View original postNo one really hates Trump for any political reason, aside from his maybe daring to touch the sacred cow of immigration restraint. But even there, his championing of that issue might just a part of his Trumpness that has more thoughtful pundits and voters alarmed. Anyone who fears some sort of insane leadership for the country may be written off as a hysterical alarmist, because he's going to be hiring a staff from the same pool of political workers and wonks that everyone uses. Oh, there might be the incidental outlier or unorthodox appointee or hiree that the media will play up for viewership, that his opponents will carry on about and his allies will staunchly rationalize, and Trump himself will even play along with the hysteria to demonstrate how unique is his approach. But it will probably go right back to business as usual if he wins.
You're right that the main arguments against Trump are not about his political views - to the extent he even has any, which he won't reverse in a heartbeat if the mood strikes him. On immigration, his policies as such are not novel or somehow more radical than those of previous immigration-focused candidates, such as Tom Tancredo in 2008. But there's nothing 'hysterical alarmist' about being concerned with the prospect of a president who will talk to foreign or domestic leaders in the same self-obsessed, dumbed down, hysterical style that Trump has been using in the campaign so far. That's more of a problem than the populism as such - after all, Hillary Clinton's tendency to take whatever position is most popular with the voters is also populism of sorts, and yet far preferable over Sanders' consistently radical and unrealistic proposals.
View original postDuring his campaign for President, Obama, rather than any policy or substance, merely used simple images like "Hope" and "Change" while his real campaign platform consisted entirely of being the first black nominee. He ran solely on his own appearance, having little to do with the black community in the United States. He was born to a white woman, by a black foreigner (Africans and Caribbean blacks are notoriously prejudiced against African-Americans), and lived in privileged circumstances with a white family his whole life, which was a subject of great derision from his primary opponent during his first Senate run. This did not stop Obama from shameless pandering to memories of the civil rights movement and appropriating whatever symbols of the history of blacks in this country he could. His supporters responded with hair-trigger accusations of racism towards anyone who leveled any sort of criticism toward Obama, and even the circulation of a memo proposing such tactics made little impression on the general public.
Largely agree with this - I never could understand how the African-American community so eagerly embraced Obama as one of their own, when he clearly wasn't, or at least only by adoption, so to speak.
View original postThe major difference between Trump's style of campaigning and Obama's is that Obama didn't need to employ the same antics Trump does, because the media took care of it for him. He could afford to be gracious and non-confrontational, and posture as the voice of reason in the battle between the media and his Republican opponents, because he knew he'd never find himself on the other side of that fight. And in his own book, he pretty much came right out and said that was the strategy of his political image, to play on white guilt and the desire of white people to see blacks succeed. He comes right out in the book and says that as long as you are not being threatening, white people are eager to help out. He knew, and was right, in that everyone would be all too willing to see the good in his taking the high road (while ignoring the point that it cost him nothing to do so). He didn't have to criticize opponents, the media, and even other politicians, would do it for him.
Trump has chosen for a long time to build his media persona and his brand by saying or doing controversial and outrageous things, even when he was only tangentially active in politics. There is a reason why many people were uneasy about him being a candidate even before the infamous official start of his campaign. It's true that both candidacies were based to a large extent on the media being willing to devote the desired kind of attention to each candidate for free - but Trump's choice of media strategy was hardly born of political calculation or desperation as you suggest. Not like Marco Rubio's ill-fated flirt with negative rhetoric.
View original postA detail often celebrated in recent years is that people of a certain age get their news from comedy programs than from actual sources of news, much less investigating facts and events on their own, despite a capacity to do so that is unmatched in the history of the world. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, even when you agree with them, are remarkably short on substantive criticism, preferring to mug and posture and make childish insults. The beauty of their particular scam is that they are explicitly comic performances, and so are not held to any standards of integrity or journalistic ethics. Yet, at the same time, it quickly became fashionable for those with similarly aligned ideological positions, to credit their commentary as if it was legitimate journalism, and their jokes were genuine political debate. They gained legitimacy without having to earn it.
I totally agree with you there - as bad as the right-wing echo chamber is, the liberals who get their news mainly from Stewart or Colbert don't have much room to talk.
View original postNow here's the thing. Lots of people have been bullied. Really bullied, not criminally assaulted, as bullying is depicted in 80s movies, or having their feelings hurt by rude remarks, much less whatever the fiction of which cyber-bullying consists. Bullying most often involves an individual with some degree of power in a limited setting embarrassing the subject with demonstrations of his control or power. In other words, the bully does things because he can, and he and his victim know he will face no consequences. While most people forget these experiences or put them out of their minds as quickly as possible, they retain the emotional recollection of the experience, and do not like it. And while the political classes might think the typical unsophisticated voter doesn't get the subtleties of their work, at a visceral level, a lot of people do. Even if they are not going to articulate it or even be conscious of it, people are aware of how low the political climate in America has slid. They see Jon Stewart smirking at them, not giving a shit that he is mocking ideas and values they hold dear, because he's playing to young people who adore snark and irony because they think it's daring and rebellious. They see Obama getting away with stuff they know no white man would. Like a bully's teasing, the political class might claim they're doing nothing wrong, and might even convince themselves of that, but what they really believe is that they have the right to exercise their power, because they are better than those who don't have it.
