I really have a hard time believing that Mytheos Holt is willing to make an argument that among the primary reasons that Donald Trump is having some success among Republican poll responders is that the American people, as a whole, are “getting fed up with treating their fellow citizens like overpriced glassware.”
Now, to be fair, I am interested in listening to theories about how the left (and the president in particular) has driven the right towards their nihilism, but you can’t blame Bruce Caitlyn Jenner and Laura Kipnis. It’s true that trigger warnings make me want to dismember small animals, but they haven’t driven me to xenophobia.
And the kind of people who are supporting Trump wouldn’t know what a trigger warning is if you handed them a copy of The Ithacan.
What’s propping up Trump is less about Trump than it is about George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney and Bob Dole and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. It’s about losing two straight presidential elections and the popular vote in five of the last six. It’s about the browning of America and the American electorate, which was a process that was furthered by St. Ronald Reagan and which the Chamber of Commerce-dominated Republican Party has done nothing to arrest. It’s about losing the battle on health care and on gay marriage. It’s about broken promises and government shutdowns that end only in defeat. It’s about not being able to end legal abortion. It’s about having to take down the Confederate Flag.
Now the party is selling another Bush. And this Bush is more like the father than the brother, which speaks well of him, actually, but is more than discouraging to the GOP’s base. The Bushes represent failure and accommodation. They are the embodiment of a lie.
The Bushes gave us David Souter and John Roberts, and they wanted to give us Harriet Miers instead of Samuel Alito. They are not to be trusted, even a little bit.
No doubt, the president had made the right crazy, but their real rage is reserved for their own leaders.
And it’s not just that they haven’t gotten what they were promised. It’s become evident that there never really was any real intention to try to deliver on the big ticket items. And, in the process of leading the base on for the last thirty-five years, the GOP elite mastered the art of destroying faith in all our institutions, from the universities to the scientific community to the media to the government and its agencies.
The more that Trump disrespects these institutions and their values, the stronger he gets. The more he points out the ineffectiveness and hypocrisy of the Republican leadership (where are the results?), the more people rally to him.
This is the triumph of not believing in anyone or anything. It’s partly a result of failure, partly the result of lies, and largely the result of the base being trained to think this way.
We’re seeing a gigantic backlash against the right by the right. Insofar as the left shares any responsibility, it’s only through poaching the intelligent people until the brainpower on the right was too weak to spark.
That, and winning.
Winning elections, and winning on issues.
In fact, the single biggest explainer of Trump’s success is probably that the GOP did so well in 2010 and still lost every important battle, and then won in 2014 and still can’t stop the president.
Winning elections was supposed to be the solution, but the last two years have been catastrophic for the right.
So, they’re not listening to advice anymore. They’re not even going to listen to Fox News anymore.
They’ve gone around the bend, and political correctness has virtually nothing to do with it.
A myth by Mytheos? I see.
I had forgotten about Laura Kipnis; had to look her up.
Obviously, I’m not the news/culture junkie that some are, and given my absolute antipathy to the glitterati, I’m probably less so “plugged in” than your average polito-internet denizen.
That said, I’d be shocked if 1% of the US knows who Kipnis is. So anyone pointing to the “radical left” for an explanation of Trump is wildly off-base.
I think you nail a big part of Trump’s appeal to the base. But there’s something more primal to it. Trump is a personified big swinging dick. A lot of men do (or want to) act that way in their daily interactions. They see Trump as telling it like it is. It’s like Meryl Streep’s Vassar commencement all over again (“Life is more like high school”.)
I was actually impressed that he provided any examples at all of this avalanche of speech totalitarianism that he’s talking about. Often as not, this kind of column just takes it for granted that liberals are deranged extremists.
But yes, it’s hard not to notice that most of the examples that he does provide are in the academic realm. The fact that he declares the faculty lounge to be the “natural habitat” of the Left is kind of a giveaway. He appears to be the kind of guy who thinks he was awfully brave to join the College Republicans.
Then again, I can’t say I’ve ever asked any Trump supporters how they feel about grad students having sex with professors. Maybe that is why the hate Mexicans so much.
It’s about not being able to support your family on your future income without working multiple jobs. It’s about the indignity of your wife having to work. It’s about the betrayed pension promises and the cost of Medicare co-pays and deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs. It’s about the fact that the US military continues to get its ass whupped in third world countries and Presidents of both parties withdraw them without the thrill of unconditional victory. It’s about the betrayal of a very special kind of immediate post-World War II American dream.
And it’s both about pushing forward the culture of not giving a damn and being angry that that’s what exists at the same time. It’s not realizing what “Looking out for Number One” winds up creating. Crass. Callous. Vicious. Armed. Dangerous.
