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Hillary Clinton
Related: About this forumTHE DANGEROUS ACCEPTANCE OF DONALD TRUMP ~The New Yorker ~ (HRC GP)
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen, the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace. The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiancehes going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.
Now for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper namewho, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liarare suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, We can control him.
No, you cant. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United Statesthe order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end oppositionwhether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
And Trump announces his enmity in the choice of his companions. The Murdoch media conglomerate has been ordered to acquiesce; its no surprise that it has. But Trumps other fellow-travellers include Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and dirty-tricks maven, while his venues have included the broadcasts of Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a Globalist plot wherein an alien force not of this world is attacking humanitynot to mention Joness marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestite who murdered Joan Rivers. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.
Now for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper namewho, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liarare suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, We can control him.
No, you cant. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United Statesthe order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end oppositionwhether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
And Trump announces his enmity in the choice of his companions. The Murdoch media conglomerate has been ordered to acquiesce; its no surprise that it has. But Trumps other fellow-travellers include Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and dirty-tricks maven, while his venues have included the broadcasts of Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a Globalist plot wherein an alien force not of this world is attacking humanitynot to mention Joness marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestite who murdered Joan Rivers. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.
continues... http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump?mbid=social_facebook
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THE DANGEROUS ACCEPTANCE OF DONALD TRUMP ~The New Yorker ~ (HRC GP) (Original Post)
Her Sister
May 2016
OP
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)1. An WW2 veteran just told me that T-rump reminds him of that
person who prepetrated WW2 and helped WW1 where millions upon millions died all in the name of the Aryn Race.
Her Sister
(6,444 posts)3. Yep many of us can easily see that too!
Why give away and gamble our future! THIS IS A FREAKING FORK IN THE ROAD!!!!!!
SunSeeker
(51,556 posts)2. K & R
eastwestdem
(1,220 posts)4. It got me scared...I guess that is the point! nt
MBS
(9,688 posts)5. This is one of Gopnik's most powerful pieces ever.
And important and true article, which I would like to paste on every wall (both virtual and real) .
It's high time for Sanders and his acolytes to start focusing on what matters: defeating Trump and everything he represents. As Gopnik wrote:
The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern historyan authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldnt mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forcesand yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.
Yes, it is really this important:
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries dont really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or rightnot by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italiansor Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. . . .The pain of not seeing that black is black soon enough will be ours, and the time to recognize this is now.
sarae
(3,284 posts)6. K & R
ProudProgressiveNow
(6,129 posts)7. K&R nt