Trump to win?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

I am what I am. Hate to be the one to deliver the bad news. That racial jazz is all out of steam. People see it for the bludgeon it is and you should know better.

Shame on you.

woodsman, my assumption was that you were NOT into that, so my hope was to get you to look at the kind of person trump chooses to be "the ceo" of his campaign. i don't think trump is hitler, but to draw an analogy: weimar was decadent; hitler was not a good solution.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, my assumption was that you were NOT into that, so my hope was to get you to look at the kind of person trump chooses to be "the ceo" of his campaign. i don't think trump is hitler, but to draw an analogy: weimar was decadent; hitler was not a good solution.

At least you seem to understand that Trump is not Hitler, false analogy notwithstanding. And America in the 21st Century is not Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

I have all the clarity on Trump and the state of American politics I need and I am entirely clear on my motives. You do not need to "educate" me about anything along those lines, thank you. Although it does seem that you and Santa could stand to learn a thing or two about your fellow Americans and maybe learn something about yourselves along the way.

Humility would be a great place to start; then maybe empathy and respect.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

Don't be scared. You'll be all right and so will your gold. You can use it to build a nice Trumpian wall around yourself to protect you against your countrymen. Then again, you already have.

Trump may pose certain unpredictable dangers, but the dangers posed by re-empowering the neoconservative ideologues who brought about the Iraq invasion are already known. There’s no guesswork involved — we have incontrovertible proof of their destructive potential.

In his signature muddled and oft-contradictory style, Trump has cobbled together a wholesale critique of U.S. foreign policy post-9/11, situating Hillary squarely within the status quo that has wrought chaos in the Middle East and Europe.

On Monday afternoon, he again denounced “regime change,” called for attaining “common ground with Russia,” and even lamented “Iraqi kids blown to pieces” as a result of policies spearheaded by Hillary. Things have gotten so worrisome for interventionist Republicans that Bill Kristol, the Darth Vader of neoconservatism and a decades-long critic of the Clintons, has expressed joy at the prospect that Hillary supporters will actually be more hawkish than him once the campaign is over, in light of their newfound counter-Trump histrionics.

The dangerous alliance between Hillary Clinton's Democrats and neocons: Fear of Trump is cementing a strange relationship

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Don't be scared. You'll be all right and so will your gold. You can use it to build a nice Trumpian wall around yourself to protect you against your countrymen. Then again, you already have.

you're so angry and nasty woodsman. you don't know much about me, yet you presume to judge my level of empathy and humility, what and whom i respect, my attitude toward risk, and so much else. speaking of humility- i suggest some intellectual humility to not presume to know what you don't know.

you're very angry, i understand that. you're so frustrated and so in a hurry for history to get on with it. i don't know your age, but perhaps you're afraid you will never live to see the day that this preposterous and ever-more corrupt system will meet its end. in your anger and your impatience you get into bed with likes of bannon. you're better than that.

history will proceed in its own sweet way in its own sweet time. we can add a little push here or there. the forces we are engaged with are so much greater than our individual lives and our individual powers. we do what we can. i, at least, don't want to destroy the world in order to save it.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Why wouldn't Woodsman and all working men and women; black, white, brown, and yellow, be upset with the elitist political parties? They care not for them and throw them the crumbs.

I come from poor, but decent farming family from SW Virginia and Eastern North Carolina. My parents lifted themselves up and got good blue collar and public service jobs (when they didn't pay much), plus made sure I got an education.

The listen to Trump because he is the only one fighting the corruption and giving hope. It's not a race thing and shame of the high and mighty that try to make it look that way.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

you're so angry and nasty woodsman. you don't know much about me, yet you presume to judge my level of empathy and humility, what and whom i respect, my attitude toward risk, and so much else. speaking of humility- i suggest some intellectual humility to not presume to know what you don't know.

you're very angry, i understand that. you're so frustrated and so in a hurry for history to get on with it. i don't know your age, but perhaps you're afraid you will never live to see the day that this preposterous and ever-more corrupt system will meet its end. in your anger and your impatience you get into bed with likes of bannon. you're better than that.

history will proceed in its own sweet way in its own sweet time. we can add a little push here or there. the forces we are engaged with are so much greater than our individual lives and our individual powers. we do what we can. i, at least, don't want to destroy the world in order to save it.