Of course the left gets the blame. It is the left’s moment and that scares the bejeepers off of the right wing, whose grand plan for permanent conservatism has brought poverty, oligarchy, and global instability — not prosperity, freedom, and peace as Ronald Reagan promised. It has brought an increasingly failed America instead of America’s finest hour as a whole succession of Presidents have promised. If the public ever realizes that Ronald Reagan sold them a mess of pottage for their inheritance from the New Deal, conservatism will be as dead in the US as the left has been since World War II.
Mytheos is just the face of the yet renewed McCarthyism.
I’m not sure what there is to blame for Trump. The Presidency is an open office. Anyone who qualifies can run. Citizens United allows for unlimited and even anonymous contributions to campaigns as well as self-financing campaigns. Trump registered as a Republican. Has he taken steps to get on the ballot in all 50 states? That’s the mark of seriousness.
As far as I am concerned, Trump is as serious a Republican candidate as any over the past 42 years.
What I am beginning to watch is whether US electoral politics can survive the 2016 election. By January of 2017 there is likely to be some clarification that will take a surprising turn. The tension in movemental politics is escalating. The double standard in law enforcement is getting too blatant. The NRA has poured too much gasoline on the fire. The Congress has too much scuttled itself as a political power with its grandstanding. The electoral system is becoming too rigged.
I’m getting a little impatient with all the attention to sideshows. But that’s the impatience of age.
You forgot the housing issues. A perfect example is West Allis, WI. West Allis is a blue collar suburb of Milwaukee. Appears almost a 1/3 of the single family homes are in for closure. Look here:
http://www.zillow.com/west-allis-wi/
These are some of the angry people you describe in your first paragraph.
There are a lot of good observations here by TarHeelDem, as usual.
But blaming the appeal of Trump on the left? WTF? That’s the kind of bullshit that should get any writer relegated to the status of anonymous commentator on blogs!
Trump’s appeal is basic fascism. Let’s look at the 14 tenets thereof:
(2) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
(3) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
(5) Rampant Sexism
(9) Corporate Power is Protected
(10)Labor Power is Suppressed
(11) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
(12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment
(13) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
To date Trump appeals to the base instincts of the meanest bullies in our population. Yes, these are the people who were upset with movements to stop the bullying of homosexuals in schools.
And all of these people are Right Wing Authoritarians – RWAs – Google it – in 2006 this was a popular term since gone into hiding on the lefternet but if you are politically astute and on the left you need to read books like The Authoritarians and understand them – these people are the enemy of humanity. No, they aren’t the dictators (those are the SDOs – another term you’ll find in the same research) – these are the thousands-of-times larger group called authoritarian followers. They all want a Hitler figure to lead them to the promised land, with fire and brimstone all along the way for the heathens. Trump is PERFECT for the RWAs.
Trump is absolutely the logical outgrowth of the wingnut media. And, if you trace back the roots, this all started with the 1986 Telecommunications actions that ended the Fairness Doctrine and opened the doors for the likes of Rush Limbaugh. At the time the Republicans thought that the media was biased towards the left (probably right on social issues, to a degree – bullshit on economic issues – but then we’ve since learned conservative think everyone who doesn’t agree with them on every issue is against them) – today the entire media leans strongly right, and in order to position themselves the wingnut media is, in terms of right field and using the analogy of the oldest stadium in the National League, somewhere in Ontario.
It’s a glib and shallow argument from a reasonably clever young man. Of course, the glibness merely fills me with contempt. This makes me despise Mytheos Holt:
So much for racism! It’s just a label that’s been devalued by overuse.
(Although I would argue that a more precise term for Trump and his followers is xenophobe, which may not be as devalued as racist. If you google both terms, racist gets 79,300,000 hits, while xenophobe gets only 393,000. So we should be able to use that one a few million more times, at least.)
Impatience is their problem, not incompetence.
All they have to do is wait for the Democrats to pull themselves apart — there’s a good year for that to happen in yet — and they’ve got all three branches of the Federal government.
Booman writes:
Actually, he is wrong…and so have you been wrong, Booman…about the “reasons” for Trump’s ongoing success.
There is only one reason, really. Trump has convinced his supporters that he is telling the truth. End of story. They are desperate to be told the truth (even if it is unpleasnt and/or unpleasantly announced), and the constant lying that has marked the last three iterations of the Permanent Government…from Clinton through Bush II and right on into Obama…has been gradually but throughly unmasked by the digital information revolution.
Perhaps he is telling the truth, at least as far as he sees it. Or perhaps he’s just another layer of the lie machine. I don’t really know. But one way or another, he is convincing more people every day that he’s the only candidate on any side of the left/right PermaGov paradigm who is presenting the unvarnished facts of the matter.
