The Russians I met when I visited there were also still traumatised and bitter over the economic privations of the 1990s. One of Putin’s masterstrokes as he took power was to take the narrative that outside meddling from American neoCon bunglers and chancers contributed to that terrible situation (arguably true) and transform it into a more general plot by the West and its (((elites))) to keep Russia down. His Know-Nothing MRGA followers eat it up but a lot of otherwise liberal and progressive Russians still buy that conspiracist line to some degree. Some of Putin’s Useful Idiots and paid tr*lls on this BBS also pushed that story before they got banned.
Are the top .01% going to let a global market meltdown happen or will it be the ultimate case of Disaster Capitalism?
They think that the fascists are their allies in the struggle against socialism and higher taxes for the ultra-wealthy.
Snyder again:
Under Vladimir Putin, today’s official Russian version of these events is that the end of the Soviet Union was a western plot. In fact Western leaders, supporters of Gorbachev, was surprised and dismayed. The West had much to do with collapse of communism in Europe, less through its foreign and military policies, than by its example. Western domestic policies had succeeded in providing many people with a sense of the future. A combination of elections, markets, the welfare state, and unions allowed both the United States and western Europe to provide not just rising standards of living but also a belief that members of coming generations might do something new and interesting. This story is told on the European side in Tony Judt’s outstanding history Postwar. In the United States, this social mobility was known as the “American Dream.”
[…]
Once American leaders and thinkers got over their surprise at this turn of events [the collapse of communist rule in Europe and the break-up of the USSR], they tended to interpret them as an affirmation of contemporary policies that were designed to break unions and undo the welfare state. That was a mistake. Given further authority by the by the end of communism, American politicians of the 1980s prepared the way for an American crack-up, the one that we are experiencing now.
Bernie Moreno took to Twitter to congratulate Biden and his running mate and to urge his “conservative friends” to accept the results of the presidential election… just over a year later, Moreno — now a candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary — has deleted the tweets calling for unity and, in a new campaign ad, looks directly into the camera and declares, “President Trump says the election was stolen, and he’s right.”
[…]
For Republicans like Paul Boyer, a state senator from Arizona, Trump’s demands of fealty to his false electoral claims are deeply troubling. Boyer was critical of Arizona’s 2020 election audit and was also the only Republican senator to vote against holding the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in contempt.
Boyer said he expects Republicans to do well in the 2022 midterms but that “long-term, I think we’re screwed as a party.”
“When you’ve got Trump telling the base the system is rigged, don’t vote, they believe him, and that’s why we lost control of the U.S. Senate, that’s why we lost the two Georgia seats,” Boyer said.
He is also frustrated that someone like him, a stalwart conservative, can suddenly find himself with no obvious place in the party. “If you ask any of my Democratic colleagues, they’ll tell you how conservative I am,” Boyer said. “And the fact that on one issue I didn’t agree with the party makes my belief on limited government, on school choice, on life, on public safety all out the window — it’s like, no, I’m not a moderate.”
Boyer plans to step down at the end of his current term and return to teaching high school literature and Latin. Part of him, he said, would like to run again, “to prove that part of the party wrong, that there is room for me in the party.”
“But I’m just so tired,” Boyer said.
My fear is that however way that happens, the Right will cry assassination, blame it on the libs, then take up Trump as their God-Martyr.
AKA “The End of History”. The same highly flawed and delusional thinking that neoCons advising Yeltsin and privatising the former Soviet economy subscribed to in the 1990s.
If we stop worrying about “the markets” and start worrying about people, the economy does heaps better. Let’s deal with the authoritarian issue and create a global system of reform and regulation that keeps people at the center of our systems rather than a few wealthy elite.
Assumption? He’s already lost it twice
I’m… not seeing that as an impediment to serving a 2nd term. I’m certain that he delegated most if not all of the heavy lifting/thinking during his 1st term, anyway (moreso than other POTUSes).
Still wonder why anyone describes Joe Manchin this way. I guess it could have to do with the Overton Window moving the “center”, but it feels more like a means of moving the Overton Window.
The problem (for them) with that is, you can’t run a corpse for President. And most of the folks they could run are just as eager to burn the party down as the country if they aren’t chosen.
He did not do any heavy thinking… he just cruised through like he did with every other thing he’s done in his life.
There are plenty of former presidents who busted their asses, night and day at the job. He’s not one of them.
To that, all I can say is this: There are people who “run” on the Jebus thing,
Jeebus is doubly-disqualified, since he’s also not a natural-born US citizen…
Though if you’re a religious fundie with political aspirations you can put one on trial.
I can, and do, the second two. The first one is the hard one. I work in the power industry, and I work a rotating scheduled with both scheduled and unscheduled overtime. Just seeing me family (I think I’m still married) is difficult.
Not all who run on the Jebus thing… People forget that Jimmy Carter was our first evangelical president…
I would be more optimistic than that. The demographics of the military have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and even at the time of the Vietnam war were already pretty far from what is often depicted in movies. As well, the chain of command is drilled into members of the US military from day one. And military justice is not something that leaves much room for disloyalty.
He’s a strongman politician. Shows of weakness would reduce his appeal. This is partly where all the Putin shirtless photo ops come from (but obviously not the whole story).
Truly, and I’d think because he didn’t ram it down our throats (thanks be to Bog).