Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
(Post 530859)
I think its a pack of deluded dead enders going out with one last barbaric yawp. (Somewhere, Whitman curses me for the equivalence.)
Trumpism might be best viewed as a moral panic. One of many moral panics we've had in recent years. People become obsessed with some issue, exhibit extreme fervor, tribalize over it, create fixation over it in the general public, then burn out under the heat of their own extremism. These things used to run over long periods of time and appear less frequently in the past, but with the advent of social media and its siloing effect on groups of fellow travelers, panics appear more often today.
Populism is arguably, by definition, a panic.
2008 exposed extreme inequalities emerging in our economy. The cure for it made those inequalities worse. We've had a K-shaped recovery since 2008. If you'd assets at that time, they've since appreciated nicely. If you didn't, or worse, if you didn't and you worked in a non-professional job, or a professional job that could be automated or offshored, the last dozen years have been mostly miserable.
Trump looked like a messiah to the credulous. He whipped them into a panic by expressing bluntly what they couldn't articulate: They were getting screwed by a system that didn't care about them.
So they freaked out and bought onto his nativist pitch. Then, as all panics will, They Went Nuts. Trumpism became, for the significant portion of his voters who were not merely voting their pocketbooks (the useful idiots), a religion.
Most panics fizzle out because they don't have a unifying hierarchy. Nobody's in charge (See: Occupy Wall Street). Trumpism was different, and it ended in the lurid fashion we all saw yesterday only because it had a CEO, or more aptly, a Pope. He was able to direct it, herd and focus its internal factions.
But ultimately, it was a panic, and as panics do, it will dissipate. It will have some impact going forward. Indeed, some of its impact may be positive, as it has caused us to refocus on the damage neoliberal economic policies do to certain segments of the population. But in a few months, when we all focus on the economic fallout that's coming once we get Covid-19 under control (the 20 years' worth of creative destruction to certain sectors of the economy [which was already unavoidable, but could be handled over a longer time frame] which Covid just accelerated into one year), Trumpism will be very much in the rear view mirror. And the pleasure of being able to read a news site or watch TV without seeing him will make the desire to forget him that much stronger, reinforcing his disappearance.
Yesterday was a unique political/psychological phenomenon. It's what you get when a panic is hijacked by a demagogue. Comparisons to Hitler or Mussolini seem easy but are ultimately facile. The Beer Hall Putsch failed. Yesterday's embarrassing approximation of it failed even more miserably. Real authoritarianism only succeeds when advocated and pushed by people working inside the system. Thinkers, plotters, people very much unlike Trump. Very much unlike the desperate sorts looking for new religions in the form of moral panics.
If you worry about authoritarians, which you should, you should worry about tech, and the corporations which are growing and consolidating power as smaller competition folds during this pandemic.
I still don't fear Donald Trump. He's too dumb to fear. I fear the people telling me they need to be given powers, to squash media, to preclude voices, to spy on us, to protect us from future Trumps. Those are the authoritarians who will create fascism under our noses, and they'll have armies of dupes cheering along with them - "It's all in our better interest!"
|
