But then, didn't postwar Germany have a different media culture than Britain from the get-go? We've heard about these wretched British tabloids all our lives. They were there waiting for Murdoch to take them to the next level. We haven't heard dramatically sleazy about the German media since, well, we hung Julius Streicher.
That's interesting because Limbaugh's syndicators also offered his show for free to impoverished rural radio stations until it became a hit. This sort of subsidy obviously favors the rich, most of all the rich fanatic. There just aren't any rich fanatics on the left to counter this. Soros? Don't make me laugh.
It will really be a sick joke that after all the incitement of race war and misogyny and Islamophobia, the thing that will finally get the antiwar movement to oppose Trump with any real conviction is his swapping favors with Putin to get their hero Snowden into a noose. As if all the other killings of Americans by other Americans under Trump will be okay, as long as he doesn't start any new wars abroad.
But Trump's got to murder a domestic political opponent of some sort to send a message to the rest of us about how his New Order will differ from the old one. Snowden is the low-hanging fruit.
Excellent observations. And this is how we know the American people don't even believe their own bullshit about how these are wars for survival. When they really believe that, they make sacrifices.
Right now, the only war for survival that any large number of Americans can imagine is a war against other Americans who are different in some way, which is really going to be a war of enslavement and mastery to maintain one's own comforts. We are already in an arms race against our fellow citizens.
War is not obsolete, war has simply evolved at the initiative of those who are willing to risk it to evade the world's established military powers. The latter are obsolete. Doing away with them will not eliminate war. It will be fought by small, secret armies of ruthless killers like ISIS and whatever Blackwater is called this week. Until someone finds a way to bring back big conventional war and unleashes it on a world that has forgotten how to defend itself from that. This has all happened before.
If you all wanted a change from that you needed someone or a coalition of someones strong enough to enforce a change. We won't have that in the future.
If you mean Trump's problems, you should recall that no incumbent president has ever failed to be re-elected during wartime. Bush Junior would have been a dead man in 2004 without a quagmire to protect him. Nixon won by the biggest landslide ever in '72, even with those troubling stories about the Watergate break-in. In '73, he had declared the war over. In '74, he was driven from office. The mass of Americans knew he was persecuting hippies and antiwar activists; they were perfectly fine with it as long as Nixon's survival was justified by America's wartime needs. The moment there was no war, everyone started looking at Nixon's criminal activities as self-serving, and everything changed.
So yes, Trump needs a war. To cover the sheer size of the crimes he's already committed and the ones he's going to commit, he might need a yuuuuuuge war.
How big a war do you think he will need to turn America into a White supremacist police state where minorities can be stripped of their voting rights after they're crushed for rebelling against his persecution?
Those monstrous measures are the revolution that he and his followers believe will eventually solve America's problems. They really blame everything on equality and human rights and social progress.
I so want to see how Trump handles his first major dispute with Iran's ally Putin. Putin may only have helped him dig up dirt on Clinton to weaken the American political system, not because he wanted Trump to win. But now one of them will have to back down from his commitment, because Iran's joining Russia in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Trump has no tools to stop the rise of Asia. It's already propping up the $ to keep its own goods cheap in the US. So he could collapse the $ as a trade barrier, but what happens when Wal-Mart doubles the price on everything on its shelves because no one in America will make substitutes? And of course, what if everyone starts dumping their US Treasuries anyway?
The worst part of US and especially White resentment of Asia is that it's based on the premise that White workers are inherently and naturally "better" than Asians, and that punitive measures will magically turn the clock back 50 years. The very people who voted for Trump are the people most resistant to technology and education. At this very moment, China is turning its low-wage but literate workforce into a mid-wage but highly skilled workforce, people who know more about modern technology than those aforementioned Americans who erase more and more of their own knowledge as they pursue their insane ideology.
Yet Americans will claim that they are right and better, and will expect to keep getting paid White man's money for what is becoming Pakistani women's work. They will be fed a million lies and conspiracy theories to explain this failure, and someone will be served up as the scapegoat, at home or abroad.
In Trump's America, will the media even bother to cover this trial?
Or worse, will they create a false dichotomy between Roof's racism and the Republican Party's racism so that the latter can say, "See, here's all the ways we're nothing at all like this loser"? Because it seems to me that the media has been using the KKK and others for that purpose for a long time, while the real differences between them and the GOP have been narrowing.
You're assuming that his redneck zombie cult has a sense of humor. All Suharto had to do when he overthrew Sukarno was to have his state apparatus direct traffic while his volunteer admirers hacked 600,000 people to death. Not much left after that to prevent Suharto from ruling as he pleased for 30 years.
Why does he deserve the benefit of a doubt when he's inciting his followers to dust off all the old prejudices that made grass-roots racism dominate America for so long?
All he has to do is look the other way while our states and our bosses do what they do best: enforce White supremacy. No enforcement of discrimination laws. No enforcement of civil rights laws. No enforcement of laws against violence upon women. No punishment of any police no matter how grotesque their assaults become.
Why not? Why should I believe that Trump is not a committed White supremacist in the American tradition?
An article in the New York Times about Steven Bannon:
"Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”
Have we reached the point where this can become the normal conversation of half of America with no real resistance?
For Christ's sake, doesn't anyone know that The National Enquirer is Trump's Pravda? Right now it's running a cover story demanding that Trump "BUILD THE WALL NOW!", with the subheading about "Mexico's Revenge - Flooding America With Drug Gangs." This is the sort of incitement that leads to wars.
The National Enquirer makes British tabloids look like, well, news sources. It is deplorable trash that lives off of popular conspiracy theories. There is no science or history to be found there. Now its owner uses his relationship with Trump to become a shaper of our national will.
Will 100,000,000 non-White Americans (including a majority of our current young children) "deserve" what's coming? Provoked by a monster and his vengeful followers and all the state and local authorities with their version of "Making America Great Again," meaning the restoration of the worst practices of their forefathers. When their victims can't take it anymore and uprisings occur, martial law will follow. From there escalation is simply a matter of will.
You don't know the South. You don't know how obsessed Southerners are with making excuses for their past, endlessly lying their asses off about how the good things about it were completely unrelated to White supremacy, Jim Crow, lynch law, prison labor, and slavery. I expect a good many Northerners over the years have come to see that the arrival of peoples of color in their own turf as reason to steal as much of that Southern past as they can get away with.
The conspiracy theories are crucial to that, since the original White supremacist order was built on myths as well.
That's what no one dares studies - the number of White people who feel that they're the underdog when they're denied the position of Master Race and need an excuse to seize it.
Mr. Wilson, you should know that Master Races resurgent at home eventually threaten their neighbors.
Trump's messages about voting fraud, as we keep ignoring, continually dogwhistled Blacks and Mexicans as being the only criminals in America. So of course his voters are above reproach.
And believe me, that will continue to be the message going forward.
But the Electoral College will be defended to the point of civil war for just that reason. There are large numbers of Americans who refuse to accept that people different than themselves are truly American and should truly have equal votes. Whether they've committed the crime of being Black or being Californian.
He's part of the groupthink of a different group. If you're not familiar with American right-wing extremism there's really nothing I can tell you. But it is large, powerful and as we've discovered it's quite cohesive. The lies it told 20 years ago became the mainstream conservative truths of 10 years ago and the centrist consensus of today. That was accomplished by repetition, not evidence.
And I've been watching this whole horrible process underway since I was young, going to a Southern Baptist church that taught contempt for other religions even though we were all stationed together in the Philippines. They seemed harmless then.
Poor people can't afford housing when property values are high. They become a nuisance to be cleared away.
"Better" clearly means you don't have a problem with a restoration of America's racist, sexist past. You have eyes that can see, but no soul that can empathize with those who have historically been discriminated against. When the time comes to ethnically cleanse the Ni**ers whom racists always accuse of "lowering property values", you will do nothing. Then they will come for others.
Perpetual White minority rule will mean this country has no future.
Presidential candidate/re-tread Sarkozy threatened Trump with tariffs if he pulls out of the Paris agreement. The irony of this is that Sarkozy now looks to be the "moderate" candidate against White nationalist Le Pen in the presidential election. But it's no sure thing that White nationalists across Europe will follow Trump in these matters. If you hate free trade, any excuse for a tariff will do, and if you want energy independence and you're not sitting on a lot of coal you probably want wind and solar and any subsidies international organizations will provide to help. The German Green party originally had far-right people among its founders.
I guess the outcome of this dispute will tell us a lot about the nature of the White Bloc stretching from the PetroPutin State to Il Douche's new empire. Far-right nationalists make terrible allies precisely because they all think their country alone deserves everything.
That depends on what class a Cuban is in. What do you know of what it was like to be poor and Black under Batista? Was it as bad as the Dominican Republic today?
The question is, what is "fair" treatment for the rich and for the poor? And given the US trade embargo that entirely defined Cuba's economy while Wall Street lavished sweatshop money on its neighbors, what is "fair" treatment for the countries that favor the rich or favor the poor?
Maybe, just maybe, you could make a deal like that with Otto von Bismarck. Any willingness I had to give Putin the benefit of a doubt that he was one-tenth the man Bismarck was pretty much went down the tubes, when I recognized the colossal damage that Trump and his racist zombie army are willing to do dragging America back into its bloody past. Putin didn't care about the consequences of that, or he did care and he welcomed it. And Putin's support of similar racist parties across Europe is reinvigorating the spirit of White supremacy that made the 20th Century so reckless and violent. But the man who sees the Slav as his brother in Whiteness today can turn on a dime tomorrow, and Putin's responsibility to his people was to consider what monster he was feeding. Racists don't hesitate to betray their agreements with subhumans.
Putin's strategic argument - supported by his US apologists - is that we should return to the era of cynical Great Powers, essentially undemocratic in their policymaking, complete with their "protective belt" of puppet border states. So Moscow should get its wretched empire of unwilling non-Russians back.
But the basis for this cynical argument is that the Great Powers will respect the old rules about not interfering with each other or even their inner belt of satrapies. But states outside of those belts are fair game for the most destructive intervention. Dig it, isolationists, that's as good as the good old days ever got.
Yet Putin undermined even that argument by aiding Trump's online smear campaign. He broke the china shop, he owns the mess that we will make of each other. If it's that easy for Great Powers to destabilize each other's governments, then the Great Power system and its subjugated spheres of influence don't create any security at all, do they? Bismarck spending money to change who becomes the Prime Minister of Britain? Of course not. That gets you all the faster to the equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand getting killed by a Russian-supported terror group, and all the weapons come out.
There have to be rules, and those rules are probably impossible for genuine democracies to agree upon. But they're also impossible for genuine dictatorships to obey.
This is our South Africa 1948 moment. But those bastards back then didn't know that they would waste the next 40 years ruining each others' lives until the unsustainability of White minority rule could no longer be punted into the future.
What's scary about South Africa is that ultimately its Black citizens had to take a poison pill defense to threaten the country with utter ruin. They refused to put their kids in the schools designed by the racists to use language to isolate them from the outside world. That refusal meant that South Africa could not advance its workforce past the most menial level of industrialization... a very dangerous place for a society to get trapped. The ability of the Black resistance to carry out acts of violence during a time of relative economic success thus left the White oligarchy with no illusions of what would happen as the economy fell behind.
The cost of that was very, very high, and it's still being paid by South Africans. Are we Americans willing to pay it?
We missed it because the planning happened 350 years ago. Race was invented by America's colonial oligarchs as a business necessity: it was getting too dangerous to ride herd on rebellious indentured servants, so a way had to be found to co-opt one portion of them to maintain a state of terror over the rest. After Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the legal concepts of "White" and "Black" were introduced to thus divide the servant class. The White race was invented to oppress, exploit, and conquer a continent.
To put it more simply, America succeeded because it was turned into the Stanford Prison Experiment. It took hours for the "guards" in the actual experiment to embrace their identity as oppressors. Imagine what 15 generations would do. That's the founding identity of the White construct which spread over the continent, and it's never truly been confronted much less overthrown.
You know that there was only a few % of difference between the number of votes Obama got and the actual majority of votes won by Clinton. People were willing to "try stuff" in 2008 because soft-racist George W. Bush had wrecked the country in several ways. Now that critical % is willing to follow the racists again BECAUSE the Democrats bailed out capitalism yet again (as it did after the Hoover and Bush Senior crashes) and all the hysteria is now about Black crime and Mexican illegals and Moslem terrorists.
Decent people have always been the backbone of support for every conservative regime that has ever committed crimes anywhere on Earth. Here is a community of decent conservative people celebrating their way of life in the US in 1930.
It certainly does. Modi's BNP in India. The military-owned industries of Egypt and Pakistan. Whatever grotesque bordello Trump's children set up in the White House by being both his inner cabinet and the overseers of his economic empire.
The historical "difference" from the world at large that we currently live in is that Great Powers routinely waged outright wars with each other using the most powerful weapons in their arsenals. We've gone for 70 years without one of those. Appreciate the status quo while it lasts.
The formula is simple. The Jew who lives in America is 70% likely to be a liberal. The Jew who is gotten to emigrate to Israel by bribery or coercion serves the Israeli state as taxpayer and possible soldier. Thus it is in the interest of US racists (and Evangelicals) to collaborate with Zionists to get Jewish-Americans to "self-deport."
Schotten's article comes closer than any other article I've seen at this site to outright admitting that Herzl's movement collaborated with the early Third Reich, a major trading partner of the Zionist settlements in Palestine, to "encourage" German Jews to flee there. Until that was no longer enough for the Nazis. Now THAT'S a parallel to what's coming.
