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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Poe's Law. But I prefer the hypothesis that he means what he says, and is a liar.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.![]()
Trump sure does love the "Just Joking" Justification, but I think he's worn it out a bit by now.
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edited 27th Nov '16 7:20:46 AM by henry42
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!Trump's victory is acting like a shining beacon for other nationalists and they are playing the worst cards of nationalistic policy.
The Economist: The new nationalism
With his call to put “America First”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism
WHEN Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again!” he was echoing the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Back then voters sought renewal after the failures of the Carter presidency. This month they elected Mr Trump because he, too, promised them a “historic once-in-a-lifetime” change.
But there is a difference. On the eve of the vote, Reagan described America as a shining “city on a hill”. Listing all that America could contribute to keep the world safe, he dreamed of a country that “is not turned inward, but outward—toward others”. Mr Trump, by contrast, has sworn to put America First. Demanding respect from a freeloading world that takes leaders in Washington for fools, he says he will “no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism”. Reagan’s America was optimistic: Mr Trump’s is angry.
Welcome to the new nationalism. For the first time since the second world war, the great and rising powers are simultaneously in thrall to various sorts of chauvinism. Like Mr Trump, leaders of countries such as Russia, China and Turkey embrace a pessimistic view that foreign affairs are often a zero-sum game in which global interests compete with national ones. It is a big change that makes for a more dangerous world.
My country right or left
Nationalism is a slippery concept, which is why politicians find it so easy to manipulate. At its best, it unites the country around common values to accomplish things that people could never manage alone. This “civic nationalism” is conciliatory and forward-looking—the nationalism of the Peace Corps, say, or Canada’s inclusive patriotism or German support for the home team as hosts of the 2006 World Cup. Civic nationalism appeals to universal values, such as freedom and equality. It contrasts with “ethnic nationalism”, which is zero-sum, aggressive and nostalgic and which draws on race or history to set the nation apart. In its darkest hour in the first half of the 20th century ethnic nationalism led to war.
Mr Trump’s populism is a blow to civic nationalism (see article)
. Nobody could doubt the patriotism of his post-war predecessors, yet every one of them endorsed America’s universal values and promoted them abroad. Even if a sense of exceptionalism stopped presidents signing up to outfits like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), America has supported the rules-based order. By backing global institutions that staved off a dog-eat-dog world, the United States has made itself and the world safer and more prosperous.
Mr Trump threatens to weaken that commitment even as ethnic nationalism is strengthening elsewhere. In Russia Vladimir Putin has shunned cosmopolitan liberal values for a distinctly Russian mix of Slavic tradition and Orthodox Christianity. In Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned away from the European Union and from peace talks with the Kurdish minority, in favour of a strident, Islamic nationalism that is quick to detect insults and threats from abroad. In India Narendra Modi remains outward-looking and modernising, but he has ties to radical ethnic-nationalist Hindu groups that preach chauvinism and intolerance.
Meanwhile, Chinese nationalism has become so angry and vengeful that the party struggles to control it. True, the country depends upon open markets, embraces some global institutions and wants to be close to America (see Banyan). But from the 1990s onwards schoolchildren have received a daily dose of “patriotic” education setting out the mission to erase a century of humiliating occupation. And, to count as properly Chinese you have in practice to belong to the Han people: everyone else is a second-class citizen (see Briefing).
Even as ethnic nationalism has prospered, the world’s greatest experiment in “post-nationalism” has foundered. The architects of what was to become the EU believed that nationalism, which had dragged Europe into two ruinous world wars, would wither and die. The EU would transcend national rivalries with a series of nested identities in which you could be Catholic, Alsatian, French and European all at once.
However, in large parts of the EU this never happened. The British have voted to leave and in former communist countries, such as Poland and Hungary, power has passed to xenophobic ultranationalists. There is even a small but growing threat that France might quit—and so destroy—the EU.
The last time America turned inward was after the first world war and the consequences were calamitous. You do not have to foresee anything so dire to fear Mr Trump’s new nationalism today. At home it tends to produce intolerance and to feed doubts about the virtue and loyalties of minorities. It is no accident that allegations of anti-Semitism have infected the bloodstream of American politics for the first time in decades.
Abroad, as other countries take their cue from a more inward-looking United States, regional and global problems will become harder to solve. The ICC’s annual assembly this week was overshadowed by the departure of three African countries. China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea are incompatible with UNCLOS. If Mr Trump enacts even a fraction of his mercantilist rhetoric, he risks neutering the World Trade Organisation. If he thinks that America’s allies are failing to pay for the security they receive, he has threatened to walk away from them. The result—especially for small countries that today are protected by global rules—will be a harsher and more unstable world.
Isolationists unite
Mr Trump needs to realise that his policies will unfold in the context of other countries’ jealous nationalism. Disengaging will not cut America off from the world so much as leave it vulnerable to the turmoil and strife that the new nationalism engenders. As global politics is poisoned, America will be impoverished and its own anger will grow, which risks trapping Mr Trump in a vicious circle of reprisals and hostility. It is not too late for him to abandon his dark vision. For the sake of his country and the world he urgently needs to reclaim the enlightened patriotism of the presidents who went before him.
edited 27th Nov '16 7:47:58 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesOne of the hopefuls for conservative party leadership oop here is channeling trump hard. Closed voting for party members with (IIRC) ranked ballots means she probably won't win. Probably. I'm starting to re-think my stance on Harper. He held a majority for four years and never did anything country ruining. Even during the refugee crisis the debate was just on how many to take in and when.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?![]()
You get to elect your party leader? Why can't we have that in America too?
