Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
It wasn't just Willie Horton (and Michigan might have been the only place where "he let Willie Horton out" could have been seen as a positive thing)- his whole campaign was stupid. I actually voted for Dukakis in disgust. There were commercials that basically just had waving flags, no substance whatsoever.
And we could/should still have a boring competent president. Trump came along and blew up the process a bit- took a second for pols to figure out what to do with an opponent whose main tactic is to call you names
(but next time they'll be ready for him). Mix in the perfect storm of Bernie driving people to believe we deserve a "choice" and Hil having been around for so long, and here we are.
|
I don't think Trump blew up anything. The process, the political system, the economy, was so fucked up, so ill, a disease like Trump appears.
Trump is like cancer. You need a number of bad things to all go very wrong inside a cell to get metastatic disease. We as a nation had enough of those things going on that a thing like Trump appeared, the normal immune response never killed him, and he spread.
Same thing is going on throughout Europe right now.
Populism sat relatively idle, controlled, from the days of Father Coughlin. Its appearance and spread is not the problem, but the symptom. If smart people like us don't realize that -- if we keep saying Trump "hacked" politics (he's not that smart) or that populism is the cause of problems -- we're fucked. And I don't think any of us actually believe that. We know exactly what caused extreme politicians like Bernie and Trump to acquire such support. I just don't think we want to admit it. It's much easier to see Trump as an aberration in a line of people like H.W. or Obama. But I think that's seeing it backwards. H.W. and Obama are very much Yesterday, the former a dinosaur Rockefeller Republican, the latter our last Moderate Democrat for a while.
Until we address inequality (that the economy is not delivering anywhere near what it should to all people), and I've no idea how that can or will be done, we're going to get more populism, which will bring us more Bernies and Trumps.
Trump = Symptom. Bernie = Symptom.
