This is why I have to run against Pete Stauber. He is too timid to contradict his most virulent supporters the way John McCain corrected a woman on election night who screamed abuse at President-elect Barack Obama. For such people its not about socialism. Its not about saving mining. Its about preparing for the next Civil War a theme which you may remember I memorialized in my last snow sculpture this year.
A lot of Pete’s supporters are spoiling for one. They’ve been reading Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh for thirty and more years. I was about to upload the long answer I sent last night to my French Pen Pal. S. wanted to better understand our politics especially how religion has taken such a major role in shaping it. She had just read some French analyst’s explanation about America which she tried to explain to me. I was already in a reflective mood so I sent her a 1300-word-reply. I meant to polish it up here but I jut read this apocalyptic post explaining how irrational Trump detractors were. In my turn I present it to my readers to show how irrational Trump fanatics are. I don’t know if Mr. Brownstein is a believer or simply a guy who likes throwing gas on a fire or a Russian Troll. Whatever Brownstein’s motivations are, it is important to see how Trump’s loyalists look at the world. Liberals are going to destroy America anyway so the Right might as well prepare to use the guns they’ve been stockpiling for ages! I won’t bother to argue with his ideas. I’ll let my long answer to my Pen pal typos and all, speak for me. PETE STAUBER WOULD RATHER GET SHOT BY AN UNHINGED GUNMAN AGAIN THAN TELL HIS SUPPORTERS THAT DONALD TRUMP WOULD TEAR THE CONSTITUTION IN HALF IT HE COULD PROFIT BY DOING SO.
From “Intellectual Take Out”
After Trump, Who Will Progressives Hate?
By Barry Brownstein 2 ½ min
Recently New York City’s Comptroller Scott Stringer suffered the loss of his mother, Arlene Stringer-Cuevas. Stringer-Cuevas died at age 86 due to complications from COVID-19.
Labeling his pain as “incalculable,” Stringer appeared on CNN to proclaim his anger. During an interview with Anderson Cooper Stringer lashed out: “Donald Trump has blood on his hands, and he has my mom’s blood on his hands.”
Stringer’s grief is certainly understandable. Were any of us in the same boat, we’d likely engage in finger-pointing as well. Indeed, in the current coronavirus social climate, folks are banding together, looking for someone to blame. That blame often falls on Donald Trump. But why?
It all makes sense to Eric Hoffer. In The True Believer, Hoffer sheds light on how mass movements use hatred as a unifying force.
Hoffer writes, “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.” The hater, Hoffer adds, “becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass.”
Mass movements need also need a “devil,” Hoffer explains. For some in history that devil has been Jews. In current times, that devil is often Trump.
Whether you pick Jews or Trump as your devil, haters will make everything the fault of their devil. Today some haters believe a Jewish conspiracy is behind COVID-19. Is their hatred different from those who believe Trump is the COVID devil?
Hoffer points out, “like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent.” Hoffer continues, “Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.” To progressives full of hate, Trump is behind every evil in the world.
Who will the progressives hate after Trump? Growing anti-Semitism in the progressive moment, makes the Jews an obvious target. More likely, progressives will escalate their attacks on the “wealthy” and others they claim have “privilege.” In line with Hoffer’s observation, they will expand their definition of those they consider “wealthy” to anyone who has achieved success.
With an economy devastated by a prolonged shutdown and millions of college graduates who majored in worthless subjects, progressives have a combustible mixture to exploit. Hoffer writes, “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” Such people dedicate themselves to a “holy cause.” Already, vigilantes call the police on their neighbors for allegedly overstepping lockdown rules.
Hoffer points to “people whose lives are barren and insecure” as they “show a greater willingness to obey.” Hoffer adds:
“To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.”
Hoffer warns, “In times of crisis…to obey is…the only firm point in a chaotic day-by-day existence.”
Looking at the irrational hatred for Trump being sown, I fear the coming of an authoritarian government, the likes of which we’ve never imagined, ushered in by progressives in a not so distant dystopian future.
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Summing up American Politics to my French Pen pal
S.,
It is not easy to explain the thinking of 330,000,000 people but I will try to start.
