I just posted this item:
Lex Anteinternet: Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the...: Rich Men North of Richmond , which is independently produced, I think, had made a big Internet and music scene splash, and frankly, not beca...
This, and it's not a new theme here, took a look at how we got to where we are, where populism has taken over the Republican Party. How, the question ultimately is, can people who see the plaint truth about Donald Trump and his attempt to subvert American democracy continue to support him?
That is, while a lot of educated "country club" or middle class conservatives have abandoned the GOP, a lot of people are coming in. And they're coming in during the current political atmosphere.
Which leads us to this.
What if it isn't the case, deep down, that populist Republicans, who now control the GOP, aren't aware that Donald Trump is lying about losing the election. What if, at least deep down, and on some level, they know that he's lying.
What would that mean?
Well, what it would mean is that the disaffected class that intends to vote for a Rich Man north of Richmond while complaining about Rich Men North of Richmond have reached to the point where they no longer regard their class as legitimate, and therefore what they are doing and supporting as completely legitimate, because the other view doesn't count.
Consider this Facebook exchange I saw the other day:
"I almost lost my Corvette and my cat!"Their bullshit needs to end through constitional revolt.
Eh?
Or:
Office Hours: Why are Republican voters more willing to believe every sort of lie?
Tonight’s Republican debate and Trump’s discussion with Tucker are likely to be cesspools of lies, but lies don’t turn off Republican voters.
Maybe the first reply answers the second.
Maybe Republican voters aren't really willing to believe every sort of lie, or at least not in the way baffled pundits of all types are baffled by, myself included.
Maybe they know they're lies, but lies that seem, to them, to serve a greater truth, in their view.
And that's what is really scary.
The first comment, boxed in the way some people like to do with Facebook comments, refers to one of Joe Biden's endless blundering statements, which in this case related his bad experience with a house fire to what occured on Maui. It was a really goofball thing to say. But the fact of the matter is that there isn't anything Joe Biden says that populists don't hate, even things they would have fully supported if he hadn't said them. And that's because Biden, who started off a centrist, went to the center left, and then went fully to the left, is a representative of Democrats, whom the populists essentially see asn objectively evil.
This is almost impossible for main stream and conventional Americans to grasp, and even though in the populist movement who fairly clearly hold these views would be unwilling to usually admit them in this fashion, but all the signs are there.
Class reduction through objectification is an old and very established thing.
The Communist Parties of the world practiced this extensively. They represented "the workers" or "the people". Their opponents were exploiters of the people, in their propaganda. Ultimately, that meant that they could be killed in the millions, as they weren't really people.
The Nazis did this with the Jews, as well as with the Slavs. Jews and Slavs were lessor, in their propaganda, although bizarrely they were also supposed to be a super crafty opponent. Never mind that none of that was true or that any rational thinking would dispel such an absurdity, that's what they promoted and that's what the German people adopted, resulting in the death of millions.
Lesser fascist movements and near fascist movements held the same view of Communists, and to some extent Socialist, that the Nazi Party did, which hated Communists along with the Jews (and indeed generally assumed that all Communists were Jewish), and therefore felt perfectly justified in suppressing them to the point of death if necessary. Of course, in many places, the Communists (who weren't majority Jewish by any means) felt the same way about right wing movements. At any rate, therefore, this produced severely repressing governments like that of the Italian fascists or Spanish Francoist, who nonetheless quite frankly enjoyed widespread popularity with large segments of their people.
And notable with all of these movements, they reduced their ideology, at the street level, to a single man.
The Nazis of course reduced it to Hitler. Indeed, the Führerprinzip held that everything should "work towards the Führer. People didn't really know what Hitler might want to do on any day to day level, but they generally could grasp it, and that was the thing to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment