To be pedantic, only ~28% of eligible voters voted for Trump, when you consider turnout and all that :-P
well to be pedantic, I said country, and by area way more than 1/2 the country voted for him -P
Just look at all that red on this map. I have the most red of any president.
I was a tad younger than you–in a stroller being pushed down the street when my mother heard the news about JFK–but I never really asked her about her reaction. She has said, though–we were in Atlanta at the time–that there were people in the city who cheered.
The red is obviously us.
My main problem with China, and any communistic country in reality, is they are just FULL OF SHIT. TOTAL BULLSHIT. ALWAYS. EVERYTHING IS BULLSHIT!. Because Face or WHATEVERFUCK! Tragic.
Get over it. If you want to have influence globally, you can’t keep up this fake facade. Period.
Luckily our president doesn’t… isn’t… fuck.
Yes our president sucks right now. Totally.
That’s a sad memory, and our country used to be full of decent people. If Trump (or Obama before him) were to go the way of JFK, I fully expect there would be parties and gloating from members of the other party, gleefully covered and encouraged by the cable news networks.
I fail to see why a horrific President that was elected by a minority with help from Putin should be mourned like JFK was, if he is forcefully ejected from office a bit early.
Well, if rumors are to be believed, multiple grand juries are in progress. With any luck, the indictments will be piled so high, it won’t matter.
Wait who is going to bring charges? I thought the Justice Dept had to do this.
Should I ask in the other thread?
Correct.
NYT OpEd pages today has an editorial about the new GOP, and the death of Reaganism. The author’s (R.R. Reno) main point is that Trump, despite his erratic nature and immature behavior, is actually on point in his perception that the new rallying cry of the Republicans has to be Americanism, a form of neo-nationalism that pushes back against globalization and globalism. The author does have some interesting points, in particular how the elites of both parties simply ignored and in many cases literally moved away from much of the population, and how globalization is championed by, and in the author’s judgment, mostly benefits, a relatively small global elite of affluent technocrats, and screws over everyone else.
Now, this analysis, which is pretty much exactly the criticism that, say, Thomas Friedman’s stuff like The World is Flat justifiably gets, has some merit. For a particular class of people around the globe, globalization is pretty much all positive, while for another, larger, group, there are many downsides. But there are also several problems with this guys’ analysis IMO. One, I think he grossly underestimates the extent that average people in the USA in particular benefit from globalization. People in Angola may be getting screwed, but people in Kansas, buying cheap stuff in WalMart, are far better off. He also overestimates the exclusiveness of the technocratic elite he locates on the coasts; it’s a lot more than just millionaires and billionaires in Silicon Valley or Park Avenue we’re talking about, it’s also a whole raft of middle class Americans in post-industrial jobs that are being more or less successful these days.
Mostly, though, Reno doesn’t provide any sort of actual solutions. He glibly glosses over the Trump platform’s lack of concrete approaches to the problems he addresses, and he sort of hand-waves away the difficulties in actually making meaningful, and on balance positive, change.
Most importantly, he completely fails to understand the intimate connection between the nativist, isolationist, and protectionist beliefs held by many who support the direction Trump is going in, and the general anti-globalization thrust of the movement. The author tries to separate the two streams, in the same way people try to separate ideology from politics in so many cases. “Sure they say X, but that’s just camouflage or pandering. Their focus on real concern Y is what’s important!” This never works out; people using strong ideological imperatives to drive policy almost never escape those imperatives. Indeed, from the outside, it’s easy to miss that in most cases, it’s policy stuff that seems rational that is secondary to people inside these movements. The stuff outsiders see as fringe or ephemeral is usually what is most important to the people who believe it.
Except “Americanism”, or something approximating it, has been the rallying cry of Republicans since at least the Tea Party bullshit, and it has become less and less fringe over time. But what they mean by “Americanism” isn’t what I would call it all, more like “white nationalism” which is damned unAmerican, IMO.
I tend to agree. I think Reno’s point though was that traditional GOP conservatives, going back to Buckley and the like in the fifties, was pretty internationalist and eventually, under the Bushes, quite globalist in a neo-liberal sort of way. In contrast, the Tea Party and its successors have pushed the GOP away from that sort of approach and towards, as you call it, white nationalism. Though I’d say this isn’t strictly “white,” it’s more a combination of elements of white nationalism, faux-egalitarian faux-populism, nativism, protectionism, and myopia.
But, there is a core of truth in the allegation that both parties have resolutely refused to work with the mass of people left behind by a globalizing economy that flat out told them, “look, the idea that semi-skilled workers can make first world money and live like technocrats was based on the magic economy of the post-war era, and depended on factors like cheap oil, limited competition, union labor, and ever-expanding consumer spending. These things are gone, and so are your jobs, sucker.” Instead of working to integrate everyone into the new economy, the right and left pretty much both through up their hands and said, “you’re on your own.”
You mean white male left behind. Democrats frequently push ideals of training and education and support programs but the we masses don’t want to share so they see it as help for lazy minorities and a waste.
I mean that was the end game of Conservatism in many ways.
The problem is the Democrats jumped on the train as well, which left those people without a party. Then they were distracted by shiny objects like gay marriage and gun control.
Well, there’s some truth to that, but the training and support stuff suffers from exactly the same problem that the Progressive programs did in the early 20th century. The actual “stuff” is often valuable, but the tone is usually one of “we’re better than you, but we will help you be like us.” The Progressives destroyed urban communities, minority and immigrant power in cities, and ran roughshod over a lot of non-WASP cultures in their well-meaning effort to deliver improvements. Some of those improvements, like working conditions and sanitation, were quite valuable, but most of them came with a very high cultural cost.
The more modern liberal approach suffers IMO from the same problem. It’s not that they won’t offer help, it’s that the help all too often comes with a projected contempt almost for those being helped. At the very least, there is the definite sense that the people being helped are in the wrong/not good enough/etc. and need to be “elevated.” This sort of cultural approach is doomed to fail.
Where did you experience this and with what program?