You think cheap psychology is going to make your weak case the slightest bit stronger? You think calling me angry and frustrated is an argument?

JK, I call it like I see it and the truth is terrible. You don't like hearing it, but you will be hearing much more of it over the next several weeks.

Again, we have Trump to thank for providing the necessary clarity, even if in spite of himself. In their desperate alliance to defend the status quo, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative have been unmasked as standing in opposition to the interests of 99% of all Americans. Their alliance is based on mutually shared assumptions of their own personal (net) worth as goodthinkers, sophisticated and advanced, and destined to rule. As it turned out, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans were really just all part of the same neoliberal tribe and like you and Santa, consider barbarians all those who do not share those assumptions.

This neoliberal union has deployed its PR wing in the media to set up a “Cosmopolitans vs. Nationalists” frame vs. a “Racist/Sexist vs. Identity Politics” frame. Conservatives have defined the battle they want to fight, and the liberals have defined the battle they want to fight, and both battles support and conceal the neoliberal assumptions Democrats and Republicans share, and that the left (the emergent third pole represented by Sanders) does not share. And now that Trump has signaled his willingness to fight that fight and win, neoliberals and neoconservatives are well and truly scared, wondering how they put themselves in such a mess. I think that's an easy one to figure out.

Being members of a tribe, it does not occur to the stateless, rootless, global-citizens of New York, Washington and Silicon Valley that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to merely (the hope of) getting rich. Having no loyalty to place, no affinity for their people, they are unable to see the love of one’s people, land, and traditions as anything but bizarre and potentially dangerous. So they denounce it as racist and xenophobic. It does not occur to them that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders New York liberals who love ethnic restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or DC liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of the District's majority-minority schools. They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world and take the largest share of its bounty for themselves.

You stand here terrified of the future, like SF, credulously accepting almost every slander, every lie served up to you by the media, so long as they comport with your prejudices against your countrymen, who are daily being ground into dust by a neoliberal regime you once claimed to detest. But now that an opening exists to really fight them, to open up a third force so desperately needed to oppose their destructive ideology, God no please, it's just too risky for my portfolio.

Forgive me for having the balls to call out that cowardly shit for what it is, particularly when millions of Americans are literally being put to death at the hands of neoliberal policies embraced by the GOP and the Democrats. Forgive yourselves for your lack of imagination and moral cowardice.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Neoliberal supporters of Hillary and the GOP are breathless in their condemnation of Trump campaign lead Steve Bannon for what they consider his encouragement of the so called "alt-right."

But scratch the surface and it turns out the source is none other the Soros-financed SPLC, whose very existence is based on terrifying liberals with spurious tales of an ever-impending, just around the corner, any day now, race war. And its founder Morris Dees has grown wealthy stoking liberal feelings of collective guilt as a means to open wallets. The SPLC has turned "mau-mauing" to a lucrative business. When the Democratic or Republican parties need to smear someone like Ron Paul and now Steve Bannon, they turn to Morris Dees.

So what is this alt-right business we're all required to fear and hate now that little Morris has his marching orders on who to smear next? The SPLC "Extremist Profile" says this.

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.

One might be prone to take this at face value if only the pearl-clutchers in the media and other oh-so-serious and "responsible" politicians would show a similar moral outrage at the tribalism and identitarian politics that dominate the Democratic party and modern liberalism. If the SPLC and the Democratic Party were as serious about defending humanism, liberalism and universalism, as they are about fellating Wall Street and the banks, we might never heard of a shibboleth called the alternative right.