Speaking of electing party leaders, do you think the Democrats can learn anything from Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor party? It looks like a similar rift is opening up in the Democratic party.
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!I think it is the same thing in most countries that had "the big left-wing party" and "the big right-wing party". It becomes harder and harder to conciliate opinions when they slowly go further and further, or when the center of gravity shifts. I want to be optimistic, and think that in four years, the GOP will implode when Trump will lose the reelection, just like the Dems should struggle right now.
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Because the founding fathers found actual democracy abhorrent. As has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout U.S. history, that whole "all men are created equal" thing didn't actually mean half as much to them as it does to some of us today.
The parties were meant to be largely self-sustaining because the Founding Fathers didn't really trust the common man. It was another check on the power of democracy, not unlike the Electoral College. Our system is based on the idea that Great Men would decide the fate of the nation with their great wisdom and intelligence, while the dumbf*ck commoners can offer helpful suggestions that the Great Men will consider the merits of. But ultimately the final say belongs to the Great Men, not the commoners.
We broke away from monarchy and built a republic because even though we hated the king and queen, we kinda liked what they stood for. To this day, American culture is still obsessed with the Divine Right to Rule and the myth of Great Men who change the world singlehandedly through their greatness. Our movies are full of them, our history is loaded with them, and our politics are built around the principle.
And it's a principle that remains powerful today. Remember Trump's RNC speech. "I alone can fix it." He rode to power through the image of the Great Man, the man who is inherently superior to all other men, who has the will and the wisdom and the power to solve the world's problems through his greatness alone.
In their fear of demagoguery, the Founding Fathers dedicated our entire political system to it.
EDIT: For a more positive example, Obama also rose to power on the image of the Great Man. In politics, it's just what you have to do, and it's what leads inevitably to approval ratings plummeting in the first year or two. Because voters always vote you in expecting the Great Man to solve all problems and are consequentially disappointed when life doesn't work that way.
edited 27th Nov '16 8:53:17 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It's one of the great divides from the Revolutionary era that characterized the Hamilton-Jefferson split. Jefferson wanting to spread democratic ideals among as many (white, male) citizens as possible while Hamilton preferred to centralize power among the allegedly wise and disinterested elites of society. The great social changes after the War of Independence and the advent of the French Revolution only further strengthened their beliefs.
Hamilton went so far as to give a six hour speech at the Constitutional Convention calling for the structure the US government to copy Britain's with an elected monarch. Jefferson when the opposite direction and wanted conventions every generation to form completely new governments so that the powers that be couldn't dictate in perpetuity.
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Considering more people by a margin of 2 million and rising voted for his opponent because they could see through his bullshit, I feel like they were.
The dumbf*ck commoner did not put Trump into power. The Great Man worship inherent in our system did. The Electoral College has put into office the very demagogue it was made to keep out.
edited 27th Nov '16 9:11:36 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.As Akhil Reed Amar says here
, the Electoral College was built to sustain slavery...and a case can be made that America's institutions were built to accomodate a slave-run economy but since its transition to actual democracy based on French Revolution model (Equal Rights for All Citizens, Universal Suffrage), the institutions haven't been updated for the new reality.
The Electoral College is proof of that. For a long time it wasn't a problem because nobody expected a day to come when African-Americans and other minorities became a major voting bloc, and yet here they are, and there comes the big demographic shift and oh the existential fear of losing one's feudal entitlement of being white and voting...quel horreur (clutches pearls).
Remember one of the reasons the Civil Rights Act was passed was because US Democrats and others felt it was important in the context of the Cold War. Until then, the only group that had taken up the cause of African-American suffrage was the Communist Party USA in the 30s. When the USSR fell and the Cold War ended, obviously some felt that "Actual Democracy" had outlived its purpose as a war measure and want to go back to business as usual.
A constitutional convention every generation sounds like a good idea. With the advent of modern tech I'm surprised countries haven't moved towards a more direct form of democracy. I'm not sure what that would like to be honest but it would be interesting. "Text 1 to 555-5555 to keep the gays outta marriage!" "text 1 to 666-6666 to fire the president!"
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?That's a good point. Aside from being the right thing to do, civil rights reform was important in order to gain real moral high ground against the Soviets. How could we claim to be champions of democracy while disenfranchising an eighth of our population?
Edit: we got around the need for perpetual constitutional conventions by having a system built on unspoken norms. Now that those norms have degraded, we should have a convention, but one where each amendment is submitted to a vote for majority approval (since a convention right now under the current terms would turn our country into Columbia from Bio Shock overnight).
edited 27th Nov '16 9:24:11 AM by Ogodei
France went through five Republics, two Empires and one Monarchy in the span of two centuries. Spain went through two Republics and a half, three Monarchies, two Dictatorships. One new Constitution every regime change.
So, maybe not every generation, but every two or three, is perfectly doable.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Again, maybe it's just me but it seemed like trump was being sarcastic when he was responding to the Hamilton cast.