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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).
It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.
In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.
Be specific. What norms, dismantled by who and when?
Most of them
The rich and powerful
The last ~50 years
Man, that might be even more vague than the original framing.
In some ways yes, in others I actually find it quite accurate.
I've seen enough of the
"Republicans destroyed the norms"
"Erm actually, it was Democrats who started destroying the norms with X"
"Erm actually, the Dems who did X were simply responding to the Republican norm destroyal of Y"
And so on and so on. Lost in all the finger pointing litigation is the core truth that the norms have been fucking obliterated and our society is worse off overall.
Thus, I'd like step back and acknowledge that
the leadership/elite of the Republican and Democratic have way more in common with each other than they do with us
their en bloc interests very very clearly do not align with ours
the rich and powerful people of Western civilization have been absolutely strip mining this civilization in their relentless pursuit of accruing more power and money to themselves, regardless of the detrimental effects to the society that created that wealth in the first place.
I agree with your general framing but would expand point 1. to the managerial/laptop class more generally, and suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety stemming from the appearance of the working class pushing their own interests.
To borrow a word from this forum's favorite (as measured by number of times I see his name) political philosopher, I think we can happily call them the "petit bourgeois". Although the laptop-class is a larger group than the original concept of the petit bourgeois so I am personally partial to the term "Professional Managerial Class" and even that is almost too narrow.
But the occupy a similar niche for sure.
100% agree but I'd go even further and say that much of the appeal of MAGA itself is also status anxiety. Its status anxiety all the way down! It's almost like people are really worried that things are being enshittified in every direction by a bunch of elites who no longer feel any obligation to their society...
The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.
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