The problem is, the faster the military becomes rational, the faster it switches to flying killer robots and then spends most of the money saved in indoctrinating the public to accept this as a solution to non-existent threats. Granted, it was all going to happen anyway. The folks who whine about drone warfare being an exceptionally American evil are not paying attention to what's going on overseas. The countries that have the most productive workforces will be the fastest to push the envelope on drone capabilities. American death merchants are small shops building maintenance-hungry Ferraris at huge markups. If, instead, you run a real industrial economy, you will be looking to build the Ford Model T of drones. Or the Kalashnikov of drones. Which hasn't happened yet.
It will be easy, because that country will not hesitate to sell that product. Not just to governments, but to private individuals. We've all been told for 100 years that robots were coming. They've got wings. We'll add our own guns.
I've been saying that the Military-Industrial Complex is White Man's Welfare. We're about to see how far that can go.
If Trump intends to set fire to all our alliances, a lot of troops and surveillance gear will be coming home from bases in over 130 countries. In fact, I support keeping more of our forces stateside, but under the extraordinary nature of Trumpism, we must now consider the danger that domestic uses be found for those forces and weapons to justify their sitting around. Weapons spending itself doesn't produce many jobs. But every time a military base opens up next to a right-wing burg because its congresswhores lobbied to be rewarded for their friendliness to the MIC, you create a new base for the far right. The theocratic churches flock in. The base entangles itself with the community through propaganda efforts. The retiring GIs and Halliburton contractors move off-base with their pensions like medieval knights established as men of influence.
So when the time comes to put down dissent in that other America hostile to the military, these guys will all be in one mental bubble about their right to do so with military force.
I somewhat disagree about these newly-ascendant Yankee racists being more attractive, because they bring their own alien baggage to the racist table. The Southern racists have always used self-victimization and all their whining about their distinctive culture and peculiar institutions and especially God 'n' Guns as their Teflon. Neo-Confederacy thus served as the central organizing principle of racist ideology; just do everything like Jefferson Davis would.
That Germanic stench that Prof. Cole observes around the newly-minted "alt-right" will create a 2nd racist constituency beyond the South, but not necessarily a comfortable fit around the old one that demands its pride of place ad nauseum. Let's get creative and start thinking of ways to get them to really hate each other. Federal vs State conflicts, the reality that the low-wage South needs free trade as it always has, the problematic position of Catholics, the inevitable grope of the alt-Right towards a national school curriculum of hate (a Common Korps?) to secure its dominance. Feel free to add.
Excuse me, Trump apologists. The "theater" is not the place for protest - but the White House is the place from which White Supremacists can make long-term plans for a state ruled by Internet bullies who ruin the lives of anyone who criticizes the man they already call "God-Emperor"?
We've been lectured all our lives about the evil of the German people made manifest by their failure to do everything in their power to sabotage Hitler from the day of his election.
Would you have condemned Marlene Dietrich, Bertold Brecht and all the other actors and writers and creative people in Germany if they had merely used their bully pulpits on Day 1 of the Third Reich to issue a plea to the Fuhrer to not do the worst that he was capable of? For all the difference it could have made?
What Flynn is doing is separating (recklessly not carefully) those Moslems of use to America and his own avarice from those who are not. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, they are willing to pay the right people in America to get to be the ones who direct our airstrikes, not those who get airstruck. Obviously these Islamists are sure they can forever protect themselves from this growing monster of American bigotry that they feed with their bribes, but I don't see why.
Well, Neocons are mostly Zionists. So the question is whether Zionists are actually Jews. You could make a good case that the early Zionists were cynics at a time when any demagogue could use his ethnic identity as the basis for building a secessionist revolution on one's own turf, but Jews were clearly out of luck. The Zionists took that secular nationalist formula and twisted it to fit the Diaspora. Machiavelli once said that in order to become a great prince, one had to find a people in great trouble... and he listed Moses as an example. I think Strauss was an admirer of Machiavelli. And I suspect those American Jews who became Neocons in the '70s envied the aggressive identity politics of Israel and even some American ethnic groups.
I even see this cynical hijacking of religion by the new buzzword, the "Alt-Right" or White Nationalists. Compare Steve Bannon's endless nattering about "Christian civilization" and the evils of multiculturalism with the on-line manifesto of Norwegian mass-murderer and Islamophobe Anders Breivik. They talk robotically about religion not as faith and practice, but as a political culture that can exclude everyone else, a hybrid of turf and race.
In truth, that's not different than when Hitler routinely invoked "Gott." Lutheranism and Catholicism meant nothing to him. Religion as the establishment of a monopoly of power under a patriarchy he could usurp meant everything.
I'm more scared of the rank & file Id Monster freed from any rational restraint than I was of the GOP's reliable oligarchs. The cheapness of Trump's campaign will be seen by all ambitious demagogues as a model for getting into power without having to compromise with the saner capitalists. More successful than Sanders' model, which still required the followers to actually contribute what for them was a lot of money. Money exists in politics solely to buy attention. Trump found a monstrous alternative: direct appeal to the attention of that darkest part of our selves long silenced by civilized order and the hard lessons of past fanaticism.
I think that your concluding description of what happened during the Middle Ages illustrates a great irony:
When the Islamic world was up and the Christian world was down, the former, basking in the brilliance of its civilization and advanced economics, could have told the latter, "We're obviously superior, so it is rational for you to convert." And the latter, living in mud and squalor, could cry back, "This is a test from God - and those of us most cruel and rapacious will lead us back and get you bastards!"
And 500 years later, exactly that had happened, and the West now basked in its rationalism and capitalism and lectured the Islamic world on the rationality of surrender, and Qutb and bin Laden and whatever maniac is running ISIS now could say, "This is a test from Allah - and those of us most cruel and rapacious will lead us back and get you pigs!"
And maybe they will, and all this will start over again. The problem here is that whoever gets on top gets lazy and complacent... because that's actually the better life that we all aspire to build for our children, in all our societies. And someone else will be gunning for them and their wealth. It is insanity to have a world of rich races and poor races looking to screw each other over, to exploit any weakness, to rob with pens or with guns.
This particular cycle - under various religious labels - has been going on at least since the Persian invasion of Greece, and no one has learned a damn thing in 2500 years.
This is not going to make you feel any better, but there is an old joke among Poles that will show you it's not a unique problem.
A Polish farmer finds an old lamp in his field and conjures a genie from it who grants him three wishes. Each time, he wishes that the Mongols rise up and sack Poland. Each time it happens, and Poland is ever more ruined. After the last time, the genie says, "It is done. But why did you want those awful Mongols to lay waste to your own country three times?"
The farmer replies, "because in order to get here each time, the Mongols had to go all the way through Russia twice."
It is amazing to see antiwar people make excuses for the rise of a fascist movement in America, on the grounds that anything that is the opposite of liberalism will lead to the destruction of the international order created by Hitler's defeat and that order is the source of all evil.
Since Trump could never be bothered to run for public office or serve in any position of public service except for the very top, he never really had the power to do any of those things before, did he?
Now how do you feel about a race war in the streets of your very own country? This woman is willing to fight that war, and Trump has said things that indicated to her he is ready to lead it. It will be waged by the restoration of all the crimes that Whites once committed with impunity - until tempers snap and someone fights back. Now you know the cycle of escalating violence that will occur after that (or maybe you don't if you believe all civil wars are CIA plots), but you will still absolve Trump of what happens, because to you an isolationist America is worth any price.
Is it not reasonable to look at Trump's history as a serial fraudster (who just settled his Trump University fraud lawsuit for $25,000,000, a true first for an American president) with four bankruptcies and endless failed hotels as a model for what his "infrastructure" project will be?
He's also going to be the first president to maintain his giant corporation from the White House, by letting his children run both. You don't have to be Naomi Klein to understand what happens when a "giant infrastructure program" is run by the same nepotist spawn who also run a giant construction racket. Tell me what happened to all that public infrastructure in Latin America and Russia, how that was going to be revitalized by corporate involvement?
Name a single elected leader of a 1st-world nation who has ever spewed the paranoia, racist myths and conspiracy theories seen from this demagogue. You'd have to go pretty far back into the West's racist past. Which is exactly the point in assuming that's the plan now.
"The ACLU? What was that? Wasn't that one of those pinko organizations like Planned Parenthood and ACORN that got run out of business by a right-wing smear campaign overseen by Steve Bannon, like around 2017 or 2018?"
You know, the Federal civil rights suits would be presided over by the very judges Trump will be appointing and the Republican Congress will be rubber-stamping. America has a proud history of ignoring chunks of its Constitution based on ethnicity.
To everyone who thinks Trump will be fair to Palestine because only globalists are evil, here is the actual ideology of the movement led by his new Minister of Propaganda Steve Bannon:
"In March 2016, Breitbart Media published a primer on the “alt-right” movement, in which prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer was depicted as a key ideological founder. “The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine,” wrote Breitbart author Allum Bokhari and technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos. “In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.”
The primer takes on new significance, given that Stephen Bannon—a self-proclaimed leader in the alt-right movement—headed Breitbart before he was appointed as the chief strategist and senior counselor of Donald Trump's administration and the head of the president-elect’s campaign. With Bannon poised to take on a powerful political position, many are outraged and fearful that organized white supremacists will have another champion inside the White House.
A new interview with alt-right leader Spencer should dispel any doubt that the alt-right movement that Bannon lauds is white nationalist in nature.
“What I would ultimately want is this ideal of a safe space for Europeans,” Spencer NPR host Kelly McEvers in an interview aired Thursday. Spencer heads the National Policy Institute and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the country’s most successful young white nationalist leaders—a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.”
He described his ideal white nation: “This is a big empire that would accept all Europeans. It would be a place for Germans, it would be a place for Slavs, it would be a place for Celts, it would be a place for white Americans and so on.”
“What I’m saying is that Europeans defined America, they defined what it is,” Spencer continued. “European people were the indispensable people who defined this nation socially and politically and culturally and demographically, obviously. I care about us more.”
***
Get it? They're making an Israel for White people. By preaching a Zionism for White people. Which will do the same things to make White people "safe" that Israel does to make Jews "safe".
One day, will we see non-White citizens forced to retain their citizenship by swearing an oath to obey "The Caucasian and democratic character of America?"
It's very early to say this, but Mr. Greenblatt's action could be the beginning of a large change in the alignments of the Jewish-American community. It comes down to that essential conflict between the Jewish memory of Hitler's rise, and the Jewish support for the Likud/GOP myth of the angry White man taking back what's "his" as the solution. In other words, the choice between being a Jewish American wanting his rights protected, and a Zionist wanting the other minorities silenced for the sake of Israel.
People will have to choose. The gray area is being blown away like fog before a storm. The opinion polls have shown growing numbers of Jewish-Americans, and more so the younger, are turning against specific parts of the Zionist narrative. But that's encountered the headwind of actually accepting Moslems in American streets.
The thing is, if Jewish-Americans are the ones most loudly saying, "First they came for the Moslems, and we did nothing," it's a powerful rebuke to Republicans and Christian Zionists who have used Jews as a human shield against charges of racism and fascism. The narrative of the rise of Hitler was used so heavily by the Right to justify vilifying any criticism of Israel that it can't very well flip off the switch when actual Jews refuse to look away. They employed Jews as the designated Nazi-detectors selectively against leftists and people of color. Now, all the alarms need to go off at once.
He's a Leninist in the same sense that Lenin was a betrayer of the Communist movement. Lenin was up against Russia's soviets - worker councils that had taken their own action against capitalists and answered to no one, Social Democrats, the largest party in the country, and the Mensheviks - whose very name is a lie his propagandists sold for they were the majority of the Russian Communist Party. He played a game of pretending to grow his faction while in fact he developed the theory of an extreme vanguard party to establish a dictatorship to destroy all the more popular representatives of the Russian workers. And of course, seize all the factories from the workers who had taken them over and put them under control of party hacks.
For Lenin it was all about the dictatorship, because he believed the people had to be re-educated and society artificially reconstructed before actual reforms would accomplish anything. Most of all, he created the bullshit term "democratic centralism", which meant that the leadership would debate options in secret, and then pretend afterwards that there never had been any options at all, that all decisions were unanimous. This was a large step towards the Fuhrer principle of Hitler, and I think for the same reason: so that the Party could move rightward and leftward on a dime against the wishes of its supporters, replacing ideology with loyalty as their due.
What would have been the racial policies of any of the alternative leaders exploiting the Depression? Father Coughlin? The DuPont conspiracy?
Truman was himself a product of a racist political machine. The only reason he integrated the armed forces in 1948 is that the Democratic Party was also struggling to integrate itself; and that was solely and entirely the result of the Roosevelt era. Truman operated as a New Dealer in the shadow of the New Deal legacy. No Democrat before 1932 would have dared suggest the idea. FDR put the party on the road that by 1964 had the Southern racists switching parties - so stop perpetrating the "Democrats ARE the racists" revisionism used by Republicans to distract from their plans to disenfranchise minorities nationwide.
But the actual vast and growing inequality by race - as opposed to the late 1960s when Black wages reached 90% the level of Whites and our nation actually began making progress - is not repugnant to you.
How racially unequal would America have to get - again - in order for you to find THAT repugnant? How long an "apprenticeship" in "acting White" must 100 million and soon a majority of Americans must endure - an apprenticeship overseen by people who have a vested interest in it NEVER ending - before the right to revolution applies, damn it?
Why has White racism become more intense, and more politically dangerous, in the 28 years SINCE the Bakke decision? Is it because in our society, in the absence of Affirmative Action, the natural polarization of wealth back into the hands of the very propertied class that manufactured America's racist culture (see "The Invention of the White Race", Theodore Allen) is allowing that class to fall back on its successful strategy of selling casteism as a substitute for decent wages?
