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Vader

The Next President

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I really wanted to bring up some of my personal feelings about the Trump presidential campaign, which has been dominating all of the news here in the US since the middle of 2015.

 

In some ways, the emotional arch of Trump for me is much like that of Gaston in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. A buffoonish chauvinist enters stage right. He makes disparaging comments about women (add minorities for good measure). We chuckle a bit, we shake our heads in disbelief.

 

But this guy keeps scheming, keeps asserting himself into our lives. He's going to get exactly what he wants, even if he needs to incite violent mobs. Suddenly, we're not laughing anymore.

 

Trump launched his campaign for President by characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists. He's proposed banning all muslims from entry into the United States. He brags about introducing forms of torture "far worse than waterboarding" into America's wars in the middle east, whose inhabitants he's described as "animals." He says the only way to successfully fight terrorism is to not only kill terrorists, but to "kill the families" of terrorists. He refused to disavow white supremacists and the KKK when pressed in an interview the other week. I could go on.

 

I have no idea what kind of president Trump would be if elected, but his behavior so far suggests a man who is not stable. To paraphrase John Oliver, I'm not sure if Trump is a white nationalist or pretending to be, but at a certain point it kind of stops mattering.

 

Even if Trump never becomes president, damage has already been done. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that watches and opposes hate groups in America, has noticed an increase in boldness of racist groups this year, many of whom are responding positively to Trump's hateful rhetoric. Five Thirty Eight, a group of American statisticians that follow politics here, has found racial slurs to be commonly paired with internet searches for information about Trump's campaign.

 

But that aside, something strikes me now in the beginning of March, and that is that Trump's supposedly imminent demise has never come. As he steamrolls his way to victory in primary after primary, I'm being forced to come to terms with a suspicion that a universe where a man like this can be the presidential nominee for one of the two major parties in the US is also a universe where such a man could conceivably be commander in chief of the greatest military and economic power on the globe.

 

Are any other Americans on here legitimately worried about Trump, or do you still consider him little more than a paper tiger, a buffoonish diversion who will disappear by Summer? For those outside the US, are there analogous right wing nativist movements in your own countries that have you biting your nails? 

Anyways, I'm sure many of you are tired of hearing about Trump everywhere you look, but I thought if there was one place on the internet where we could thoughtfully consider this demagogue's rise to prominence in American politics, it might be here.

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My own view is that Trump is just bringing to the surface a truth that many people have always known is true: the United States is currently, and has been since its inception, a misogynist white supremacist state that is virulently hostile to all sorts of people for no particular reason, up to and including being perfectly willing to talk about torturing and killing them. I don't think this marks the USA out as special - everyone else is racist, sexist, etc. - but given that some people have been and are willing to cling to some kind of American exceptionalism, it's interesting to see someone tearing the facade off so adroitly. There's no way to downplay Trump's obvious appeal to huge swathes of the country except by saying that people are just virulently racist, at the very least in the passive sense of not giving a shit about anyone who they think is different enough to not matter, at all.

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It stopped being funny a while ago, now it's terrifying and surreal.

How did we arrive in a world where this is what's happening? How fucking weird is this? What's going on? Are we being punk'd?

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"Terrifying and surreal" are the perfect adjectives. He really must be stopped.

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I don't think this marks the USA out as special - everyone else is racist, sexist, etc. - but given that some people have been and are willing to cling to some kind of American exceptionalism, it's interesting to see someone tearing the facade off so adroitly.

There have been a few good articles over the last few weeks that have pointed out how much American exceptionalism has been recast in the negative: "America’s twenty-first century 'exceptions' appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending" (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/26/we-are-not-denmark-hillary-clinton-and-liberal-american-exceptionalism).

On the other hand, America is certainly not exceptional for having its political process hijacked by a narcissistic demagogue appealing to reactionary bigots. In that, Trump is eerily similar to ISIS against which he rails...

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I wrote a very long thing that boils down to: my depression has never been worse, I wish I had the resources necessary to emigrate, regardless if he wins or not.

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I'm not really following politics lately, but I think there's also some rise in fascism in Europe currently.

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Donal Trump is a terrifying indictment of American politics as usual, as practiced by Democrats and Republicans both. You can't expect to defend mass collection of private citizens' data because of the existential threat that terror poses and not expect it to have an effect. You can't continue to indiscriminately murder civilians abroad (sometimes American civilians) using drone strikes because of the existential threat that terror poses and not expect it to have an effect. You can't refuse to offer displaced Syrian refugees a place to live because of the existential threat that terror poses and not expect it to have an effect.