Seems to me what you're describing is contempt or disdain for 'unsophisticated voters' - which no doubt is indeed a large factor in Trump's support, the 'don't tread on me' of a few years ago. I'm not sure how being looked down on equates to being bullied, though.
View original postThat's what everyone thinks about something they're good at - they know how hard they had to work to get that good, it assumes a disproportionate significance in their minds, since it has consumed a good portion of their lives, and they resent people who don't appreciate what they went through to get here. And so the political class has become increasingly isolated and ever more content to put on shows and cynically play to one another, rather than really appeal to the voters. They hit the talking points and craft an image, or a message, while saying less and less. And more and more, they've been shutting out anyone who doesn't play along with them, not just through the normal channels, but using the tactics of public perception, of political correctness and in trying to define the way debate is conducted. And people want to hit back. They don't being told what they can't say or what ideas they can't have. Maybe at one time or another, they got excited by a non-traditional politician, whether John Anderson or Ross Perot or Ralph Nader or Ron Paul or Howard Dean, only to see them belittled and mocked, and marginalized. Maybe they just liked a mainstream candidate, and got sick of seeing his verbal slips ridiculed by a professional entertainer delivering a prepared monologue. It's like having a professional athlete mock a businessman for stumbling. Can you blame them for their satisfaction in someone like Trump who can't be handled by the usual restraints, who has been going along taking criticism and ridicule for over 20 years in the public eye, building up a tolerance to newsprint criticism while not having to respond to it, lest he lose an election? The man has been delivering a product for years, and knows something about appealing to people. Individuals who have met him in casual professional circumstances describe him as possessing the common touch. He doesn't tell construction workers and janitors whom he employees "You're fired." He saves that for the sort of dipshits who go on reality TV. And people don't care, because those folks have it coming. People have been trying to go outside the system for decades and looking for something else, and being told they can't have it, while the establishment becomes ever more smug and certain of itself, and more blatant in the exposure of their craft. Maybe Trump isn't what people want, but at least he's not taking their crap anymore! Maybe he's lying, maybe he'll disappoint voters, but how can they be any worse off? What candidate hasn't?
What that really says, though, is that those people are, de facto, fed up with the reality of democracy itself - with the inevitable ideologically dubious compromises, the careful rhetoric of politicians who can't burn all their bridges on a single issue, the horse-trading necessary to achieve things. With any populist, whether it's Trump or Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen or whoever, there are really only three possibilities if they are elected: they will either become nearly undistinguishable from the candidates they ranted about; or they will try not to contradict their rhetoric too much and hence get absolutely nothing done; or they will get things done by severely curtailing democracy, as parties on both left and right did in many countries in the 1920s and 1930s, and as people like Orban in Hungary, Putin in Russia or Erdogan in Turkey are doing today (in Putin's case there never was much democracy to begin with, admittedly).
The reality of democracy is certainly ugly, and it's very easy to criticize it - but while some things like the obsession with political correctness or excessive pork/bloat in spending bills may be possible to adjust in a direction that's more palatable to voters, the need for compromises and for making deals is inherent to democracy. And as the cliche says, democracy may be ugly but it's still better than all the alternatives.
View original postTrump is a perverse kind of Batman - He's running because we have to chase him. He's the candidate America needs right now, but hopefully not the one we deserve.
Wasn't the whole point of your post that he is the candidate you deserve, the logical follow-up to your earlier election choices? As for needing - if you mean that America needs to learn the tough lesson of how electing populists is even worse than electing 'regular' politicians, perhaps. I rather hope that lesson can be learned without having to waste four years on it, though.
Why is there Trump? I blame Obama.
- 06/03/2016 09:19:00 PM
1493 Views
Why do right wingers have such trouble with reality?
- 14/03/2016 07:17:46 PM
579 Views
Why do left wingers all have such poor reading comprehension skills?
- 15/03/2016 01:03:10 AM
725 Views
Why do left wingers all have such poor reading comprehension skills?
- 15/03/2016 01:03:10 AM
725 Views
You make several interesting points.
- 16/03/2016 08:23:08 PM
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Compromising is fine as long as both sides do so.
- 16/03/2016 11:37:18 PM
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Both sides do do so. But both sides are also wide-ranging coalitions, not monolithic entities.
- 17/03/2016 09:28:31 PM
767 Views
All you're doing is highlighting the failures of the GOP; hence the voters' preference for outsiders
- 18/03/2016 02:47:01 AM
595 Views
I must say, the media seems to be going insane with Trump hatred.
- 20/03/2016 11:35:21 PM
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