You cannot separate racism from capitalist injustices in this country; the latter manufactured the former intentionally.
However, Trump may well set up the 1860-level crisis a few years from now, as his followers try to hold on to the part of the country they dominate once he's in the grave and the nation is fragmented even further.
Though I'm the first to associate Trump with the racial evils of the past, I think the current crisis is closer to America in 1932, facing the right way out of far greater suffering than Whites now experience. There were many evil alternatives to Roosevelt, both on the ballot and in the sphere of media demagoguery. We were lucky that the timing worked out that none of the latter could make the jump from radio to the White House before FDR.
Most rank & file Whites never believed in markets; they believed in inequality and caste. That means a return to the days when a White man accepted the crappy wages his local Big Daddy gave him in exchange for being guaranteed a greater recognition as human than any person of color. Of which beatings, lynchings, laws, and culture are just aspects.
Reagan brought many ideologists into the White House, and elevated think tanks like the Heritage Foundation from the fringes to a status they've never surrendered. What damage he did through policy may have been kept in check on purpose to normalize his priesthood so they could keep dragging the country to the Right for decades.
And that in turn made Trump possible. Time for the next lunge back into darkness.
The next labor movement, if it ever happens at all, will be organized by Latinos. In the past we had WASPy, guild-based unions that failed to accomplish anything until heavily-immigrant radical unions like the CIO and IWW put the fear of God into the bosses. Only Latinos are in the right position now to do likewise, and only if the supposed re-industrialization of America actually gets anywhere. But that very fact will make it easier to race-bait the movement.
In fairness, it depends on the whole notion of what the so-called proletariat "wants", or whether that itself is a product of indoctrination. I think American workers were conditioned to want money, and European workers were conditioned to want power. The AFL-CIO and Democratic Party were glad to go the way they did. The Left is just as arrogant as the neoliberals when it claims that only it understands what the workers "want", or that the workers are even a unified class beyond their ethnic and parochial divisions. We're trapped in a long cycle: whenever our workers get organized, they temporarily get leverage for wages that get them out of poverty - but that causes the next generation of workers to be rapidly co-opted by bourgeois temptations, which castrates their unity, and then the bosses blame economic stagnation on "inferiors" and "parasites", and half the workers agree and turn on the other half, plunging us back into the 19th century.
Now I think we'd be better off if the workers had as much class consciousness as the elites obviously do. But then we'd be better off to have direct democracy instead of representative democracy. We don't know how to organize either.
Or, Trump will take the next step, one that has already been prepared by right-wing oligarchs, one that would confirm in one sweeping act all the worst we fear:
The costs of jailing will be covered by convict labor.
Why not? We are already moving in this direction. Only recently the Dept. of Justice finally joined the movement against privatized prisons by ending the sending of Federal convicts there, but that will surely be preempted. The state governments, meanwhile, are going all-out for privatized prisons and convict labor. Combine the two, and even though slave labor is not profitable by itself, the addition of even a reduced taxpayer contribution to operating costs will make the business more lucrative than the military-industrial complex.
You see, once private firms are able to own convict labor, they can divert a small sliver of their guaranteed profits to relentlessly propagandize voters to allow more and more of it, to rig the legal system to convict more and more people of more and more crimes... or whatever the majority (race) considers crimes by the minority (races). All-White juries to decide which convicts get sentenced to slave labor? Exactly how the Jim Crow South operated its chain gang labor system for generations.
All those armed bigots patrolling for illegals will not mind that the illegals aren't sent back. The armed bigots will be the new prison guards.
We can't be sure about that until we know how Iran's long-mooted entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization obligates Putin. At that point, like all the alliances dragging countries into wars throughout history, he is compelled by the need to prove his commitments to all his allies. Sound familiar?
But a pure cynic, and we surely have one here, might be willing to betray Iran or partly betray it to leave it in a weakened position... to be filled by Russia. These two countries do not like each other. They battle each other over energy markets. Some years ago, when Europe feared Putin's energy blackmail, the US tried to pressure Europe to give up both Russian and Iranian imports, which was nuts. Each country has good reason to want to see something bad happen to the other's exports.
By the time reactor designs currently licensed for approval in the US get completed, Trump will be gone, and solar and wind will be cheaper everyplace where they are allowed to compete without punitive charges placed on them.
Since it takes energy to strip carbon from CO2, any industrial process must use energy. But that energy would itself have to release no CO2, and if we have that energy, then why not use it to replace a coal or methane-fired generator instead? Until all of those are eliminated, that is the most efficient use of any unit of clean energy we can create.
I used to think that Israel's comeuppance might come at the hands of an Arab world, sick of monarchs funding jihadis, turning to the Russia-Iran axis, but Trump's relationship with Putin and Israel complicates that. It's worth it for Putin to avoid a fight with Trump there so as to reward him for the more strategically important goal of castrating NATO in wealthy, relevant Europe.
They don't distinguish between immigrants and American citizens of color. They will have no problem with re-imposing Jim Crow and taking the jobs of those they despise. They show zero sympathy for the many African-Americans who also lost jobs from these processes because they don't believe those people ever deserved good jobs in the first place.
And what % of those jobs would have been lost to automation regardless of neoliberalism?
I'm really getting sick of people who use the term "working people" to only refer to Whites in declining industries.
The next proletariat in America will be mostly non-White. The next labor movement in America will be dominated by Latinos.
But the crime of these minorities in the eyes of many of my fellow leftists is that they see they might win within the system, and they don't have a sense of racist entitlement to threaten violence to overthrow it in favor of the seduction of leading a racial caste system.
It's damned sick when leftists want that system overthrown so badly that they tell themselves that fascists are proletarians, and that the KKK and Nazis will somehow unleash redistributive justice.
Trump's supporters have in fact shown no evidence that they want anything but redistributive injustice, the non-market guarantee of property and extra-legal power for them at the expense of all who are different. Most people at these rallies look the other way while some among them are beating up actual leftist protesters. But how can any leftists look the other way at such a thing?
And by the way, exit polls during the primaries showed the average income of Trump supporters to be over $72,000 a year, higher than Clinton or Sanders supporters. Some proletariat.
Clinton implied that half of Trump's supporters were racists.
I think that was charitable. She meant "racist by American standards." Those standards are themselves based on the belief that White culture and hierarchy represent some sort of natural superiority proved by infallible markets, and minorities are still expected to one day capitulate to them. Nearly all Republicans and many or most Democrats actually believe that. But many of those Republicans, in turn, believe in overt use of violence, starvation, and social humiliation to achieve that noble goal. Most Democrats want punishments to be used against minority persons for individual misdeeds, not collective punishment against a criminal race whose members are all guilty of "something".
Now on top of that, Trump is mainstreaming those relatively disorganized Republicans who actually believe that minorities are genetically inferior and irredeemable and must remain under subjugation forever even if that requires the dilution or elimination of their right to vote.
Which, in my book, is an act of war, beyond the crimes of Wall Street against the American people.
I go to green technology sites and look up cheap housing technology all the time. You have to learn to sort out the serious efforts from the stuff with no economic grounding.
But the main way you bring down the cost of living is by getting rid of car-centric sprawl. That means more young people moving to cities, reversing the path of their forefathers. Once you eliminate $50,000 three-ton pickup trucks in your life, and learn to drive fewer miles and use mass transit, you learn to walk again. And that yields health benefits. You also have a lot more entertainment options in the city, and some of them are free.
But what we need is a way to keep housing supplies ahead of urban real estate speculation, and that requires a different model of land use. The one virtue of Houston's lack of zoning is that it is possible to create dual-use buildings on the European model, with stores in the bottom and apartments above. But only recently has Houston had the housing density to cause such buildings to exist, and it's being done more as a fashion statement in Downtown and Midtown than a necessity. If we could safely fold more forms of economic activity into residential spaces we might open up more of a city's total acreage to housing. However, to truly stay ahead of the developers' schemes to inflate prices, we might need floating housing complexes. Buckminster Fuller worked on this idea and claimed the Federal government was interested in his work as a means of low-income housing. Most of the world's supercities are on the sea.
Although right-wingers have in fact always been hypocrites about free markets, Trump has gathered around him all the factions on the right who are most willing to use governmental power to rig markets to favor White Christian men in all things. He talks airily about banning or expelling all sorts of people.
So at the very least, it's not just that he threatens to abolish the EPA and all forms of environmental safety. He may even designate those who reject his "wisdom" and try to push ahead with private alternative energy as enemies of the American Way of Life and punish them. He's not using market-based arguments like right-wingers have used in the past to oppose government subsidies, he's using cultural arguments that "real" Americans are those who get their hands dirty doing manly things like digging for coal, and they are owed eternal fealty because the superiority of those fuels and the culture that grew around them are an eternal truth. He's implying that the people who support alternative energy are somehow alien because they see technology as being able to obsolete a social order that his cultists will kill to defend.
But then that's true with lots of other issues. You can't argue policy with people looking for a real, live, bloody Kulturkampf. Stop looking at Trump's wildly-flailing policy statements. Look at his followers and ask the question, "Whom do they want him to exterminate?" Because they all know that the only thing Donald Trump is good at is destroying people.
That's like comparing the elections of Weimar Germany that left the German people so dissatisfied... with the election that gave the German people the Fuhrer they wanted and doomed them and hundreds of millions of others to destruction.
Ultimately, Trump's ideology and bigotry is the fault of one political party in particular that chose to embrace that long ago to attract a certain kind of voter who was leaving the other party. The two-party system accurately reflects the division of Americans into those who want to bring back the inequalities of the past for some perceived self-advantage and those who oppose that or prefer to focus on other bases for governance.
This is the product of assuming that "consumer choice" is the basis for legitimate government, as opposed to an informed citizenry searching for secular causality for improvements in our society.
There was a time when calling ordinary citizens "consumers" was subversive; it appeared with Ralph Nader and the movement to ensure safe products at the end of the '60s. But the idea was co-opted by the retailers. Instead of a consumer being a citizen demanding that the government perform investigatory and regulatory tasks that he could not practically do in an increasingly bewildering world of goodies, it became a celebration of the goodies.
The idea that we could shop for belief goes back further, to the all-important decision to disestablish state churches and allow a "free market of ideas" in religion. But by the late 20th century this hardly seemed to have political implications. Until the Evangelical movement arose and made one's choice of faith a matter of political outcomes, as in the right to demand that schools teach a fake science financed by Evangelicals. This spilled out into more and more areas of politics, abetted by fake and front advocacy groups funded by a network with an agenda of removing secular democracy from our lives.
The sum of these manipulations is the idea that a citizen is merely a pliable consumer of goods and faith, both controlled by right-wing oligarchs who themselves collaborate in every area of politics. The American heresy of this faith is the Gospel of Prosperity, where one pleads with God for wealth in exchange for overlooking the crimes of the wealthy. The choice of goods and the choice of "facts" thus merge into one act of submission to the Patriarchy of "entrepreneurs" from whom all earthly goods flow.
To me the interesting distinction between Hitler's attempt at totalitarianism (since no actual state has truly attained the totalitarian wish list) and Stalin's is that Hitler's state directed all its brutality at those defined as being "enemies without," while Stalin spent so much effort at destroying "enemies within." Hitler purged internal rivals by the hundreds, but defined his primary enemies literally out of the human race by the millions before planning their fate. That meant that an ordinary, obedient German could live pretty well and pretty freely until wartime privations closed in. Hitler feared their opinions, too; when he made his deal with the USSR, party members burned their cards in protest.
That sense of tyranny defined by tribal status, of a conqueror tribe whose members live in relative freedom and prosperity and thus consent, should scare us, because that was the norm that underlay oppression and inequality in human societies for millenia before the rise of Communism. Even when white Western populations clawed some recognition of human rights out of their rulers, they had zero problem with conquering distant lands and imposing utterly different governance there.
The problem here probably is one of entrenched power; a successful industry builds up its network of political puppets and propaganda groups over the decades, which it then uses to stave off rising new industries that haven't built up their own lobbies yet.
It's striking that in the UK, the Tory bias in energy policy is towards both nuclear and offshore wind, meaning the industries that are most capital-intensive, while penalizing the cheaper onshore wind industry and ordinary citizens putting solar panels on their roofs. I bet I know where some of that capital is going.
However, the coal % is falling rapidly.
Also it is well known that a large number of EV car buyers up to this point are in states which have made more progress towards renewables. And that those buyers are unusually likely to buy solar panels for their homes. Why condemn electric cars as a national failure when products in real life are sold individually in a country with widely varying conditions?
And to put it bluntly, as a last resort we the people can shut down the coal plants to save our world, but we probably lack the guts to shut down cars.
Well, if you don't want to be associated with that particular faction of White nationalists, do you have a useful suggestion for what you want them to be called instead? Because I think a genuine majority of White nationalists think that Blacks have not assimilated, and that they have contributed nothing of value to America. "Assimilation" seems to be an elastic term that stretches to cover many agendas.
Since these artificial penalties can only punish people who actually are connected to the grid, I guess more and more people will disconnect. Which will create a real crisis for the utilities that could have been avoided. Watch the price of battery storage systems and attempts by small groups of people to create microgrids.
The purpose of Trump's rhetoric was never really to make illegal aliens go away. This is all about the creeping fact that Whites are losing their majority in America, which drives all the other perceived affronts in the eyes of racists. The purpose was to pursue the process of delegitimizing the rights of all immigrants, and then the rights of those citizens perceived as not being "real" Americans.
