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I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
Lest someone think that I come only to shit on the Democrats, unfortunately no. Would that I actually supported either of the two main parties... my political life would be easier. But the Republicans, too, deserve some questioning on this topic. Republicans' reaction to Bill and Hillary Clinton, at one point, was a sort of precursor to the mental shattering caused by the concept of Trump. Interestingly, despite often being accused of being racist, from what I recall Republicans did not actually react to Obama quite as hysterically as they reacted to the Clintons. Sure, there was a lot of vitriol against Obama, such as Birtherism, but it was probably half as vehement as what was thrown at the Clintons.
Yet even though Republicans were in many ways mind-melted by the Clintons, including to the point that Republican forums back in the day teemed with theories about the Clintons literally being a murderous and pedophilic crime family, I still do not think it quite matches up to the new standards of psychological devastation that Trump has wreaked. That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
Why does Trump have this effect? Is it just that there is a large number of people in this country who fail to agree with me that Trump's chances of becoming a dictator are extremely small, that a man who has most key institutions against him, has the top military brass against him, and lives in a country where the military rank and file are probably not about to try to overthrow civilian authority, has very little chance of ending American democracy?
I am not sure. The idea of Trump being the curtain call on American democracy is certainly one of the main things behind his psychological impact on people, but I have seen plenty of people who seem existentially horrified by him for completely different reasons. Some people seem to be driven out of their wits' ends just by the very fact that Trump is crude and vulgar rather than sounding like an intellectual.
I think you're right that Trump has a unique effect. He has done on me. I would say in my case he has utterly shattered what used to be an (okay, probably patrician) sense that the average Joe is a basically well intentioned person who is smarter than sometimes estimated and is a canny judge of character. The popularity of Trump has really changed that and made me significantly less confident in the average person's judgement. That so many people can be enchanted by the most naked sociopathy I have possibly ever seen has changed my view of human nature.
If, prior to his first candidacy, you had showed me 100 hours of video of Trump speaking, I would have thought it was some kind of satire.
Politics being a contest of character is a fable. It's good you were disabused of it, Trump or no Trump.
Yes, that's right, people do not give a shit about the decorum of personal virtue of their political leaders. What they care about is if those leaders are their friends, and if they can take from their enemies to give to them. You can be the most distasteful of human beings and that does not matter. What matters is that you're looking out for me and my own.
America is not special. It's not more magical or anointed than other places. Much more ridiculous, venal, megalomaniacal have ruled over men than Donald J. Trump, and much more will still. You should have believed it. It can happen here. You are not immune to politics.
Now that you've left the poetic notions aside and joined us in pragmatic reality, please consider your feeling seriously and listen to Cicero when he says that contracting Tiberius Gracchus derangement syndrome is a bad idea for your Republic. The rift between the plebs and the patricians will not be mended by the death of their Tribune. Figurative or not.
In some ways it feels to me like the previous system was a weird biumvirate between the patricians of the Blue Team, and the patricians of the Red Team. The plebs cheer on their favorite color of chariot racing team, and have their own division, but everyone knows that despite their, well, uncouth plebian political aims (mass deportation, tariffs, reparations, abolishing law enforcement, depending on the tribe) that the patricians, at least, all agree are beyond the pale, but to which they will give lip service to solidify their grasp on their team voters.
To some extent, and without trying to definitively draw out the exact sequence of events, we've found ourselves at a point where Trump represents that the Red Team patricians have completely lost control of the chariot teams, and the patricians generally are realizing that they've lost control of the team. For a bit in 2020, it seemed like this might happen to both teams (maybe aping the other team thinking they had a winning strategy? Maybe just general pleb unrest in all corners?), but the blue patricians are now pretty solidly back in control and want to shout about the dangers of the other team.
From where I stand as a contrarian probably assumed to side with the patricians, I see the point, but I wonder about the entire apparatus that seems, from this angle, purpose built to dangle red meat in front of the masses offering a modicum of control, but, like, not real control. It plays to the sentiments and economic battles of the elites without really much regard for giving the plebs what they're shouting for, and that seems almost exploitive. On the other hand, someone needs to prevent a democratic spiral into voting for exclusively bread and circuses (maybe with AGI).
So I'm not sure what to make of it. Maybe there is space for a cooler heads "maybe we should think pragmatically and build a better system that actually cares about the needs of non-elites, rather than paying lip service, while also keeping the budget in check", but that doesn't seem to currently be on offer.
I can't find it again, but I remember reading years ago a short passage from an interview with a never-Trumper Republican campaign strategist, which was being passed around online because he got a little too honest with the interviewer. Specifically, in the passage he said — albeit in less blunt language — that the job of Republican politicians is to, as you put it, convincingly dangle enough red meat in front of stupid flyover plebs to get them to vote for you, despite knowing you're never going to deliver for them, but only for the donor class instead; and that his job as a campaign advisor is to help those politicians lie to those low-class rubes more convincingly.
Multiple people have pointed out that our Republic, like most others, began with a very narrow franchise, the vote limited to a fairly small, elite fraction of the population; and, further, every time there was a (nigh-inevitable) movement to expand that franchise, it was accompanied by a movement to transfer some measure of power out of the hands of elected officials and into unelected ones — whether judges, or (temporary) appointed officials, or eventually permanent technocrat "experts." Further, that while most countries managed to make this transition, and keep real power out of the hands of the plebs, we have a few clear examples of states that failed, and made the mistake of letting the masses elect who they actually wanted to offices with actual power, the most notable — the type specimen, if you will — being Weimar Germany.
The patricians all agree that what the plebs want is beyond the pale, because what the plebs want is fascism. The average MAGA voter wants fascism, and Trump is comparable to Hitler because he's honestly appealing (rather than disingenuously baiting) to the same portion of the population that Hitler did to take power — the sizable fraction of the electorate that will go fascist if given any opportunity. Hence why so many on the left have long warned about the grave and looming threat of fascism in America — because there are millions and millions of would-be fascists in this country, and it was the tacit agreement of elites from both parties to maintain a cordon sanitaire keeping these people disenfranchised and powerless that served as the bulwark holding it back. And it is Trump who — even worse than George W. Bush threatened with his "compassionate conservatism" — breached this essential political barrier, and gave those previously disempowered plebs enough of a taste of what they were denied for so long, that it's going to be an immensely challenging political project to put them back into containment.
I'm curious, what exactly do you think the word "fascism" means in this context. Can you define it?
I've had in my personal backlog to look into the etymology there: Fascism pretty clearly draws on fasces, the bundle of wooden rods (sometimes with an axe) used to symbolize the power of the law to punish in ancient Rome. This didn't have the negative associations before the 20th century, and early American leaders were huge Rome stans, so it's amusingly depicted behind the podium in the House of Representatives and on the seal of the Senate. Loosely, people throw around the term "fascism" seemingly to describe any government action to punish (implied: something the speaker thinks shouldn't be punished).
But I've wondered specifically how this relates to another similarly-derived English word for a bundle of sticks that is generally taken as a slur. The evolution of language over time is so weird to me.
Reddit etymologists explain why a fascist is a faggot with an axe: https://old.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9wt6w2/fascistfaggot_a_common_root/
Interestingly, a “faggot” is also the name for a meat dumpling made of various meats, possibly cognate to the fajita dish: “bundle”.
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