09 December 2019
What is it about Trump?
Part of it is this: millions of people who'd never want Donald Trump to be their boss now feel that he has become, or is becoming, exactly that. Something like this, I suspect, accounts for the great fear of his "authoritarian" tendencies, which in reality amount to the sort of insults and threats many expect from a disrespectful if not downright cruel employer. Unfortunately, the choice of this employer is nobody's own, unless someone is willing to leave the country rather than live under his rule -- an option few who feel this way about Trump will want to accept. The opposition to Trump thus becomes a metaphorical, almost spiritual general strike. It certainly isn't one in any material sense, or else the President might give it more attention than his usual spite. It remains true, of course, that Trump can't "fire" American citizens, as some no doubt fear he wants to, but that fear will persist as long as Trump does. Fear of the Trump movement is something else, to the extent that they want something more than Trump, but it's difficult to address that movement on its own terms while Trump himself remains on the scene. For that reason, 2024 could be an even more interesting year than 2020, but next year will be interesting enough in the proverbially Chinese sense of the term....
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3 comments:
It is far simpler than that. As H. L. Mencken once wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Notice how often the left uses fear-mongering as path to power. In the 70s, it was fear of ozone depletion. Since the 80s, its been fear of climate change. Back in 1989, Al Gore stated that we had only 12 years to deal with the problem or the earth was doomed. 30 years later, they're still claiming the apocalypse is 12 years away. tRump is nothing more than another hobgoblin they throw out there in the hopes of scaring enough voters to put them in control of the senate and oval office as well as the assembly. The left has, as its goal, nothing more than to become the ONLY political party in the country, as their comrades in Russia and China have done.
A few more examples of the left's constant fear mongering:
The Emergency Rent Control Act of 1974. Nearly 50 years after it was passed, the left still refuses to make this law permanent. Instead, whenever it reaches its expiration date, they simply move the expiration date ahead a few years. Why? So they can hold the possibility of excessively high rents over the heads of the poor and of minorities in NYC.
As mentioned before, the whole global warming scare. "If we don't eliminate our carbon footprint, the earth is doomed." Tell that to the dinosaurs. The earth they thrived on had a climate warm enough that, for a few hundred MILLION years, there were no polar ice caps and the CO2 levels were about 5 times what they are currently. Life - especially plant life - thrives under those conditions. So what the left is basically saying is that they are less intelligent and adaptable than dinosaurs.
Human beings - specifically homo sapiens - survived the ice age. At a time when NYC was buried under an ice sheet a MILE thick, homo sapiens managed to keep going. Not only that, we managed to move out of africa and colonize the entire planet, to some extent or other.
This is one of the reasons I now refuse to support the left. I detest the use of fear as a political tool. I now refer to the left as "chicken-liberal", because of their constant squawks regarding the falling sky.
Alas, if you renounce fearmongering you're left with no one to support in American politics -- or at least no one with any chance of winning an election. We are reactionary all around, with the only real choice being what you fear the most. That wasn't how liberalism was supposed to work, but here we are just the same.
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