Now, the purpose for that might be preparatory to ethnic cleansing. But our history suggests that racists have no problem with non-Whites within their borders as long as the latter clearly have lesser rights, much lesser, as in the rights of caged animals. The trick is restoring the legal recognition that White people are categorically on top over all other citizens, stretching precedents under Common Law from a single victory like Voter ID, or a religious right to discriminate, or profile searches, or a right to kill based on "reasonable fear." Such efforts exist in dark corners of the far-right fringe... but they are no longer the fringe under Trump, are they?
Race war. That's what is most damaging to democracy. Because there is no democratic road out of a race war. If those judged the "good guys" are the majority and win the war, they will bloc vote on every issue. Rigid factions that guarantee one will win every election and issue is not democracy. If they are instead the minority but still managed to win, they truly can't risk restoring democracy. And if the faction judged the "bad guys" wins, whether majority or minority, it likely will seek a final solution through elimination rather than the costly hassle of routine oppression. Increasingly, that seems to be what happens.
If you can't believe race war can happen in America, you haven't been paying attention to Americans at all.
More importantly, how would they FIGHT to prevent single payer? We have just begun to see in the last 8 years how many tools capitalists have to threaten our society with civil war. It works. It wears down resistance among sensible officials with liberal leanings. Don't send the government on a fools' errand to impose socialism until you're personally prepared to go all the way to revolution, with the government or against it.
Obviously, a real terrorist infiltrator would just lie on the exam. The point of the exam is the assumption that the "culture" of the immigrants will create terrorists after they get here and refuse to assimilate.
We all know the game. There's only room for one brand of intolerant fundamentalism in a society; the one that's already established there. So those bigots are the only ones who don't have to take the exam. They can even demand that the language and laws be deformed to say it's not bigotry when they alone do it. "Equality" is the degree of inequality that existed in 1950s America, which conveniently excludes alien practices.
Well, there is a sequence of methods that Hitler used to create jobs for his followers. Since his economic theory was ultimately theft, it could only be a series of stopgaps. First order the firing of Jews and leftists and the handing of their jobs to his followers. Then round up the Jews and leftists and draft more of his followers to guard them in camps. Then begin an arms buildup and hire more followers to oversee the factories. Then use the arms to seize neighbors' resources, convert those into more arms and jobs. Then use the prisoners and conquered as slave labor to support more followers in combat. After that? Well, who cares, it's the end of the world.
As Hunter Thompson said before his death, "Of COURSE political consultants study the methods of the 3rd Reich. They worked - for a while." We should consider the possibility that Trump's followers know his methods won't create jobs for workers in general, just jobs for themselves at the expense of those they consider beneath them. All that I've seen of them indicates that they genuinely want life to get worse for non-Whites, that this sadism is the point of their sense of well-being far more than creating more jobs for everyone. Maybe the media needs to ask them tougher questions about their real priorities.
The psychological study referenced in this story may explain a mystery that I keep running up against: why so many American men on the Internet, presumably White, are so psychotically threatened by alternative energy, as if the preservation of oil and coal had some greater significance than real costs. From the article's abstract:
"Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the white male effect, which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful."
In other words, having grown up in a world where oil and coal-based economics put White men on top, White men who prize being on top above all other values refuse to see oil and coal as being capable of causing harm. To them risk is anything that is "different", not "familiar but lethal", because the only real risk is any shakeup in the status quo hierarchy endangering their positions.
Now if that shakeup has already happened, as in many industries, you've got men self-servingly filled with conviction that everyone is now in danger unless the world is forced back into a mold with their place on top baked in. They'll make up the craziest stories about the new order to fill that need to see danger. How else do we explain people convinced that solar cells must be dangerous to people around them based on the idea that they're sucking up energy? It's voodoo under another name.
Or perhaps up to 40% of Americans have the gut feelings of evil, violent people. Why are you saying we should make excuses for them? Your argument fails because Romney was a businessman who had the advantage of being sane, and there are surely many, many people better than Romney who might have gotten the nomination, but instead these bastards went out of their way to get the most proudly destructive person they could see. This is not a gamble, this is a declaration of war by one group of American citizens on other groups that, in their heart, they want to crush, perhaps up to 100,000,000 of them. You say that's crazy. I say exactly. They want a madman to do their dirty work, to make the orders official that in their heart they've always wanted to follow.
If they were what you claim, they would have nominated Ron Paul twenty years ago. Paul never gets more than 1% of the vote because they don't want LESS government, they want WHITE government.
Sir, you have ignored the track record of Trump personally appearing at rallies where his cultists rough up protesters who in no way represent the War Party or "big gun users". They invariably beat up men like the Black Lives Matter protester in Birmingham, Alabama. I call it unstable and going off the deep end, and they do it at the slightest provocation. But most of all, it is a clear signal as to whom these people believe they must silence in order to make America great again. Not the cops, not the military.
Yes, the world is always lecturing the Germans, "How could you not have united against Hitler," or the Italians, "How could you not have united against Mussolini." No one ever asks, "Well, how bad did their bourgeois democratic opponents have to be to inspire support for fascism?" No one even remembers who those opponents were today. Because there was nothing those opponents could be that was bad enough to justify the sadistic vindictiveness that empowered fascism and its amazing ability to create tragedies on a scale beyond the sad little countries that carried them out. We think we know how bad America is because of the Clintons. We haven't scratched the surface of what we're capable of doing to each other. Trump's people have got the itch bad.
That inflammatory speech has been pouring out of Ted Nugent and a growing number of office-seeking Republicans since 2008. "Second Amendment solutions", Sharron Angle, remember her?
Note that Trump didn't say "gun owners", he said "Second Amendment people." Growing numbers of gun-rights proponents are outright saying that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to give the "people" the weapons needed to overthrow the government if necessary. That's not the same thing as gun owners, but then just as only certain types of Christian seem compelled to organize around a demand for theocratic law, only certain types of gun owner seem to be feel that they are one people, superior to other Americans, whose craving for weapons able to overthrow the government make them fitting to exercise power over the rest of us.
A lot of readers here do not understand the long-term patterns in far-right rhetoric. In the 1990s, some of these extremist hucksters were pushing the idea that Blacks were only "13th Amendment citizens", implying that a mistake had been made that could be corrected by that Constitutional Convention that they still demand based on terms that would likely involve insurrection. The more recent master narrative of the Right has been to use hatred of immigrants to keep worming away on every legal front to establish a special right to discriminate: from racial profiling at airports, to police rights to regard Blacks as special threats (thus negating the militia movement's claim to support gun rights for all), to Christian rights to discriminate against LGBT persons for damn near anything. The goal is to restore the legal tradition of special rights that in practice can only be utilized by White Christian conservatives.
Only a naive person can fail to see the connection between these schemes and the demographic decline of the schemers. Their rhetoric all aims to establish the idea that America is a Republic, not a Democracy. Meaning, it is the property of only certain kinds of people, those who look like the ones who owned it 200 years ago, White Christian property owners who were organized into militias. Small government is easy when it only represents one kind of human, who then are left free to hold their lessers at gunpoint.
The political line that Trump has taken wanders around on many matters - but when it comes to who qualifies as "real" Americans, it inexorably narrows. Trump and his personality cult are vague about many things, but they know exactly whom to beat up at his rallies. The question of whom his supporters will allow to fully participate in our society becomes far more critical when guns are brought into the equation.
The big thing you're failing to see, Mr. Engelhardt, is that the sense of threat is no longer really from abroad. Our people are forming into factions, the kind that form before a civil war. One side is becoming a minority and is assembling the rhetoric to talk itself into the gamble of destroying the government to impose a restored order of tribal patriarchy that can never be amended. The other side is simply everyone else, good guys and bad guys, the entire range of what is normally found in hegemonic liberal capitalism. Yet to use the language of civil war is bad P.R., so it hides behind all the other issues of sovereign rights of force from police shootings to our superpower military.
The factionalism will turn to eliminationism, and history says that in democracies, the Right usually lands its blow first.
If Clinton threatened to personally barge into the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to berate Moslems, would you call that proof she is a proven and deadly war hawk? Yet Trump ACTUALLY DID THAT. Last year, his threat to visit so scared the psychotic Netanyahu regime that it had to talk him into canceling. Even it was afraid of what Trump might unleash with nothing more than his big mouth and tiny fingers and infinite hatred of anyone who gets in his way.
I've been going through responses like yours to figure out the antiwar "left's" insane blindness to Trump's outright insanity. And all I can figure is, you hate the American government and everyone who's been in it. So Trump is automatically judged innocent, because he's never held a damn elected position in his life. What should disqualify him a hundred times over for the Presidency is a virtue in your eyes. You don't want to vote for someone to run the Federal government, you want to vote for someone who will magically destroy it, while your hands stay clean of the fallout. You probably call yourself an anti-Zionist, but by your reckoning Kahane and the other settler extremists are less bad than Netanyahu because they never held the executive power to commit mass killings of Palestinians. But that's bullshit, because they laid the groundwork for the conversion of Israeli Jews into a tribe of racists heavily in favor of Netanyahu's Apartheid state. Trump is playing that role in America today against all minorities. The great evil in the world today is not big government, but the forces both elite and popular grabbing at the reins of power to restore a zombie parody of our very bloody past. That sort of megalomania will not obey your simplistic notions of who is isolationist and who is interventionist.
We're poking into a deeper crisis here about America's role as a global status-quo power at the very moment when Americans are all feeling that under the status quo they've been cheated by other Americans or other countries out of the lifestyle to which they've become indoctrinated.
Now you see how that works against establishment Democrats. It seems that people who have violently different grievances against the status quo can form ad hoc alliances to overthrow it, like when the Nazis and Communists destabilized the Weimar Republic each confident that they would prevail in the deluge. The hardest, least glamorous political space to occupy is that of someone who recognizes that huge changes must be carried out using the very same institutions that have suppressed those changes. The greatest practitioners of such politics in America were Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who in effect were gifted existential threats and the ground troops to carry out change in places where the Federal government had no past power. Each could play good cop to extort reforms from a weakened oligarch class while pointing to a very real and dangerous bad cop. Each drew on tremendous good will from a loyal public in having to experiment with radical changes, and fail, and try again.
I'm not sure that country exists anymore. Once we succeeded the British Empire as the world's status quo power in 1945, the clock started ticking on our own sense of self-entitlement. It also started ticking on the inevitable bureaucratization of the New Deal agenda, such that Big Government can now be blamed for things that it couldn't be blamed for in 1929, even if they're the same things. This puts the defenders of liberal capitalism in an awful corner. Reagan began a 35 year demolition of such defenders by creating a nostalgia for a mythical hybrid of past tribalist America and imperialist Britain, obviating the need to invest in our workers and minorities. That cut off the funds from taxing the rich needed to pay for liberal programs. Those tax savings were used by the rich to buy further extremist indoctrination in every media. But it also meant the country chained itself to the global crimes of the rich as its only means of economic growth.
And Democrats have caved in and adopted all that as part of the cynically-revised status quo: we now have all the financial instability of the Gilded Age plus a hated Big Government that weakens the credibility of socialist solutions. This unstable giant can now justify all the wrong acts in the name of getting past each little obstacle because now all of them are existential crises. But the giantism itself is the one obstacle that's a taboo subject.
This is what people want blown up, for an infinitude of selfish reasons. They sense it's all going to blow anyway but they want it on their favorable terms, like the Roman landowners yanking out the last supports for their civilization because they think their little fiefdoms will come out ahead on taxes. How many died from this?
This is why it's very difficult for a declining status-quo empire to dismantle itself without collapsing. The Democrats of today are not up to the task, including Sanders. The Republicans, God help us, are cheering for the explosion and arming to butcher the survivors.
The antiwar libertarians and the Trump cult operate on basically the same premise: White Christian Americans are economically superior to all other races but evil Big Government and racially-contaminated democracy get in the way of their asserting their natural supremacy at home and abroad. Look up some of Ron Paul's newsletter smears against African-Americans in the past. Paul is now a Republican because his supporters from 1980s libertarianism are now Republicans, and God knows how many are now Trumpists. Gary Johnson is running as a sort of goulash of libertarian and Reagan Republican, but as Chomsky would likely point out Reagan's aggression was the reality of the capitalist need for eternal expansion, not the isolationist bubble that the Libertarians and Trumpists dream about. Shut down internationalism and you must completely restructure the US economy in ways no free-market absolutist could tolerate.
It would appear that some American "leftists" have so thoroughly refused to accept any responsibility for their own failure in getting working-class Whites to adopt socialism, that they are now being seduced by the idea of helping Trump win in the hope that he will destroy the evil American empire and the Federal government from within.
Those of us Americans who are harmed by his cruelty, racism, and vindictiveness will not forgot who betrayed us when we crawl out of the ashes.
Trump asked three times about getting to use nuclear weapons because he really wants to annihilate his enemies. Which he relentlessly demonstrates with his open hatred of America's minorities.
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But then, didn't postwar Germany have a different media culture than Britain from the get-go? We've heard about these wretched British tabloids all our lives. They were there waiting for Murdoch to take them to the next level. We haven't heard dramatically sleazy about the German media since, well, we hung Julius Streicher.
That's interesting because Limbaugh's syndicators also offered his show for free to impoverished rural radio stations until it became a hit. This sort of subsidy obviously favors the rich, most of all the rich fanatic. There just aren't any rich fanatics on the left to counter this. Soros? Don't make me laugh.
It will really be a sick joke that after all the incitement of race war and misogyny and Islamophobia, the thing that will finally get the antiwar movement to oppose Trump with any real conviction is his swapping favors with Putin to get their hero Snowden into a noose. As if all the other killings of Americans by other Americans under Trump will be okay, as long as he doesn't start any new wars abroad.