May you be born(e) into interesting times.
AG
And you got this right?
Dean’s Argh moment was a total invention of the media: bitchiness and deceit completely, like Gore’s sigh and earth tomes, completely in the vein of the most villainous lady in the US media, Miss Dowd who has not got emotionally beyond fourteen. What Trump said to the Fox lady who was baiting him with provocative feminist bullshit on the order of her superiors will be his apotheosis in so far at that will work for him. What stupid shit letting a lady attack him on the level. Why not a man? Sexism. Who would dare deny that HRC went to his wedding because he had earlier given her money? That’s how simple it has become. And the feminist bullshit from the Fox lady was obvious from her lack of criticism of MEN on the state who in power had curtailed abortion, limited a woman’s right to decide things for herself. even increased the difficulty of her being able to vote. Don’t dump on Trump. The reality is not pretty. I have no illusions about his sincerity or good intentions. Nevertheless he has drawn away the curtain showing us the ugly reality. Sanders did not go to his wedding by the way!
My comment was only about AG’s projection that Trump was finished after his dust-up with Kelly. (I didn’t expect it to either hurt or help him.) If AG hadn’t slammed Boo for getting it wrong on something or other, I wouldn’t have bothered to mention AG’s recent boo-boo.
Yes, the Dean scream was invented out of whole cloth and the Gore irrelevant minutia was repeated as if it meant something, something.
We already knew that feminism v. the Fox clique loses. Now we know faux feminism from a faux news talking head flubs against a faux macho man.
Sanders isn’t on take big money and go to the big weddings circuit. Or maybe it’s a NYC thing.
Of course it’s not exclusively a NYC ‘thing’. Have you ever heard of California?
We shall see,
Won’t we.
AG
How Roger Ailes Picked Trump, and Fox News’ Audience, Over Megyn Kelly
Not projecting that Trump won’t crash and burn sometime in the next 14 months — only that “bloodgate” wasn’t his Waterloo.
It’s cumulative, Marie. Like a starfish on an oyster, the media just keep pulling and prying until they get their prey.
Watch.
AG
There is only one reason, really. Trump has convinced his supporters that he is telling the truth. End of story. They are desperate to be told the truth
Booman devotes paragraphs 4,5,6,8 and 9 to the lies, deceit, broken promises, and untrustworthy representation of GOP leadership that have led their jaded electorate to exactly the state of desperation you describe.
It’s the whole point of his post. Did you not see that?
He “devotes paragraphs 4,5,6,8 and 9 to the lies, deceit, broken promises, and untrustworthy representation of GOP leadership…”
Yes. i read it.
Did you read mine?
“…the constant lying that has marked the last three iterations of the Permanent Government…from Clinton through Bush II and right on into Obama…has been gradually but throughly unmasked by the digital information revolution.”
Note the words “Clinton” and “Obama” in that sentence. Also note the words “GOP leadership” in your own statement.
My point is that the lying has been endemic to both parties of the Permanent Government, and that Trump is gaining followers who might have been Democrats had Clinton and Obama not pursued the same lying strategies that the Republicans have practiced. When that fatuous bureaucrat James Clapper looked right into the media cameras during the NSA hearings, blatantly lied his ass off and was not summarily fired by Obama, the light began to dawn on the heretofore media-tranced people of the U.S. that they’d been had by both sides of the political system. Trump is using that realization to his own advantage. He is acting like he’s telling the truth while in reality he isn’t saying a goddamned thing that can be pinned as true or false.
A brilliant gambit, actually.
How long can he sustain that magic act?
We’ll see, but the lesson to be drawn from his success is as follows:
The American public now no longer believes the statements of either political party.
It’s about damned time.
Booman is a partisan media worker. He continually blames the Republicans while acting like the Democrat’s shit doesn’t smell just as bad as does that of the Republicans. I’m here to tell people that the shit smell in Washington is bipartisan It’s an equal opportunity sewer and unless the Dems come up with someone who actually tells the truth the next election will be even less successful than have been the previous ones. Less people will vote, not more, because It is now quite even to people who generally have to move their lips to read that the whole system is totally broken. The only “true”…as in verifiable…thing that Trump said in that whole fixed Fox News rigamarole was as follows.
There it is in all of its splendor.
His “platform.”
That…and nothing else…is what he’s running on. And winning.
Sigh…
The system is so broken…both parties…that you can run on simply telling that one truth.
And now the news:
WTFU.
AG
The election of Barack Hussein Obama and his presidency is the ‘trigger’ event. That it would drive them mad and destroy them is his legacy.