But there's no money in arguing for common humanity in the face of identity politics, so they traded class politics for ass politics and cashed in, going about the business of setting Americans against each other for the benefit of a tiny neoliberal elite sitting atop the Democratic and Republican parties. So long as the 99% fight each other, elites carry on without concern. And instead of working for free speech in the face of regressive liberals, the Democrats use the SPLC to run censorship and smear campaigns against those they consider enemies. Instead of working for universal American values, they revel in a confusing, contradictory farrago of liberal moral relativism that keeps traditional left class politics in line and frees Democrat and GOP neoliberals/neoconservatives to run rapine across the country and the world.

Much better to turn a blind eye to the rise of tribal, identitarian liberalism financed by likes of George Soros and egged on by the Democratic Party and their public relations unit in the media, while joining forces with neoconservatives to wave the bloody shirt of racism at the merest hint of it among their political enemies. More than anything else, it is their hypocrisy and double standard that provided an opening for Donald Trump and introduces the alt-right to the level of national politics. I may not share many affinities with people identifying themselves with this cohort, but their enemies are mine and I'm happy for the opportunity to make common cause to defeat the hideous monster birthed from the unholy union of the Democrat and GOP elites. In fact, it's my pleasure.

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right

In times of change, outsiders recognize their common interests and take common cause as the only means available for them to move their fight forward. And this is precisely what Steve Bannon is counting to break the Democrat/GOP neoliberal alliance in favor of Trump. The Clinton Republicans at Mr. Bloomberg's shop think he's America's most dangerous political operative. The more I learn, the more I tend to agree. Along with Trump, there is no greater threat to the neoliberal stranglehold people like Bloomberg and Soros hold on our politics. They should be afraid and by their unhinged flailing about, it's clear they're terrified.

While attacking the favored candidates in both parties at once may seem odd, Bannon says he’s motivated by the same populist disgust with Washington that’s animating candidates from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Like both, Bannon is having a bigger influence than anyone could have reasonably expected. But in the Year of the Outsider, it's perhaps fitting that a figure like Bannon, whom nobody saw coming, would roil the national political debate.

This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

You think cheap psychology is going to make your weak case the slightest bit stronger?

usually not cheap. ;-)
but for you, free!

You think calling me angry and frustrated is an argument?

actually i think of it more as an explanation for your willingness to overlook the risks of what you advocate.

.
Again, we have Trump to thank for providing the necessary clarity, even if in spite of himself.

the analysis was clear long before the rise of trump. we have been discussing here, at itulip, for years. perhaps others needed his clarification.

In their desperate alliance to defend the status quo, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative have been unmasked as standing in opposition to the interests of 99% of all Americans. Their alliance is based on mutually shared assumptions of their own personal (net) worth as goodthinkers, sophisticated and advanced, and destined to rule. As it turned out, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans were really just all part of the same neoliberal tribe and like you and Santa, consider barbarians all those who do not share those assumptions.

i agree with your critique and in fact am among the "barbarians," as you define them.

This neoliberal union has deployed its PR wing in the media to set up a “Cosmopolitans vs. Nationalists” frame vs. a “Racist/Sexist vs. Identity Politics” frame. Conservatives have defined the battle they want to fight, and the liberals have defined the battle they want to fight, and both battles support and conceal the neoliberal assumptions Democrats and Republicans share, and that the left (the emergent third pole represented by Sanders) does not share. And now that Trump has signaled his willingness to fight that fight and win, neoliberals and neoconservatives are well and truly scared, wondering how they put themselves in such a mess. I think that's an easy one to figure out.

i think you are conflating what is easy with what is not. as i said, i agree with your analysis of our political economy, but what i - at least - am scared of is not the upsetting of that system, but the means and messenger in this particular instance. my worry is not for that corrupt system, but for what this particular candidate will construct in its stead.

as i analogized above - weimar was decadent and needed to be changed for the good of all germans and, it turned out, every other person too. but hitler was not a good solution for that problem. i know america is not weimar, and trump not hitler, but that's why it's called "an analogy" instead of "an equation." the situations are similar, not congruent.