But Trump's got to murder a domestic political opponent of some sort to send a message to the rest of us about how his New Order will differ from the old one. Snowden is the low-hanging fruit.
Excellent observations. And this is how we know the American people don't even believe their own bullshit about how these are wars for survival. When they really believe that, they make sacrifices.
Right now, the only war for survival that any large number of Americans can imagine is a war against other Americans who are different in some way, which is really going to be a war of enslavement and mastery to maintain one's own comforts. We are already in an arms race against our fellow citizens.
War is not obsolete, war has simply evolved at the initiative of those who are willing to risk it to evade the world's established military powers. The latter are obsolete. Doing away with them will not eliminate war. It will be fought by small, secret armies of ruthless killers like ISIS and whatever Blackwater is called this week. Until someone finds a way to bring back big conventional war and unleashes it on a world that has forgotten how to defend itself from that. This has all happened before.
If you all wanted a change from that you needed someone or a coalition of someones strong enough to enforce a change. We won't have that in the future.
If you mean Trump's problems, you should recall that no incumbent president has ever failed to be re-elected during wartime. Bush Junior would have been a dead man in 2004 without a quagmire to protect him. Nixon won by the biggest landslide ever in '72, even with those troubling stories about the Watergate break-in. In '73, he had declared the war over. In '74, he was driven from office. The mass of Americans knew he was persecuting hippies and antiwar activists; they were perfectly fine with it as long as Nixon's survival was justified by America's wartime needs. The moment there was no war, everyone started looking at Nixon's criminal activities as self-serving, and everything changed.
So yes, Trump needs a war. To cover the sheer size of the crimes he's already committed and the ones he's going to commit, he might need a yuuuuuuge war.
How big a war do you think he will need to turn America into a White supremacist police state where minorities can be stripped of their voting rights after they're crushed for rebelling against his persecution?
Those monstrous measures are the revolution that he and his followers believe will eventually solve America's problems. They really blame everything on equality and human rights and social progress.
I so want to see how Trump handles his first major dispute with Iran's ally Putin. Putin may only have helped him dig up dirt on Clinton to weaken the American political system, not because he wanted Trump to win. But now one of them will have to back down from his commitment, because Iran's joining Russia in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Trump has no tools to stop the rise of Asia. It's already propping up the $ to keep its own goods cheap in the US. So he could collapse the $ as a trade barrier, but what happens when Wal-Mart doubles the price on everything on its shelves because no one in America will make substitutes? And of course, what if everyone starts dumping their US Treasuries anyway?
The worst part of US and especially White resentment of Asia is that it's based on the premise that White workers are inherently and naturally "better" than Asians, and that punitive measures will magically turn the clock back 50 years. The very people who voted for Trump are the people most resistant to technology and education. At this very moment, China is turning its low-wage but literate workforce into a mid-wage but highly skilled workforce, people who know more about modern technology than those aforementioned Americans who erase more and more of their own knowledge as they pursue their insane ideology.
Yet Americans will claim that they are right and better, and will expect to keep getting paid White man's money for what is becoming Pakistani women's work. They will be fed a million lies and conspiracy theories to explain this failure, and someone will be served up as the scapegoat, at home or abroad.
In Trump's America, will the media even bother to cover this trial?
Or worse, will they create a false dichotomy between Roof's racism and the Republican Party's racism so that the latter can say, "See, here's all the ways we're nothing at all like this loser"? Because it seems to me that the media has been using the KKK and others for that purpose for a long time, while the real differences between them and the GOP have been narrowing.
You're assuming that his redneck zombie cult has a sense of humor. All Suharto had to do when he overthrew Sukarno was to have his state apparatus direct traffic while his volunteer admirers hacked 600,000 people to death. Not much left after that to prevent Suharto from ruling as he pleased for 30 years.
Why does he deserve the benefit of a doubt when he's inciting his followers to dust off all the old prejudices that made grass-roots racism dominate America for so long?
All he has to do is look the other way while our states and our bosses do what they do best: enforce White supremacy. No enforcement of discrimination laws. No enforcement of civil rights laws. No enforcement of laws against violence upon women. No punishment of any police no matter how grotesque their assaults become.
Why not? Why should I believe that Trump is not a committed White supremacist in the American tradition?
An article in the New York Times about Steven Bannon:
"Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”
Have we reached the point where this can become the normal conversation of half of America with no real resistance?
For Christ's sake, doesn't anyone know that The National Enquirer is Trump's Pravda? Right now it's running a cover story demanding that Trump "BUILD THE WALL NOW!", with the subheading about "Mexico's Revenge - Flooding America With Drug Gangs." This is the sort of incitement that leads to wars.
The National Enquirer makes British tabloids look like, well, news sources. It is deplorable trash that lives off of popular conspiracy theories. There is no science or history to be found there. Now its owner uses his relationship with Trump to become a shaper of our national will.
Will 100,000,000 non-White Americans (including a majority of our current young children) "deserve" what's coming? Provoked by a monster and his vengeful followers and all the state and local authorities with their version of "Making America Great Again," meaning the restoration of the worst practices of their forefathers. When their victims can't take it anymore and uprisings occur, martial law will follow. From there escalation is simply a matter of will.
You don't know the South. You don't know how obsessed Southerners are with making excuses for their past, endlessly lying their asses off about how the good things about it were completely unrelated to White supremacy, Jim Crow, lynch law, prison labor, and slavery. I expect a good many Northerners over the years have come to see that the arrival of peoples of color in their own turf as reason to steal as much of that Southern past as they can get away with.
The conspiracy theories are crucial to that, since the original White supremacist order was built on myths as well.
That's what no one dares studies - the number of White people who feel that they're the underdog when they're denied the position of Master Race and need an excuse to seize it.
Mr. Wilson, you should know that Master Races resurgent at home eventually threaten their neighbors.
Trump's messages about voting fraud, as we keep ignoring, continually dogwhistled Blacks and Mexicans as being the only criminals in America. So of course his voters are above reproach.
And believe me, that will continue to be the message going forward.
But the Electoral College will be defended to the point of civil war for just that reason. There are large numbers of Americans who refuse to accept that people different than themselves are truly American and should truly have equal votes. Whether they've committed the crime of being Black or being Californian.
He's part of the groupthink of a different group. If you're not familiar with American right-wing extremism there's really nothing I can tell you. But it is large, powerful and as we've discovered it's quite cohesive. The lies it told 20 years ago became the mainstream conservative truths of 10 years ago and the centrist consensus of today. That was accomplished by repetition, not evidence.
And I've been watching this whole horrible process underway since I was young, going to a Southern Baptist church that taught contempt for other religions even though we were all stationed together in the Philippines. They seemed harmless then.
Poor people can't afford housing when property values are high. They become a nuisance to be cleared away.
"Better" clearly means you don't have a problem with a restoration of America's racist, sexist past. You have eyes that can see, but no soul that can empathize with those who have historically been discriminated against. When the time comes to ethnically cleanse the Ni**ers whom racists always accuse of "lowering property values", you will do nothing. Then they will come for others.
Perpetual White minority rule will mean this country has no future.
Presidential candidate/re-tread Sarkozy threatened Trump with tariffs if he pulls out of the Paris agreement. The irony of this is that Sarkozy now looks to be the "moderate" candidate against White nationalist Le Pen in the presidential election. But it's no sure thing that White nationalists across Europe will follow Trump in these matters. If you hate free trade, any excuse for a tariff will do, and if you want energy independence and you're not sitting on a lot of coal you probably want wind and solar and any subsidies international organizations will provide to help. The German Green party originally had far-right people among its founders.
I guess the outcome of this dispute will tell us a lot about the nature of the White Bloc stretching from the PetroPutin State to Il Douche's new empire. Far-right nationalists make terrible allies precisely because they all think their country alone deserves everything.
That depends on what class a Cuban is in. What do you know of what it was like to be poor and Black under Batista? Was it as bad as the Dominican Republic today?
The question is, what is "fair" treatment for the rich and for the poor? And given the US trade embargo that entirely defined Cuba's economy while Wall Street lavished sweatshop money on its neighbors, what is "fair" treatment for the countries that favor the rich or favor the poor?
Calculations using Purchasing Power Parity would probably make Cuba look even better due to the cheap medical care compared to its neighbors.
Maybe, just maybe, you could make a deal like that with Otto von Bismarck. Any willingness I had to give Putin the benefit of a doubt that he was one-tenth the man Bismarck was pretty much went down the tubes, when I recognized the colossal damage that Trump and his racist zombie army are willing to do dragging America back into its bloody past. Putin didn't care about the consequences of that, or he did care and he welcomed it. And Putin's support of similar racist parties across Europe is reinvigorating the spirit of White supremacy that made the 20th Century so reckless and violent. But the man who sees the Slav as his brother in Whiteness today can turn on a dime tomorrow, and Putin's responsibility to his people was to consider what monster he was feeding. Racists don't hesitate to betray their agreements with subhumans.
Putin's strategic argument - supported by his US apologists - is that we should return to the era of cynical Great Powers, essentially undemocratic in their policymaking, complete with their "protective belt" of puppet border states. So Moscow should get its wretched empire of unwilling non-Russians back.
But the basis for this cynical argument is that the Great Powers will respect the old rules about not interfering with each other or even their inner belt of satrapies. But states outside of those belts are fair game for the most destructive intervention. Dig it, isolationists, that's as good as the good old days ever got.
Yet Putin undermined even that argument by aiding Trump's online smear campaign. He broke the china shop, he owns the mess that we will make of each other. If it's that easy for Great Powers to destabilize each other's governments, then the Great Power system and its subjugated spheres of influence don't create any security at all, do they? Bismarck spending money to change who becomes the Prime Minister of Britain? Of course not. That gets you all the faster to the equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand getting killed by a Russian-supported terror group, and all the weapons come out.
There have to be rules, and those rules are probably impossible for genuine democracies to agree upon. But they're also impossible for genuine dictatorships to obey.
That depends on what a single man in Russia wants as his price. There's no one who can say no to it now in any case.
This is our South Africa 1948 moment. But those bastards back then didn't know that they would waste the next 40 years ruining each others' lives until the unsustainability of White minority rule could no longer be punted into the future.
What's scary about South Africa is that ultimately its Black citizens had to take a poison pill defense to threaten the country with utter ruin. They refused to put their kids in the schools designed by the racists to use language to isolate them from the outside world. That refusal meant that South Africa could not advance its workforce past the most menial level of industrialization... a very dangerous place for a society to get trapped. The ability of the Black resistance to carry out acts of violence during a time of relative economic success thus left the White oligarchy with no illusions of what would happen as the economy fell behind.
The cost of that was very, very high, and it's still being paid by South Africans. Are we Americans willing to pay it?
We missed it because the planning happened 350 years ago. Race was invented by America's colonial oligarchs as a business necessity: it was getting too dangerous to ride herd on rebellious indentured servants, so a way had to be found to co-opt one portion of them to maintain a state of terror over the rest. After Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the legal concepts of "White" and "Black" were introduced to thus divide the servant class. The White race was invented to oppress, exploit, and conquer a continent.
To put it more simply, America succeeded because it was turned into the Stanford Prison Experiment. It took hours for the "guards" in the actual experiment to embrace their identity as oppressors. Imagine what 15 generations would do. That's the founding identity of the White construct which spread over the continent, and it's never truly been confronted much less overthrown.
You know that there was only a few % of difference between the number of votes Obama got and the actual majority of votes won by Clinton. People were willing to "try stuff" in 2008 because soft-racist George W. Bush had wrecked the country in several ways. Now that critical % is willing to follow the racists again BECAUSE the Democrats bailed out capitalism yet again (as it did after the Hoover and Bush Senior crashes) and all the hysteria is now about Black crime and Mexican illegals and Moslem terrorists.
Decent people have always been the backbone of support for every conservative regime that has ever committed crimes anywhere on Earth. Here is a community of decent conservative people celebrating their way of life in the US in 1930.
http://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/black-people-lynched.jpg
It certainly does. Modi's BNP in India. The military-owned industries of Egypt and Pakistan. Whatever grotesque bordello Trump's children set up in the White House by being both his inner cabinet and the overseers of his economic empire.
I wonder when China will begin to recognize, as the US should have long ago, that overseeing a world of violent dictators is not "stability" at all.
The historical "difference" from the world at large that we currently live in is that Great Powers routinely waged outright wars with each other using the most powerful weapons in their arsenals. We've gone for 70 years without one of those. Appreciate the status quo while it lasts.
The formula is simple. The Jew who lives in America is 70% likely to be a liberal. The Jew who is gotten to emigrate to Israel by bribery or coercion serves the Israeli state as taxpayer and possible soldier. Thus it is in the interest of US racists (and Evangelicals) to collaborate with Zionists to get Jewish-Americans to "self-deport."
Schotten's article comes closer than any other article I've seen at this site to outright admitting that Herzl's movement collaborated with the early Third Reich, a major trading partner of the Zionist settlements in Palestine, to "encourage" German Jews to flee there. Until that was no longer enough for the Nazis. Now THAT'S a parallel to what's coming.
The problem is, the faster the military becomes rational, the faster it switches to flying killer robots and then spends most of the money saved in indoctrinating the public to accept this as a solution to non-existent threats. Granted, it was all going to happen anyway. The folks who whine about drone warfare being an exceptionally American evil are not paying attention to what's going on overseas. The countries that have the most productive workforces will be the fastest to push the envelope on drone capabilities. American death merchants are small shops building maintenance-hungry Ferraris at huge markups. If, instead, you run a real industrial economy, you will be looking to build the Ford Model T of drones. Or the Kalashnikov of drones. Which hasn't happened yet.
