I am still searching for the reason why well-educated, intelligent, and well-off Americans with seemingly good moral character continue to support an obviously immature, narcissistic sociopath. Is it really just lower taxes and racism? Opposition to abortion? Some kind of hidden, irrational fear of socialism, Antifa, diversity? Are they acting out their evangelical fantasies? I honestly do not recognize these people anymore, they've become zombified by a virus.
Sep 8, 2023·edited Sep 8, 2023Liked by Robert Reich
I think that those well-educated, intelligent, and well-off Americans with seemingly good moral character constitute only a tiny fraction of MAGATs.
Anecdotally, I know a few. When I speak to them, it becomes clear that they are as tribal in their own way as the vast majority of MAGATs who vote against their own economic and physical well being.
Those people aren't evangelicals, and some are even Jewish. I ask them how they can ally themselves with white supremacists. Universally they deny that Trump supports them despite evidence to the contrary. When I get a chance, I ask whether they donate? Whether they are aware of the scams, like Trump U. Trump Family Charity? Trump defense fund?
It's disappointing that they see Trump as important, considering he is charged in 4 sperate jurisdictions with 91 counts. Most see him as a victim, despite knowing he was found liable of sexual crimes and that he is a serial liar. Most accuse Democrats of the same.
I agree with Robert, but I also think most Republican support is cultural.. Hatred of "the other." I am dismissed as a member of the "deep state."
Here's a message from yesterday: "I suspect George Soros the leader of Totalitarianism everyone elite and all of Washington money grabbing. Dont forget the NWO we are in a world of shit They say it is a spiritual battle my sword is drawn God save us is my cry ".
The person who sent it knows I am Jewish, and that I was an administrative law judge. She probably was one of my brother's clients. I think many people have a cultural predisposition to demagoguery, Jung called it the collective racist subconscious. I estimate that about 20% of the general population is so afflicted.
Where I live, we also have another 20% who are proto Fascists. They seek a "caudillo", a leader in the mold of Francisco Franco, Juan Peron, Simon Bolivar, and more particularly, Fulgencio Batista. Hatred of all Democrats is a legacy.
Yes, I know those people you describe, too. However, we cannot give up. Hope IS alive. The common good and a type of “golden rule” exists in every religion and culture. We are likely going to see hydrogen energy sooner rather than later. We must all hold on, Daniel! Hope and hard work through 2024!
I'm waiting to find the escape valve into the wormhole in space.
I think that we have the demographics, and that we can out register and outvote them nationally. In Ohio, the state supreme court, wiffed on expanding the voting map yesterday. The entire Ohio Republican Party has been implicated in corruption, the ex- party chair is in jail. People like Gym Jordan should be investigated, as he is still in contempt of the past Congress. According to Navarro's book, about another 3 or 4 were part of the Green Bay sweep.
I think that in the south, Democrats have been remiss in finding a second coming of Jimmy Carter. The social gospel is the Democrats' pathway to getting support from even those cultural warriors lost to abortion, gays, guns and God.
I just don't think that many Americans will ever buy what she's selling. Loving one another is impossible for most of us; we can barely abide ourselves and our families, much less people who look, act, think, and speak very differently from ourselves. We haven't evolved enough to swing that; worse, we may be stuck here. You can't realistically expect a hairless ape to become angelic.
Williams unfortunately is another spoiler that no one, and I mean no one, should ever vote for. If she runs and if other third party candidates run one has to remember their spoilers not candidates.
Yes, Daniel the Ohio gerrymandering has meant disaster here. Nonetheless, wormhole or not (ha!), we can’t just give up. Getting Biden re-elected has to be THE paramount focus, and that means leaving no “flank” unguarded or uncontested, and register voters and recruit younger people. We have a lot of awful people fouling up our state, and a lot of gems (like former Gov Dick Celeste) working hard to bring Ohio forward again.
The Ohio Supreme Court didn't "wiff on" the voting map, if that cheers you at all--the plaintiffs asked that their cases be dismissed. See the Washington Post:
"The Democrats and voting rights advocates who filed the complaints last March had both requested on Tuesday that the Supreme Court dismiss their cases: Neiman v. LaRose and League of Women Voters of Ohio v. LaRose.
"In the petition to have their cases dismissed, the plaintiffs wrote that, even if a newly redrawn map were to correct all of the deficiencies of the one used in 2022, it would be an expensive and lengthy process that would leave Ohio residents in limbo for at least several more months.
"For all of these reasons, given that the [2022 map] is at least a partial remedy, and given the substantial costs and uncertainty that further litigation would entail, Petitioners have decided to no longer pursue their challenge,” the plaintiffs wrote. 'They strongly believe this is the best result under the circumstances for the people of Ohio who deserve certainty about the congressional map that they will be voting under in this cycle, at the very least.'”
Dave Chapelle lives in Ohio and I think he should run for office there. He would be a good one to call out DT. While I don’t appreciate his raunchy version of satire, his philosophical satire cuts through hypocrisy.
I can see your point, but can't share your enthusiasm--many of my friends in Ohio, where I grew up and my family still lives, are gay or trans, and he's consistently on record as not-their friend. Plus now engaging his millions trying to stop Yellow Springs (the college town where he has a home) from building affordable housing near him. Brilliant comedian though.
And that "hope" being alive is due to remembering the Golden Rule in its thousands of formulations from throughout all time. At our gallery we have partnered with the Golden Rule project for over 25+ years. This project provides free materials (posters, story cards, passport booklets) to schools and various groups in Utah. It is pondering and engaging this common principle that has to potential to create peace, justice for the future of all life on planet Earth. If any of you wish to share these materials we can provide them.
i agree with you but realize that this ideal is so foreign and obtuse to the conservative segment of America that it can only be a dream and a goal for now.
Daniel, I remember something from college and a 1965 movie that has always stuck with me. It is a conversation from Ship of Fools. Blaming all the misfortunes in the world on the Jews the reply "that is right, the bicycle riders and the the Jews. ?But why the bicycle riders? reply ?Why the Jews?
I don't remember much more about the movie but that short conversation has always stuck and been reinforced over years. Working to help poor whites in the mountains of West Virginia with a youth group "hate like they were Black". Total disrespect for a qualified Black electrician by a white engineer in our Tennessee plant. Working around the world of with hate for "those people, others". Hate does almost always stem from our own failures.
I wish I could say I didn't hate Trump but I really do hate him for all the damage he has done to the USA and the world.
Ship of Fools* is based on sea voyage she actually took in 1931 from Mexico to Germany. It then took her 20 years to write this novel based on her experience. She probably knew her subjects well, and the movie version was well done, but I remember the disdain she had for Jewish writers.
Maybe she figured out how to turn hate into money.
Maybe by dedicating her skill as a creative writer to telling a true story she surpassed her own ordinary everyday constraints on her consciousness. Racism is a blight on social consciousness and a detriment to society. Sometimes, if they are true to their subject matter, artists surpass themselves and find something that resonates in us all despite their mean, limited, unexamined belief system. I don’t hate it when that happens. But I understand that creating art and literature can evoke the ground of shared humanity, peace, love and understanding that does not belong to the artist. The end result can stand on its own. even if ugly it can tell us something true about ourselves.Human beings are messy and complicated. Give credit for honest effort and the result. Was she a good writer besides being a bad person? Can we say she is a bad person because she is a bad example of a human being? I am an imperfect human who occasionally thinks that even as I squint towards peace love and understanding. One resists rewarding bad behavior. Does that mean rejecting good art, or technology for that matter, when attached to a hideous human? Should Elon Musk be allowed to control the technology he sells to governments? Keep the technological advances. After all , we paid for it from inception. How do you constrain the deranged all powerful evil brat that is Elon and put him back in his place before he destroys civilization? Fascinating comic book villain, only he’s a real person. And yeh, he is an antisemite. What a cliché villain.
Learn something new every day. I knew nothing of the authors history. Remarkable that something from 50 plus years ago can stick with you and likely not what the author intended.
My one hope is that they are more noisy and less numerous than we think….
I know we’ve seen them vote for him. How much can we put down to the fear of “socialism” or “communism” in the form of despotic leaders like Putin? Or greed {if the educated among his followers are somewhat successful, maybe they’re afraid of leeching hoards of poor people … }
I don’t know. The “Trump Phenomenon” feels like he made a crossroads deal with the Devil … {but I don’t believe in the the Devil}.
These people know he's done nothing for them.This is a mind control cult and they need to be aware of it.He manipulates their heads w/ a vibe.Watch him clap at those rallies.Has any other candidate had these issues,so much in question and spoken the way he does? 'I;m being arrested for you,what kind of drek is that?
Shared your assessment - except perhaps one quibble re the term "cultural."
"Hatred of the other" is a manufactured phenomenon - not a cultural structure. The creation of "other" can be a component of a culture (esp when it comes to linguistics, as tribal groups generate their own internal lingo...with notions like NWO attaining mythological meaning, less as a concept, more as a form of "I belong to this group and you don't"). But that doesn't HAVE to be hateful...just distinctive.
I quibble on this point, because many of the authoritarians exploited "othering" and then manufacturing hate to go after enemies - but outsiders may misunderstand the agenda and approach, conflating the outcome with the process.
The GOP has no problem with "a free press" - rather, they have a problem with "disloyal" press. That is, they like people they buy and pay for who say what they're paid to say.
The GOP has no problem with science - private equity financiers would love to know exactly what real estate is gonna flood ahead of time, and then know exactly which buyers are stupid enough to reject climate change and buy housing with inadequate protection. It's the 21st century equivalent to trading swampland in Florida. It'll end up the same way.
The GOP has no problem with Jewish people (look who Ivanna married!) or with Muslim people (Dr. Oz!) or with Black people (Herschel Walker! Herman Cain! Clarence Thomas!). Rather, they have a problem with any of them that may be disloyal to the financial interests behind the party. A judge who can't be bought is a threat. A doctor who cannot be coopted or kickbackef is a threat. All professionals who perform professionally - rather than following partisan orders - must be punished and disciplined. Disobey, and you will be forced to use Rudy Giuliani's makeup artist and scheduling assistant.
I think this is an important quibble, because if Fascist or authoritarian or other tendencies could become cultural, then the only solution might be to destroy and rebuild that culture. But if the problem is people abusing culture by injecting hatred into it - perhaps we can find ways to take the profit from doing so away from them, and then get the dangers they present to subside.
Lol, if Herr Jung couldn't straigjten out Teutons, what chance have we?
Education MAY work - but consider polling numbers about Americans who believe in Darwin...actually, consider how US beliefs about evolution track (remember twice as many white people migrated our of the South as Black people during each of the Great Migrations). And then cross reference that with beauty pageants (do we know anyone who used to own one?) - there's still a video on YouTube from when 47 or so of the 48 Miss USA contestants suggested that kids should learn "both sides" when learning education. (Way I see it, Trump's people paid more attention to those numbers - and other attributes of the contestants - than they did to Bannon or any other theorist).
Ask a Texan why Texas declared independence from Mexico - each will tell you that Mexico intruded on their rights. How many will tell you WHICH "property" rights infuriated them the most?
We think of "education" as K-12 and universities - but given the extent of the stubborn anti-Darwinian Americans, perhaps we'd best add in institutionalized "dis-education" - someone, somewhere is undoing the work of hundreds of thousands of biology teachers. If we don't know where and how, we may focus on resolving one serious problem and overlook a much more serious one (as most Weimar Germans did, noting the threat of the Comintern, but never recognizing that there might be worse emerging from their midst...).
I'm a lifelong Liberal who moved to the mountains, mostly for the isolation, the beauty, the fresh air and with hopes of living among less angry, less violent, and more neighborly people, and so, as it happened, I live in a very red part of the country as well. Over the past 20 years or so living here, I've managed to find it in my heart to befriend my Republican neighbors, and even some devout MAGA people, and what I've learned, and was surprised to learn, is that they just aren't what I expected them to be. I've also found out that they aren't anything like what most of my Democratic friends think they are like, at all.
First, and contrary to perhaps the most profound of these imagined differences, is that they aren't any less intellegent than any other segement of the working people I've met, and I've traveled this country, extensively.
Second, the majority of them don't even follow our politics, much less go to or even watch, tfg's rallies. They know about him, and have and will continue to vote for him, but they mostly will do so because of the fact that they watch Fox News for 15 minutes per day. Most of all though, they just don't want to be involved. They're as sick of the hatred and division as anybody else. They're sick of being lied to. They're exhausted from working endless gadam hours for "bullshit pay", and they know well that tomorrow will just bring more of the same. As will the next, and the next.
As Robert suggests, and as I've found out through my travels, todays working Republicans are not people of the North or the South, or rural or urban, or smart or stupid, they are mostly people who, for one reason or another, and like myself, were simply unable to make their way to places of higher learning, and so have suffered this decline in earnings, and into perpetual and always increacing -worry-. A similar percentage of the Democrats I know, are in exactly the same boat. Some of us were not even able to finish high school, due to the facts of their own lives. Some had to go directly to work after HS due to illness in their families among many other reasons; some just hated school due to their inability to perform well there, for a myriad of personal and/or psychological reasons, or problems, but that does not mean that they are of low IQ. By and large, they are not. They are every bit as intelligent as Democrats are, full stop.
In many cases, their parents weren't able to continue their own education because their own parents had no idea as to how to get there, and so had no idea as to how to teach their own kids, our current MAGA crowd included, the benefits of or even the basics regarding how to prepare themselves, for college. In their own families, college was and still often is, simply a thing for other people, but not for those in their own, extended, families.
Imagine if you will, that no one at all in your own extended family, ever went to college. You may well grow up thinking that that is simply the norm, that it is just fine to plan to leave HS, and then go and find a job, even though you are plenty smart enough to make your way through college. For most Americans, imagination here, is unessesary, it is just how it is.
For generations, we did just that, and as such, we've been the backbone of our nations' economy, but as Robert points out, and as many people here still seem to be missing, that option has become less and less and then still less, successful, for us, the working class, of Americans as time has gone by.
So we've been changing, due to this change, this downward spiral in our own ability to succeed, our own ability to properly raise a family, when our parents and grandparents were obviously, more able to do that, and so we've become more and more -worried-, every day and all day long, about our own ability to do that properly, and then, as more time has passed, to do that, at all.
So my current neighbors, and in fact all of the working people I've known over the past 50 years, have -WORried-, all day, and every day of our lives, about our own families, what their futures might be and then, as time has passed, if we'll even be able to FEEd them properly, or put roofs over their heads. I know men who have skipped breakfast for years, so that their kids might have more, to eat, -Worry- begets -worry-, and then our confidence, our pride, begins to suffer. We begin to think of ourselves as failures, and then, all of that, leads to -anger-, at ourselves, at our parents for not being able to teach us how to live in the world we were born into, and yes, at that very world itself. We, America's working class, have lost faith that our country and our politicains care at all about our plight, and so even our patriotism has begun to suffer, and now EVerything, has become suspect, to us.
Follow? Now imagine a clown like tfg comes into the picture. I don't see him as a man of great intelligence. He is certainly a fool and I often think that he is downright stupid, but I do have to admit, he was able to see and then to exploit we working Ameicans for his own purposes, by lying to us with claims that he was not just aware of our problems, and not just on our side, but one who is equally, and always, persecuted as well, when nothing could be further from the truth. Thus the "He's on our side!! ", bullshit.
The problem is that he, as a born rich man, was taught the corrupt methods of getting over on everyone he meets, and cannot possibly understand what it is like to be poor and struggling, to live most of our lives working our asses off without ever getting anywhere, at all.
And the problem is that as a world class grifter, he's been able to convince a huge part of working America, that he does.
So my republican neighbors, and many who are Democrats, myself included, have simply lost our faith in anything. And everything. Some still believe in "The Man Upstairs", but more and more, they've stopped going to church, and consequently, have stopped putting their money in the collection plate.
We, or at least a large portion of America's working people, have lost faith that our employers have our best interests at heart, as once was the case, and indeed we have lost our faith in our own country, not to give us handouts, but simply to assist us, so that we might succeed in the dear, astonishingly trusting, and innocent eyes of our children, and then regain our sense of pride, and our confidence, so that we might one day regain our love of country, as well.
The problem, the result of all of this, is that a criminal has millions of Americans gaining more and more faith in him, without an understanding of or even a care as to the catstrophe that would be the result of the end of our democracy, replaced by the autocraticy that would be that man's ultimate, perect, desire, if he is re-elected.
But even if he is stopped, by whatever means; removal from the ballot, conviction for his crimes or even being sent to prison, the problems will remain. The rich, the ultra rich, will never give up their money making machines, and so the world's currency will continue to be stored in their banks, frozen there, out of circulation, and so unavailable to the rest of us. The answer, as Robert has been explaining to us for a very long time now, is in the re-balancing of equity in our world, and in every corner of it.
True equity, or anything even remotely close to that, of course, will not happen within the lives of anyone alive today, but we can and must, begin that work, now, or, I believe, our own country may well collapse at the end of a very bloody civil war. Joe Biden has begun that work. It is clear. It is obvious, to all thinking people. So somehow, we must spread that word. As tfg becomes more and more suspect to Rebublicans and even the MAGA crowd, having been convicted of his crimes, perhaps we can convince them that they have been duped, and so gain some of their votes, so as to one day eliminate the Republican party, once and for all.
But. Democrats, at present, are not helping. At least not as well as we might. Instead, most of my Democrat friends are -angry- too, but mostly at Republicans, especially the MAGA crowd, and mostly for very good reasons. But it is the current division in this country, caused by tfg, that will kill our country before anything else will.
We must, I believe, do as I've tried to do here in my own retirement; learn to see that the vast majority of our working class Americans, and including, yes, our working class Republican Americans, aside from the relatively few MAGA nuts among us, are at heart, decent, good hearted people who have been done dirty by the rich, and so they are indeed, very
-angry-.
It is the same, across the country, -worry- has begotten -anger-, and anger has turned to misplaced -hatred-. So the answer is not more anger, and more hate. It will be, if we Democrats can pull it off, the elimination of the anger and hatred that tfg has for his own monetary gain, heartlessly stoked, with language that is directed towards the least successful of us, the less intelligent of us, the less well educated of us, and so the least able of us to understand that American Democracy is still an absolute treasure, and one that is well worth saving.