Being members of a tribe, it does not occur to the stateless, rootless, global-citizens of New York, Washington and Silicon Valley that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to merely (the hope of) getting rich.

as a rootless cosmopolitan by birth, but not practice, i can nonetheless appreciate [if from afar] the comforts of shared sub-culture.

i myself have never been motivated by the desire to get rich - otherwise i would have become an orthopedic surgeon instead of a psychiatrist. at the time i chose the latter career it was the second lowest paid of all medical specialities. [i don't know the current data.] perhaps getting rich is the motivation of others.

in fact, were trump elected and able to implement his stated policies i would likely be better off financially. my concern is the type of world we leave to my children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of everyone else as well.

Having no loyalty to place, no affinity for their people, they are unable to see the love of one’s people, land, and traditions as anything but bizarre and potentially dangerous. So they denounce it as racist and xenophobic.

although i have no love for bill kristol, i am nonetheless concerned that breitbart headlined him as a "renegade jew" as if that was perhaps the most important thing about it, and what their readers would be most stirred up about. do you not consider that a telling detail?

It does not occur to them that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders New York liberals who love ethnic restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or DC liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of the District's majority-minority schools. They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world and take the largest share of its bounty for themselves.

as i said, i share your critique. multiculturalism is a far more complicated and risky thing that its advocates have acknowledged. the u.s. handles it much better than most, but it is an issue here too. a multiculturalism that i could respect would not deny the importance of tribe and creed - the "melting pot" image is demonstrably overstated. perhaps "stew" would be a better metaphor.

You stand here terrified of the future

as i said, i would likely be better off under trump. it is not for myself that i am afraid.

like SF, credulously accepting almost every slander, every lie served up to you by the media, so long as they comport with your prejudices against your countrymen, who are daily being ground into dust by a neoliberal regime you once claimed to detest. But now that an opening exists to really fight them, to open up a third force so desperately needed to oppose their destructive ideology, God no please, it's just too risky for my portfolio.

again, it is not for my portfolio that i fear. it and i would do better with trump.

Forgive me for having the balls to call out that cowardly shit for what it is, particularly when millions of Americans are literally being put to death at the hands of neoliberal policies embraced by the GOP and the Democrats. Forgive yourselves for your lack of imagination and moral cowardice.

i still think that, as in vietnam, you are willing to destroy the world in order to "save" it.

as for the "alt-right," it labels an amalgam, as all such labels do. nonetheless, when people at trump rallies cry out - apropos of obama - "hang the nigger" it says something about at least some of its membership.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

usually not cheap. ;-)
but for you, free!

Cute how you jettison professional and medical ethics just for the pleasure of a kick down. Thesis proven.

Your tribal instincts remain firm, Doctor. I guess you haven't noticed your profession is at long last taking baby steps towards self-awareness. Your good colleague almost reaches it, but craps out when the call of the tribe beckons.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Cute how you jettison professional and medical ethics just for the pleasure of a kick down. Thesis proven.

Your tribal instincts remain firm, Doctor. I guess you haven't noticed your profession is at long last taking baby steps towards self-awareness. Your good colleague almost reaches it, but craps out when the call of the tribe beckons.

that all you got, woodsman? taking what was obviously a joke seriously? seriously?

unwilling to address the issues i raise? i am trying to engage in discussion. you prefer harangue? again, imo you're better than that.

we engaged in a similar exchange once before, in which i ultimately got you to actually engage with me by asking whether whatever-it-was was, in your opinion, worse than slavery. i am trying to do the same thing now, to reason together or at least exchange opinions in a respectful way.

i've always respected your knowledge and judgement, if not always agreeing with the latter. i take what you say seriously, and i assume it is offered with good intent, except when it seems magnified by anger, as in the "worse than slavery?" discussion. and even then i do my best to respond calmly and respectfully, hoping you will do the same.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

that all you got, woodsman? unwilling to address the issues i raise? i am trying to engage in discussion. you prefer harangue? again, imo you're better than that.

Clearly, much better. And for reasons that are likely becoming increasingly clear to iTulipers as you and Santa persist in digging yourselves deeper.

But on to the meat of your retort, doctor.

although i have no love for bill kristol, i am nonetheless concerned that breitbart headlined him as a "renegade jew" as if that was perhaps the most important thing about it, and what their readers would be most stirred up about. do you not consider that a telling detail?

