Watching American laborers embrace Donald Trump as their choice for president makes me look back to the Egyptians who worshiped the pharaohs as representing the gods on earth.
The Republican Party has cultivated an electorate that denounces government in all its forms, except its military and prisons, and praises the gods of the Free Marker AKA the employers, calling them “creators” as God has created the Universe.
Just as ancient Egyptians pointed to the giant pyramids as proof of what their great pharaoh has created, the laborers in the Republican Party point to Trump’s billions as proof of his greatness; both ignoring the reality that it was their blood, sweat and tears that built both and are now only held by one man.
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Yes, I get that, but it’s still the largest of all the subsets in that party. Even so, when national polls are published as they seem to be published daily by the media, Trump never falls below 40% of the electorate.
Most of us are laborers. Doctors are laborers. If the bread and butter of your life is supplied by your labor and not drawn from an wealth generating pile of capital, you are a laborer.
40% won’t win an election, but knowing that 40% of us willingly buy into this propaganda gives me an unsettled feeling.
…that Bernie Sanders actually has the support of a larger share of the overall electorate than does Donald Trump. The media can’t seem to control their attraction to the shiny object that is Trump.
I do think the truth is probably somewhere between where you and Bob say it is. I wouldn’t underestimate or overestimate the strength of Trump, since these polls have fluctuated and it’s an incredibly fluid race. He is also appealing to a lot of folks that haven’t voted or been involved in the process before, as is Bernie Sanders on our side, and we can’t be sure if they will show up or not.
That said, the longer his ideas dominate the headlines, the more mainstream opinion will be steered toward them. We no longer have unifying figures of mass appeal able to take him down. Tom Brokaw didn’t have an effect, Colin Powell won’t, Malala won’t, and it’s unclear to me if a figure like John McCain would be able to do it. There is no new Billy Graham who is credibly with American Christians but also has a mainstream middle of the road message. His strategy is sadly an effective one for our atomized age.
There isn’t one point in time where you could say “hey things were great then” without someone else contradicting you.
There’s also been very few times where people were excited about their choices for President or when they thought that either person would do fine. 1952? I wasn’t alive then so not sure.
Lot’s of people are uninformed and/or idiots. Trump’s a rich huckster who doubles as a reality game show host. It’s natural they should come together.
What’s more troubling is that all the alternatives aren’t great either. Sec Clinton is no where near perfect but she’ll do for most people. We’ll see once she gets in and the First Husband is back on the stage. If the past is any indication we’re in for some rough years of public annoyance (sample-Clinton Foundation, lack of transparency, Clinton advisors jockeying for power, could be anything, except maybe a sex scandal).
My point is that you can kvetch about most anything these days. Stuff changes, usually for the perceived “worse” but there’s really nothing you can do about it.
In my historians eye, two back to back elections where one would be voting for the greater of the two goods, and indeed it is a rarity.
Funny thing is, grampa Conway thought Ike was the second coming of Herbert Hoover and was devastated by the magnitude of Stevenson’s twin defeats. Now Ike is the Republican liberal Americans, and even socialists like Bernie Sanders, are pining for.
Actually, there is. Robert Reich called it The Great Prosperity and it was a time that most of us, myself included, thought that this new phenomenon of the middle class would be the future.
I worked at a hospital in Michigan in the late 1970’s that was under an EEOC order to correct past injustices. Up until the late 60’s every application from a black person went only two places- kitchen or housekeeping.
I recently worked for a company with a woman who retired after 40 years. She took a break in the 60’s though. Why? She got pregnant and the company made her quit. They later rehired her. So maybe great for white males, not so great for many others.
I agree with you, the era of “Great Prosperity” was not great for everyone. However, your argument (which I see repeated elsewhere) seems meant to imply that such an era is not possible without the discrimination inflicted on black people and women. Taking that a step further, the implication is that the prosperity was *because of* the discrimination inflicted on black people and women.
I see nothing that supports such a contention. They are separate problems – in the 1960s, people felt that black people were lazy and unintelligent and could do nothing more than kitchen/housekeeping, and that women were best when they were at home.
At the same time, we had economic policies which limited the amount of upward potential on incomes (with a 92% income tax rate), strong unions, and corporations that weren’t yet following the MBA-led trend of slashing and burning their way to more money.
I think the latter was more responsible for the “Great Prosperity”, and that we *can* get back there.
Had nothing to do with it. Other unique and non-repeating circumstances had more to do with it.
So, what we really need to do is get involved in a war that destroys most cities and nearly all industry west of Moscow and east of London, win it without substantial long-term cost on our own economic capacity, then do the same in Asia, and that way we spend a decade or two employing tens of thousands of steelworkers at wages negotiated by the USW, and not have the enterprise be completely unfeasible. At least until the rest of the world rebuilds and sells steel cheaper than we can.
That it also helped to have 25% of the worlds population under Communism and another 25% living in places where they weren’t participants in the global economy (India, Indonesia, etc).
They buy stuff from Asia…
My thinking is in line with CMD. We’ve been around the block on this a number of times in the past.
… Hit send before having written anything… derp…
I don’t know that the constant –225 years on and going — refrain of ‘America in decline’ is all that bad of a thing: it’s really just the exhibition of majority being encroached upon, and losing ground to, another group or groups. It’s true: the influence of White America is in decline and, of course, they have so closely identified with America they think that decline of White American influence is synonymous with decline of America altogether. I also think that lack of advancement for many, in particular African Americans, was a deliberate choice of the oppressor class (read “Whites”)…
Prior to what is widely considered “the enlightenment” when one majority, (or peoples or state or what have you) gave way before another peoples or majority, or before an organization of minorities, the initial peoples feared, and perhaps rightly so, that their power and influence would go to zero. Historians have termed this “Carthaginean peace” where one people was wholly supplanted by another. I don’t know that America has that luxury. America, for instance, freed the slaves in situ without displacement as the British tried: send them en masseto Jamaica and Haiti, etc to be rid of them. This was an implicit agreement to live together: one might even be tempted to call it an implicit social contract. Somewhere along the line we stopped trying to negotiate that terrain.
All this fits neatly into the context of johntmay’s diary: the choices people make — whether or not to vote Trump or whether to vociferously oppose government in almost all its forms — can be, here and now and today, just as blinkered and uninformed as the choices the rank racists made in the early half of the 20th century, or the choices Egyptians made regarding their ruling elite. Of, as johntmay put it, “the more things change…”
I doubt that we have any clue whatever as to what John Q. Egyptian thought of the pyramids.
He thought, Thank goodness we have a place to store our grain.
A day late, but comment of the day.
What is making Trump’s fortune, really, is the thrash TV where he finds attention. That is where he rides herd.
This is more than the result of the misguided thinking of working class republicans. It is the inevitable result of a cultural model that puts the popular ahead of the good and the true, and the self ahead of the good of the village.
We’re talking about something deeply ingrained, something much wider than the already wide crowds Trump supporters.
Love thy neighbor, said Jesus 2,000 years ago. We unlearned that, smug moderns that we are.
Love thyself, we say now. Look and behold, then, the love thyself candidate .
He entertained them for years on “The Apprentice”, trashing and firing candidates he didn’t like. Now, they can participate in watching him do the same thing to Bush, Rubio, Fiorina et al.