Joseph R. Biden is the only man alive, I believe, at this incredibly momentous point in time, who can drive this truck and over the mountain of disaster that tfg has built. But he needs our help. We must stop the hate and end the division in this country, or not even Joe will be able to save American Democracy. We can do this by a very simple means; by simply opening our minds, by dropping the hate and MSM talking points, and by simply talking, calmly, intelligently, WITH, our fellow Americans, instead.
My apologies for being so long winded. I've just never been so passionate, about anything, in my now long life.
we republicans are lied about when I voted for trump I was instantly called a racist but your opinion is your own I just don't want a racist pedophile as a president so I'm fine with what you choose
Not very representative. Higher crime, higher dependency on benefits in red counties. Much higher rates of unemployment. More drug use.
When you elicit a financial statement, you will find that most have family members that need government benefits of some sort... E.G. the highest proportion of benefits per capita in the US is Owsley County Ky. Approximately 80% MAGATs vote fore the party that will kill their own means of support. .
True, but I stand by my comment. If we don't end the hate, if we don't begin to see ourselves as Working Class Americans up against the same obstacles, instead of Dems and MAgats, then this country is doomed.
Demagogue and demagogue worship / buy in, are the right considerations. Of course all with grievance jump on the bandwagon of resentment - righteous or not. However, the deepest well of resentment originates as Bob says, via disappearing economic hope from the greater mass of us. I was inside of it, and watched the hatred and distrust fester and grow.
Thank you for your thoughtful (as usual) and informative comments. Kevin Phillips, in his American Theocracy, noted that many of these people are revanchist Confederates; for then the Civil War never ended. If so, Trump is their anti-Lincoln .
ts1213...can you please elaborate on how Biden is the cause of your perceived economic woes.
The left didn't start the 'culture wars'...conservatives who hate did. Are you a conservative who hates? Christians who follow the teachings of Christ..not trump...are not hated. God/Christ never designated America the country of choice. So why should Christian Nationalist be considered Christian? They are a political tribe not a religious or faith based group. If that is your families philosophy, then you are right, it does not align with Democrats. How can a true Christian conscience vote for a lying, philandering, sexist, racist (you get the picture) trump? Please don't tell me God uses flawed men...like like he used David. God used David because he was repentant and begged for forgiveness. Has trump ever repented or even admitted he has wronged? You must have checked your Christian conscience at the election box.
People who turned to Trump are hurting. I came from those that were part of the 36% of the unionized workforce in 1970...my parents! I then moved into the college educated elites. In every paragraph that Bob writes, I saw my life flash before me. Now, we have reaped what we have sown. However, the key is to ORGANIZE, speak truth like Bob, scale it up and somehow reach good people. That’s by voting! We did this in Ohio to save Democracy in August. We can and must do this throughout the Nation. Then, look ahead to ensure the wizards of the right are exposed early.
PaulaOH - I couldn’t agree more with what you wrote. Although I was thrilled with the No on Issue 1 (which hopefully will now become a Yes vote on Issue 1) I was angered when they came out yesterday saying that we were stuck with the gerrymandered maps for 2024. While I had a few racists in my family that I fought against growing up I also currently have some diehard (college educated) trump supporters that I currently fight against. Having conversations with them makes my head, and heart, hurt because I don’t understand why they can support a rapist and obvious liar when that man is only out for himself. I ask what they think he is going to do for them now when he already had four years to do something that would have been good for them before and they really have no answers other than to repeat mis (dis) information and conspiracy theories. I ask if the corporations would lower their prices wouldn’t that help with inflation and their ability not to have to live paycheck to paycheck. I ask why they support a man who treats women as if it is a man’s right to think that they can do unspeakable things to woman as if a woman has no right to their own body (and own choices). I ask if they see how the biblical writings are now being skewed politically and why they think that that is okay. I ask them why they cannot just love a person for Who they Are and NOT for who they think that they should be. I ask them what has happened in the world that gives them a right to hate someone else just because they are different from them. Head/Heart Hurts.
Anon, it makes my head hurt too at times, and no evidence seems sufficient. It’s important to distinguish between the “cult” members referenced by others, and the independents, the “hurting” folks, and the offspring of Reagan Democrats. Bidenomics is working. We have to get those facts before everyone. Cult members, the far right, entrenched MAGAs, nothing will likely move.
PaulaOH, I agree with you because Biden has done quite a lot better than most want to give him credit for. I will keep trying until someone makes a compelling argument for why the three year difference in age really makes any difference if trump and Biden are our two choices. I have heard their reasoning for most of the other questions I have asked but they usually pause and struggle to answer that one. It should be about more than hate for the other person that they feel in making their decisions. If I can just get them to think instead of just feel then maybe we all can start to heal. Maybe?
Oh my. You may have talked to “college educated” Trumper group - unfortunately I think they never graduated or covered their heads with aluminum foil while at the academy. That is the group that most baffling to me too. Maybe their trying to mate with the 1%ers or are suffering from selfishness and greed and have no understanding of the “common good.” But KEEP Talking! You are rumbling we hear to warn us of an approaching storm... the motivation to avoid damage.
I didn’t consider myself elite either, however, I have come to believe it’s inescapable. We change when we are educated. What we (kids if the working class) think, differs from those who didn’t have our...privileged education. IMHO.
I think right wing media (Fox, Newsmax, talk radio) are part of the problem. Most of my family members are the people you describe. They listen to right wing media exclusively throughout the day. The theme of most of the "reporting" is the same : The Democrats and leftists HATE America! They want to destroy it and replace it with socialist regime that totally controls your behavior! Most Republicans are wusses, only Trump and people like him can save the country!
I try hard to convince them that this poison is BS, but they don't listen anymore. I have become one of THEM! It is very depressing!
Charles Wright -- IMO, there is a reason these people are glued to Fox, Newsmax, etc., and it’s not merely because they are hurting and disappointed in Demo politics. These individuals are attracted to what they hear on more than one level. They’re filled with hatred for the system as a whole and blame is an excuse; and figure that if the government is overthrown, they might have a chance to get what’s due them, a bigger piece of the pie.
A lot of these pro Trump people work for the corporations that cause most of the pollution in our environment, manipulate the laws, and make the armaments for the useless wars humanity wages on each other based on greed and profit. The economic injustices that these entities have caused have hurt them, too, but their thinking is in lock step with the people who are in control of the injustices on the majority of us. Their type of thinking is caused from frustration, yes, but it’s also desirous of throwing out the baby with the water.
I think ALL advertising driven media is part of the problem.
Right-wing media is obviously a propaganda machine, but the audiences come to it for a "comforting" dose of anger - a psychological need that channels frustrations but also feeds off of generating and harvesting them. People "tune out" the ads - which plants them into the brains. The propaganda is just packaging to deliver behavioral (commercial) manipulation.
Left wing media is a little better - many real-world journalists working for MSNBC who have real professional ethics, though it's hardly universal - but to the extent it embraces an "us/them" device, it's just packaging too, imitating FauxNews, but delivering a smaller, weaker product financed by essentially the same handful of corporations.
Perhaps the problem is too many people reading streams and feeds, feeling as if THEIR personal stream made their judgments better than others (a delusion deliberately fed by advertisers...) - while those other people with their different stream are "crazy MAGA zombies" or "determined to turn your kid gay!" - too few reading and discussing books.
That too fits with an advertiser driven ambition: if every feed gives us the delusion of understanding enough to have valid judgments on every topic - every book (even the bilge put out by ghost writers for right wing trash) challenges a reader to fit material from one chapter against material from another - to focus. Books become threatening - they imply we need to focus, think, and remember before judging. People "defend books" by buying them - without ever reading them, as if text on dead trees had some magical power of sufficiently bought and sold...
As for trying to convince "them" - that's probably the problem. They are us. We will never convince "them" they are wrong. Nobody anywhere can ever do that very effectively.
The right-wing media operates by creating an "us/them." But not everyone buys into it quite the same way - some people are addicted to an anger feed, others just want to feel links to other people and feel lonely, scared, or a desire to feel SOMETHING (mixed with a desire to feel nothing as well, that's the toxic interplay of addiction). (Left wing media is also following this path - which is so unfortunate, since the best professionals - Jon Stewarts, Dan Rathers, Oprah Winfreys and so many others - tried to show us better ways to do this).
Don't try to convert "them." Find things you love and invite others to love those things along with you. Some of "them" may come along. Influence a single person...and we've done our part and helped defend America. Right?
I agree with you in many ways. Some of my dearest friends and family members are very good people but vote their portfolios, rather than what is good for all the people. There is no racial hatred in their political leanings, it is preservation of their wealth. It amazes me how we come from the same background but made different choices with our lives’ priorities. Our parents came into adulthood during the Great Depression, teaching us to live within our means, be frugal, work for the commonweal. Different life circumstances produced different results.
Because they are dear friends to you - not some "other" - perhaps you have some means of reaching them that others do not.
There is nothing wrong with voting ones portfolio if one knows exactly what one is doing and why. That said, actually convincing them would take A LOT of work - Robert Reich has a very very convincing picture of what went wrong at GM long before their bankruptcy, and multiple banks long before their bankruptcies, and at IBM back when they discovered financial engineering was easier, lower hanging fruit than innovation - or back when Hewlett Packard decided it was no longer interested in an American labor force, but only a quarterly profit.
I would ask those family members if their portfolios are invested in companies with high stock values because of buybacks whether the buyback policies mean they are more like Google or Apple or other mega corps, or more like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, IBM, or portfolio stalwarts like AT&T (which was rescued from bankruptcy by Bell South).
Once they realize you can speak the language of portfolios too - AND there is more to that story than "tax cuts, labor cuts, cost cuts, buybacks" - they may be amenable to listening more.
And then you can tell them the story of the most lucrative investments of the 1920s - the Matchbook King (Ivar Krueger), the Florida Swamps, and "bank debt backed by hardworking Midwesterners who will literally work themselves to death before defaulting, safest bank notes ever!"
Those are all American analogued they ought to know about. After that though...well, people voted their portfolios in the 1850s too - and lost everything. And Germans and Italians voted THEIR portfolios in 1930s...and lost everything. Voting ones portfolio isnt "evil" - but evil people who know other people do it could easily screw them over and steal or wreck or hold hostage that entire portfolio.
Sorry, I was being snarky there. After the LONG Depression of the Gilded Age (with cyclical rounds of genocide as people driven out of the South and other parts of impoverished America moved West) - conventional wisdom of the early 20th century discovered the miracle of diversification as the solution to withstand any similar crisis.
Put your money into real estate, they're not making more of it! (And the best performing assets were Florida property deeds...which traders never investigated beyond whether it was in fact a deed and whether it was increasing in value...). Until the bottom fell out of that market...
Put your money into bank debt and notes, because bankers are more skilled at valuing risks - if you buy their notes, so long as the collateral was good when they placed the loans, you're protected! (Except not from a dustbowl or a financial squeeze that obliterates many different banks)
Put your money into stocks!
And on and on. The Great Depression has been studied to death, but my belief is that the people of that era were as smart as we are now, and just as cock sure that they had wizardry that outmaneuvered any crisis. People in late 1920s voted their portfolios again and again and saw returns year after year - only to discover it wasnt just one sham, but multiple different scams running concurrently in a world where smart people aren't always loyal to one another (and some folks even called disloyalty an advantageous survival skill...those social Darwinists had no end of nastiness to offer).
Anyways - just wanted to throw all that out there if you felt discouraged while dealing with dear friends. Preserving friendship is more important than how one votes. But I really wish people didn't vote for people like Trump.
In my opinion, what goes around cones around, Karma, or whatever else you want to term it, is God’s, Nature, or Whatever’s way of showing us that like attracts like and this is what happens to one’s who believe they need to do this thing—it hurts—them, eventually. It’s also what happens to addicts who hit rock bottom. Just how much do you want to hurt, ends up being the optimum question. However, this lesson can be very slow in coming.
I do agree with Robert that all of the 'left behind, woe is me, NO power whatsoever, doing worse than my great-grandparents' despair is absolutely a CAUSAL factor in the MAGAts' collective embrace/demands for authoritarian FASCISM, and the miraculous 'big daddy' despot-'savior' who will make it all go away for them.
But, it does NOT excuse the fact that they cannot EVER 'think for themselves', and reject the abject toxic BULLSHIT being fed to them 24/7 by all of the various and multitudinous NAZI propaganda 'networks'.
They must be inherently, collectively feeble minded in order to be brainwashed sooooo effing thoroughly as to vote for and promote/DEMAND that which will hurt them, or even end their own existence.
Or to 'think' that their SHITler is ONE OF THEM, and would "have that beer with them" if they were to show up at the gates of his Merde-A-Nogo, or Deadminster compounds, just because he speaks the same racist/xenophobic/misogynistic/ANTI-SEMITIC/etc. 'language' as them, or promises them to fix their problems, all while being the EXACT 'coastal elite' (MINUS the intellect of course!) they loathe, blame, and despise sooo vitriolically for all of their woes.
These fascist media 'outlets' have completely convinced these MAGA devout, rightwingnut peckerwoods that anything NOT to the right of effing NAZISM is; commie pinko, libtard socialism, and is evil, will destroy their 'white race', and end their freedoms (most especially their effing 2A freeDUMB 'right' to butcher whoever they deem as an 'enemy'), even though those 'socialist programs' are the ONLY thing which is actually saving many of them currently.
Like Daniel says, this does NOT excuse the (supposedly) educated, and wealthy who support SCUMp and his fascism propagating goons/minions, who only have a total elimination of ALL of their taxes, and inherent white supremacist racism as reasons for supporting the evil despot.
Don't even get me started on the effing KAPO PUTZES of my tribe who somehow idiotically believe that once the fascists are fully in power, THEY will be spared from the resultant genocide/2nd Holocaust, just because they supported him/it so vociferously on his way to absolute power.
(Just ask the wealthy, industrialist Jews of late1920s to early1930s Germany who supported (S)Hitler 1.0 back then, oh wait you CAN'T, since they were the first ones obliterated, just as the current SHITler will throw his current 'Yid' backers under the bus.)
They are all even more delusional YET if they really believe that either SCUMp, his 'Muricun NAZI Party, or any of the Christofascsits REALLY support Israel at all, for ANY reason other than it's current fascist leader, or for it's necessary role in the completion of their effing rapture BS. ;)
Trump studied them for years, and now he is their spokesman. The least we can do is telling them that voting is like investing. As Warren Buffett reminds us time and time again successful investing require emotional self-control. Greed, fear, anger lead to disaster. When you vote you invest into your own future, and the future of your children and grandchildren.
Because they identify with Trump, they like Trump, they are just like Trump, Narcissists and Sociopaths.
It's their personality, that is why they migrate to the Republican party, they see the others that are just like them. The Republican wolf-pack mentality, they all obey the top dog no matter what, 100% absolute loyalty. If the Devil were a Republican running for office, they would vote for him as that would be "their guy."
Thus, it is their psychological disorder - educated or not.
Sep 8, 2023·edited Sep 8, 2023Liked by Robert Reich
I just finished reading John Dos Pasos' heartbreaking 1921 novel "Three Soldiers" about American soldiers in France during World War I. At that time, Dos Pasos was a socialist but would, by the early 1960s become a Goldwater conservative. (As Churchill remarked: if you're not a socialist when you are young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're old, you have no brain.") Here is one reader's reaction to Dos Pasos' depiction of the rank and file American so easily brutalized, which he calls "the bizarre rituals of the dispossessed," the attractions of Trumpism, it seems to me:
Or rather, all is hierarchy and the duties and obligations of hierarchy. Humiliation and servitude – these are the lessons - only alleviated or punctuated with references to killing Negroes down South or raping German women in revenge for German atrocities in Belgium (and all this said without even a hint of irony by soldiers in their ‘manly conversations’). Such talk becomes one of those bizarre rituals of the dispossessed, a kind of repulsive pride, a variety of bullying self-assertion by men reduced to worthlessness except in the value they have in fulfilling the tasks they have been trained for, that they remain perpetually waiting for. For such talk is all that is left to these ‘men’, the only way for them to assert their position in the social order, to show their worthiness. Their value as human beings is asserted by reference and in counter-distinction to those even less powerful than themselves – and the sad fact is that all that this bravado shows is a series of grotesque highlights further etching out their impotence and powerlessness, a kind of sharpening around about the contours of their own slavery.
Some researchers looked at where the January 6 rioters, many of whom were fairly well-off, came from. They found the greatest commonality is that they came from counties that were rapidly diversifying. I think racism and xenophobia, inflamed by Republican leaders, are major factors.
Racism and xenophobia are often a result of people looking for a scapegoat to explain why they are not succeeding. Many people would become less racist if their economic situation were to improve.
I could not agree more! I see everyday what Robert is talking about with the kids without college degrees or life work skills for good paying jobs out of high school (i.e. welders, construction jobs, etc..). However, I cannot for the life of me understand the irrational fears of people who love DJT and KNOW better. These well educated people KNOW that following him or his "wannabes" will lead us to dictatorship. They have given up. It has to be deep rooted fear of the boogie man....black/brown people becoming the majority of people living in the U.S. In addition, our outdated system of elections based on the electoral college and Senate control which gives the states with a very small comparable population enormous control and allows this outrageous minority rule situation in the United States. Both could well lead to our demise.
My guess; they don't suffer from the economic and social inequalities, but believe that gov't is broken. I find this to be true among some of my conservative friends - a point on which this centrist and those Reds agree. What I'm quick to point out is that tRump knows how to break things, but he and his performance artist sycophants don't have a friggin' clue on how to rebuild it. Authoritarianism or fascism certainly isn't the solution.
This is my exact reaction to this explanation. The people who I've lost to Trumpism are White, well-off, college educated, straight and supposedly Christian. I'm disgusted by them.
I'm continually astonished how the siren song, the elegy - ahem! - that "hillbilly elegy," to "the" time when the US was great, increasingly points at the '50s before the advent in US politics, of the systematic destruction as socialistic, by the Яepuблиkan$, of every New Deal policy that fueled that very greatness in the first place. How come nobody seems to have caught on to that ‽ How come nobody is or has been calling it out to high heaven ‽ It's not as if it were some great secret that the capitalist caste-warriors despised Roosevelt and the New Deal even more than those who - for whatever reason - despised Hillary. Just a comment, a question, a rhetorical question?