Telling? Oh, absolutely. The details, however, it seems you missed.

It tells us that tribal instincts dominate your thinking and short circuits your higher mental and moral faculties. It tells us that as a one of the tribe, you default to simple, cultural rubrics that are largely unconscious and generally inadequate to describe extant reality, but perfectly Hillarious when deployed so carelessly by a man of science dedicated to reason and inquiry.

Oh, if I had a dollar every time I saw this at work in the office!

i am nonetheless concerned that breitbart headlined him as a "renegade jew" as if that was perhaps the most important thing about it

What does it mean one Jew calls another Jew a renegade? If I say "renegade Jew" does it mean I hate Jews? If a news organization with an decidedly pro-Israel bias quotes a Jew calling another Jew a renegade, does it mean it is the modern incarnation of Der Stürmer? And if antisemitism can be implied in such a transparently obvious attempt to shut down debate, what does that tell you about the seriousness of the commitment to resisting antisemitism or encouraging civil debate?

Just posing rhetorical questions, doctor. No need to answer in detail, as you've already told us with elegant brevity.

Horowitz: Bill Kristol ‘Renegade Jew’

by DAVID HOROWITZ
18 May 2016

I have been accused of being a provocateur all my life – when I was a leftist in the ’60s proclaiming (God help me) that Vietnam was the fulfillment of the American dream; when I left the left declaring that, “the beginning of political morality is anti-Communism;” when I said that identity politics “owed more to Mussolini than to Marx;” when I opposed reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact because it was “bad for blacks and racist too;” and when I organized “Islamo-fascism Awareness Weeks” on a hundred college campuses across the country. Now I have provoked a firestorm on the Internet through a Breitbart article that called Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.”

According to the Internet, Webster synonyms for renegade are “defector” and “deserter.” I applied the term to Kristol because of his efforts to launch a third-party campaign to block the nominee of his party, split the conservative vote, and ensure the election of a Democrat whose party had provided a path to nuclear weapons to the Jews’ mortal enemy (and America’s as well). I picked the emotional term “renegade” because I wanted to shock Kristol and his co-conspirators into realizing the gravity of their actions.

However, I had no idea that this would provoke the reaction it did. A veritable tsunami of attacks were directed at Breitbart and myself from Kristol’s supporters on the “neo-conservative” right and from die-hard enemies of the Republican nominee in all political quarters. Even the Anti-Defamation League (which had once attacked me over my anti-reparations campaign) chimed in, calling the title of my piece “inappropriate and offensive.” This was actually pretty mild, considering others were denouncing it as “disgraceful” and “an anti-Semitic slur.”

How, by the way, is the characterization “anti-Semitic slur” even possible? Are Jews immune to defecting from causes? When I publicly repudiated the radical cause, thirty years ago, the first attack on me appeared in the Village Voice under the title, “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.” It was written by Paul Berman, who years later became a somewhat chastened radical himself.

Berman’s attack stung me – as I hoped my charge would sting Kristol and cause him to reconsider his course. But the epithet didn’t bother anybody but me. My current critics would stigmatize me not only as a defector from the conservative cause but as a double agent who never really left the left. After my Breitbart article appeared, Commentary editor (and Kristol relative) John Podhoretz sent me a one-line email: “Once a Stalinist always a Stalinist,” while Commentary writer Jonathan Tobin in a piece titled “Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace,” suggested: “You can take the boy out of the Bolsheviks but you can’t take the Bolshevik out of the boy.”

Like many of the attacks on Trump, these squalid responses with their flimsy intellectual content call to mind a famous remark of Lionel Trilling’s, made more than 60 years ago. Conservatives, he wrote, did not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas.” It is not that Kristol or his defender Tobin haven’t had worthy and defensible ideas. They have. But this makes it even sadder to see the flimsy arguments they trot out to discredit Trump and to defend Kristol’s indefensible campaign. Criticisms of Trump’s personal attacks on his Republican rivals are reasonable. But not when they fail to take into account the 60,000 political ads that were aired by those same rivals whose purpose was to destroy him (the ads were not, should anybody have missed them, about policies and issues).