 

Donald Trump is the sum of all political choices made since 9/11, but he's largely uninteresting to look at; rather, it's interesting to look at the people who give him the power he has. You can say the media is to blame for his rise to power, or you can say it's the fault of Republicans for not taking him seriously, but none of that is really all that interesting or important: Donal Trump has a support base, and it's interesting to look at why they support such a nauseating demagogue.

 

I think the most compelling point about his support base was a long point Vox made about the rise of American authoritarianism. American authoritarianism can also explain why we ignore our moral imperative to welcome Syrian refugees, and why we stand behind a Middle East foreign policy and counterterrorism strategy that's objectively, as measured against its stated goals, an abject and total failure. We are a nation that fears alterity, and one that's consumed with hand-wringing about how the changing social order marks an end of civilization as we know it. We're confronted with the moral collapse of America as shown through cops murdering black people or black people murdering cops or selfie-taking, empowered youth or whiny, pathetic youth or having an opinion or anti-having an opinion free speech maximalism or feminism or anti-feminism or any of a number of easily digested false dichotomies, so we aren't bothered by a moral imperative to not let Russia bomb Syrian civilians, and we aren't bothered by Europe turning Greece, a country it's already damned to economic failure, into one great internment camp for Syrians, and we aren't bothered by funding several governments that are repressive military regimes -- because what about us, and what about our safety. We don't address the larger moral failure of all of us because it's easier for us to point at Trump's supporters and dismiss them, just like it's easier for Trump's supporters to point at and dismiss us, when the truth is that we all have a little bit of authoritarianism in us -- even if it's just the littlest bit. The left is prone to the same kind of lashing out as authoritarians are, only we frame it as callout culture and pretend the new name makes it something other than what it is.

 

I think Donald Trump is an uninteresting symptom of an interesting problem: the problem of the fundamental breakdown of the American people. He is himself a shallow and banal subject, and should largely go unaddressed. What makes him interesting is the question of why people support him, so we should remove him from the equation as much as we can and just look at his support base. They came from somewhere, and they feel the way they do for a reason.

 

This is pretty disjointed because I woke up in the middle of the night and will go back to bed after posting this, but I hope I made my point at least well enough for the gist of it to come across. The short version is basically "who cares about Trump, it's his support base we need to be paying attention to."

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We're all gonna have to migrate to Canada at some point. Yes, Europe is at this moment quite the powderkeg of unstoppable nationalism, jumping like hungry wolves on the influx of immigrants from Syria and other Middle-Eastern warzones and failed states. For a small while, Germany seemed to be the shining example of how to do it right, with Angela Merkel bravely declaring "Wir schaffen das". Regrettably, reality has appeared a tad more resilient to this ideal. The Cologne incident at new year's eve, where a group of North-African gangsters (not refugees) attacked women en masse, did much to sway public opinion in favor of let's-close-our-borders-sentiments.

 

Here in the Netherlands, after ten years of insane mini-Trump shenanigans, we STILL have to deal with Geert Wilders and his terror-politics. I just really, really can't believe that so many people actually want to close the borders again. Preposterous ideas and ungrounded fears for sharia law (never ever going to happen) and terrorism (yes, the Parisian attacks were awful and Cologne was painful, but let's be really honest here, without being facetious or taking this lightly, they were incidents, looked at from even a short distance away. The number of serious 'attacks' in the last ten years can be counted on a single hand) seem impossible to allay.

 

Now, I don't think the end of the world is nigh. I still refuse to believe that Trump can be president, and I have this unquenchable optimism that things will work out in Europe. In the end, the moderate masses will calmly say: "let's not do this", and that'll be the end of it.

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Now, I don't think the end of the world is nigh. I still refuse to believe that Trump can be president, and I have this unquenchable optimism that things will work out in Europe. In the end, the moderate masses will calmly say: "let's not do this", and that'll be the end of it.

 

Boy, I hope you're right. I'm pretty freaked over the UK's current rumblings towards abandoning the EU. There are too many people with viewpoints too shaped by tabloid ranting about EU regulations messing with the shape of bananas and other nonsense. Sometimes the moderate masses aren't as moderate as you expect them to be.

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I like listening to podcasts and ASMR and video-tutorials. I typically listen to that stuff when I'm the only one in the room or car. I recently heard an idea that conservative talk-radio provides many folks an illusion of social-interaction when they are commuting and that this fills some essential need. I can identify with that idea based on my own media consumption. So I'm willing to give some considertion to the idea that conservative talk-radio and its availability has a part in further bigoting the populous. What if Trump-supporters just don't know about ASMR?

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Maybe Trump's voice triggers ASMR for his supporters  :o

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Trump is a weird sort of ill-advised love child of P.T. Barnum and Huey Long with some Pat Buchanan and George Wallace thrown in. He's a carnival barker, a demagogue, a nativist, and a host of other things. I hesitate to call him a Fascist because that implies that he has a well defined ideology. There are certainly elements of Fascism in the mix, but I feel like he's instinctually groping for angry stances that might resonate with some people and then seeing what gains traction and doubling down on it. If something doesn't have the desired effect he discards it and the boorish outrageous persona he's taken on gives him room to cynically do that.

