Politics Thread

Idk man, your defense for why Trump isn't a fascist reminds me a lot of this:



Like yeah, things didn't escalate to those extremes you mention and maybe it is erroneous to label him a fascist full-stop, but the signs to where things were leading (and in many ways still are given the guy still hasn't conceded to a loss of power) are there. Calling him a fascist is not to diminish the power of the word or its history, it's to recognize where things are going and stop it before it reaches a more dire point.


Anyway, I get the point your making. It feels like both sides are continuously bickering and nothing ever gets done. But at the very least I think the left's claims of Trump being a racist/fascist/white supremacist who could destroy the world are rooted in more fact than Fox News positioning Joe Biden as the love child of Lenin and Marx.

You're lucky.  My Dad's favorite is Neil Diamond.  The horror.. the horror...

My dad's a Johnny Cash guy.

www.businessinsider.com/aoc-spars-with-centrist-democrats-after-unexpected-house-losses-2020-11

This sums up the phone call that's making its rounds online pretty well.  Rep. Abigail Spanberger is her name and she and others have been doing some finger-pointing as to why the Democrats lost a ton of their other elections that they were hoping/projecting to win.  Naturally there's been pushback from others.

But I'll end with this quote from Michelle Obama from earlier in the week that I just read this morning.  Now she may not be President but behind Barack she's probably the most popular figure in the Democratic party.  You might agree with her or think she has a good point but I can tell you anyone who voted for Trump either enthusiastically or reluctantly is going to read this and think to themselves 'this is why I never vote for you guys.' 

"Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division," she wrote. "We’ve got a lot of work to do to reach out to these folks in the years ahead and connect with them on what unites us."

Let me put it another way.  This is a question that I've heard people pose before, is Trump a brain-dead moron or is he a diabolical, tyrannical genius?  I don't give him nearly as much credit as his critics, I think he's an idiot.  He's never been in politics, he never went to law school, I don't think he knows what he's saying half the time and almost all of it is just to gin up his base.  If you think his comments come from a place of fascistic endeavor that's okay, I think it comes from a place of total and complete ignorance of just about everything.

I mean, I agree that he's an ignorant buffoon and I'm always skeptical when people claim a Trump gaff is some elaborate attempt at 4D chess. But he doesn't have to be a Machiavellian genius to embrace fascist qualities.

El Chapo is building schools in Mexico while being imprisoned in America. Trump can’t even pretend to care about Covid. That’s how bad Trump is; guys worse than the Mexican cartel.

Okay, that article sounds like some pretty routine dem infighting, and compared to what Twitter was like during the primary there really isn't anything terribly shocking about it.  The left and moderate wings of the party have been going at it like that for the better part of the last four years.  I'm probably more on Spanberger's side of the argument than AOC's but I wouldn't extrapolate too much from this call's existence.  

As for that Michelle Obama quote... what is supposed to be so offensive about that?  She's basically agreeing with everything you're saying, that there needs to be more work in reaching out to the redder areas of the country.  

You kind of seem to be missing the point.  Trump wanted to be a dictator, but wasn't effective enough to pull it off. The two are not mutually exclusive.  Hitler probably wasn't the smartest person in the world either, but things went slightly better for him and he managed to wreak untold chaos and death because of it. Trump fortunately got thwarted before he could completely undermine democracy, but like, you're not going to just immediately forgive someone who tried to kill you just because they fucked up and ended shooting themselves in the foot instead.

My Dad's is The Moody Blues.

But... they did. These aren't Mitt Romney voters we're talking about, they're Trump voters. Trump was a guy who said the quiet part loud. He lied on a nearly hourly basis in ways that were transparent and obvious, he constantly race baited, he did wily erratic and chaotic things to control the news cycle, and divided people at every possible opportunity. These aren't subjective opinions about the guy they were basically his brand and it would be wildly patronizing to suggest that his voters were too stupid to see it. If they didn't want to be seen that way, they probably should have voted for someone else and frankly it's kind of ridiculous to expect anyone to run against a guy without pointing out his obvious flaws what voting for him says about you.




Yeah, that would probably be a bad campaign ad. But that Michelle Obama quote isn't a campaign ad. I do think activists could stand to be a bit more mindful of what they say at times, but you cannot realistically expect human being to spend their entire lives speaking with perfect diplomatic discipline at all times, especially when that means speaking around very obvious and apparent things (like the fact that Donald Trump's campaign was fucking hateful), doing that would make everyone sound like a robot that's oblivious to the world around them. And frankly, if that innocuous quote is the most stridently partisan thing you can find you either really aren't looking very hard or there really isn't that much out there.



This is largely a distinction without a difference. His desire for unlimited power was readily apparent and he said and did all sorts of highly authoritarian things to do it. The fucking guy tried to sabotage the U.S. mail in order to keep power and is actively trying to get his crony judges to throw the election after the fact and a whole lot of other things. And frankly, just saying he was too stupid to know what he was doing is kind of ridiculous. He was dumb but he wasn't that dumb. He's a 74-year-old college graduate who ran a multi-million dollar corporation, he knows how the world works and he knows that what he was doing was decidedly not normal.

Anyone who says they weren't playing Significant Other 24/7 back in 1999 is a damn liar.  

That's it. That's all I'm trying to say. You and I probably agree way more than we disagree when it comes to Trump as a person and his abilities as a leader, I just think that if the game is to tempt voters to the Democratic side it would serve their argument well to be more mindful as to the approach.



I'll meet you halfway. I think he approached the Presidency as owning his own company, doing whatever he wanted, saying whatever he wanted, threatening people, thinking he answer to no one and trying to make things happen outside proper procedures of which I think he was more or less ignorant, willfully ignorant toward the end I'm sure. He surrounded himself with family and yes-men from his inner circle who just jerked him off the whole time and ignored advice from anyone else. Bad leader? Sure. But dictator, I just hesitate to use that term especially when the incompetence is on full display.