I have no quarrel with people who have doubts about what Trump would do if elected. It is the task of the candidate to allay those doubts. For reasonable critics, Trump’s announcement of his prospective Supreme Court nominees should be an important step along the way. These names are not Trump cronies and would therefore provide an independent check on a crucial governmental function.

My quarrel is not with Trump skeptics, but with the effort to nullify the vote of the Republican electorate – a politically active and informed, and conservative segment of that electorate. Kristol’s third-party effort exudes an elitist contempt for the will of the people, which is particularly unbecoming in a crowd that prides itself on being “constitutional conservatives.”

Finally, I am disturbed by the failure of the nullifiers to consider the perils of the choices our country now faces. For the life of me, I cannot understand how my friends in the conservative movement can not have qualms about derailing the candidacy of the Republican Party’s pro-Israel, pro-military, pro-American nominee, and electing the candidate of a party that has built its foreign policy around making Islamist Iran the number one power in the Middle East, providing its jihadists with a path to nuclear weapons, putting $150 billion into their terrorist war chest, and turning a blind eye to their circumvention of international restrictions so that they can build ballistic missiles capable of destroying the Jewish state and causing incalculable damage to the United States.

As for not getting the joke, I fail to see the humor in yielding one's professional credentials as a not-so-subtle rhetorical club to put the poors in their place. That joke isn't funny anymore.

[spinoza]

Re: Trump to win?

Hello, everyone, I've been a long time lurker in these forums since 2009. This thread, in particular, has had my interest since it began.

Woodsy, I also supported Bernie as an antidote to the rampant corruption in our system, despite misgivings about some of his policy particulars. But the Trump train is very different. The actual policy proposals and SCOTUS list sound very much for the interest of the elite at the expense of the blue collar American. He seems to me to be a fake populist. The rhetoric doesn't match the policy.

Not that I'm a fan of Clinton. I won't and can't vote for her.

Honestly, though Gary Johnson is as exciting as warm oatmeal, he has a chance to get a third voice on the stage. Isn't third party support the realistic way to start breaking up the political oligarchy?

Thanks for your insightful posts, and especially you, jk. You both always have insightful contributions.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

As for not getting the joke, I fail to see the humor in yielding one's professional credentials as a not-so-subtle rhetorical club to put the poors in their place. That joke isn't funny anymore.

the joke was implying - but never asserting- that i was rendering a professional opinion as opposed to merely the observations of a fellow human being. if that wasn't obvious, i apologize for the implication.

can we try to interact as fellow human beings, woodsman? not archetypes or symbols but as individuals each seeking his own way forward? individuals using this community not as a soapbox but as a platform to examine and clarify what is happening in the world?

[santafe2]

Re: Trump to win?

i think you are conflating what is easy with what is not. as i said, i agree with your analysis of our political economy, but what i - at least - am scared of is not the upsetting of that system, but the means and messenger in this particular instance. my worry is not for that corrupt system, but for what this particular candidate will construct in its stead.

This is my concern. It appears nearly half the electorate is willing to trade neo-liberalism for neo-fascism while ignoring that neo-fascism is a more abusive neo-liberal fast track. Trump will not assist the US in moving away from neo-liberalism, he will provide an authoritarian mandate to widen state sponsored police abuse along with continued economic abuse.

I take one of my cues from the African American community who have always been on the front lines of both types of abuse. A Wall Street Journal poll published earlier this week shows the following level of support for the two main candidates:
Clinton: 91%
Trump: 1%

I think black folks understand that authoritarian rule will impact their community first and with more force. I agree and I think that authoritarian attitude will spread to all communities who do not comprise the top economic and social tier.

At it's core, the Trump movement is a white racist neo-Southern strategy. It is built on anger and hate for the other. Trump followers may be in denial but they cannot choose their facts. Now that Trump has added Steve Bannon to lead his campaign we will more clearly see how angry, fearful and hateful these people are.