Tagged: the deplorables

Reelin in the years

I notice journalists, especially from the NY Times, congratulate each other inordinately. Rarely, however, does one self-congratulate/self-hug himself like Ken Vogel does.

Maybe people who bashed Hillary Clinton are finally having second thoughts about doing so.

President Bonespurs forgot that right-wingers lost the first Civil War. He’ll take a deferment from the civil war to come.

The civil war will last until the Deplorables run out of meth and oxy.

Bernie Sanders says there’s voter suppression in New Hampshire. Unfortunately for Bern, they aren’t suppressing votes for Warren and Biden.

To be fair, Bern’s plan to eradicate billionaires is more in line with the dictatorship of the proletariat than a plan that saves the bourgeoisie from themselves …

Which begs the question: why is Bernie running for president? It seems like a distraction from the duties of a revolutionary leader.

Answer: Bern will burn the Democratic Party to the ground. That was always his plan. The notion of  winning the nomination is only a pipe dream used to keep his benighted followers in line.

Lukacs’ reactionary stance towards literary modernism reminds one of the limits of dialectical materialism.

I guess nothing is forever 21.

The lights

Trump’s deplorables have been radicalized by Breitbart, Fox News, and extremist Christian academies.

Weak willed people are susceptible to the propaganda of a strongman like Trump. One sees the same phenomenon in Turkey and Russia.

Trump supporters are precisely the sort that “founders” like Hamilton and Madison worried about.

Worse yet, the Republican Party is acting as a fifth column.

The first act of Trump’s presidency is likely unconstitutional. It won’t be the last time this happens. The courts are the only thing that stand between democracy and dictatorship.

Gallows pole

The CIA knows Trump is lying before he does.

One word sums up a Trump presidency.

Ugly.

Breitbart is opening offices in Paris, Berlin, and the Wolf’s Lair.

After the repeal of Obamacare, the Deplorables opioid scripts will no longer be covered. What will they sell on the black market then?

Hwylio mewn cyfog

Western democracies have been around for two centuries. There’s no revolutionary force in existence of any sufficient weight, whether progressive or regressive (i.e., today’s gutter populism), to suggests there’s a threat of their demise on the near or distant horizon.

The endless stream of “end of this or that” columns (e.g., the end of liberalism, the end of neoliberalism, the end of the elite, the end of the state, the end of globalization, etc.) is a shopworn brand of political prognostication. It does show, however, the futility of ideology critique in the era of late capitalism and the worldwide culture industry (as per Adorno), whether immanent or transcendental.

The critical question is whether today’s forces of regression (e.g., Brexiteers in the UK, Deplorables in the US) are strong enough to undo all democratic institutions without facing significant resistance from the forces of enlightenment and reason.

Gong show

Cartoon politicians like Farage and Trump are the pacifiers of the working man and woman.

Mr Trump is on a victory tour, first stop in my hometown of Cincinnati. It’s only a matter of time before he starts pinning military medals on his suit jacket.

Mr Trump’s election was a global 9/11. He could very well turn the US into a Verbrecherstaat.

In psychoanalytic terms, he’s a psychical infant.

Infantile psyche + Twitter = global clown show. This is the quality of entertainment the Deplorables crave.

There’s no way back to the economic and cultural insulation of the Shire. As Marx wrote long ago, the cheap commodities of the bourgeoisie have battered down all Chinese walls. Brexit and Trump walls will fare no better.

On reflection

Mr Trump is a failed President even before taking office. He’ll have to answer to the pitchforks and patarini who elected him sooner than later.

His fate depends on what motivated the Deplorables. If they were motivated by the prospect of manufacturing jobs returning in mass numbers to the US, their belief will be shattered. However, if they were motivated by identity politics (i.e., misogyny, xenophobia, and racism), then their faith will be fully rewarded by Trump’s Presidency.

There are pockets of reason and enlightenment strewn over a landscape of inbred cultural backwardness. Radical cosmopolitans must stand up and say no to ignorance and cultural backwardness, whenever and wherever revanchist populism surfaces.

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There are also historical precedents for the Trump-Farage-Le Pen-Petry phenomenon. Cola Di Rienzo, Savonarola, Luther, and Robespierre attempted to channel the anger of “the people” towards various political ends. They lost control (the Peasants’ War of 1524-25, which was crushed with Luther’s help) and lost their lives in the process (Savonarola, Cola, and Robespierre).