Kerry, you’re spot in. I wrote the following article that states essentially for TRUE DEMOCRACY to come back, we need to stop participating in these “lesser of evil” ritual:
Albeit possibly a less painful death than asphyxiation by Zyklon B, or a non-lethal at first/quickly body hit by a .223 round, which is what will happen to US 'others', eventually, if a 'third party' candidate helps hand/guarantee the next election to SHITler and it's NAZI goons, as a permanent installment into power. ;) :(
Who drank the Kool Aid in the Jim Jones scenario,and why? I see such a glaring likeness here.I wonder how many would actually follow him to freezing Russia and then what,this is horrifying lunacy!Would they want to live in Cuba,Russia,or China?
Franklin…About 35% of this country is already not voting. I gather they read your essay. How’s that working out for us? The purveyors of true democracy. You’re making about as much sense as Cornel West. Congratulations!
Reach Mr. Reich’s article on Ayn Rand. In the late 90s I spent some time in Ann Arbor and was fearful then at the consequences of the growing Ayn Rand society - evidenced by the number of posters listing the meetings around campus.
Part of the reason is that Capitalism, which is the economic engine of our economy, does not have a sufficient governor, meaning it has only weak controls. Everyone paying their fair share and everyone benefiting from our economy is what is required for the common good. The inequality in our country is pornographic.
I have a friend who is a banker, a cousin who is a PhD economist, relatives whose businesses are doing quite well and all are trump supporters. The banker and economist do it for money (tax cuts). The business owners do it because he appeals to their manhood and their racism. None of them look any deeper than that.
Yep. That’s my point. It’s not just about “the great unwashed”, those mullet-coiffed, toothless, obese, wife-beater clothed exemplars prominently displayed as the Trump army. It’s the millions of deeply cynical, avariciously selfish, and wholly unAmerican pricks who think that they don’t owe anybody anything for their comfortable lives.
They are all also quite DELUSIONAL as well, if they really believe that the fascists they put in total, unaccountable, unfettered, and NO consequence power and control will ALLOW them to keep their wealth, 'comfortable lives', and status just because they are also 'with the program' of being; racist, pure Aryan white supremacist, xenophobic, ANTI-SEMITIC, etc., CIS male 'Christians'. ;)
Does anyone remember when Scump wanted only blond haired,blue eyed Swedish immigrants.Definitely a brain defect,always thought he was better than others,what's inside him is a mash of a mess!
Yes, he was going even 'above and beyond' in his white supremacist racism what was accepted even by the 3rd REICH eugenicists as the 'Aryan Ideal', and his very own Teuton heritage.
Surprised he did not expand that to also include blonde, blue eyed, buxom, Slavic WOMEN (only) to his 'wish list'. ;)
I have come to believe that the oft repeated video of Trump proclaiming his ability to shoot someone while retaining his followers was actually a “brainworm” message –“I can do anything,” with the unspoken understanding, “And so can 𝙔𝙊𝙐!" That is his appeal- the freedom to be the (expletive omitted) they’ve always wished they could be.
Yeah, I’ll buy that. He has an aspirational appeal that started with his bullshit television reality show as a powerful and domineering boss. All of his tasteless displays of wealth. The arm candy. And now, an entire political party bowing and scraping, in deadly fear of becoming his enemy. Mocking gold star parents and disabled journalists just because he can. Bragging about assaulting women, but saying they let him because he’s a star. Yeah, a real role model for a country full of pickup truck driving gun owners who don’t need either.
It's their LACK OF SCIENCE. In the lab we perform experiments, we learn to obtain good data from bad, identify good data from bad, and do controlled experiments to prove good data from bad (be our own Devil's advocate). IF the experiment outcome is different than our hypothesis then we change our position and except the new outcome of the experiment.
Republicans double down on their position. Their psychological disorder (narcissist, sociopath) does not allow them this scientific train of thought.
The science minded can sort through and determine the truth.
Like all of Bernie Sanders' supporters, I watched with shock and horror as Bernie was being marginalized by the media during his run for President. Even news anchors like Rachel Maddow and those of NPR were doing it; Rachel made no bones about her support for Hillary Clinton. I was appalled then and still am because Bernie's message, which he repeated over and over, was so important - that the 1% had more wealth than the 99% - and that billionaires were buying political offices. He was the only one called for a living wage and for an end to laws and practices that have led us to this horrific economic imbalance. As soon as it became clear to the powers that be that Bernie's message was gaining traction, that he was becoming very popular, they worked their magic through the media to marginalize him. That was when I stopped watching CNN, NPR, MSNBC. I lost all trust in these so-called news organizations. They have become propaganda outlets. And our country has suffered the consequences.
It wasn't just the media's doing; the DNC played a major part in scheduling debates, etc.
Bernie addressed a Fox Town Hall (Hillary refused to do so) and, to the shock of the hosts, got a standing ovation. He could have beat Trump.
Now Biden is trying to turn the Democratic Party back to its working-class constituency, but the media largely ignores that to harp on his age. I fear they'd rather have Trump than an FDR Democrat--which is all the more reason we have to vote for Biden.
Even IF their rightwing corporatist ideologies were not at play in the major media's preference for SCUMp, YES, he makes them much more coin in actual viewership revenue (both from ads, and cable subscriptions) because his chaotic, abjectly BOMBASTIC, clown car shit show is perceived as much more 'screen addictive' and enthralling/'charismatic' <-LOFL! than "old boring" Biden to so many in this land, sadly, due to the effing 'reality show' demanding, popular(ist) mentality of our society.
Beam me up, Scotty (yeah, I know that Kirk never said that, but still). :(
"I lost all trust in these so-called news organizations. They have become propaganda outlets. And our country has suffered the consequences."
Yes. And your comment is a major factor in why our country is in such dire straits.
But, IMO, the simplest reason is that, regardless of religious affiliation, racism, aversion to the common good, people become Trumpists is that they are addicts to the drug of entertainment, distraction and false promises that Trump and his ilk continually scream about to drown out their own immoral, criminal behavior and lull so many into false complacence necessary to ignore their own foolishness.
And let's not forget that the aforementioned "news organizations" do not, in the first place, profit from spreading propaganda as such. Instead, they profit from perpetuating and catering to what you rightly describe as an addiction to entertainment and distraction. There'd be no entertainment/distraction in showing the Biden administration or the Democratic Party plodding along in these unexceptional and unexceptionable efforts on behalf of a working-class constituency. Instead, the entertainment/distraction lies in the crassness and violence of (for example) Trumpism, and that's why (in this instance) Trumpism gets so much media coverage. The solution, or the first step toward one, would be for serious, progressive-minded people to POPULARIZE (in this instance) those unexceptional and unexceptionable efforts on behalf of a working-class constituency until a critical mass of the latter group starts noticing what's going on.
I respectfully disagree. First and foremost the cable media profit from eyeballs. They profit from the advertisers profiting from the eyeballs - not from 'perpetuating and catering to what you rightly describe as an addiction to entertainment and distraction.'
Maureen and Sally---kudos for bringing out these points! Could not agree more. The DNC's tanking of Bernie's campaign merely proved to independents and progressives that the Dem establishment was NOT interested in helping the working class.
Absolutely! Could not agree more. Meanwhile, Dr. Reich and others of his persuasion bash anyone who considers third-party candidates. We're supposed to overlook all the Dems' shortcomings, plus the DNC's pandering to Big Corp, and vote blue. Otherwise, we're supporting "fronts" for the GOP, as Reich phrases it. That label, especially relative to the Greens, is completely unfair. Insulting, even.
This is a perfect example of why Trump and Bernie supporters are two sides of the same coin. "My guy wasn't getting traction. Those women were sticking together. Hillary had no qualifications. It's all a big media conspiracy." Journalists miss a lot. They make erroneous assumptions. They both-sides everything. Sometimes they are just lazy or self-righteous. I write about this a lot. There is no conspiracy. Throughout presidential campaigns there has been an outside candidate that doesn't win, but influences the conversation and subsequent legislation. Clinton - whom 538 noted was as liberal in the Senate as Elizabeth Warren - found it easier to talk about poverty and free college after Sanders paved the way.
I would also urge you to examine where you're "Bernie was slighted" anger came from. Because you would have been the perfect Cambridge Analytica/Russian Troll Farm target. You are, in fact, acting on the trolls' behalf with this comment. Russian wants nothing more than for people in the U.S. to lose confidence in the very systems that keep democracy alive.
I'm not sure I would say Bernie was "slighted"......I'm sure he knows that politics is a tough game. I often thought that he recognized he hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of becoming president, and that he was there to move the dialogue in a positive direction. I still maintain that no one has done more to move the political rhetoric to the left than Bernie has done.
Absolutely agree! Politics is incremental. The right knows that, and has been working since the '80s to change the discourse, and then benefit from our changed assumptions that small government is good, that fewer taxes for the rich is helpful to the economy, that college should coast a bagjillion dollars, and that we should treat each other badly. I loved that Bernie got in the race in 2015. Here was someone - finally - saying what we all know in our bones is the right way to govern. He gave Hillary cover to publicly moved to the left herself. We were going to change the conversation, get new assumptions. Sadly, the need for immediate gratification from many of his supporters elected Trump. And only now - with the guy none of us saw as a progressive - that both discourse and policy is starting to change.
wow....I feel like I got something right amidst years of getting lost in what happened to people who voted for Trump. (Not to nit pick, but I think you spelled budjillion wrong.)
Thank you! I witnessed the Bernie and Ron Paul show back in the day. After seeing that both campaigns were stopped, I’ve realized there’s a bigger agenda here at play:
Maybe you are correct (in Bernie being able to take down SCUMp).
I still believe that this land, as a whole (EVEN including many leftist, progressive liberals) is WAY, WAY, WAY TOO ANTI-SEMITIC to EVER elect a Jewish POTUS, even if they could bring themselves to pull that lever for an admitted socialist. :(
People should get educated on what happened in 1930's Nazi Germany..and then take a look at the agenda of the Christian Reich Wing, and Trump's Project 2025 plan to to do away with the checks and balances of the Legislative and Judiciary branches, and concentrate all power in the Executive branch..with a dictatorship.
Yup - my father’s generation sacrificed their lives to save us from what we have in Trump and his MAGA. I also believe that the Republican Party is a an accomplice to Trump's crimes and treason.
The issues that we are facing were long in play before Bernie Sanders was running for President. I always stated that Congress is the bigger player and we still get hooked on that THE Presidential candidate will fix it all! Maybe blame FOX news for getting a monopoly on cable and feeding the toxic propaganda. MSNBC or Rachel Maddow had nothing on the anger that FOX fed. Time to understand that. Again it did not matter who the DEM Presidential Candidate was-- Democrats did not see the looming monster at the gate who against all predictions won the 2016 election.
Well said. Without our orchestrated economic inequalities, many other social tensions, such as race, gender, and political ideology would be much less severe. But until the 1% understands that presiding over Brazil 2.0 is actually not in their long-term interest, we will continue our national descent. Predictably, they are showing no signs whatsoever of realizing that a prosperous middle-class will actually make them safer and more powerful. Instead, they persist in choosing razor wire and private security in return for relatively modest gains in short-term profit. Ethics aside, it's remarkably stupid.
EVERYTHING they do is short sighted, as if the very next microsecond is ALL that matters at all to them.
Somehow, they are delusional enough to really believe that THEY will be able to survive under air conditioned domes, with endless supplies of fossil fuels powering said big city sized air conditioners, without a total violent physical revolt by those they leave outside to perish.
Yes, yes the bald brazen truth which silently underlies all the political turmoil. In the past 40 years the oligarchs have stolen the country and made bank. They used the Republican Party and the Supreme Court to do it and the vast number of Americans are feeling the pain. The Republicans now divert their attention from how they are screwed with a focus on "values" issues.
The oligarchs also used the Democratic Party's shift to neoliberalism from Clinton to Obama to steal the country and its wealth: creating free trade agreements, destroying unions, lowering tariffs, and exporting jobs.
Biden is the first Democratic President since LBJ to care about the working class, to support unions, and to try to restore domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately, Trump got to them first with his pretense of caring for them and won the loyalty of many of them, and, because Biden was Obama's VP, they find it easy to believe Trump's lies that Biden is no different from Obama and the Clintons..
In my opinion, as a far leftist, Biden is even worse than Clinton and Obama. Failure to prosecute the GOP leaders and the insurrection for several years makes Biden an accomplice. Biden should have fired Garland immediately. It cost the Democrats control of the Congress and supreme Court and allows the dictatorship to proceed. Biden does not use his bully pulpit to point out what a dictatorship is. No gun rights, no minimum wage, no freedom of speech, the subjects can be tortured, killed, and poisoned with pollution... The rich owned news media never ever mentions this either. It is a big elephant in the room nobody speaks of! TV celebrities getting charged with rape is all the news is good for nowadays.
Bob Johnson, Biden and Garland have been BUSY! Busy cleaning up Trump’s mess & all he unraveled. Biden came in on a PANDEMIC which made our country & economy suffer. He strengthened our economy, our allies (which Trump alienated), supported infrastructure, strengthened NATO, fighting for our Democracy by aiding the Ukrainian war, etc., etc. He has done very well as a President.
Garland has been busy prosecuting over a thousand insurrectionists, Trump SUPPORTERS. Because he did so, Trump got little showing when he called for his “supporters” for his first indictment...or his second or third. I lost track.
Garland was smart in appointing Jack Smith who is demonstrating his capabilities. If you notice, all the dominos are strategically lined up and about to fall.
Yes, but think about how much further along we would be if a Jack Smith 'type' was in charge of the DoJ instead of Garland. ;)
Of course, merely by appointing someone that systematically aggressive to head the department Biden would be accused of going after his "political enemies" by the fascists, but they are doing that ANYWAY, so what do the 'visuals' even matter anymore?!?
Going after the little fish, the peasants, instead of the organizers in the backers, for several years, letting them get reelected and bankrupt the nation, is a failure in my book. Now Biden protecting the economy for the
Future oligarchs, maybe why the Koch brother wants a different GOP oligarch leader, they now realize what a grifter Trump is ,and they can't trust him.
Biden is constrained by Congress. If the Dems take the House AND the Senate, he can do a lot more. Plus the filibuster needs to go along with the electoral college. And the Supreme Court needs house cleaning.
Bob Johnson ; Isn't the Executive branch supposed to stay out of the DOJ? How is a president supposed to "prosecute the GOP leaders and the insurrection for several years"?
You also have to understand that Biden had only a few choices in terms of priorities - his first was to get the economy working for the people who needed jobs, and to try & get away from the intense divisions we are in - he wants a more civil discourse. That won't make those screaming for indictments happy, but it is Step ONE towards normality, and indictments are in process by DOJ (finally). I believe that there was a long pause in the investigations for 2 reasons - firstly the DOJ (Chris Wray) did not want to do any of it because it was so political (often their own guys?) and so they waited....secondly they were hoping normalcy would take over & it could all be shoved under the rug, and nobody would remember - it was all too awful to contemplate what might happen to the country if pursued. But eventually they realized they HAD to take it on, and here we are - bit by bit - it is all pouring out into the daylight ! None of that was Biden's doing - he stayed out of it DELIBERATELY so they cannot accuse him of anything.
Bidens job is to protect America from all threats foreign and domestic and if he can't do that is incompetent! But I will still vote for him to try to save democracy and socialism. I will vote for the lesser of two evils again.
Also,Jack Smith who was head of the Public Integrity Unit was working at the Hague in the Netherlands on I believe a Kosova matter,hence some of the delay,also after that he had a bad motorcycle accident.
I believe that Bob is inferring that by firing hand-wringing, nebbish Garland, and putting a vicious PITBULL in his place instead might have sped up the prosecutions, or even the START of prosecutions 100 fold.
The 4th REICH NAZIS are going to SCREAM "leftist Deep State weaponization", and "political persecution/election interference" REGARDLESS of how removed Biden is or seems to be from such, so I see his point. :)
I wouldn't say "worse." I doubt Clinton or Obama would have done any of the above. At least Biden is pro-union, a bit environmentalist, and trying to restore US manufacturing--not much, but better than nothing--and better than Clinton or Obama.
Biden would have been crucified if he did that. I don't think Garland intended to do anything. If it wasn't for the January 6 committee, it wouldn't have happened but Biden can't afford to get involved and make it appear he is persecuting his opponents. If he fired Garland, it's unlikely he'd get anyone else successfully nominated.
Ol' Grover has been somewhat quiet lately, maybe because he has figured out that the (now) 'Muricun NAZI Party he supported so vociferously in the past will come for his wife if given unfettered power??
Correct ! The whole "abortion!" screaming fiasco is the prime motivator that has the ignorant getting all hot under the collar, while not recognizing that those with the funds can do whatever they want to do if they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy ! How many top CEO's do they think actually care about such things ?
Hey Jeoffry, I’d argue that the oligarchs started this even before the last 40 years. I’d go back to after the civil war and the installation for the federal reserve. That was when the ideology that was America fell
I would argue the idea that the rich should rule, goes back thousands of years. Our past has been paid with human blood and suffering. The churches and the rich like to keep the masses ignorant and insane so they can be blamed.
When it comes to the rich, I include them in my book. and here is one example as to how they built our current world (how billionaires "donated" to our world):
For background, I'm finishing up my book where I discussed these topics and more. Here's the site if interested - I should be done in the next month or so
Thing is there IS a difference between those who are educated & generally prosperous & those who are bottom level, sometimes not very bright & poor, and the bottom level has zero ATTRACTION for those who reside above that level - they see what that level looks like & it produces a 'yuck' reaction in most people. Now that is not fair of course since those bottom level people are not there by their own choice, and often are because of the advantages taken by the higher ups, but that is understood only by a few free thinkers. I can see things from both sides - I was fortunate enough to get chosen for one of the top girls schools in London, wore a fancy uniform the only one who did in my neighborhood, and learnt all the advantages of the snooty attitude of others at the school & assumed I was going to be successful at whatever I did ! I generally was so, and still have a good attitude to attack life, but I also know how the working class background of others in my area made them incapable of the same attack, since they spent a lot of time moaning about how unfair life was to them ! THAT is how they become doomed from an early age - life is tough, and without an attack mode you get nowhere ! THAT is why there are some kids who, even without the advantages I had, can see how to get ahead & do it all by themselves - it's entirely confidence & sheer guts that does it !