It will be easy, because that country will not hesitate to sell that product. Not just to governments, but to private individuals. We've all been told for 100 years that robots were coming. They've got wings. We'll add our own guns.
I've been saying that the Military-Industrial Complex is White Man's Welfare. We're about to see how far that can go.
If Trump intends to set fire to all our alliances, a lot of troops and surveillance gear will be coming home from bases in over 130 countries. In fact, I support keeping more of our forces stateside, but under the extraordinary nature of Trumpism, we must now consider the danger that domestic uses be found for those forces and weapons to justify their sitting around. Weapons spending itself doesn't produce many jobs. But every time a military base opens up next to a right-wing burg because its congresswhores lobbied to be rewarded for their friendliness to the MIC, you create a new base for the far right. The theocratic churches flock in. The base entangles itself with the community through propaganda efforts. The retiring GIs and Halliburton contractors move off-base with their pensions like medieval knights established as men of influence.
So when the time comes to put down dissent in that other America hostile to the military, these guys will all be in one mental bubble about their right to do so with military force.
I somewhat disagree about these newly-ascendant Yankee racists being more attractive, because they bring their own alien baggage to the racist table. The Southern racists have always used self-victimization and all their whining about their distinctive culture and peculiar institutions and especially God 'n' Guns as their Teflon. Neo-Confederacy thus served as the central organizing principle of racist ideology; just do everything like Jefferson Davis would.
That Germanic stench that Prof. Cole observes around the newly-minted "alt-right" will create a 2nd racist constituency beyond the South, but not necessarily a comfortable fit around the old one that demands its pride of place ad nauseum. Let's get creative and start thinking of ways to get them to really hate each other. Federal vs State conflicts, the reality that the low-wage South needs free trade as it always has, the problematic position of Catholics, the inevitable grope of the alt-Right towards a national school curriculum of hate (a Common Korps?) to secure its dominance. Feel free to add.
Excuse me, Trump apologists. The "theater" is not the place for protest - but the White House is the place from which White Supremacists can make long-term plans for a state ruled by Internet bullies who ruin the lives of anyone who criticizes the man they already call "God-Emperor"?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement
This is a civil war that is only being waged by one side.
Dystopia is unchallenged rule by racists.
We've been lectured all our lives about the evil of the German people made manifest by their failure to do everything in their power to sabotage Hitler from the day of his election.
Would you have condemned Marlene Dietrich, Bertold Brecht and all the other actors and writers and creative people in Germany if they had merely used their bully pulpits on Day 1 of the Third Reich to issue a plea to the Fuhrer to not do the worst that he was capable of? For all the difference it could have made?
What Flynn is doing is separating (recklessly not carefully) those Moslems of use to America and his own avarice from those who are not. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, they are willing to pay the right people in America to get to be the ones who direct our airstrikes, not those who get airstruck. Obviously these Islamists are sure they can forever protect themselves from this growing monster of American bigotry that they feed with their bribes, but I don't see why.
Well, Neocons are mostly Zionists. So the question is whether Zionists are actually Jews. You could make a good case that the early Zionists were cynics at a time when any demagogue could use his ethnic identity as the basis for building a secessionist revolution on one's own turf, but Jews were clearly out of luck. The Zionists took that secular nationalist formula and twisted it to fit the Diaspora. Machiavelli once said that in order to become a great prince, one had to find a people in great trouble... and he listed Moses as an example. I think Strauss was an admirer of Machiavelli. And I suspect those American Jews who became Neocons in the '70s envied the aggressive identity politics of Israel and even some American ethnic groups.
I even see this cynical hijacking of religion by the new buzzword, the "Alt-Right" or White Nationalists. Compare Steve Bannon's endless nattering about "Christian civilization" and the evils of multiculturalism with the on-line manifesto of Norwegian mass-murderer and Islamophobe Anders Breivik. They talk robotically about religion not as faith and practice, but as a political culture that can exclude everyone else, a hybrid of turf and race.
In truth, that's not different than when Hitler routinely invoked "Gott." Lutheranism and Catholicism meant nothing to him. Religion as the establishment of a monopoly of power under a patriarchy he could usurp meant everything.
I'm more scared of the rank & file Id Monster freed from any rational restraint than I was of the GOP's reliable oligarchs. The cheapness of Trump's campaign will be seen by all ambitious demagogues as a model for getting into power without having to compromise with the saner capitalists. More successful than Sanders' model, which still required the followers to actually contribute what for them was a lot of money. Money exists in politics solely to buy attention. Trump found a monstrous alternative: direct appeal to the attention of that darkest part of our selves long silenced by civilized order and the hard lessons of past fanaticism.
I think that your concluding description of what happened during the Middle Ages illustrates a great irony:
When the Islamic world was up and the Christian world was down, the former, basking in the brilliance of its civilization and advanced economics, could have told the latter, "We're obviously superior, so it is rational for you to convert." And the latter, living in mud and squalor, could cry back, "This is a test from God - and those of us most cruel and rapacious will lead us back and get you bastards!"
And 500 years later, exactly that had happened, and the West now basked in its rationalism and capitalism and lectured the Islamic world on the rationality of surrender, and Qutb and bin Laden and whatever maniac is running ISIS now could say, "This is a test from Allah - and those of us most cruel and rapacious will lead us back and get you pigs!"
And maybe they will, and all this will start over again. The problem here is that whoever gets on top gets lazy and complacent... because that's actually the better life that we all aspire to build for our children, in all our societies. And someone else will be gunning for them and their wealth. It is insanity to have a world of rich races and poor races looking to screw each other over, to exploit any weakness, to rob with pens or with guns.
This particular cycle - under various religious labels - has been going on at least since the Persian invasion of Greece, and no one has learned a damn thing in 2500 years.
This is not going to make you feel any better, but there is an old joke among Poles that will show you it's not a unique problem.
A Polish farmer finds an old lamp in his field and conjures a genie from it who grants him three wishes. Each time, he wishes that the Mongols rise up and sack Poland. Each time it happens, and Poland is ever more ruined. After the last time, the genie says, "It is done. But why did you want those awful Mongols to lay waste to your own country three times?"
The farmer replies, "because in order to get here each time, the Mongols had to go all the way through Russia twice."
It is amazing to see antiwar people make excuses for the rise of a fascist movement in America, on the grounds that anything that is the opposite of liberalism will lead to the destruction of the international order created by Hitler's defeat and that order is the source of all evil.
Since Trump actually said "I love less-educated Americans," I fail to see how Trump's promises to appeal to them are not relevant.
Since Trump could never be bothered to run for public office or serve in any position of public service except for the very top, he never really had the power to do any of those things before, did he?
Now how do you feel about a race war in the streets of your very own country? This woman is willing to fight that war, and Trump has said things that indicated to her he is ready to lead it. It will be waged by the restoration of all the crimes that Whites once committed with impunity - until tempers snap and someone fights back. Now you know the cycle of escalating violence that will occur after that (or maybe you don't if you believe all civil wars are CIA plots), but you will still absolve Trump of what happens, because to you an isolationist America is worth any price.
Is it not reasonable to look at Trump's history as a serial fraudster (who just settled his Trump University fraud lawsuit for $25,000,000, a true first for an American president) with four bankruptcies and endless failed hotels as a model for what his "infrastructure" project will be?
He's also going to be the first president to maintain his giant corporation from the White House, by letting his children run both. You don't have to be Naomi Klein to understand what happens when a "giant infrastructure program" is run by the same nepotist spawn who also run a giant construction racket. Tell me what happened to all that public infrastructure in Latin America and Russia, how that was going to be revitalized by corporate involvement?
Name a single elected leader of a 1st-world nation who has ever spewed the paranoia, racist myths and conspiracy theories seen from this demagogue. You'd have to go pretty far back into the West's racist past. Which is exactly the point in assuming that's the plan now.
"The ACLU? What was that? Wasn't that one of those pinko organizations like Planned Parenthood and ACORN that got run out of business by a right-wing smear campaign overseen by Steve Bannon, like around 2017 or 2018?"
You know, the Federal civil rights suits would be presided over by the very judges Trump will be appointing and the Republican Congress will be rubber-stamping. America has a proud history of ignoring chunks of its Constitution based on ethnicity.
To everyone who thinks Trump will be fair to Palestine because only globalists are evil, here is the actual ideology of the movement led by his new Minister of Propaganda Steve Bannon:
"In March 2016, Breitbart Media published a primer on the “alt-right” movement, in which prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer was depicted as a key ideological founder. “The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine,” wrote Breitbart author Allum Bokhari and technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos. “In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.”
The primer takes on new significance, given that Stephen Bannon—a self-proclaimed leader in the alt-right movement—headed Breitbart before he was appointed as the chief strategist and senior counselor of Donald Trump's administration and the head of the president-elect’s campaign. With Bannon poised to take on a powerful political position, many are outraged and fearful that organized white supremacists will have another champion inside the White House.
A new interview with alt-right leader Spencer should dispel any doubt that the alt-right movement that Bannon lauds is white nationalist in nature.
“What I would ultimately want is this ideal of a safe space for Europeans,” Spencer NPR host Kelly McEvers in an interview aired Thursday. Spencer heads the National Policy Institute and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the country’s most successful young white nationalist leaders—a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.”
He described his ideal white nation: “This is a big empire that would accept all Europeans. It would be a place for Germans, it would be a place for Slavs, it would be a place for Celts, it would be a place for white Americans and so on.”
“What I’m saying is that Europeans defined America, they defined what it is,” Spencer continued. “European people were the indispensable people who defined this nation socially and politically and culturally and demographically, obviously. I care about us more.”
***
Get it? They're making an Israel for White people. By preaching a Zionism for White people. Which will do the same things to make White people "safe" that Israel does to make Jews "safe".
One day, will we see non-White citizens forced to retain their citizenship by swearing an oath to obey "The Caucasian and democratic character of America?"
It's very early to say this, but Mr. Greenblatt's action could be the beginning of a large change in the alignments of the Jewish-American community. It comes down to that essential conflict between the Jewish memory of Hitler's rise, and the Jewish support for the Likud/GOP myth of the angry White man taking back what's "his" as the solution. In other words, the choice between being a Jewish American wanting his rights protected, and a Zionist wanting the other minorities silenced for the sake of Israel.
People will have to choose. The gray area is being blown away like fog before a storm. The opinion polls have shown growing numbers of Jewish-Americans, and more so the younger, are turning against specific parts of the Zionist narrative. But that's encountered the headwind of actually accepting Moslems in American streets.
The thing is, if Jewish-Americans are the ones most loudly saying, "First they came for the Moslems, and we did nothing," it's a powerful rebuke to Republicans and Christian Zionists who have used Jews as a human shield against charges of racism and fascism. The narrative of the rise of Hitler was used so heavily by the Right to justify vilifying any criticism of Israel that it can't very well flip off the switch when actual Jews refuse to look away. They employed Jews as the designated Nazi-detectors selectively against leftists and people of color. Now, all the alarms need to go off at once.
He's a Leninist in the same sense that Lenin was a betrayer of the Communist movement. Lenin was up against Russia's soviets - worker councils that had taken their own action against capitalists and answered to no one, Social Democrats, the largest party in the country, and the Mensheviks - whose very name is a lie his propagandists sold for they were the majority of the Russian Communist Party. He played a game of pretending to grow his faction while in fact he developed the theory of an extreme vanguard party to establish a dictatorship to destroy all the more popular representatives of the Russian workers. And of course, seize all the factories from the workers who had taken them over and put them under control of party hacks.
For Lenin it was all about the dictatorship, because he believed the people had to be re-educated and society artificially reconstructed before actual reforms would accomplish anything. Most of all, he created the bullshit term "democratic centralism", which meant that the leadership would debate options in secret, and then pretend afterwards that there never had been any options at all, that all decisions were unanimous. This was a large step towards the Fuhrer principle of Hitler, and I think for the same reason: so that the Party could move rightward and leftward on a dime against the wishes of its supporters, replacing ideology with loyalty as their due.
So what does this tell us about Mr. Bannon?
My response to Mr. Koroi:
What would have been the racial policies of any of the alternative leaders exploiting the Depression? Father Coughlin? The DuPont conspiracy?
Truman was himself a product of a racist political machine. The only reason he integrated the armed forces in 1948 is that the Democratic Party was also struggling to integrate itself; and that was solely and entirely the result of the Roosevelt era. Truman operated as a New Dealer in the shadow of the New Deal legacy. No Democrat before 1932 would have dared suggest the idea. FDR put the party on the road that by 1964 had the Southern racists switching parties - so stop perpetrating the "Democrats ARE the racists" revisionism used by Republicans to distract from their plans to disenfranchise minorities nationwide.
But the actual vast and growing inequality by race - as opposed to the late 1960s when Black wages reached 90% the level of Whites and our nation actually began making progress - is not repugnant to you.
How racially unequal would America have to get - again - in order for you to find THAT repugnant? How long an "apprenticeship" in "acting White" must 100 million and soon a majority of Americans must endure - an apprenticeship overseen by people who have a vested interest in it NEVER ending - before the right to revolution applies, damn it?
Why has White racism become more intense, and more politically dangerous, in the 28 years SINCE the Bakke decision? Is it because in our society, in the absence of Affirmative Action, the natural polarization of wealth back into the hands of the very propertied class that manufactured America's racist culture (see "The Invention of the White Race", Theodore Allen) is allowing that class to fall back on its successful strategy of selling casteism as a substitute for decent wages?
You cannot separate racism from capitalist injustices in this country; the latter manufactured the former intentionally.
