Trumps’ Trap. Follow what what he does, not what he says.
(I’m left of Sanders in case you’re wondering)
Who gives a hoot whether Trump claims another country should investigate anything. He’s pressing your buttons left over from the election he barely won. Boom!, you’re triggered. Now you spend wasted efforts decrying the button press. This is a waste of time. This story about Biden and the Ukraine will amount to nothing at all. If it does succeed, then what? You’re going to give far right politicians a mega boost. “Trump tried to drain the swamp, but those evil Liberals cheated him”
Right, back to pointless liberal squawking about whatever nonsense Trump farts next.