David G Hinkes, recently, someone in my community struck up a conversation with me and based on the fact that we looked of similiar heritage, she motioned to me and said, "our ancestors were immigrants here right, but they made it and were successful because they worked hard." I agreed that they worked hard but I told her that regular people did not make much progress until beginning in the 1930's with FDR's programs and policies, like welfare, jobs programs, workers's rights, social security, etc. She conceded. Perhaps to just be polite, but I hope my countering thoughts made a difference, even a small one.
I think the answer is simple. The USA is unique in the western world in not having a a two party system divided on left/righjt wing lines. The USA has succesfully made socialistic policies non acceptable. There is no non capitalistic alernative to offer a counter balance in which each keeps the other in check. This leaves the working classes in the USA as easy prey for populists, racists and conspiracy theory mongers. They have nowhere else to go.
When the Dems were seduced by the corporatists and bankers we slid into this mess. Bernie might have saved us, or not, but it would have been worth the fight.
I like many of Bernie's ideas. Too bad that he didn't win the primary and also that Al Gore was aced out of the Presidency by the Supreme Court. The most logical reason that we didn't get either one of them, or Hillary either, was because of all the dark money that the Supreme Court allowed into elections from the Citizens United decision. The Supreme Court is doing as much damage to this nation as the R's in Congress. Joe is doing a great job, considering who he has to work with.
I believe the DNC had their delegates loaded with special electors. These people were not elected in the primaries. Pretty sure it was those delegates that torpedoed Bernie. I also believe the DNC has changed this part of the system going forward. Were those special delegates enticed or chosen so that Bernie could not win? Don't know.
Furthermore, in countries with 2 party parliamentary systems, third parties can hold the balance of power when there is minority government or multiple parties can form a coalition government; in either case, the smaller parties can force the dominant party to consider the needs of their constituents.
In the US system, all a third party can do is siphon off votes from one or both of the dominant parties.
Michael Fewster ; Our media have few stories showing how the rich already have a form of socialism ; They get most of the wealth that is produced while workers barely keep a roof over their heads, have to go without health care, and generally struggle more and more every day.
Down here in Australia we do have a left / right situation but the left are being seduced into thinking that being a Lite version of the Right will work. It doesn't !!!!!!!!! The Right are now quite weak but let no one run around with the idea that they've gone away. They haven't and never will !!! They are just re-grouping for the next assault
The R's are great at re-defining the meaning of words to make them into the opposite of their original meaning. Like "entitlement" to mean "leaching off the state" instead of it's real meaning of "a payment out of a system into which you and your employer(s) contributed in order to guarantee a decent retirement, or in case of disability which disables you from working for a living." There are more caveats than I have listed, but hopefully you get the picture. Also, "deep state" which is the imaginary bugaboo which did not allow drumpf and his ilk to make the kinds of "progress" he would have liked or which he and they had no intention of trying to cure any of the current things that were/are wrong in this nation. That means anything from plague to economic disparity to crumbling infrastructure.
White men are drawn to Trump because he gets to be the bad boy that they always wanted to be, but didn’t have the guts to. They love his demeaning ways, so much so that they have invested part of their own identities into his success.
The dots can’t get any closer together, but to actually connect them is to say that over the last eight years of their lives they’ve been played the fool and been proud of it
I’ve never been drawn to a coward and a liar. He got elected because the D’s organization was bought and paid for by Hillary people. The Imelda, Marcos of American politics.
They also LOVE that their putrid orange fuehrer ALWAYS gets away with any and all crimes he commits as well.
Whereas they know that for the most part, THEY would not be able to skate the same way, save for whatever leniency or benefit their lily-whiteness/'Christianity', and CIS maleness 'entitles' them to get.
I don't believe it is a coincidence that tRump rose to power right on the heels of Barack Obama. The core of the groups that became the MAGAT movement became terrified that "They" were taking over. The MAGATs were easy prey for someone like tRump that sensed he could exploit them; aided and abetted by morally challenged Republicans that were so desperate to regain power that they were more than willing to sell their souls to a worthless example of humanity like tRump. Lord help us: we still have 14 months until the general election and four separate trials that tRump is no doubt planning to turn into a circus.
The terrified white backlash was definitely a factor in SCUMp's ascent, even despite the ones who point out that there were many MAGAt voters who also pulled the lever for Obama's terms as well (I STILL do not believe it was as many as were claimed, regardless of the 'math' ;) ).
I would add going to college is expensive; the debt incurred and repayment of loans during the years they would be trying to build a family and future. Also ending company funded pensions in favor of self generated IRAs for old age was also a factor.
So they think they're getting screwed, but they vote for someone who's going to screw them. Even further. Makes no sense to me except that they don't seem to have the sense to figure it out.
They all 'accuse' US 'libtards' of being all about, and totally controlled by our feelings.
But that is EXACTLY what the rightwing media, and the fascist pols are using to appeal to, control, and brainwash them into voting against their very own EXISTENCE, as; hatred, paranoia, FEAR, 'othering', etc. are also 'feelings', albeit very negative ones. ;)
I was astounded to read recently that US median wealth (net worth) is lower than Spain’s. Naturally, the same is not true about mean wealth because all the billionaires bring up the average. American inequality will spell the death of its democracy.
“Last June, after being charged with retaining government secrets, he told a Republican gathering in Michigan: ‘I’m being indicted for you.’ On August 3, the day of his indictment for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, he posted, in all caps, ‘I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU.’ A week later, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, he said, ‘They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.’”
If all of that sounds familiar, it should: Trump is playing Christ-as-martyr, merely refashioning the concept of Jesus’s dying for the world’s sins in his own image, for his own purposes. A lot of his target audience is attuned to exactly that sort of claim, and it’s Trump’s calculation that he is the opiate of these masses.
More concretely, a great deal of the disaffection Bob talks about can be traced back to globalization, though even before GATT was ever formulated, let alone put into effect, advances in air and sea travel made the exporting of goods cheaper and more efficient. Generations ago, when the great majority of what the U.S. was consumed in the U.S., it was in employers’ interest to pay their workers well because the more money workers had, the more they’d spend on the manufacturers’ wares. But ship most of it overseas, for foreign customers to buy, and there’s no incentive to pay workers a penny more than absolutely necessary.
In effect, American employers have rewritten the old Communist slogan into From each according to his abilities, to each according to OUR needs.
I grew up listening to my Dad, a staunch Democrat and my Uncle, a staunch Republican, arguing with each other. They loved each other deeply. My way of putting their politics into words was: Democrats and Republicans want the same going for our country: A good life for all.
However, it seems, now, as if many Republicans want to build a wall around what they have, to keep anyone else .
Marilyn Klerx-Hardie, yes I agree. I would add that many it seems, though not all, want to harm others or neglect their suffering to justify their delusions of grandeur and feelings of separateness from others.
I agree, however I don't think that I am qualified to diagnose "delusions of grandeur." I like the simplicity of your "feelings of separateness from others." The first...(excuse me..
Please) makes me want to turn away. The second invites me to engage in discussion. I try to police myself to avoid escalating the sad division today. Do you agree?
Marilyn Klerx-Hardie, if sometime in the future you notice my attempt at making those words not counterproductive and more fleshed out, I would be interested to know how they land with you. Thanks!
Marilyn Klerz-Hardie, thank you for pointing out how the words "delusions of grandeur" landed with you and that you find them to be counterproductive to evoking conversation. I will think on that and perhaps be able to find some replacement words for the concept or some words to flesh out how I define the concept and believe it fits.
They identify with Trump, they like Trump, they are just like Trump, Narcissists and Sociopaths.
It's their personality, that is why they migrate to the Republican party, they see the others that are just like them. The Republican wolf-pack mentality, they all obey the top dog no matter what, 100% absolute loyalty. If the Devil were a Republican running for office, they would vote for him as that would be "their guy."
Thus, it is their psychological disorder - educated or not.
> > > This is what we are up against:
“10 signs for spotting a sociopath – Warning signs:”
“Sociopaths are masters are presenting themselves as heroes with high morals and philosophy, yet underneath it they are the true criminal minds in society who steal, undermine, deceive, and often incite emotional chaos among entire communities. They are masters at turning one group of people against another group while proclaiming themselves to be the one true savior. Wherever they go, they create strife, argument and hatred, yet they utterly fail to see their own role in creating it. They are delusional at so many levels that their brains defy logical reasoning.”
“#1) Sociopaths are charming. Sociopaths have high charisma and tend to attract a following just because people want to be around them. They have a "glow" about them that attracts people who typically seek guidance or direction.
“#2) Sociopaths are more spontaneous and intense than other people. They tend to do bizarre, sometimes erratic things that most regular people wouldn't do. They are unbound by normal social contracts. Their behavior often seems irrational or extremely risky.”
“#3) Sociopaths are incapable of feeling shame, guilt or remorse. Their brains simply lack the circuitry to process such emotions. This allows them to betray people, threaten people or harm people without giving it a second thought. They pursue any action that serves their own self interest even if it seriously harms others.”
“#4) Sociopaths invent outrageous lies about their experiences. They wildly exaggerate things to the point of absurdity, but when they describe it to you in a storytelling format, for some reason it sounds believable at the time.”
“#5) Sociopaths seek to dominate others and "win" at all costs. They hate to lose any argument or fight and will viciously defend their web of lies, even to the point of logical absurdity.”
“#6) Sociopaths tend to be highly intelligent, but they use their brainpower to deceive others rather than empower them. Their high IQs often makes them dangerous. This is why many of the best-known serial killers who successfully evaded law enforcement were sociopaths.”
“#7) Sociopaths are incapable of love and are entirely self-serving. They may feign love or compassion in order to get what they want, but they don't actually FEEL love in the way that you or I do.”
“#8) Sociopaths speak poetically. They are master wordsmiths, able to deliver a running "stream of consciousness" monologue that is both intriguing and hypnotic. They are expert storytellers and even poets.”
“#9) Sociopaths never apologize. They are never wrong. They never feel guilt. They can never apologize. Even if shown proof that they were wrong, they will refuse to apologize and instead go on the attack.”
“#10) Sociopaths are delusional and literally believe that what they say becomes truth merely because they say it! “
Up until quite recently, I looked down on MAGA Trump supporters with the same disdain. I have even likened them to ‘brain dead zombies’, my words.
But I think I now understand these Americans. These people feel they have been forgotten and overlooked by their government for decades. They have.
They have been brainwashed by listening to conservative media lie to them and misdirect the blame from where it belongs, our government’s longstanding policies, onto minorities and immigrants and the left and LGBTQ community.
Our government, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat administrations, prioritizes and serves the interests and agendas of the elites, billionaires and corporations, and does just the barest minimum, and only when compelled, to help individual hardworking Americans.
Both political parties have largely ignored the needs of the people in favor of accommodating their respective wealthy mega donors. This has been the case for decades. But since 1996 when Fox News first began its daily disinformation and misdirection propaganda, their viewers have become radicalized over the 28 years of exposure to the conservative lies the right propagates nightly and daily.
Donald Trump merely capitalized on their resentment, the dissatisfaction of those Americans for his own political gain. And because he is charismatic, he has gotten away with it.
I grew up in NYC where Trump was based, and although his father was a KKK supporter, Trump used to be for a time a liberal who financially supported the Democratic party long ago. Even back then, the man who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal” was commonly viewed by many New Yorkers as a con man. So I was not surprised, that he reverted to his father’s ultra right wing conservatism as he grew older.
But Trump, whatever one might say about him, understands his base. So much so, that they were ready “to fight like hell” for him on January 6, 2021, to storm the capitol and ‘hang Mike Pence’. So much so, that they overlook Trump’s actual ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ and are now even more committed to discarding true democracy altogether and enthusiastically supporting Trump’s stated vision for authoritarianism and autocracy, if re-elected
I mention all this, (and I hope you will read this in its entirety, Dr. Reich. Because the Democrats could, (I submit it is at least very possible for the Democrats,) if they were so inclined, to steal Maga voters from the GOP in the next election.
There’s no way MAGA Trump supporters would vote for Biden. (Frankly, nor will I.) However, they could be persuaded by a Democratic candidate who would really address their needs and concerns AND provide and be ready to vigorously defend, intelligent workable progressive solutions in a manner that everyone could easily understand.
That person is not Joe Biden, unfortunately. But there are many Democrats who would make persuasive, charismatic, populist candidates who would restore unity and faith to the American people in their government on both sides of the political divide, IF they were genuinely and sufficiently committed and motivated to fight to better the lives of “regular Americans”.
Please forgive the rudeness of idiots. (Maureen) The DNC is the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party of the United States. One of its major duties is to fund the election campaigns of those it approves of. Without that financial backing, a candidate would have the nearly impossible task of financing his or her own campaign. Thank you, Ms. Stokes, for your interest and encouragement. 💐
but my point is that if we focus on our local polices and towns and we take back our local communities, we can stop the chain of the top influencing the bottom.
You can't take back local communities without local independent media and the money to run ordinary local citizens against candidates with an agenda and the money from up the chain. I know there are a few cases that are successful, just as there are a few civil rights law suits that are successful. That makes it appear that the system works when it actually doesn't for the masses.
I agree with you that true change comes from a bottom-up approach; the right-wing realized that and have been working at taking over every local and state institution institution since the 1980s, while the Democrats focused on the national level.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't vote at the national level, too, especially in 2024, because if Trump and the fascist oligarchs backing him win, there may never be another election in America--not even for dog-catcher--and the chance to work on organizing from the bottom up may be gone. Even if it isn't, it's going to take another 40 years to work our way up, so ignoring national level politics while we do it could doom us.. The right wing didn't do as well as they have by ignoring ANY level of government.
And his MAGAt brownshirt 'army' will loyally work for him and do whatever he tells them to do, even if they are cognizant enough to realize that fact, and that they themselves will eventually get 'thrown under the bus' by him, since he is their worshiped 'god-savior', and they all think he deserves that dedication and devotion. :(
They idiotically fuel and feed his psychotic narcissism at their very own expense and existence.
I am still searching for the reason why well-educated, intelligent, and well-off Americans with seemingly good moral character continue to support an obviously immature, narcissistic sociopath. Is it really just lower taxes and racism? Opposition to abortion? Some kind of hidden, irrational fear of socialism, Antifa, diversity? Are they acting out their evangelical fantasies? I honestly do not recognize these people anymore, they've become zombified by a virus.
I think that those well-educated, intelligent, and well-off Americans with seemingly good moral character constitute only a tiny fraction of MAGATs.
Anecdotally, I know a few. When I speak to them, it becomes clear that they are as tribal in their own way as the vast majority of MAGATs who vote against their own economic and physical well being.
Those people aren't evangelicals, and some are even Jewish. I ask them how they can ally themselves with white supremacists. Universally they deny that Trump supports them despite evidence to the contrary. When I get a chance, I ask whether they donate? Whether they are aware of the scams, like Trump U. Trump Family Charity? Trump defense fund?
It's disappointing that they see Trump as important, considering he is charged in 4 sperate jurisdictions with 91 counts. Most see him as a victim, despite knowing he was found liable of sexual crimes and that he is a serial liar. Most accuse Democrats of the same.
I agree with Robert, but I also think most Republican support is cultural.. Hatred of "the other." I am dismissed as a member of the "deep state."
Here's a message from yesterday: "I suspect George Soros the leader of Totalitarianism everyone elite and all of Washington money grabbing. Dont forget the NWO we are in a world of shit They say it is a spiritual battle my sword is drawn God save us is my cry ".
The person who sent it knows I am Jewish, and that I was an administrative law judge. She probably was one of my brother's clients. I think many people have a cultural predisposition to demagoguery, Jung called it the collective racist subconscious. I estimate that about 20% of the general population is so afflicted.
Where I live, we also have another 20% who are proto Fascists. They seek a "caudillo", a leader in the mold of Francisco Franco, Juan Peron, Simon Bolivar, and more particularly, Fulgencio Batista. Hatred of all Democrats is a legacy.
Yes, I know those people you describe, too. However, we cannot give up. Hope IS alive. The common good and a type of “golden rule” exists in every religion and culture. We are likely going to see hydrogen energy sooner rather than later. We must all hold on, Daniel! Hope and hard work through 2024!
I'm waiting to find the escape valve into the wormhole in space.
I think that we have the demographics, and that we can out register and outvote them nationally. In Ohio, the state supreme court, wiffed on expanding the voting map yesterday. The entire Ohio Republican Party has been implicated in corruption, the ex- party chair is in jail. People like Gym Jordan should be investigated, as he is still in contempt of the past Congress. According to Navarro's book, about another 3 or 4 were part of the Green Bay sweep.
I think that in the south, Democrats have been remiss in finding a second coming of Jimmy Carter. The social gospel is the Democrats' pathway to getting support from even those cultural warriors lost to abortion, gays, guns and God.
Daniel Soloman, my heart warmed at "a second coming of Jimmy Carter". Thank you! I agree that the heart is the path. Awaken it and they will come.
Marianne Williamson has a lot of heart and love in her presidential campaign.
I just don't think that many Americans will ever buy what she's selling. Loving one another is impossible for most of us; we can barely abide ourselves and our families, much less people who look, act, think, and speak very differently from ourselves. We haven't evolved enough to swing that; worse, we may be stuck here. You can't realistically expect a hairless ape to become angelic.
The presidency also requires enormous knowledge and political skill. That is why Biden has succeeded (when he has).
Betty Tabony, I am only slightly familiar with her words, but she seems to. We need many, many, more candidates geniunely speaking from the heart,
Williams unfortunately is another spoiler that no one, and I mean no one, should ever vote for. If she runs and if other third party candidates run one has to remember their spoilers not candidates.
If she runs as a 3rd party candidate, I think it weakens Joe Biden's chances, consequently, puts MAGA in the White House. What do your think Betty?
Also it's obvious,we need a major mindset change in our beloved nation.I just pray about it.
No, let's not pray, let's just do something about it.
Yes! it's the change in our perception. We are looking through a glass darkly.