However, Trump may well set up the 1860-level crisis a few years from now, as his followers try to hold on to the part of the country they dominate once he's in the grave and the nation is fragmented even further.
Though I'm the first to associate Trump with the racial evils of the past, I think the current crisis is closer to America in 1932, facing the right way out of far greater suffering than Whites now experience. There were many evil alternatives to Roosevelt, both on the ballot and in the sphere of media demagoguery. We were lucky that the timing worked out that none of the latter could make the jump from radio to the White House before FDR.
This time, not lucky.
Surprise, surprise.
Most rank & file Whites never believed in markets; they believed in inequality and caste. That means a return to the days when a White man accepted the crappy wages his local Big Daddy gave him in exchange for being guaranteed a greater recognition as human than any person of color. Of which beatings, lynchings, laws, and culture are just aspects.
That would make him essentially Trump's Pat Buchanan. Which is very logical given Pat's foundational role in White-resentment paleoconservatism.
Reagan brought many ideologists into the White House, and elevated think tanks like the Heritage Foundation from the fringes to a status they've never surrendered. What damage he did through policy may have been kept in check on purpose to normalize his priesthood so they could keep dragging the country to the Right for decades.
And that in turn made Trump possible. Time for the next lunge back into darkness.
How far back into our racist past do you want America to go to be "fair"? 1960? 1910? 1860? Say when. And let's ask Bannon too.
Birtherism is not "anti-Establishment." White Supremacy is as establishment as America gets. As Original Intent as Founding Fathers who owned slaves.
Germany had a Gestapo long before 1933. What it chose to do with its data, however, changed radically under its new masters.
The next labor movement, if it ever happens at all, will be organized by Latinos. In the past we had WASPy, guild-based unions that failed to accomplish anything until heavily-immigrant radical unions like the CIO and IWW put the fear of God into the bosses. Only Latinos are in the right position now to do likewise, and only if the supposed re-industrialization of America actually gets anywhere. But that very fact will make it easier to race-bait the movement.
In fairness, it depends on the whole notion of what the so-called proletariat "wants", or whether that itself is a product of indoctrination. I think American workers were conditioned to want money, and European workers were conditioned to want power. The AFL-CIO and Democratic Party were glad to go the way they did. The Left is just as arrogant as the neoliberals when it claims that only it understands what the workers "want", or that the workers are even a unified class beyond their ethnic and parochial divisions. We're trapped in a long cycle: whenever our workers get organized, they temporarily get leverage for wages that get them out of poverty - but that causes the next generation of workers to be rapidly co-opted by bourgeois temptations, which castrates their unity, and then the bosses blame economic stagnation on "inferiors" and "parasites", and half the workers agree and turn on the other half, plunging us back into the 19th century.
Now I think we'd be better off if the workers had as much class consciousness as the elites obviously do. But then we'd be better off to have direct democracy instead of representative democracy. We don't know how to organize either.
Or, Trump will take the next step, one that has already been prepared by right-wing oligarchs, one that would confirm in one sweeping act all the worst we fear:
The costs of jailing will be covered by convict labor.
Why not? We are already moving in this direction. Only recently the Dept. of Justice finally joined the movement against privatized prisons by ending the sending of Federal convicts there, but that will surely be preempted. The state governments, meanwhile, are going all-out for privatized prisons and convict labor. Combine the two, and even though slave labor is not profitable by itself, the addition of even a reduced taxpayer contribution to operating costs will make the business more lucrative than the military-industrial complex.
You see, once private firms are able to own convict labor, they can divert a small sliver of their guaranteed profits to relentlessly propagandize voters to allow more and more of it, to rig the legal system to convict more and more people of more and more crimes... or whatever the majority (race) considers crimes by the minority (races). All-White juries to decide which convicts get sentenced to slave labor? Exactly how the Jim Crow South operated its chain gang labor system for generations.
All those armed bigots patrolling for illegals will not mind that the illegals aren't sent back. The armed bigots will be the new prison guards.
We can't be sure about that until we know how Iran's long-mooted entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization obligates Putin. At that point, like all the alliances dragging countries into wars throughout history, he is compelled by the need to prove his commitments to all his allies. Sound familiar?
But a pure cynic, and we surely have one here, might be willing to betray Iran or partly betray it to leave it in a weakened position... to be filled by Russia. These two countries do not like each other. They battle each other over energy markets. Some years ago, when Europe feared Putin's energy blackmail, the US tried to pressure Europe to give up both Russian and Iranian imports, which was nuts. Each country has good reason to want to see something bad happen to the other's exports.
I am aware of that danger. What Trump is aware of is beyond me; he simply feels impulses and acts on them at random.
It seems that Trump likes nukes. So he could just skip to the holocaust.
By the time reactor designs currently licensed for approval in the US get completed, Trump will be gone, and solar and wind will be cheaper everyplace where they are allowed to compete without punitive charges placed on them.
Since it takes energy to strip carbon from CO2, any industrial process must use energy. But that energy would itself have to release no CO2, and if we have that energy, then why not use it to replace a coal or methane-fired generator instead? Until all of those are eliminated, that is the most efficient use of any unit of clean energy we can create.
I used to think that Israel's comeuppance might come at the hands of an Arab world, sick of monarchs funding jihadis, turning to the Russia-Iran axis, but Trump's relationship with Putin and Israel complicates that. It's worth it for Putin to avoid a fight with Trump there so as to reward him for the more strategically important goal of castrating NATO in wealthy, relevant Europe.
They don't distinguish between immigrants and American citizens of color. They will have no problem with re-imposing Jim Crow and taking the jobs of those they despise. They show zero sympathy for the many African-Americans who also lost jobs from these processes because they don't believe those people ever deserved good jobs in the first place.
And what % of those jobs would have been lost to automation regardless of neoliberalism?
I'm really getting sick of people who use the term "working people" to only refer to Whites in declining industries.
The next proletariat in America will be mostly non-White. The next labor movement in America will be dominated by Latinos.
But the crime of these minorities in the eyes of many of my fellow leftists is that they see they might win within the system, and they don't have a sense of racist entitlement to threaten violence to overthrow it in favor of the seduction of leading a racial caste system.
It's damned sick when leftists want that system overthrown so badly that they tell themselves that fascists are proletarians, and that the KKK and Nazis will somehow unleash redistributive justice.
Trump's supporters have in fact shown no evidence that they want anything but redistributive injustice, the non-market guarantee of property and extra-legal power for them at the expense of all who are different. Most people at these rallies look the other way while some among them are beating up actual leftist protesters. But how can any leftists look the other way at such a thing?
And by the way, exit polls during the primaries showed the average income of Trump supporters to be over $72,000 a year, higher than Clinton or Sanders supporters. Some proletariat.
Clinton implied that half of Trump's supporters were racists.
I think that was charitable. She meant "racist by American standards." Those standards are themselves based on the belief that White culture and hierarchy represent some sort of natural superiority proved by infallible markets, and minorities are still expected to one day capitulate to them. Nearly all Republicans and many or most Democrats actually believe that. But many of those Republicans, in turn, believe in overt use of violence, starvation, and social humiliation to achieve that noble goal. Most Democrats want punishments to be used against minority persons for individual misdeeds, not collective punishment against a criminal race whose members are all guilty of "something".
Now on top of that, Trump is mainstreaming those relatively disorganized Republicans who actually believe that minorities are genetically inferior and irredeemable and must remain under subjugation forever even if that requires the dilution or elimination of their right to vote.
Which, in my book, is an act of war, beyond the crimes of Wall Street against the American people.
Remember, if the Democrats win the Senate, Sanders becomes Chairman of the Budget Committee. Then he's the monkeywrench in everyone's plans.
I go to green technology sites and look up cheap housing technology all the time. You have to learn to sort out the serious efforts from the stuff with no economic grounding.
But the main way you bring down the cost of living is by getting rid of car-centric sprawl. That means more young people moving to cities, reversing the path of their forefathers. Once you eliminate $50,000 three-ton pickup trucks in your life, and learn to drive fewer miles and use mass transit, you learn to walk again. And that yields health benefits. You also have a lot more entertainment options in the city, and some of them are free.
But what we need is a way to keep housing supplies ahead of urban real estate speculation, and that requires a different model of land use. The one virtue of Houston's lack of zoning is that it is possible to create dual-use buildings on the European model, with stores in the bottom and apartments above. But only recently has Houston had the housing density to cause such buildings to exist, and it's being done more as a fashion statement in Downtown and Midtown than a necessity. If we could safely fold more forms of economic activity into residential spaces we might open up more of a city's total acreage to housing. However, to truly stay ahead of the developers' schemes to inflate prices, we might need floating housing complexes. Buckminster Fuller worked on this idea and claimed the Federal government was interested in his work as a means of low-income housing. Most of the world's supercities are on the sea.
Although right-wingers have in fact always been hypocrites about free markets, Trump has gathered around him all the factions on the right who are most willing to use governmental power to rig markets to favor White Christian men in all things. He talks airily about banning or expelling all sorts of people.
So at the very least, it's not just that he threatens to abolish the EPA and all forms of environmental safety. He may even designate those who reject his "wisdom" and try to push ahead with private alternative energy as enemies of the American Way of Life and punish them. He's not using market-based arguments like right-wingers have used in the past to oppose government subsidies, he's using cultural arguments that "real" Americans are those who get their hands dirty doing manly things like digging for coal, and they are owed eternal fealty because the superiority of those fuels and the culture that grew around them are an eternal truth. He's implying that the people who support alternative energy are somehow alien because they see technology as being able to obsolete a social order that his cultists will kill to defend.
But then that's true with lots of other issues. You can't argue policy with people looking for a real, live, bloody Kulturkampf. Stop looking at Trump's wildly-flailing policy statements. Look at his followers and ask the question, "Whom do they want him to exterminate?" Because they all know that the only thing Donald Trump is good at is destroying people.
That's like comparing the elections of Weimar Germany that left the German people so dissatisfied... with the election that gave the German people the Fuhrer they wanted and doomed them and hundreds of millions of others to destruction.
Ultimately, Trump's ideology and bigotry is the fault of one political party in particular that chose to embrace that long ago to attract a certain kind of voter who was leaving the other party. The two-party system accurately reflects the division of Americans into those who want to bring back the inequalities of the past for some perceived self-advantage and those who oppose that or prefer to focus on other bases for governance.
This is the product of assuming that "consumer choice" is the basis for legitimate government, as opposed to an informed citizenry searching for secular causality for improvements in our society.
There was a time when calling ordinary citizens "consumers" was subversive; it appeared with Ralph Nader and the movement to ensure safe products at the end of the '60s. But the idea was co-opted by the retailers. Instead of a consumer being a citizen demanding that the government perform investigatory and regulatory tasks that he could not practically do in an increasingly bewildering world of goodies, it became a celebration of the goodies.
The idea that we could shop for belief goes back further, to the all-important decision to disestablish state churches and allow a "free market of ideas" in religion. But by the late 20th century this hardly seemed to have political implications. Until the Evangelical movement arose and made one's choice of faith a matter of political outcomes, as in the right to demand that schools teach a fake science financed by Evangelicals. This spilled out into more and more areas of politics, abetted by fake and front advocacy groups funded by a network with an agenda of removing secular democracy from our lives.
The sum of these manipulations is the idea that a citizen is merely a pliable consumer of goods and faith, both controlled by right-wing oligarchs who themselves collaborate in every area of politics. The American heresy of this faith is the Gospel of Prosperity, where one pleads with God for wealth in exchange for overlooking the crimes of the wealthy. The choice of goods and the choice of "facts" thus merge into one act of submission to the Patriarchy of "entrepreneurs" from whom all earthly goods flow.
To me the interesting distinction between Hitler's attempt at totalitarianism (since no actual state has truly attained the totalitarian wish list) and Stalin's is that Hitler's state directed all its brutality at those defined as being "enemies without," while Stalin spent so much effort at destroying "enemies within." Hitler purged internal rivals by the hundreds, but defined his primary enemies literally out of the human race by the millions before planning their fate. That meant that an ordinary, obedient German could live pretty well and pretty freely until wartime privations closed in. Hitler feared their opinions, too; when he made his deal with the USSR, party members burned their cards in protest.
That sense of tyranny defined by tribal status, of a conqueror tribe whose members live in relative freedom and prosperity and thus consent, should scare us, because that was the norm that underlay oppression and inequality in human societies for millenia before the rise of Communism. Even when white Western populations clawed some recognition of human rights out of their rulers, they had zero problem with conquering distant lands and imposing utterly different governance there.
The problem here probably is one of entrenched power; a successful industry builds up its network of political puppets and propaganda groups over the decades, which it then uses to stave off rising new industries that haven't built up their own lobbies yet.
It's striking that in the UK, the Tory bias in energy policy is towards both nuclear and offshore wind, meaning the industries that are most capital-intensive, while penalizing the cheaper onshore wind industry and ordinary citizens putting solar panels on their roofs. I bet I know where some of that capital is going.
Chinese nuclear plants: safe until earthquake.
American fracking: safe until it causes earthquake.
No one is looking out for your safety.
However, the coal % is falling rapidly.
Also it is well known that a large number of EV car buyers up to this point are in states which have made more progress towards renewables. And that those buyers are unusually likely to buy solar panels for their homes. Why condemn electric cars as a national failure when products in real life are sold individually in a country with widely varying conditions?
And to put it bluntly, as a last resort we the people can shut down the coal plants to save our world, but we probably lack the guts to shut down cars.
Well, if you don't want to be associated with that particular faction of White nationalists, do you have a useful suggestion for what you want them to be called instead? Because I think a genuine majority of White nationalists think that Blacks have not assimilated, and that they have contributed nothing of value to America. "Assimilation" seems to be an elastic term that stretches to cover many agendas.