I don't think he can get elected tbh. I think there's an upper limit to the support he can get in a general election. What scares me is that I didn't think he'd get this far and I think he's got a good shot at being the nominee, so I'm a little concerned that maybe I'm wrong about his chances in the general.

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What scares me is that I didn't think he'd get this far and I think he's got a good shot at being the nominee, so I'm a little concerned that maybe I'm wrong about his chances in the general.

 

God, this is what terrifies me too. I can't conceive of any way he wins the general election, but I've been wrong about his ceiling up until this point. I'd assumed I'd be a writing a postmortem for him by November of last year at the latest, and look where we are now.

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I hesitate to call him a Fascist because that implies that he has a well defined ideology. There are certainly elements of Fascism in the mix, but I feel like he's instinctually groping for angry stances that might resonate with some people and then seeing what gains traction and doubling down on it. If something doesn't have the desired effect he discards it and the boorish outrageous persona he's taken on gives him room to cynically do that.

 

Actually, if you look up most definitions of fascism, you've described it perfectly in Trump's actions. Fascism isn't so much about ideology as about methodology: appeals to popular frustrations and fears, with authoritarian control offered as the answer to all of them. The actual content of the appeals doesn't matter because authoritarianism is always the answer to them. That's what makes studying Franco and Mussolini (and to a lesser extent, Hitler) so aggravating, because they're constantly shifting the supposed "heart" of their message to be immediately salient to whatever they personally wanted at a given time. Mussolini even says right out, although I'm going to paraphrase it, that you will never understand fascism if you have to ask what it means, because it's an instinctual force that opposes intellect. That's Trump to a T.

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It helps that all of the other republican candidates are nearly as terrible

 

On a policy level, Cruz is just as bad if not worse. He personally scares me a little less because his rhetoric, while bigoted, is significantly less racist than Trump's. While he is extraordinarily arrogant, I don't think he would defy the military by ordering forms of combat engagements too cavemanish for them to take seriously.

 

I think Rubio would be a slightly more conservative Bush II. In other words, terrible, but a bastion of tolerance compared to his colleagues. I honestly think a Rubio nomination is the best we can really hope for, and I say that with a full understanding of how profoundly conservative he is.

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I don't think very highly of the Republican Party or its elected officials, but it was a new level of disappointment for me when all the candidates said they would vote for the republican nominee even if it was Trump. That provides me with an additional clue about how their priorities are completely driven by power and loyalty to their party's name.

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I don't think very highly of the Republican Party or its elected officials, but it was a new level of disappointment for me when all the candidates said they would vote for the republican nominee even if it was Trump. That provides me with an additional clue about how their priorities are completely driven by power and loyalty to their party's name.

 

This is the problem with the 2 party system, if you don't vote with one of the parties it is like you aren't voting at all.

 

I am a Bernie Sander's fan, and if he doesn't win the nomination I will begrudgingly vote for HRC because at the end of the day I would rather  have someone who represents 50% of my interest than 0%.

 

I have anecdotally heard several republicans I know who are abstaining from voting if Trump wins, so it could mean lower voter turnout for republicans this year even with Trumps rabid base.

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Yeah I've heard similar things from some Republicans (including overhearing a phonecall a coworker was making - said he'd prefer Cruz, which is... well, they're the same person, Trump's just honest about it). Some of them hate Trump.

 

But I've also heard people say they'll vote for Trump if Bernie doesn't get the nom. I think it's a vocal minority saying that, but it's scary nonetheless.

 

I fucking hate Hillary, but I have no choice but to vote for her if Trump is in the running. ):

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Yeah I've heard similar things from some Republicans (including overhearing a phonecall a coworker was making - said he'd prefer Cruz, which is... well, they're the same person, Trump's just honest about it). Some of them hate Trump.

 

But I've also heard people say they'll vote for Trump if Bernie doesn't get the nom. I think it's a vocal minority saying that, but it's scary nonetheless.

 

I fucking hate Hillary, but I have no choice but to vote for her if Trump is in the running. ):

 

That's absolutely nuts, like "want to watch the world" crazy.

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The justification is often one of accelerationism.

 

So, essentially, they do want America to burn and fall apart, as fast as possible, so that someone better can pick up the pieces.

 

It's... not a good plan. I'd go so far as to say it's almost evil.

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That's absolutely nuts, like "want to watch the world" crazy.

Not necessarily. I've heard it justified as not wanting to vote establishment, which is valid in its own right if misguided in supporting Trump.

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