"I think that in the south, Democrats have been remiss in finding a second coming of Jimmy Carter. "
Raphael Warnock has entered the chat.
Not the same.
Perhaps, but I do think he's evidence of the kind of potential Dr. King recognized.
Yes, Daniel the Ohio gerrymandering has meant disaster here. Nonetheless, wormhole or not (ha!), we can’t just give up. Getting Biden re-elected has to be THE paramount focus, and that means leaving no “flank” unguarded or uncontested, and register voters and recruit younger people. We have a lot of awful people fouling up our state, and a lot of gems (like former Gov Dick Celeste) working hard to bring Ohio forward again.
I like the thought, but doubt we'll see another Jimmy Carter; he was one of kind and I always admired him - even still.
The Ohio Supreme Court didn't "wiff on" the voting map, if that cheers you at all--the plaintiffs asked that their cases be dismissed. See the Washington Post:
"The Democrats and voting rights advocates who filed the complaints last March had both requested on Tuesday that the Supreme Court dismiss their cases: Neiman v. LaRose and League of Women Voters of Ohio v. LaRose.
"In the petition to have their cases dismissed, the plaintiffs wrote that, even if a newly redrawn map were to correct all of the deficiencies of the one used in 2022, it would be an expensive and lengthy process that would leave Ohio residents in limbo for at least several more months.
"For all of these reasons, given that the [2022 map] is at least a partial remedy, and given the substantial costs and uncertainty that further litigation would entail, Petitioners have decided to no longer pursue their challenge,” the plaintiffs wrote. 'They strongly believe this is the best result under the circumstances for the people of Ohio who deserve certainty about the congressional map that they will be voting under in this cycle, at the very least.'”
That's a BS rationalization if I ever heard one.
God knows the Republicans have money for everything else! This is disgusting!
Dave Chapelle lives in Ohio and I think he should run for office there. He would be a good one to call out DT. While I don’t appreciate his raunchy version of satire, his philosophical satire cuts through hypocrisy.
I can see your point, but can't share your enthusiasm--many of my friends in Ohio, where I grew up and my family still lives, are gay or trans, and he's consistently on record as not-their friend. Plus now engaging his millions trying to stop Yellow Springs (the college town where he has a home) from building affordable housing near him. Brilliant comedian though.
America has answered the question - What happens when there are no jobs?☢️
Hoping
And that "hope" being alive is due to remembering the Golden Rule in its thousands of formulations from throughout all time. At our gallery we have partnered with the Golden Rule project for over 25+ years. This project provides free materials (posters, story cards, passport booklets) to schools and various groups in Utah. It is pondering and engaging this common principle that has to potential to create peace, justice for the future of all life on planet Earth. If any of you wish to share these materials we can provide them.
i agree with you but realize that this ideal is so foreign and obtuse to the conservative segment of America that it can only be a dream and a goal for now.
Daniel, I remember something from college and a 1965 movie that has always stuck with me. It is a conversation from Ship of Fools. Blaming all the misfortunes in the world on the Jews the reply "that is right, the bicycle riders and the the Jews. ?But why the bicycle riders? reply ?Why the Jews?
I don't remember much more about the movie but that short conversation has always stuck and been reinforced over years. Working to help poor whites in the mountains of West Virginia with a youth group "hate like they were Black". Total disrespect for a qualified Black electrician by a white engineer in our Tennessee plant. Working around the world of with hate for "those people, others". Hate does almost always stem from our own failures.
I wish I could say I didn't hate Trump but I really do hate him for all the damage he has done to the USA and the world.
Katherine Anne Porter, author of Ship of Fools, was actually an antisemite. 'https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/16/books/rediscoveries-the-angel-of-malignity-the-cold-beauty-of-katherine-anne-porter.html
Ship of Fools* is based on sea voyage she actually took in 1931 from Mexico to Germany. It then took her 20 years to write this novel based on her experience. She probably knew her subjects well, and the movie version was well done, but I remember the disdain she had for Jewish writers.
Maybe she figured out how to turn hate into money.
Maybe by dedicating her skill as a creative writer to telling a true story she surpassed her own ordinary everyday constraints on her consciousness. Racism is a blight on social consciousness and a detriment to society. Sometimes, if they are true to their subject matter, artists surpass themselves and find something that resonates in us all despite their mean, limited, unexamined belief system. I don’t hate it when that happens. But I understand that creating art and literature can evoke the ground of shared humanity, peace, love and understanding that does not belong to the artist. The end result can stand on its own. even if ugly it can tell us something true about ourselves.Human beings are messy and complicated. Give credit for honest effort and the result. Was she a good writer besides being a bad person? Can we say she is a bad person because she is a bad example of a human being? I am an imperfect human who occasionally thinks that even as I squint towards peace love and understanding. One resists rewarding bad behavior. Does that mean rejecting good art, or technology for that matter, when attached to a hideous human? Should Elon Musk be allowed to control the technology he sells to governments? Keep the technological advances. After all , we paid for it from inception. How do you constrain the deranged all powerful evil brat that is Elon and put him back in his place before he destroys civilization? Fascinating comic book villain, only he’s a real person. And yeh, he is an antisemite. What a cliché villain.
Learn something new every day. I knew nothing of the authors history. Remarkable that something from 50 plus years ago can stick with you and likely not what the author intended.
It’s a joke.
Blaming the “bicycle riders” who are nobody and anybody showed how ridiculous blaming “the Jews” is.
That’s how I took it anyway.
To sum up your eloquent mini essay: IT'S A CULT.
in a nutshell, that is true. but what drew the cultists to him? racism, bigotry, fear, ignorance?
All of the above.
Daniel Soloman,, I agree. In the Maga, there is a strong disconnection from the totality of all human beings, hence the violence toward others.
they are out for themselves. care nothing for others
. D = we. R = me.
Playing the Martyr card! He got arrested and should pay for his nonsense! The man has absolutely no clue and never did!
It’s an epidemic of magical thinking.
My one hope is that they are more noisy and less numerous than we think….
I know we’ve seen them vote for him. How much can we put down to the fear of “socialism” or “communism” in the form of despotic leaders like Putin? Or greed {if the educated among his followers are somewhat successful, maybe they’re afraid of leeching hoards of poor people … }
I don’t know. The “Trump Phenomenon” feels like he made a crossroads deal with the Devil … {but I don’t believe in the the Devil}.
These people know he's done nothing for them.This is a mind control cult and they need to be aware of it.He manipulates their heads w/ a vibe.Watch him clap at those rallies.Has any other candidate had these issues,so much in question and spoken the way he does? 'I;m being arrested for you,what kind of drek is that?
I think there are cultists, but there are more who are susceptible to peer pressure.
Even I usually root for the underdog.
Shared your assessment - except perhaps one quibble re the term "cultural."
"Hatred of the other" is a manufactured phenomenon - not a cultural structure. The creation of "other" can be a component of a culture (esp when it comes to linguistics, as tribal groups generate their own internal lingo...with notions like NWO attaining mythological meaning, less as a concept, more as a form of "I belong to this group and you don't"). But that doesn't HAVE to be hateful...just distinctive.
I quibble on this point, because many of the authoritarians exploited "othering" and then manufacturing hate to go after enemies - but outsiders may misunderstand the agenda and approach, conflating the outcome with the process.
The GOP has no problem with "a free press" - rather, they have a problem with "disloyal" press. That is, they like people they buy and pay for who say what they're paid to say.
The GOP has no problem with science - private equity financiers would love to know exactly what real estate is gonna flood ahead of time, and then know exactly which buyers are stupid enough to reject climate change and buy housing with inadequate protection. It's the 21st century equivalent to trading swampland in Florida. It'll end up the same way.
The GOP has no problem with Jewish people (look who Ivanna married!) or with Muslim people (Dr. Oz!) or with Black people (Herschel Walker! Herman Cain! Clarence Thomas!). Rather, they have a problem with any of them that may be disloyal to the financial interests behind the party. A judge who can't be bought is a threat. A doctor who cannot be coopted or kickbackef is a threat. All professionals who perform professionally - rather than following partisan orders - must be punished and disciplined. Disobey, and you will be forced to use Rudy Giuliani's makeup artist and scheduling assistant.
I think this is an important quibble, because if Fascist or authoritarian or other tendencies could become cultural, then the only solution might be to destroy and rebuild that culture. But if the problem is people abusing culture by injecting hatred into it - perhaps we can find ways to take the profit from doing so away from them, and then get the dangers they present to subside.
Tell it to Herr Jung. He evaluated his own volk, Teutons.
Education works. So does divine grace. This not my province but the tax collector (Roman deep state) was on his way to Damascus when... SHAZZAM!
Lol, if Herr Jung couldn't straigjten out Teutons, what chance have we?
Education MAY work - but consider polling numbers about Americans who believe in Darwin...actually, consider how US beliefs about evolution track (remember twice as many white people migrated our of the South as Black people during each of the Great Migrations). And then cross reference that with beauty pageants (do we know anyone who used to own one?) - there's still a video on YouTube from when 47 or so of the 48 Miss USA contestants suggested that kids should learn "both sides" when learning education. (Way I see it, Trump's people paid more attention to those numbers - and other attributes of the contestants - than they did to Bannon or any other theorist).
Ask a Texan why Texas declared independence from Mexico - each will tell you that Mexico intruded on their rights. How many will tell you WHICH "property" rights infuriated them the most?
We think of "education" as K-12 and universities - but given the extent of the stubborn anti-Darwinian Americans, perhaps we'd best add in institutionalized "dis-education" - someone, somewhere is undoing the work of hundreds of thousands of biology teachers. If we don't know where and how, we may focus on resolving one serious problem and overlook a much more serious one (as most Weimar Germans did, noting the threat of the Comintern, but never recognizing that there might be worse emerging from their midst...).
I'm a lifelong Liberal who moved to the mountains, mostly for the isolation, the beauty, the fresh air and with hopes of living among less angry, less violent, and more neighborly people, and so, as it happened, I live in a very red part of the country as well. Over the past 20 years or so living here, I've managed to find it in my heart to befriend my Republican neighbors, and even some devout MAGA people, and what I've learned, and was surprised to learn, is that they just aren't what I expected them to be. I've also found out that they aren't anything like what most of my Democratic friends think they are like, at all.
First, and contrary to perhaps the most profound of these imagined differences, is that they aren't any less intellegent than any other segement of the working people I've met, and I've traveled this country, extensively.
Second, the majority of them don't even follow our politics, much less go to or even watch, tfg's rallies. They know about him, and have and will continue to vote for him, but they mostly will do so because of the fact that they watch Fox News for 15 minutes per day. Most of all though, they just don't want to be involved. They're as sick of the hatred and division as anybody else. They're sick of being lied to. They're exhausted from working endless gadam hours for "bullshit pay", and they know well that tomorrow will just bring more of the same. As will the next, and the next.
As Robert suggests, and as I've found out through my travels, todays working Republicans are not people of the North or the South, or rural or urban, or smart or stupid, they are mostly people who, for one reason or another, and like myself, were simply unable to make their way to places of higher learning, and so have suffered this decline in earnings, and into perpetual and always increacing -worry-. A similar percentage of the Democrats I know, are in exactly the same boat. Some of us were not even able to finish high school, due to the facts of their own lives. Some had to go directly to work after HS due to illness in their families among many other reasons; some just hated school due to their inability to perform well there, for a myriad of personal and/or psychological reasons, or problems, but that does not mean that they are of low IQ. By and large, they are not. They are every bit as intelligent as Democrats are, full stop.
In many cases, their parents weren't able to continue their own education because their own parents had no idea as to how to get there, and so had no idea as to how to teach their own kids, our current MAGA crowd included, the benefits of or even the basics regarding how to prepare themselves, for college. In their own families, college was and still often is, simply a thing for other people, but not for those in their own, extended, families.
Imagine if you will, that no one at all in your own extended family, ever went to college. You may well grow up thinking that that is simply the norm, that it is just fine to plan to leave HS, and then go and find a job, even though you are plenty smart enough to make your way through college. For most Americans, imagination here, is unessesary, it is just how it is.
For generations, we did just that, and as such, we've been the backbone of our nations' economy, but as Robert points out, and as many people here still seem to be missing, that option has become less and less and then still less, successful, for us, the working class, of Americans as time has gone by.
So we've been changing, due to this change, this downward spiral in our own ability to succeed, our own ability to properly raise a family, when our parents and grandparents were obviously, more able to do that, and so we've become more and more -worried-, every day and all day long, about our own ability to do that properly, and then, as more time has passed, to do that, at all.
So my current neighbors, and in fact all of the working people I've known over the past 50 years, have -WORried-, all day, and every day of our lives, about our own families, what their futures might be and then, as time has passed, if we'll even be able to FEEd them properly, or put roofs over their heads. I know men who have skipped breakfast for years, so that their kids might have more, to eat, -Worry- begets -worry-, and then our confidence, our pride, begins to suffer. We begin to think of ourselves as failures, and then, all of that, leads to -anger-, at ourselves, at our parents for not being able to teach us how to live in the world we were born into, and yes, at that very world itself. We, America's working class, have lost faith that our country and our politicains care at all about our plight, and so even our patriotism has begun to suffer, and now EVerything, has become suspect, to us.
Follow? Now imagine a clown like tfg comes into the picture. I don't see him as a man of great intelligence. He is certainly a fool and I often think that he is downright stupid, but I do have to admit, he was able to see and then to exploit we working Ameicans for his own purposes, by lying to us with claims that he was not just aware of our problems, and not just on our side, but one who is equally, and always, persecuted as well, when nothing could be further from the truth. Thus the "He's on our side!! ", bullshit.
The problem is that he, as a born rich man, was taught the corrupt methods of getting over on everyone he meets, and cannot possibly understand what it is like to be poor and struggling, to live most of our lives working our asses off without ever getting anywhere, at all.
And the problem is that as a world class grifter, he's been able to convince a huge part of working America, that he does.
So my republican neighbors, and many who are Democrats, myself included, have simply lost our faith in anything. And everything. Some still believe in "The Man Upstairs", but more and more, they've stopped going to church, and consequently, have stopped putting their money in the collection plate.
We, or at least a large portion of America's working people, have lost faith that our employers have our best interests at heart, as once was the case, and indeed we have lost our faith in our own country, not to give us handouts, but simply to assist us, so that we might succeed in the dear, astonishingly trusting, and innocent eyes of our children, and then regain our sense of pride, and our confidence, so that we might one day regain our love of country, as well.
The problem, the result of all of this, is that a criminal has millions of Americans gaining more and more faith in him, without an understanding of or even a care as to the catstrophe that would be the result of the end of our democracy, replaced by the autocraticy that would be that man's ultimate, perect, desire, if he is re-elected.
But even if he is stopped, by whatever means; removal from the ballot, conviction for his crimes or even being sent to prison, the problems will remain. The rich, the ultra rich, will never give up their money making machines, and so the world's currency will continue to be stored in their banks, frozen there, out of circulation, and so unavailable to the rest of us. The answer, as Robert has been explaining to us for a very long time now, is in the re-balancing of equity in our world, and in every corner of it.
True equity, or anything even remotely close to that, of course, will not happen within the lives of anyone alive today, but we can and must, begin that work, now, or, I believe, our own country may well collapse at the end of a very bloody civil war. Joe Biden has begun that work. It is clear. It is obvious, to all thinking people. So somehow, we must spread that word. As tfg becomes more and more suspect to Rebublicans and even the MAGA crowd, having been convicted of his crimes, perhaps we can convince them that they have been duped, and so gain some of their votes, so as to one day eliminate the Republican party, once and for all.
But. Democrats, at present, are not helping. At least not as well as we might. Instead, most of my Democrat friends are -angry- too, but mostly at Republicans, especially the MAGA crowd, and mostly for very good reasons. But it is the current division in this country, caused by tfg, that will kill our country before anything else will.
We must, I believe, do as I've tried to do here in my own retirement; learn to see that the vast majority of our working class Americans, and including, yes, our working class Republican Americans, aside from the relatively few MAGA nuts among us, are at heart, decent, good hearted people who have been done dirty by the rich, and so they are indeed, very
-angry-.
It is the same, across the country, -worry- has begotten -anger-, and anger has turned to misplaced -hatred-. So the answer is not more anger, and more hate. It will be, if we Democrats can pull it off, the elimination of the anger and hatred that tfg has for his own monetary gain, heartlessly stoked, with language that is directed towards the least successful of us, the less intelligent of us, the less well educated of us, and so the least able of us to understand that American Democracy is still an absolute treasure, and one that is well worth saving.
Joseph R. Biden is the only man alive, I believe, at this incredibly momentous point in time, who can drive this truck and over the mountain of disaster that tfg has built. But he needs our help. We must stop the hate and end the division in this country, or not even Joe will be able to save American Democracy. We can do this by a very simple means; by simply opening our minds, by dropping the hate and MSM talking points, and by simply talking, calmly, intelligently, WITH, our fellow Americans, instead.
My apologies for being so long winded. I've just never been so passionate, about anything, in my now long life.
we republicans are lied about when I voted for trump I was instantly called a racist but your opinion is your own I just don't want a racist pedophile as a president so I'm fine with what you choose
Not very representative. Higher crime, higher dependency on benefits in red counties. Much higher rates of unemployment. More drug use.
When you elicit a financial statement, you will find that most have family members that need government benefits of some sort... E.G. the highest proportion of benefits per capita in the US is Owsley County Ky. Approximately 80% MAGATs vote fore the party that will kill their own means of support. .
True, but I stand by my comment. If we don't end the hate, if we don't begin to see ourselves as Working Class Americans up against the same obstacles, instead of Dems and MAgats, then this country is doomed.
Demagogue and demagogue worship / buy in, are the right considerations. Of course all with grievance jump on the bandwagon of resentment - righteous or not. However, the deepest well of resentment originates as Bob says, via disappearing economic hope from the greater mass of us. I was inside of it, and watched the hatred and distrust fester and grow.
Thank you for your thoughtful (as usual) and informative comments. Kevin Phillips, in his American Theocracy, noted that many of these people are revanchist Confederates; for then the Civil War never ended. If so, Trump is their anti-Lincoln .
So true
So true
I don't believe you. I think you're FOS.
ts1213...can you please elaborate on how Biden is the cause of your perceived economic woes.