What hath supposed blues fan Lee Atwater wrought?
Since these artificial penalties can only punish people who actually are connected to the grid, I guess more and more people will disconnect. Which will create a real crisis for the utilities that could have been avoided. Watch the price of battery storage systems and attempts by small groups of people to create microgrids.
The purpose of Trump's rhetoric was never really to make illegal aliens go away. This is all about the creeping fact that Whites are losing their majority in America, which drives all the other perceived affronts in the eyes of racists. The purpose was to pursue the process of delegitimizing the rights of all immigrants, and then the rights of those citizens perceived as not being "real" Americans.
Now, the purpose for that might be preparatory to ethnic cleansing. But our history suggests that racists have no problem with non-Whites within their borders as long as the latter clearly have lesser rights, much lesser, as in the rights of caged animals. The trick is restoring the legal recognition that White people are categorically on top over all other citizens, stretching precedents under Common Law from a single victory like Voter ID, or a religious right to discriminate, or profile searches, or a right to kill based on "reasonable fear." Such efforts exist in dark corners of the far-right fringe... but they are no longer the fringe under Trump, are they?
Race war. That's what is most damaging to democracy. Because there is no democratic road out of a race war. If those judged the "good guys" are the majority and win the war, they will bloc vote on every issue. Rigid factions that guarantee one will win every election and issue is not democracy. If they are instead the minority but still managed to win, they truly can't risk restoring democracy. And if the faction judged the "bad guys" wins, whether majority or minority, it likely will seek a final solution through elimination rather than the costly hassle of routine oppression. Increasingly, that seems to be what happens.
If you can't believe race war can happen in America, you haven't been paying attention to Americans at all.
More importantly, how would they FIGHT to prevent single payer? We have just begun to see in the last 8 years how many tools capitalists have to threaten our society with civil war. It works. It wears down resistance among sensible officials with liberal leanings. Don't send the government on a fools' errand to impose socialism until you're personally prepared to go all the way to revolution, with the government or against it.
Obviously, a real terrorist infiltrator would just lie on the exam. The point of the exam is the assumption that the "culture" of the immigrants will create terrorists after they get here and refuse to assimilate.
We all know the game. There's only room for one brand of intolerant fundamentalism in a society; the one that's already established there. So those bigots are the only ones who don't have to take the exam. They can even demand that the language and laws be deformed to say it's not bigotry when they alone do it. "Equality" is the degree of inequality that existed in 1950s America, which conveniently excludes alien practices.
Well, there is a sequence of methods that Hitler used to create jobs for his followers. Since his economic theory was ultimately theft, it could only be a series of stopgaps. First order the firing of Jews and leftists and the handing of their jobs to his followers. Then round up the Jews and leftists and draft more of his followers to guard them in camps. Then begin an arms buildup and hire more followers to oversee the factories. Then use the arms to seize neighbors' resources, convert those into more arms and jobs. Then use the prisoners and conquered as slave labor to support more followers in combat. After that? Well, who cares, it's the end of the world.
As Hunter Thompson said before his death, "Of COURSE political consultants study the methods of the 3rd Reich. They worked - for a while." We should consider the possibility that Trump's followers know his methods won't create jobs for workers in general, just jobs for themselves at the expense of those they consider beneath them. All that I've seen of them indicates that they genuinely want life to get worse for non-Whites, that this sadism is the point of their sense of well-being far more than creating more jobs for everyone. Maybe the media needs to ask them tougher questions about their real priorities.
The psychological study referenced in this story may explain a mystery that I keep running up against: why so many American men on the Internet, presumably White, are so psychotically threatened by alternative energy, as if the preservation of oil and coal had some greater significance than real costs. From the article's abstract:
"Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the white male effect, which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful."
In other words, having grown up in a world where oil and coal-based economics put White men on top, White men who prize being on top above all other values refuse to see oil and coal as being capable of causing harm. To them risk is anything that is "different", not "familiar but lethal", because the only real risk is any shakeup in the status quo hierarchy endangering their positions.
Now if that shakeup has already happened, as in many industries, you've got men self-servingly filled with conviction that everyone is now in danger unless the world is forced back into a mold with their place on top baked in. They'll make up the craziest stories about the new order to fill that need to see danger. How else do we explain people convinced that solar cells must be dangerous to people around them based on the idea that they're sucking up energy? It's voodoo under another name.
Or perhaps up to 40% of Americans have the gut feelings of evil, violent people. Why are you saying we should make excuses for them? Your argument fails because Romney was a businessman who had the advantage of being sane, and there are surely many, many people better than Romney who might have gotten the nomination, but instead these bastards went out of their way to get the most proudly destructive person they could see. This is not a gamble, this is a declaration of war by one group of American citizens on other groups that, in their heart, they want to crush, perhaps up to 100,000,000 of them. You say that's crazy. I say exactly. They want a madman to do their dirty work, to make the orders official that in their heart they've always wanted to follow.
If they were what you claim, they would have nominated Ron Paul twenty years ago. Paul never gets more than 1% of the vote because they don't want LESS government, they want WHITE government.
Sir, you have ignored the track record of Trump personally appearing at rallies where his cultists rough up protesters who in no way represent the War Party or "big gun users". They invariably beat up men like the Black Lives Matter protester in Birmingham, Alabama. I call it unstable and going off the deep end, and they do it at the slightest provocation. But most of all, it is a clear signal as to whom these people believe they must silence in order to make America great again. Not the cops, not the military.
Yes, the world is always lecturing the Germans, "How could you not have united against Hitler," or the Italians, "How could you not have united against Mussolini." No one ever asks, "Well, how bad did their bourgeois democratic opponents have to be to inspire support for fascism?" No one even remembers who those opponents were today. Because there was nothing those opponents could be that was bad enough to justify the sadistic vindictiveness that empowered fascism and its amazing ability to create tragedies on a scale beyond the sad little countries that carried them out. We think we know how bad America is because of the Clintons. We haven't scratched the surface of what we're capable of doing to each other. Trump's people have got the itch bad.
That inflammatory speech has been pouring out of Ted Nugent and a growing number of office-seeking Republicans since 2008. "Second Amendment solutions", Sharron Angle, remember her?
Note that Trump didn't say "gun owners", he said "Second Amendment people." Growing numbers of gun-rights proponents are outright saying that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to give the "people" the weapons needed to overthrow the government if necessary. That's not the same thing as gun owners, but then just as only certain types of Christian seem compelled to organize around a demand for theocratic law, only certain types of gun owner seem to be feel that they are one people, superior to other Americans, whose craving for weapons able to overthrow the government make them fitting to exercise power over the rest of us.
A lot of readers here do not understand the long-term patterns in far-right rhetoric. In the 1990s, some of these extremist hucksters were pushing the idea that Blacks were only "13th Amendment citizens", implying that a mistake had been made that could be corrected by that Constitutional Convention that they still demand based on terms that would likely involve insurrection. The more recent master narrative of the Right has been to use hatred of immigrants to keep worming away on every legal front to establish a special right to discriminate: from racial profiling at airports, to police rights to regard Blacks as special threats (thus negating the militia movement's claim to support gun rights for all), to Christian rights to discriminate against LGBT persons for damn near anything. The goal is to restore the legal tradition of special rights that in practice can only be utilized by White Christian conservatives.
Only a naive person can fail to see the connection between these schemes and the demographic decline of the schemers. Their rhetoric all aims to establish the idea that America is a Republic, not a Democracy. Meaning, it is the property of only certain kinds of people, those who look like the ones who owned it 200 years ago, White Christian property owners who were organized into militias. Small government is easy when it only represents one kind of human, who then are left free to hold their lessers at gunpoint.
The political line that Trump has taken wanders around on many matters - but when it comes to who qualifies as "real" Americans, it inexorably narrows. Trump and his personality cult are vague about many things, but they know exactly whom to beat up at his rallies. The question of whom his supporters will allow to fully participate in our society becomes far more critical when guns are brought into the equation.
The big thing you're failing to see, Mr. Engelhardt, is that the sense of threat is no longer really from abroad. Our people are forming into factions, the kind that form before a civil war. One side is becoming a minority and is assembling the rhetoric to talk itself into the gamble of destroying the government to impose a restored order of tribal patriarchy that can never be amended. The other side is simply everyone else, good guys and bad guys, the entire range of what is normally found in hegemonic liberal capitalism. Yet to use the language of civil war is bad P.R., so it hides behind all the other issues of sovereign rights of force from police shootings to our superpower military.
The factionalism will turn to eliminationism, and history says that in democracies, the Right usually lands its blow first.
If Clinton threatened to personally barge into the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to berate Moslems, would you call that proof she is a proven and deadly war hawk? Yet Trump ACTUALLY DID THAT. Last year, his threat to visit so scared the psychotic Netanyahu regime that it had to talk him into canceling. Even it was afraid of what Trump might unleash with nothing more than his big mouth and tiny fingers and infinite hatred of anyone who gets in his way.
I've been going through responses like yours to figure out the antiwar "left's" insane blindness to Trump's outright insanity. And all I can figure is, you hate the American government and everyone who's been in it. So Trump is automatically judged innocent, because he's never held a damn elected position in his life. What should disqualify him a hundred times over for the Presidency is a virtue in your eyes. You don't want to vote for someone to run the Federal government, you want to vote for someone who will magically destroy it, while your hands stay clean of the fallout. You probably call yourself an anti-Zionist, but by your reckoning Kahane and the other settler extremists are less bad than Netanyahu because they never held the executive power to commit mass killings of Palestinians. But that's bullshit, because they laid the groundwork for the conversion of Israeli Jews into a tribe of racists heavily in favor of Netanyahu's Apartheid state. Trump is playing that role in America today against all minorities. The great evil in the world today is not big government, but the forces both elite and popular grabbing at the reins of power to restore a zombie parody of our very bloody past. That sort of megalomania will not obey your simplistic notions of who is isolationist and who is interventionist.
We're poking into a deeper crisis here about America's role as a global status-quo power at the very moment when Americans are all feeling that under the status quo they've been cheated by other Americans or other countries out of the lifestyle to which they've become indoctrinated.
Now you see how that works against establishment Democrats. It seems that people who have violently different grievances against the status quo can form ad hoc alliances to overthrow it, like when the Nazis and Communists destabilized the Weimar Republic each confident that they would prevail in the deluge. The hardest, least glamorous political space to occupy is that of someone who recognizes that huge changes must be carried out using the very same institutions that have suppressed those changes. The greatest practitioners of such politics in America were Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who in effect were gifted existential threats and the ground troops to carry out change in places where the Federal government had no past power. Each could play good cop to extort reforms from a weakened oligarch class while pointing to a very real and dangerous bad cop. Each drew on tremendous good will from a loyal public in having to experiment with radical changes, and fail, and try again.
I'm not sure that country exists anymore. Once we succeeded the British Empire as the world's status quo power in 1945, the clock started ticking on our own sense of self-entitlement. It also started ticking on the inevitable bureaucratization of the New Deal agenda, such that Big Government can now be blamed for things that it couldn't be blamed for in 1929, even if they're the same things. This puts the defenders of liberal capitalism in an awful corner. Reagan began a 35 year demolition of such defenders by creating a nostalgia for a mythical hybrid of past tribalist America and imperialist Britain, obviating the need to invest in our workers and minorities. That cut off the funds from taxing the rich needed to pay for liberal programs. Those tax savings were used by the rich to buy further extremist indoctrination in every media. But it also meant the country chained itself to the global crimes of the rich as its only means of economic growth.
And Democrats have caved in and adopted all that as part of the cynically-revised status quo: we now have all the financial instability of the Gilded Age plus a hated Big Government that weakens the credibility of socialist solutions. This unstable giant can now justify all the wrong acts in the name of getting past each little obstacle because now all of them are existential crises. But the giantism itself is the one obstacle that's a taboo subject.
This is what people want blown up, for an infinitude of selfish reasons. They sense it's all going to blow anyway but they want it on their favorable terms, like the Roman landowners yanking out the last supports for their civilization because they think their little fiefdoms will come out ahead on taxes. How many died from this?
This is why it's very difficult for a declining status-quo empire to dismantle itself without collapsing. The Democrats of today are not up to the task, including Sanders. The Republicans, God help us, are cheering for the explosion and arming to butcher the survivors.
The antiwar libertarians and the Trump cult operate on basically the same premise: White Christian Americans are economically superior to all other races but evil Big Government and racially-contaminated democracy get in the way of their asserting their natural supremacy at home and abroad. Look up some of Ron Paul's newsletter smears against African-Americans in the past. Paul is now a Republican because his supporters from 1980s libertarianism are now Republicans, and God knows how many are now Trumpists. Gary Johnson is running as a sort of goulash of libertarian and Reagan Republican, but as Chomsky would likely point out Reagan's aggression was the reality of the capitalist need for eternal expansion, not the isolationist bubble that the Libertarians and Trumpists dream about. Shut down internationalism and you must completely restructure the US economy in ways no free-market absolutist could tolerate.
It would appear that some American "leftists" have so thoroughly refused to accept any responsibility for their own failure in getting working-class Whites to adopt socialism, that they are now being seduced by the idea of helping Trump win in the hope that he will destroy the evil American empire and the Federal government from within.
Those of us Americans who are harmed by his cruelty, racism, and vindictiveness will not forgot who betrayed us when we crawl out of the ashes.
Trump asked three times about getting to use nuclear weapons because he really wants to annihilate his enemies. Which he relentlessly demonstrates with his open hatred of America's minorities.