Phredd3 wrote: ↑November 1st, 2020, 3:12 pm
And why anyone would want that in a President is something that continues to completely escape me. I just do not get it.
CrazyNotCrazie wrote: ↑November 1st, 2020, 3:13 pm
I need a shower. How do his supporters defend this?
I tag-quote these 2 responses to the Trump truck caravan merely as a jumping-off point to the larger issue: the people. I do not propose to offer a definitive answer to the above questions. I am more “thinking aloud” about why I think Phredd3 and CNC are getting at the right question. My post repeats some stuff I’ve said here before.
We know what Trump is. And we know that real conservatives have left the Republican party to the no-longer-conservative enablers in both houses of Congress.
We are faced with the prospect that, win or lose, Trump will get the votes of ~65-70 million of our fellow citizens.
My mantra is, “Willful ignorance is dangerously stupid.” To watch Fox News “opinion makers” of an evening is an act of willful ignorance. Acts of willful ignorance have proliferated in recent years. The longstanding, implicit way to determine a “fact” has disappeared among millions of Americans. The very idea of “alternate facts” betrays not only science, but common sense, and leads to QAnon fantasies, the “truth” of which convinces yet more Trumpists daily. Talk about needing a shower......
It also leads to fascism. I do not use this merely as a shocking label; I mean it literally. Trump literally ran a fascist-themed campaign in 2016 — historically great nation undermined by vermin, dark-skinned Others, saved only by a Strongman proclaiming racially superior, manly values — and has built on it, more and more explicitly by 2020.
The core of Trumpism is fascism. The neo-Nazis and white supremacists see him as one of them. He encourages their lawlessness, in the name of law and order. He encourages violence, in the name of restoring calm. He encourages voter suppression, in the name of protecting the vote. Trumpist fascism is the Big Lie writ very large.
These are obvious to normal people. But a significant minority of Trumpists are drawn to fascism. And a majority of Trumpists live in an altered state of reality, ignorant of basic facts, evidence-based science and news. For them the pandemic is mostly fake news. Willful ignorance is dangerously stupid, not just to the willfully ignorant but to the hostages to their stupidity: you and me. Trumpists frequently claim to live in “the real world.” In fact they inhabit an unreal world, dragging us by their ignorance and stupidity into that netherworld.
That netherworld is fascism, which is not entirely unknown in American history. In fact, exactly 100 years ago — a coincidence, not a history-repeats-itself theme — the Second KKK took power in a number of states for several years in the 1920s. Their “reactionary populism” was built on the themes that Trump stumbled into in the years leading up to 2016: “alien forces,” abetted by callow liberalism, were overrunning the country. Like the 1920s Klan, Trump rose to power by promising to make America great again through a return to “true Americanism,” suppression of immigration, and manly white nationalism.
The context of the rise of this Second Klan was unnerving economic and technological change plus a world war. The context of Trumpism’s rise was decades of confusing, often horrific, military engagements with uncertain or disappointing results, a deep recession with a slow recovery, and decades-long-developing inequality of ghastly proportions.
A significant proportion of Americans, busy just trying to cope, ignorant of the complexities of their own country’s political culture, not to mention the Constitution itself, committed to their faith and to their real religion — sports — slid into willful ignorance. Which led to the dangerous stupidity of 2016’s World Historical Mistake.
Tens of millions of American — some understandably aggrieved by vast inequality, others aggrieved by abortion, others doing very, very well and therefore aggrieved by the threat of “socialism,” all aggrieved by political correctness — hope to stop history in its tracks.