The left didn't start the 'culture wars'...conservatives who hate did. Are you a conservative who hates? Christians who follow the teachings of Christ..not trump...are not hated. God/Christ never designated America the country of choice. So why should Christian Nationalist be considered Christian? They are a political tribe not a religious or faith based group. If that is your families philosophy, then you are right, it does not align with Democrats. How can a true Christian conscience vote for a lying, philandering, sexist, racist (you get the picture) trump? Please don't tell me God uses flawed men...like like he used David. God used David because he was repentant and begged for forgiveness. Has trump ever repented or even admitted he has wronged? You must have checked your Christian conscience at the election box.
"You are hated because you are a Christian" is a key Republican propaganda meme, and it is a shameless lie.
No, they are
Don't believe me? Take it from a Republican: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/opinion/economy-china-america-decline.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR3CVve7oWe2lZP7LYiWtra_b6UI2g_q1GJ9WCZkocR7sMlakQJ-9yHSKy8
Couldn't read it. I'm not a paid subscriber for the New York Times. Btw, what is this a reply to?
People who turned to Trump are hurting. I came from those that were part of the 36% of the unionized workforce in 1970...my parents! I then moved into the college educated elites. In every paragraph that Bob writes, I saw my life flash before me. Now, we have reaped what we have sown. However, the key is to ORGANIZE, speak truth like Bob, scale it up and somehow reach good people. That’s by voting! We did this in Ohio to save Democracy in August. We can and must do this throughout the Nation. Then, look ahead to ensure the wizards of the right are exposed early.
It’s about people. Good people who deserve more.
PaulaOH - I couldn’t agree more with what you wrote. Although I was thrilled with the No on Issue 1 (which hopefully will now become a Yes vote on Issue 1) I was angered when they came out yesterday saying that we were stuck with the gerrymandered maps for 2024. While I had a few racists in my family that I fought against growing up I also currently have some diehard (college educated) trump supporters that I currently fight against. Having conversations with them makes my head, and heart, hurt because I don’t understand why they can support a rapist and obvious liar when that man is only out for himself. I ask what they think he is going to do for them now when he already had four years to do something that would have been good for them before and they really have no answers other than to repeat mis (dis) information and conspiracy theories. I ask if the corporations would lower their prices wouldn’t that help with inflation and their ability not to have to live paycheck to paycheck. I ask why they support a man who treats women as if it is a man’s right to think that they can do unspeakable things to woman as if a woman has no right to their own body (and own choices). I ask if they see how the biblical writings are now being skewed politically and why they think that that is okay. I ask them why they cannot just love a person for Who they Are and NOT for who they think that they should be. I ask them what has happened in the world that gives them a right to hate someone else just because they are different from them. Head/Heart Hurts.
Paula, I like the questions you are asking people.
I was replying back to PaulaOH on her comment and then I went off on my own tangent (whoops) but thank you for your kindness and encouragement.
Anon, it makes my head hurt too at times, and no evidence seems sufficient. It’s important to distinguish between the “cult” members referenced by others, and the independents, the “hurting” folks, and the offspring of Reagan Democrats. Bidenomics is working. We have to get those facts before everyone. Cult members, the far right, entrenched MAGAs, nothing will likely move.
PaulaOH, I agree with you because Biden has done quite a lot better than most want to give him credit for. I will keep trying until someone makes a compelling argument for why the three year difference in age really makes any difference if trump and Biden are our two choices. I have heard their reasoning for most of the other questions I have asked but they usually pause and struggle to answer that one. It should be about more than hate for the other person that they feel in making their decisions. If I can just get them to think instead of just feel then maybe we all can start to heal. Maybe?
Oh my. You may have talked to “college educated” Trumper group - unfortunately I think they never graduated or covered their heads with aluminum foil while at the academy. That is the group that most baffling to me too. Maybe their trying to mate with the 1%ers or are suffering from selfishness and greed and have no understanding of the “common good.” But KEEP Talking! You are rumbling we hear to warn us of an approaching storm... the motivation to avoid damage.
I come from the working class. I am college educated. I do not consider myself an elite.
I didn’t consider myself elite either, however, I have come to believe it’s inescapable. We change when we are educated. What we (kids if the working class) think, differs from those who didn’t have our...privileged education. IMHO.
Hopefully for the better thinker for Justice.
That has not been my experience. The Trump supporters I know are financially comfortable
I think right wing media (Fox, Newsmax, talk radio) are part of the problem. Most of my family members are the people you describe. They listen to right wing media exclusively throughout the day. The theme of most of the "reporting" is the same : The Democrats and leftists HATE America! They want to destroy it and replace it with socialist regime that totally controls your behavior! Most Republicans are wusses, only Trump and people like him can save the country!
I try hard to convince them that this poison is BS, but they don't listen anymore. I have become one of THEM! It is very depressing!
Charles Wright -- IMO, there is a reason these people are glued to Fox, Newsmax, etc., and it’s not merely because they are hurting and disappointed in Demo politics. These individuals are attracted to what they hear on more than one level. They’re filled with hatred for the system as a whole and blame is an excuse; and figure that if the government is overthrown, they might have a chance to get what’s due them, a bigger piece of the pie.
A lot of these pro Trump people work for the corporations that cause most of the pollution in our environment, manipulate the laws, and make the armaments for the useless wars humanity wages on each other based on greed and profit. The economic injustices that these entities have caused have hurt them, too, but their thinking is in lock step with the people who are in control of the injustices on the majority of us. Their type of thinking is caused from frustration, yes, but it’s also desirous of throwing out the baby with the water.
I think ALL advertising driven media is part of the problem.
Right-wing media is obviously a propaganda machine, but the audiences come to it for a "comforting" dose of anger - a psychological need that channels frustrations but also feeds off of generating and harvesting them. People "tune out" the ads - which plants them into the brains. The propaganda is just packaging to deliver behavioral (commercial) manipulation.
Left wing media is a little better - many real-world journalists working for MSNBC who have real professional ethics, though it's hardly universal - but to the extent it embraces an "us/them" device, it's just packaging too, imitating FauxNews, but delivering a smaller, weaker product financed by essentially the same handful of corporations.
Perhaps the problem is too many people reading streams and feeds, feeling as if THEIR personal stream made their judgments better than others (a delusion deliberately fed by advertisers...) - while those other people with their different stream are "crazy MAGA zombies" or "determined to turn your kid gay!" - too few reading and discussing books.
That too fits with an advertiser driven ambition: if every feed gives us the delusion of understanding enough to have valid judgments on every topic - every book (even the bilge put out by ghost writers for right wing trash) challenges a reader to fit material from one chapter against material from another - to focus. Books become threatening - they imply we need to focus, think, and remember before judging. People "defend books" by buying them - without ever reading them, as if text on dead trees had some magical power of sufficiently bought and sold...
As for trying to convince "them" - that's probably the problem. They are us. We will never convince "them" they are wrong. Nobody anywhere can ever do that very effectively.
The right-wing media operates by creating an "us/them." But not everyone buys into it quite the same way - some people are addicted to an anger feed, others just want to feel links to other people and feel lonely, scared, or a desire to feel SOMETHING (mixed with a desire to feel nothing as well, that's the toxic interplay of addiction). (Left wing media is also following this path - which is so unfortunate, since the best professionals - Jon Stewarts, Dan Rathers, Oprah Winfreys and so many others - tried to show us better ways to do this).
Don't try to convert "them." Find things you love and invite others to love those things along with you. Some of "them" may come along. Influence a single person...and we've done our part and helped defend America. Right?
I agree with you in many ways. Some of my dearest friends and family members are very good people but vote their portfolios, rather than what is good for all the people. There is no racial hatred in their political leanings, it is preservation of their wealth. It amazes me how we come from the same background but made different choices with our lives’ priorities. Our parents came into adulthood during the Great Depression, teaching us to live within our means, be frugal, work for the commonweal. Different life circumstances produced different results.
Because they are dear friends to you - not some "other" - perhaps you have some means of reaching them that others do not.
There is nothing wrong with voting ones portfolio if one knows exactly what one is doing and why. That said, actually convincing them would take A LOT of work - Robert Reich has a very very convincing picture of what went wrong at GM long before their bankruptcy, and multiple banks long before their bankruptcies, and at IBM back when they discovered financial engineering was easier, lower hanging fruit than innovation - or back when Hewlett Packard decided it was no longer interested in an American labor force, but only a quarterly profit.
I would ask those family members if their portfolios are invested in companies with high stock values because of buybacks whether the buyback policies mean they are more like Google or Apple or other mega corps, or more like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, IBM, or portfolio stalwarts like AT&T (which was rescued from bankruptcy by Bell South).
Once they realize you can speak the language of portfolios too - AND there is more to that story than "tax cuts, labor cuts, cost cuts, buybacks" - they may be amenable to listening more.
And then you can tell them the story of the most lucrative investments of the 1920s - the Matchbook King (Ivar Krueger), the Florida Swamps, and "bank debt backed by hardworking Midwesterners who will literally work themselves to death before defaulting, safest bank notes ever!"
Those are all American analogued they ought to know about. After that though...well, people voted their portfolios in the 1850s too - and lost everything. And Germans and Italians voted THEIR portfolios in 1930s...and lost everything. Voting ones portfolio isnt "evil" - but evil people who know other people do it could easily screw them over and steal or wreck or hold hostage that entire portfolio.
Sorry, I was being snarky there. After the LONG Depression of the Gilded Age (with cyclical rounds of genocide as people driven out of the South and other parts of impoverished America moved West) - conventional wisdom of the early 20th century discovered the miracle of diversification as the solution to withstand any similar crisis.
Put your money into real estate, they're not making more of it! (And the best performing assets were Florida property deeds...which traders never investigated beyond whether it was in fact a deed and whether it was increasing in value...). Until the bottom fell out of that market...
Put your money into bank debt and notes, because bankers are more skilled at valuing risks - if you buy their notes, so long as the collateral was good when they placed the loans, you're protected! (Except not from a dustbowl or a financial squeeze that obliterates many different banks)
Put your money into stocks!
And on and on. The Great Depression has been studied to death, but my belief is that the people of that era were as smart as we are now, and just as cock sure that they had wizardry that outmaneuvered any crisis. People in late 1920s voted their portfolios again and again and saw returns year after year - only to discover it wasnt just one sham, but multiple different scams running concurrently in a world where smart people aren't always loyal to one another (and some folks even called disloyalty an advantageous survival skill...those social Darwinists had no end of nastiness to offer).
Anyways - just wanted to throw all that out there if you felt discouraged while dealing with dear friends. Preserving friendship is more important than how one votes. But I really wish people didn't vote for people like Trump.
In my opinion, what goes around cones around, Karma, or whatever else you want to term it, is God’s, Nature, or Whatever’s way of showing us that like attracts like and this is what happens to one’s who believe they need to do this thing—it hurts—them, eventually. It’s also what happens to addicts who hit rock bottom. Just how much do you want to hurt, ends up being the optimum question. However, this lesson can be very slow in coming.
THIS!
I do agree with Robert that all of the 'left behind, woe is me, NO power whatsoever, doing worse than my great-grandparents' despair is absolutely a CAUSAL factor in the MAGAts' collective embrace/demands for authoritarian FASCISM, and the miraculous 'big daddy' despot-'savior' who will make it all go away for them.
But, it does NOT excuse the fact that they cannot EVER 'think for themselves', and reject the abject toxic BULLSHIT being fed to them 24/7 by all of the various and multitudinous NAZI propaganda 'networks'.
They must be inherently, collectively feeble minded in order to be brainwashed sooooo effing thoroughly as to vote for and promote/DEMAND that which will hurt them, or even end their own existence.
Or to 'think' that their SHITler is ONE OF THEM, and would "have that beer with them" if they were to show up at the gates of his Merde-A-Nogo, or Deadminster compounds, just because he speaks the same racist/xenophobic/misogynistic/ANTI-SEMITIC/etc. 'language' as them, or promises them to fix their problems, all while being the EXACT 'coastal elite' (MINUS the intellect of course!) they loathe, blame, and despise sooo vitriolically for all of their woes.
These fascist media 'outlets' have completely convinced these MAGA devout, rightwingnut peckerwoods that anything NOT to the right of effing NAZISM is; commie pinko, libtard socialism, and is evil, will destroy their 'white race', and end their freedoms (most especially their effing 2A freeDUMB 'right' to butcher whoever they deem as an 'enemy'), even though those 'socialist programs' are the ONLY thing which is actually saving many of them currently.
Like Daniel says, this does NOT excuse the (supposedly) educated, and wealthy who support SCUMp and his fascism propagating goons/minions, who only have a total elimination of ALL of their taxes, and inherent white supremacist racism as reasons for supporting the evil despot.
Don't even get me started on the effing KAPO PUTZES of my tribe who somehow idiotically believe that once the fascists are fully in power, THEY will be spared from the resultant genocide/2nd Holocaust, just because they supported him/it so vociferously on his way to absolute power.
(Just ask the wealthy, industrialist Jews of late1920s to early1930s Germany who supported (S)Hitler 1.0 back then, oh wait you CAN'T, since they were the first ones obliterated, just as the current SHITler will throw his current 'Yid' backers under the bus.)
They are all even more delusional YET if they really believe that either SCUMp, his 'Muricun NAZI Party, or any of the Christofascsits REALLY support Israel at all, for ANY reason other than it's current fascist leader, or for it's necessary role in the completion of their effing rapture BS. ;)
Sad but true.
Trump studied them for years, and now he is their spokesman. The least we can do is telling them that voting is like investing. As Warren Buffett reminds us time and time again successful investing require emotional self-control. Greed, fear, anger lead to disaster. When you vote you invest into your own future, and the future of your children and grandchildren.
Because they identify with Trump, they like Trump, they are just like Trump, Narcissists and Sociopaths.
It's their personality, that is why they migrate to the Republican party, they see the others that are just like them. The Republican wolf-pack mentality, they all obey the top dog no matter what, 100% absolute loyalty. If the Devil were a Republican running for office, they would vote for him as that would be "their guy."
Thus, it is their psychological disorder - educated or not.
I just finished reading John Dos Pasos' heartbreaking 1921 novel "Three Soldiers" about American soldiers in France during World War I. At that time, Dos Pasos was a socialist but would, by the early 1960s become a Goldwater conservative. (As Churchill remarked: if you're not a socialist when you are young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're old, you have no brain.") Here is one reader's reaction to Dos Pasos' depiction of the rank and file American so easily brutalized, which he calls "the bizarre rituals of the dispossessed," the attractions of Trumpism, it seems to me:
Or rather, all is hierarchy and the duties and obligations of hierarchy. Humiliation and servitude – these are the lessons - only alleviated or punctuated with references to killing Negroes down South or raping German women in revenge for German atrocities in Belgium (and all this said without even a hint of irony by soldiers in their ‘manly conversations’). Such talk becomes one of those bizarre rituals of the dispossessed, a kind of repulsive pride, a variety of bullying self-assertion by men reduced to worthlessness except in the value they have in fulfilling the tasks they have been trained for, that they remain perpetually waiting for. For such talk is all that is left to these ‘men’, the only way for them to assert their position in the social order, to show their worthiness. Their value as human beings is asserted by reference and in counter-distinction to those even less powerful than themselves – and the sad fact is that all that this bravado shows is a series of grotesque highlights further etching out their impotence and powerlessness, a kind of sharpening around about the contours of their own slavery.
Some researchers looked at where the January 6 rioters, many of whom were fairly well-off, came from. They found the greatest commonality is that they came from counties that were rapidly diversifying. I think racism and xenophobia, inflamed by Republican leaders, are major factors.
Racism and xenophobia are often a result of people looking for a scapegoat to explain why they are not succeeding. Many people would become less racist if their economic situation were to improve.
I could not agree more! I see everyday what Robert is talking about with the kids without college degrees or life work skills for good paying jobs out of high school (i.e. welders, construction jobs, etc..). However, I cannot for the life of me understand the irrational fears of people who love DJT and KNOW better. These well educated people KNOW that following him or his "wannabes" will lead us to dictatorship. They have given up. It has to be deep rooted fear of the boogie man....black/brown people becoming the majority of people living in the U.S. In addition, our outdated system of elections based on the electoral college and Senate control which gives the states with a very small comparable population enormous control and allows this outrageous minority rule situation in the United States. Both could well lead to our demise.
My guess; they don't suffer from the economic and social inequalities, but believe that gov't is broken. I find this to be true among some of my conservative friends - a point on which this centrist and those Reds agree. What I'm quick to point out is that tRump knows how to break things, but he and his performance artist sycophants don't have a friggin' clue on how to rebuild it. Authoritarianism or fascism certainly isn't the solution.
"Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one." - Sam Rayburn
Knowing how to break things is why he appeals to so many people.
This is my exact reaction to this explanation. The people who I've lost to Trumpism are White, well-off, college educated, straight and supposedly Christian. I'm disgusted by them.
I'm continually astonished how the siren song, the elegy - ahem! - that "hillbilly elegy," to "the" time when the US was great, increasingly points at the '50s before the advent in US politics, of the systematic destruction as socialistic, by the Яepuблиkan$, of every New Deal policy that fueled that very greatness in the first place. How come nobody seems to have caught on to that ‽ How come nobody is or has been calling it out to high heaven ‽ It's not as if it were some great secret that the capitalist caste-warriors despised Roosevelt and the New Deal even more than those who - for whatever reason - despised Hillary. Just a comment, a question, a rhetorical question?
Kerry, you’re spot in. I wrote the following article that states essentially for TRUE DEMOCRACY to come back, we need to stop participating in these “lesser of evil” ritual:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-stop-voting-in-presidential
Shooting yourself in the head is not an option.
Albeit possibly a less painful death than asphyxiation by Zyklon B, or a non-lethal at first/quickly body hit by a .223 round, which is what will happen to US 'others', eventually, if a 'third party' candidate helps hand/guarantee the next election to SHITler and it's NAZI goons, as a permanent installment into power. ;) :(
Who drank the Kool Aid in the Jim Jones scenario,and why? I see such a glaring likeness here.I wonder how many would actually follow him to freezing Russia and then what,this is horrifying lunacy!Would they want to live in Cuba,Russia,or China?
Only about half of MAGATs are religious fanatics.
Franklin…About 35% of this country is already not voting. I gather they read your essay. How’s that working out for us? The purveyors of true democracy. You’re making about as much sense as Cornel West. Congratulations!
Reach Mr. Reich’s article on Ayn Rand. In the late 90s I spent some time in Ann Arbor and was fearful then at the consequences of the growing Ayn Rand society - evidenced by the number of posters listing the meetings around campus.
Sorry - Reach should read as Read.
Part of the reason is that Capitalism, which is the economic engine of our economy, does not have a sufficient governor, meaning it has only weak controls. Everyone paying their fair share and everyone benefiting from our economy is what is required for the common good. The inequality in our country is pornographic.
Agreed. Although I’d say the inequality is obscene.
I have a friend who is a banker, a cousin who is a PhD economist, relatives whose businesses are doing quite well and all are trump supporters. The banker and economist do it for money (tax cuts). The business owners do it because he appeals to their manhood and their racism. None of them look any deeper than that.
Yep. That’s my point. It’s not just about “the great unwashed”, those mullet-coiffed, toothless, obese, wife-beater clothed exemplars prominently displayed as the Trump army. It’s the millions of deeply cynical, avariciously selfish, and wholly unAmerican pricks who think that they don’t owe anybody anything for their comfortable lives.
They are all also quite DELUSIONAL as well, if they really believe that the fascists they put in total, unaccountable, unfettered, and NO consequence power and control will ALLOW them to keep their wealth, 'comfortable lives', and status just because they are also 'with the program' of being; racist, pure Aryan white supremacist, xenophobic, ANTI-SEMITIC, etc., CIS male 'Christians'. ;)
Does anyone remember when Scump wanted only blond haired,blue eyed Swedish immigrants.Definitely a brain defect,always thought he was better than others,what's inside him is a mash of a mess!
Yes, he was going even 'above and beyond' in his white supremacist racism what was accepted even by the 3rd REICH eugenicists as the 'Aryan Ideal', and his very own Teuton heritage.
Surprised he did not expand that to also include blonde, blue eyed, buxom, Slavic WOMEN (only) to his 'wish list'. ;)
Yup: he speaks to the disenfranchised and acts for the wealthy (including himself).
Perhaps the operative word here is “seemingly.”
I have come to believe that the oft repeated video of Trump proclaiming his ability to shoot someone while retaining his followers was actually a “brainworm” message –“I can do anything,” with the unspoken understanding, “And so can 𝙔𝙊𝙐!" That is his appeal- the freedom to be the (expletive omitted) they’ve always wished they could be.
Yeah, I’ll buy that. He has an aspirational appeal that started with his bullshit television reality show as a powerful and domineering boss. All of his tasteless displays of wealth. The arm candy. And now, an entire political party bowing and scraping, in deadly fear of becoming his enemy. Mocking gold star parents and disabled journalists just because he can. Bragging about assaulting women, but saying they let him because he’s a star. Yeah, a real role model for a country full of pickup truck driving gun owners who don’t need either.
It's their LACK OF SCIENCE. In the lab we perform experiments, we learn to obtain good data from bad, identify good data from bad, and do controlled experiments to prove good data from bad (be our own Devil's advocate). IF the experiment outcome is different than our hypothesis then we change our position and except the new outcome of the experiment.
Republicans double down on their position. Their psychological disorder (narcissist, sociopath) does not allow them this scientific train of thought.
The science minded can sort through and determine the truth.
Interesting analysis. Takes the moral positions out of the equation.
Exactly. It all comes down to how you think. Everyone's brain is not wired the same and are unable to think correctly.
Like all of Bernie Sanders' supporters, I watched with shock and horror as Bernie was being marginalized by the media during his run for President. Even news anchors like Rachel Maddow and those of NPR were doing it; Rachel made no bones about her support for Hillary Clinton. I was appalled then and still am because Bernie's message, which he repeated over and over, was so important - that the 1% had more wealth than the 99% - and that billionaires were buying political offices. He was the only one called for a living wage and for an end to laws and practices that have led us to this horrific economic imbalance. As soon as it became clear to the powers that be that Bernie's message was gaining traction, that he was becoming very popular, they worked their magic through the media to marginalize him. That was when I stopped watching CNN, NPR, MSNBC. I lost all trust in these so-called news organizations. They have become propaganda outlets. And our country has suffered the consequences.
It wasn't just the media's doing; the DNC played a major part in scheduling debates, etc.
Bernie addressed a Fox Town Hall (Hillary refused to do so) and, to the shock of the hosts, got a standing ovation. He could have beat Trump.
Now Biden is trying to turn the Democratic Party back to its working-class constituency, but the media largely ignores that to harp on his age. I fear they'd rather have Trump than an FDR Democrat--which is all the more reason we have to vote for Biden.
Maureen, I agree it seems they would rather have the former guy and I think they have a definite preference for the R Party. Makes me sick.
Me, too. Remember that some of the major media are owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos.
Even IF their rightwing corporatist ideologies were not at play in the major media's preference for SCUMp, YES, he makes them much more coin in actual viewership revenue (both from ads, and cable subscriptions) because his chaotic, abjectly BOMBASTIC, clown car shit show is perceived as much more 'screen addictive' and enthralling/'charismatic' <-LOFL! than "old boring" Biden to so many in this land, sadly, due to the effing 'reality show' demanding, popular(ist) mentality of our society.
Beam me up, Scotty (yeah, I know that Kirk never said that, but still). :(
Maureen, you're right. Isn't it so sad that when you follow the money, it always seems to go back to the big rascals and not the good guys (and gals).
Maureen ; Well said!
Thank you.
"I lost all trust in these so-called news organizations. They have become propaganda outlets. And our country has suffered the consequences."
Yes. And your comment is a major factor in why our country is in such dire straits.
But, IMO, the simplest reason is that, regardless of religious affiliation, racism, aversion to the common good, people become Trumpists is that they are addicts to the drug of entertainment, distraction and false promises that Trump and his ilk continually scream about to drown out their own immoral, criminal behavior and lull so many into false complacence necessary to ignore their own foolishness.
And let's not forget that the aforementioned "news organizations" do not, in the first place, profit from spreading propaganda as such. Instead, they profit from perpetuating and catering to what you rightly describe as an addiction to entertainment and distraction. There'd be no entertainment/distraction in showing the Biden administration or the Democratic Party plodding along in these unexceptional and unexceptionable efforts on behalf of a working-class constituency. Instead, the entertainment/distraction lies in the crassness and violence of (for example) Trumpism, and that's why (in this instance) Trumpism gets so much media coverage. The solution, or the first step toward one, would be for serious, progressive-minded people to POPULARIZE (in this instance) those unexceptional and unexceptionable efforts on behalf of a working-class constituency until a critical mass of the latter group starts noticing what's going on.
I respectfully disagree. First and foremost the cable media profit from eyeballs. They profit from the advertisers profiting from the eyeballs - not from 'perpetuating and catering to what you rightly describe as an addiction to entertainment and distraction.'
Maureen and Sally---kudos for bringing out these points! Could not agree more. The DNC's tanking of Bernie's campaign merely proved to independents and progressives that the Dem establishment was NOT interested in helping the working class.
Absolutely! Could not agree more. Meanwhile, Dr. Reich and others of his persuasion bash anyone who considers third-party candidates. We're supposed to overlook all the Dems' shortcomings, plus the DNC's pandering to Big Corp, and vote blue. Otherwise, we're supporting "fronts" for the GOP, as Reich phrases it. That label, especially relative to the Greens, is completely unfair. Insulting, even.
This is a perfect example of why Trump and Bernie supporters are two sides of the same coin. "My guy wasn't getting traction. Those women were sticking together. Hillary had no qualifications. It's all a big media conspiracy." Journalists miss a lot. They make erroneous assumptions. They both-sides everything. Sometimes they are just lazy or self-righteous. I write about this a lot. There is no conspiracy. Throughout presidential campaigns there has been an outside candidate that doesn't win, but influences the conversation and subsequent legislation. Clinton - whom 538 noted was as liberal in the Senate as Elizabeth Warren - found it easier to talk about poverty and free college after Sanders paved the way.
I would also urge you to examine where you're "Bernie was slighted" anger came from. Because you would have been the perfect Cambridge Analytica/Russian Troll Farm target. You are, in fact, acting on the trolls' behalf with this comment. Russian wants nothing more than for people in the U.S. to lose confidence in the very systems that keep democracy alive.
I'm not sure I would say Bernie was "slighted"......I'm sure he knows that politics is a tough game. I often thought that he recognized he hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of becoming president, and that he was there to move the dialogue in a positive direction. I still maintain that no one has done more to move the political rhetoric to the left than Bernie has done.
Absolutely agree! Politics is incremental. The right knows that, and has been working since the '80s to change the discourse, and then benefit from our changed assumptions that small government is good, that fewer taxes for the rich is helpful to the economy, that college should coast a bagjillion dollars, and that we should treat each other badly. I loved that Bernie got in the race in 2015. Here was someone - finally - saying what we all know in our bones is the right way to govern. He gave Hillary cover to publicly moved to the left herself. We were going to change the conversation, get new assumptions. Sadly, the need for immediate gratification from many of his supporters elected Trump. And only now - with the guy none of us saw as a progressive - that both discourse and policy is starting to change.
wow....I feel like I got something right amidst years of getting lost in what happened to people who voted for Trump. (Not to nit pick, but I think you spelled budjillion wrong.)
I agree with your assessment of Russia, but I do not calibrate my reactions/behavior/opinions/assemssments according to how it will play in Russia.
Wow, your misunderstanding of what I wrote explains a lot.
Wow, your disdainful attitude explains a lot - to me.
Thank you! I witnessed the Bernie and Ron Paul show back in the day. After seeing that both campaigns were stopped, I’ve realized there’s a bigger agenda here at play:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-stop-voting-in-presidential
Maybe you are correct (in Bernie being able to take down SCUMp).
I still believe that this land, as a whole (EVEN including many leftist, progressive liberals) is WAY, WAY, WAY TOO ANTI-SEMITIC to EVER elect a Jewish POTUS, even if they could bring themselves to pull that lever for an admitted socialist. :(
(I do HOPE that I am incorrect on this though!)
Yeah - you're probably right, tragically. What is the deal with anti-semitism in 2023? I just don't get it. WHAT is the deal??
People should get educated on what happened in 1930's Nazi Germany..and then take a look at the agenda of the Christian Reich Wing, and Trump's Project 2025 plan to to do away with the checks and balances of the Legislative and Judiciary branches, and concentrate all power in the Executive branch..with a dictatorship.
Yup - my father’s generation sacrificed their lives to save us from what we have in Trump and his MAGA. I also believe that the Republican Party is a an accomplice to Trump's crimes and treason.
The issues that we are facing were long in play before Bernie Sanders was running for President. I always stated that Congress is the bigger player and we still get hooked on that THE Presidential candidate will fix it all! Maybe blame FOX news for getting a monopoly on cable and feeding the toxic propaganda. MSNBC or Rachel Maddow had nothing on the anger that FOX fed. Time to understand that. Again it did not matter who the DEM Presidential Candidate was-- Democrats did not see the looming monster at the gate who against all predictions won the 2016 election.
I think the fact that Bernie had a heart attack while
on the campaign trail had something to do with marginalizing him.
Well said. Without our orchestrated economic inequalities, many other social tensions, such as race, gender, and political ideology would be much less severe. But until the 1% understands that presiding over Brazil 2.0 is actually not in their long-term interest, we will continue our national descent. Predictably, they are showing no signs whatsoever of realizing that a prosperous middle-class will actually make them safer and more powerful. Instead, they persist in choosing razor wire and private security in return for relatively modest gains in short-term profit. Ethics aside, it's remarkably stupid.
Stop spending time and energy expecting the 1% to change. Why should they? They have what they want: all of us as their slaves.
BOOM!
EVERYTHING they do is short sighted, as if the very next microsecond is ALL that matters at all to them.
Somehow, they are delusional enough to really believe that THEY will be able to survive under air conditioned domes, with endless supplies of fossil fuels powering said big city sized air conditioners, without a total violent physical revolt by those they leave outside to perish.
Oz will have spoken!
Yes, yes the bald brazen truth which silently underlies all the political turmoil. In the past 40 years the oligarchs have stolen the country and made bank. They used the Republican Party and the Supreme Court to do it and the vast number of Americans are feeling the pain. The Republicans now divert their attention from how they are screwed with a focus on "values" issues.
The oligarchs also used the Democratic Party's shift to neoliberalism from Clinton to Obama to steal the country and its wealth: creating free trade agreements, destroying unions, lowering tariffs, and exporting jobs.
Biden is the first Democratic President since LBJ to care about the working class, to support unions, and to try to restore domestic manufacturing. Unfortunately, Trump got to them first with his pretense of caring for them and won the loyalty of many of them, and, because Biden was Obama's VP, they find it easy to believe Trump's lies that Biden is no different from Obama and the Clintons..
In my opinion, as a far leftist, Biden is even worse than Clinton and Obama. Failure to prosecute the GOP leaders and the insurrection for several years makes Biden an accomplice. Biden should have fired Garland immediately. It cost the Democrats control of the Congress and supreme Court and allows the dictatorship to proceed. Biden does not use his bully pulpit to point out what a dictatorship is. No gun rights, no minimum wage, no freedom of speech, the subjects can be tortured, killed, and poisoned with pollution... The rich owned news media never ever mentions this either. It is a big elephant in the room nobody speaks of! TV celebrities getting charged with rape is all the news is good for nowadays.
Bob Johnson, Biden and Garland have been BUSY! Busy cleaning up Trump’s mess & all he unraveled. Biden came in on a PANDEMIC which made our country & economy suffer. He strengthened our economy, our allies (which Trump alienated), supported infrastructure, strengthened NATO, fighting for our Democracy by aiding the Ukrainian war, etc., etc. He has done very well as a President.
Garland has been busy prosecuting over a thousand insurrectionists, Trump SUPPORTERS. Because he did so, Trump got little showing when he called for his “supporters” for his first indictment...or his second or third. I lost track.
Garland was smart in appointing Jack Smith who is demonstrating his capabilities. If you notice, all the dominos are strategically lined up and about to fall.
Yes, but think about how much further along we would be if a Jack Smith 'type' was in charge of the DoJ instead of Garland. ;)
Of course, merely by appointing someone that systematically aggressive to head the department Biden would be accused of going after his "political enemies" by the fascists, but they are doing that ANYWAY, so what do the 'visuals' even matter anymore?!?
Going after the little fish, the peasants, instead of the organizers in the backers, for several years, letting them get reelected and bankrupt the nation, is a failure in my book. Now Biden protecting the economy for the
Future oligarchs, maybe why the Koch brother wants a different GOP oligarch leader, they now realize what a grifter Trump is ,and they can't trust him.
Biden is constrained by Congress. If the Dems take the House AND the Senate, he can do a lot more. Plus the filibuster needs to go along with the electoral college. And the Supreme Court needs house cleaning.
The Democrats had control of the Congress the first several years.
Bob Johnson ; Isn't the Executive branch supposed to stay out of the DOJ? How is a president supposed to "prosecute the GOP leaders and the insurrection for several years"?
You also have to understand that Biden had only a few choices in terms of priorities - his first was to get the economy working for the people who needed jobs, and to try & get away from the intense divisions we are in - he wants a more civil discourse. That won't make those screaming for indictments happy, but it is Step ONE towards normality, and indictments are in process by DOJ (finally). I believe that there was a long pause in the investigations for 2 reasons - firstly the DOJ (Chris Wray) did not want to do any of it because it was so political (often their own guys?) and so they waited....secondly they were hoping normalcy would take over & it could all be shoved under the rug, and nobody would remember - it was all too awful to contemplate what might happen to the country if pursued. But eventually they realized they HAD to take it on, and here we are - bit by bit - it is all pouring out into the daylight ! None of that was Biden's doing - he stayed out of it DELIBERATELY so they cannot accuse him of anything.
Legal action is not in his perview anyway. Not his job.
Bidens job is to protect America from all threats foreign and domestic and if he can't do that is incompetent! But I will still vote for him to try to save democracy and socialism. I will vote for the lesser of two evils again.
Also,Jack Smith who was head of the Public Integrity Unit was working at the Hague in the Netherlands on I believe a Kosova matter,hence some of the delay,also after that he had a bad motorcycle accident.
Excuses are like but holes. Everyone could make them.
I believe that Bob is inferring that by firing hand-wringing, nebbish Garland, and putting a vicious PITBULL in his place instead might have sped up the prosecutions, or even the START of prosecutions 100 fold.
The 4th REICH NAZIS are going to SCREAM "leftist Deep State weaponization", and "political persecution/election interference" REGARDLESS of how removed Biden is or seems to be from such, so I see his point. :)
I wouldn't say "worse." I doubt Clinton or Obama would have done any of the above. At least Biden is pro-union, a bit environmentalist, and trying to restore US manufacturing--not much, but better than nothing--and better than Clinton or Obama.
He HAS become much more progressive lately (due to the 'Bernie faction' influence of/on the party, maybe??).
Way back, he was centrist at best, and even possibly center-right on some issues.
Fighting is pro free trade and union busting immigrants. He is no Lefty
Biden would have been crucified if he did that. I don't think Garland intended to do anything. If it wasn't for the January 6 committee, it wouldn't have happened but Biden can't afford to get involved and make it appear he is persecuting his opponents. If he fired Garland, it's unlikely he'd get anyone else successfully nominated.
Lewis Powell, movement conservatives, and Grover Norquist all conspired to restore the Confederacy and install its feudalism in America.
Ol' Grover has been somewhat quiet lately, maybe because he has figured out that the (now) 'Muricun NAZI Party he supported so vociferously in the past will come for his wife if given unfettered power??
Correct ! The whole "abortion!" screaming fiasco is the prime motivator that has the ignorant getting all hot under the collar, while not recognizing that those with the funds can do whatever they want to do if they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy ! How many top CEO's do they think actually care about such things ?
Hey Jeoffry, I’d argue that the oligarchs started this even before the last 40 years. I’d go back to after the civil war and the installation for the federal reserve. That was when the ideology that was America fell
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-esoteric-philosophy-is-vital-329
I would argue the idea that the rich should rule, goes back thousands of years. Our past has been paid with human blood and suffering. The churches and the rich like to keep the masses ignorant and insane so they can be blamed.
I would 100% agree with you! This are the topics I write about on my substack!
When it comes to the church, i write about we can use Africa as a case study and how the church devastated the continent:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-black-mans-guide-to-reality
When it comes to the rich, I include them in my book. and here is one example as to how they built our current world (how billionaires "donated" to our world):
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/donating-to-a-good-cause-how-billionaires
For background, I'm finishing up my book where I discussed these topics and more. Here's the site if interested - I should be done in the next month or so
https://www.unorthodoxtruth.com/
Bob Johnson, say it again and again. Succinct truth! Thank you!
Thing is there IS a difference between those who are educated & generally prosperous & those who are bottom level, sometimes not very bright & poor, and the bottom level has zero ATTRACTION for those who reside above that level - they see what that level looks like & it produces a 'yuck' reaction in most people. Now that is not fair of course since those bottom level people are not there by their own choice, and often are because of the advantages taken by the higher ups, but that is understood only by a few free thinkers. I can see things from both sides - I was fortunate enough to get chosen for one of the top girls schools in London, wore a fancy uniform the only one who did in my neighborhood, and learnt all the advantages of the snooty attitude of others at the school & assumed I was going to be successful at whatever I did ! I generally was so, and still have a good attitude to attack life, but I also know how the working class background of others in my area made them incapable of the same attack, since they spent a lot of time moaning about how unfair life was to them ! THAT is how they become doomed from an early age - life is tough, and without an attack mode you get nowhere ! THAT is why there are some kids who, even without the advantages I had, can see how to get ahead & do it all by themselves - it's entirely confidence & sheer guts that does it !
vcragain, oh please, blaming the victims of the system instead of the system is so rooted in ego, oh so apparent in its motivation.
The whole rightwing 'bootstraps' BS argument.
Kind of impossible to resolve when one does not even own boots in the first place. ;)
David G Hinkes, recently, someone in my community struck up a conversation with me and based on the fact that we looked of similiar heritage, she motioned to me and said, "our ancestors were immigrants here right, but they made it and were successful because they worked hard." I agreed that they worked hard but I told her that regular people did not make much progress until beginning in the 1930's with FDR's programs and policies, like welfare, jobs programs, workers's rights, social security, etc. She conceded. Perhaps to just be polite, but I hope my countering thoughts made a difference, even a small one.
I think the answer is simple. The USA is unique in the western world in not having a a two party system divided on left/righjt wing lines. The USA has succesfully made socialistic policies non acceptable. There is no non capitalistic alernative to offer a counter balance in which each keeps the other in check. This leaves the working classes in the USA as easy prey for populists, racists and conspiracy theory mongers. They have nowhere else to go.
When the Dems were seduced by the corporatists and bankers we slid into this mess. Bernie might have saved us, or not, but it would have been worth the fight.
I like many of Bernie's ideas. Too bad that he didn't win the primary and also that Al Gore was aced out of the Presidency by the Supreme Court. The most logical reason that we didn't get either one of them, or Hillary either, was because of all the dark money that the Supreme Court allowed into elections from the Citizens United decision. The Supreme Court is doing as much damage to this nation as the R's in Congress. Joe is doing a great job, considering who he has to work with.
The reason we didn't get Bernie is that the DNC torpedoed him.
I believe the DNC had their delegates loaded with special electors. These people were not elected in the primaries. Pretty sure it was those delegates that torpedoed Bernie. I also believe the DNC has changed this part of the system going forward. Were those special delegates enticed or chosen so that Bernie could not win? Don't know.
Nobody could know, but I'd bet heavily that they were chosen specifically so that Bernie couldn't win.
But the DNC was working against him long before the convention, according to my reading.
Seduced and bought are two different things.
I blame Hillary the bane of the Democratic Party . If she ever buys the nomination again we will get another trumpet 🎺 or a worse spawn of satan.
Agree completely, Kerry.
Furthermore, in countries with 2 party parliamentary systems, third parties can hold the balance of power when there is minority government or multiple parties can form a coalition government; in either case, the smaller parties can force the dominant party to consider the needs of their constituents.
In the US system, all a third party can do is siphon off votes from one or both of the dominant parties.
Michael Fewster ; Our media have few stories showing how the rich already have a form of socialism ; They get most of the wealth that is produced while workers barely keep a roof over their heads, have to go without health care, and generally struggle more and more every day.
Laurie Blair, shout it out! Thank you! That needs to be on billboards across America.
Not any form of socialism. Socialism is a planned economy not giving money to people. We have corporate welfare and a corporate tax rebate system.
Down here in Australia we do have a left / right situation but the left are being seduced into thinking that being a Lite version of the Right will work. It doesn't !!!!!!!!! The Right are now quite weak but let no one run around with the idea that they've gone away. They haven't and never will !!! They are just re-grouping for the next assault
The R's are great at re-defining the meaning of words to make them into the opposite of their original meaning. Like "entitlement" to mean "leaching off the state" instead of it's real meaning of "a payment out of a system into which you and your employer(s) contributed in order to guarantee a decent retirement, or in case of disability which disables you from working for a living." There are more caveats than I have listed, but hopefully you get the picture. Also, "deep state" which is the imaginary bugaboo which did not allow drumpf and his ilk to make the kinds of "progress" he would have liked or which he and they had no intention of trying to cure any of the current things that were/are wrong in this nation. That means anything from plague to economic disparity to crumbling infrastructure.
Correct.
White men are drawn to Trump because he gets to be the bad boy that they always wanted to be, but didn’t have the guts to. They love his demeaning ways, so much so that they have invested part of their own identities into his success.
The dots can’t get any closer together, but to actually connect them is to say that over the last eight years of their lives they’ve been played the fool and been proud of it
I’ve never been drawn to a coward and a liar. He got elected because the D’s organization was bought and paid for by Hillary people. The Imelda, Marcos of American politics.
They also LOVE that their putrid orange fuehrer ALWAYS gets away with any and all crimes he commits as well.
Whereas they know that for the most part, THEY would not be able to skate the same way, save for whatever leniency or benefit their lily-whiteness/'Christianity', and CIS maleness 'entitles' them to get.
I don't believe it is a coincidence that tRump rose to power right on the heels of Barack Obama. The core of the groups that became the MAGAT movement became terrified that "They" were taking over. The MAGATs were easy prey for someone like tRump that sensed he could exploit them; aided and abetted by morally challenged Republicans that were so desperate to regain power that they were more than willing to sell their souls to a worthless example of humanity like tRump. Lord help us: we still have 14 months until the general election and four separate trials that tRump is no doubt planning to turn into a circus.
The terrified white backlash was definitely a factor in SCUMp's ascent, even despite the ones who point out that there were many MAGAt voters who also pulled the lever for Obama's terms as well (I STILL do not believe it was as many as were claimed, regardless of the 'math' ;) ).
I would add going to college is expensive; the debt incurred and repayment of loans during the years they would be trying to build a family and future. Also ending company funded pensions in favor of self generated IRAs for old age was also a factor.
So they think they're getting screwed, but they vote for someone who's going to screw them. Even further. Makes no sense to me except that they don't seem to have the sense to figure it out.
They all 'accuse' US 'libtards' of being all about, and totally controlled by our feelings.
But that is EXACTLY what the rightwing media, and the fascist pols are using to appeal to, control, and brainwash them into voting against their very own EXISTENCE, as; hatred, paranoia, FEAR, 'othering', etc. are also 'feelings', albeit very negative ones. ;)
I was astounded to read recently that US median wealth (net worth) is lower than Spain’s. Naturally, the same is not true about mean wealth because all the billionaires bring up the average. American inequality will spell the death of its democracy.
Bill Gates walks into a bar.....
“Last June, after being charged with retaining government secrets, he told a Republican gathering in Michigan: ‘I’m being indicted for you.’ On August 3, the day of his indictment for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, he posted, in all caps, ‘I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU.’ A week later, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, he said, ‘They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.’”
If all of that sounds familiar, it should: Trump is playing Christ-as-martyr, merely refashioning the concept of Jesus’s dying for the world’s sins in his own image, for his own purposes. A lot of his target audience is attuned to exactly that sort of claim, and it’s Trump’s calculation that he is the opiate of these masses.
More concretely, a great deal of the disaffection Bob talks about can be traced back to globalization, though even before GATT was ever formulated, let alone put into effect, advances in air and sea travel made the exporting of goods cheaper and more efficient. Generations ago, when the great majority of what the U.S. was consumed in the U.S., it was in employers’ interest to pay their workers well because the more money workers had, the more they’d spend on the manufacturers’ wares. But ship most of it overseas, for foreign customers to buy, and there’s no incentive to pay workers a penny more than absolutely necessary.
In effect, American employers have rewritten the old Communist slogan into From each according to his abilities, to each according to OUR needs.
I hope the privileged elites who run the Democratic Party are listening to you.
I grew up listening to my Dad, a staunch Democrat and my Uncle, a staunch Republican, arguing with each other. They loved each other deeply. My way of putting their politics into words was: Democrats and Republicans want the same going for our country: A good life for all.
However, it seems, now, as if many Republicans want to build a wall around what they have, to keep anyone else .
Marilyn Klerx-Hardie, yes I agree. I would add that many it seems, though not all, want to harm others or neglect their suffering to justify their delusions of grandeur and feelings of separateness from others.
I agree, however I don't think that I am qualified to diagnose "delusions of grandeur." I like the simplicity of your "feelings of separateness from others." The first...(excuse me..
Please) makes me want to turn away. The second invites me to engage in discussion. I try to police myself to avoid escalating the sad division today. Do you agree?
Marilyn Klerx-Hardie, if sometime in the future you notice my attempt at making those words not counterproductive and more fleshed out, I would be interested to know how they land with you. Thanks!
WOW! You have just made a friend, no matter whether we disagree or agree in the future!!!
Marilyn Klerz-Hardie, thank you for pointing out how the words "delusions of grandeur" landed with you and that you find them to be counterproductive to evoking conversation. I will think on that and perhaps be able to find some replacement words for the concept or some words to flesh out how I define the concept and believe it fits.
Trying to use a Republican to fix the mess a Republican got us into 40 years ago . . . or, and they got tired of hiding their racism . . .
They identify with Trump, they like Trump, they are just like Trump, Narcissists and Sociopaths.
It's their personality, that is why they migrate to the Republican party, they see the others that are just like them. The Republican wolf-pack mentality, they all obey the top dog no matter what, 100% absolute loyalty. If the Devil were a Republican running for office, they would vote for him as that would be "their guy."
Thus, it is their psychological disorder - educated or not.
> > > This is what we are up against:
“10 signs for spotting a sociopath – Warning signs:”
“Sociopaths are masters are presenting themselves as heroes with high morals and philosophy, yet underneath it they are the true criminal minds in society who steal, undermine, deceive, and often incite emotional chaos among entire communities. They are masters at turning one group of people against another group while proclaiming themselves to be the one true savior. Wherever they go, they create strife, argument and hatred, yet they utterly fail to see their own role in creating it. They are delusional at so many levels that their brains defy logical reasoning.”
“#1) Sociopaths are charming. Sociopaths have high charisma and tend to attract a following just because people want to be around them. They have a "glow" about them that attracts people who typically seek guidance or direction.
“#2) Sociopaths are more spontaneous and intense than other people. They tend to do bizarre, sometimes erratic things that most regular people wouldn't do. They are unbound by normal social contracts. Their behavior often seems irrational or extremely risky.”
“#3) Sociopaths are incapable of feeling shame, guilt or remorse. Their brains simply lack the circuitry to process such emotions. This allows them to betray people, threaten people or harm people without giving it a second thought. They pursue any action that serves their own self interest even if it seriously harms others.”
“#4) Sociopaths invent outrageous lies about their experiences. They wildly exaggerate things to the point of absurdity, but when they describe it to you in a storytelling format, for some reason it sounds believable at the time.”
“#5) Sociopaths seek to dominate others and "win" at all costs. They hate to lose any argument or fight and will viciously defend their web of lies, even to the point of logical absurdity.”
“#6) Sociopaths tend to be highly intelligent, but they use their brainpower to deceive others rather than empower them. Their high IQs often makes them dangerous. This is why many of the best-known serial killers who successfully evaded law enforcement were sociopaths.”
“#7) Sociopaths are incapable of love and are entirely self-serving. They may feign love or compassion in order to get what they want, but they don't actually FEEL love in the way that you or I do.”
“#8) Sociopaths speak poetically. They are master wordsmiths, able to deliver a running "stream of consciousness" monologue that is both intriguing and hypnotic. They are expert storytellers and even poets.”
“#9) Sociopaths never apologize. They are never wrong. They never feel guilt. They can never apologize. Even if shown proof that they were wrong, they will refuse to apologize and instead go on the attack.”
“#10) Sociopaths are delusional and literally believe that what they say becomes truth merely because they say it! “
Old news. Learned this in psychology grad school 20 years ago, but maybe it helps those who haven’t been.
Most people have not taken psychology.
I have a graduate degree in psychology so that makes me immune to their nonsense.
Actually, if you go to college, eve a community college, you must take Basic Psych known as Psych 1.
Well, not in 2002 when I went back to college and went to a community college.
Up until quite recently, I looked down on MAGA Trump supporters with the same disdain. I have even likened them to ‘brain dead zombies’, my words.
But I think I now understand these Americans. These people feel they have been forgotten and overlooked by their government for decades. They have.
They have been brainwashed by listening to conservative media lie to them and misdirect the blame from where it belongs, our government’s longstanding policies, onto minorities and immigrants and the left and LGBTQ community.
Our government, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat administrations, prioritizes and serves the interests and agendas of the elites, billionaires and corporations, and does just the barest minimum, and only when compelled, to help individual hardworking Americans.
Both political parties have largely ignored the needs of the people in favor of accommodating their respective wealthy mega donors. This has been the case for decades. But since 1996 when Fox News first began its daily disinformation and misdirection propaganda, their viewers have become radicalized over the 28 years of exposure to the conservative lies the right propagates nightly and daily.
Donald Trump merely capitalized on their resentment, the dissatisfaction of those Americans for his own political gain. And because he is charismatic, he has gotten away with it.
I grew up in NYC where Trump was based, and although his father was a KKK supporter, Trump used to be for a time a liberal who financially supported the Democratic party long ago. Even back then, the man who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal” was commonly viewed by many New Yorkers as a con man. So I was not surprised, that he reverted to his father’s ultra right wing conservatism as he grew older.
But Trump, whatever one might say about him, understands his base. So much so, that they were ready “to fight like hell” for him on January 6, 2021, to storm the capitol and ‘hang Mike Pence’. So much so, that they overlook Trump’s actual ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ and are now even more committed to discarding true democracy altogether and enthusiastically supporting Trump’s stated vision for authoritarianism and autocracy, if re-elected
I mention all this, (and I hope you will read this in its entirety, Dr. Reich. Because the Democrats could, (I submit it is at least very possible for the Democrats,) if they were so inclined, to steal Maga voters from the GOP in the next election.
There’s no way MAGA Trump supporters would vote for Biden. (Frankly, nor will I.) However, they could be persuaded by a Democratic candidate who would really address their needs and concerns AND provide and be ready to vigorously defend, intelligent workable progressive solutions in a manner that everyone could easily understand.
That person is not Joe Biden, unfortunately. But there are many Democrats who would make persuasive, charismatic, populist candidates who would restore unity and faith to the American people in their government on both sides of the political divide, IF they were genuinely and sufficiently committed and motivated to fight to better the lives of “regular Americans”.
Vote Blue, but for someone New 2024. 🇺🇸
And how, exactly, do you propose to get that "someone new" on the ballot in place of Biden?
Third parties are spoilers funded by big money to split the vote of small d democratic voters thereby diminishing the power of their ballots.
I most cases, I agree
Ask the DNC? Whoever they are!
If you were an American, you'd know.
I am not American so please enlighten me. I know they are the heads of the Democratic Party but I don't know who they are?
I have asked but no-one can tell me.
Just interested..
Please forgive the rudeness of idiots. (Maureen) The DNC is the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party of the United States. One of its major duties is to fund the election campaigns of those it approves of. Without that financial backing, a candidate would have the nearly impossible task of financing his or her own campaign. Thank you, Ms. Stokes, for your interest and encouragement. 💐
Many thanks Elai. I would just like the names of these people in the DNC who make these decisions. No-one seems to know?
You may like my article where I question even voting at all. Voting for the lesser of two evils isn’t a vote. It’s playing a rigged game:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-stop-voting-in-presidential
not voting is playing into their hands, it seems to me
Hey man! So i address this in my article. We always think no voting is playing into their hands but it’s actually the opposite
By not voting for presidential elections, we’re choosing to focus on other areas.
This was a topic that came up in the comments on my article. Hoping you can check it out 😊
Local policies come from the top down, and so does the money for local candidates. Don't be distracted.
but my point is that if we focus on our local polices and towns and we take back our local communities, we can stop the chain of the top influencing the bottom.
You can't take back local communities without local independent media and the money to run ordinary local citizens against candidates with an agenda and the money from up the chain. I know there are a few cases that are successful, just as there are a few civil rights law suits that are successful. That makes it appear that the system works when it actually doesn't for the masses.
I agree with you that true change comes from a bottom-up approach; the right-wing realized that and have been working at taking over every local and state institution institution since the 1980s, while the Democrats focused on the national level.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't vote at the national level, too, especially in 2024, because if Trump and the fascist oligarchs backing him win, there may never be another election in America--not even for dog-catcher--and the chance to work on organizing from the bottom up may be gone. Even if it isn't, it's going to take another 40 years to work our way up, so ignoring national level politics while we do it could doom us.. The right wing didn't do as well as they have by ignoring ANY level of government.
trump is whatever is beneficial for him at the moment. His thoughts go no deeper than that.
And his MAGAt brownshirt 'army' will loyally work for him and do whatever he tells them to do, even if they are cognizant enough to realize that fact, and that they themselves will eventually get 'thrown under the bus' by him, since he is their worshiped 'god-savior', and they all think he deserves that dedication and devotion. :(
They idiotically fuel and feed his psychotic narcissism at their very own expense and existence.