Our history leans most heavily on English law, custom and religion. Even though we broke with England our common language led us to throw our weight behind England and its allies in the 1st and 2nd world wars. We have become like the student who outshines its teacher. But we have mixed feelings about what that legacy means. We are proud to the point of vanity for saving the world. Some of us want to keep saving it. But because so many of our attempt to save it have been disastrous – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq we also resent other nations when they find fault with us. And we argue among ourselves about what we should and should not do.
At the founding of the English colonies England, like much of western Europe was fractured religiously. Those fractures were brought to the colonies but also were not quite so important in a new land where the native population was melting away because of European diseases and in the face of vastly superior technology. By the end of the Revolutionary war with 3 million Europeans that process was unstoppable. As Americans moved west they continued the fracturing of Protestantism started in Europe at the reformation. But…
But…because there was so much room to move around Americans were almost too busy building America to let religion get in the way. “Heretics” simply moved away. Tiny Rhode Island was famous for its non conformists. Even the Pilgrims were separatists determined not to be told what to do by Henry the 8th’s Anglican church. So the idea of letting the state or the Pope tell anyone how to worship was very unpopular. Then too at the start of the revolution American Patriots were borrowing from the anti-royalist enlightenment ideas. Religious tolerance sounded pretty good to people who hadn’t been fighting over how to worship God. Even heavily catholic Maryland founded as a refuge for English Catholics was welcome into the Revolution.
In time however, the protestant majority of a young nation began taking a dim view of Catholics especially because they were regarded as giving a Pope their first loyalty over being Americans. The heavy settlement of Irish during the great famine pushed this prejudice and it spread west through What is today rural Trump country. Until JFK’s election it was impossible for a lot of Americans to vote for a “papist”.
1960 was a long time ago but what brought the protestants together was abortion. Catholics followed the idea that life began at conception. When I started in politics it was Catholics that were the most ferocious pro life politicians. As Republicans were trying to figure out how to win back America from decades of Democratic supremacy they saw the heavily urban catholic vote as a source of voters they could pull away from Democrats. At the same time civil rights laws had alienated the civil war south from Democrats. When I was young many old southerners still hated Abraham Lincoln for marching through Georgia. But a new generation of southerners saw the Republican party as making more sense than a separate independent party. Ronald Reagan was so appealing to them that hundreds of southern democrats switched over. That fused two groups of people together…
Those groups were big business pro-corporatist Republicans and southern anti civil rights white southerners. For generations southerners had voted with Republicans on economic issues even though they pinched their nose over Abraham Lincoln. By the time of Reagan, 120 years after the Civil War, all was forgiven. And the cement was abortion.
I have a theory about abortion. When I was a kid pregnancy for single women was cruel and society was more interested in shaming them into dangerous illegal abortions than helping them out. The South and north had long had laws prohibiting it but not because of the Catholic notion of life at conception. Instead those laws were passed in an era where women were regarded almost as men’s property. If they got pregnant, like a slave master’s slave, the resulting children were not theirs to make decisions about. Lots of Republicans were pro choice back then. They disapproved of a society that drove young women to back alley abortionists. They also felt contraception was or should be acceptable. In those years…
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In those years the south especially had a very punitive attitude about pre-marital sex. And of course all the blame was endured by women and not so much by men. They opposed sex education. They believed contraceptives only encouraged immorality.
So “fundamentalist attitudes” made an alliance with Catholics who regarded contraceptives as interfering with an act that was only justified for the purpose of procreation.
Today’s Republican Catholics aren’t happy with Pope Francis because he isn’t pushing the pro life agenda as hard as his predecessors which is angering fundamentalist pro life protestants.
In my view the pro life agenda is mostly a self righteous tool to break our old notion that church and state should be separated. In God we trust has been on our counsel but that began in an era when America had only Christian churches and it was a cheap way to feel united as a nation. With communism religion seemed to be under attack. Marx called it the opiate of the people and Stalin persecuted Christian’s. In 1954 the congress inserted “under God” into an unofficial “Pledge of Allegiance that had become more popular. That pledge hadn’t bee written when my grandfather was a kid and he didn’t recite it every day with or without God in it. And he still volunteered to fight in a war he didn’t think America had any business fighting. His core philosophy was “My country right or wrong”. By the Vietnam War I disagreed with that philosophy. I only wanted my country to be right.
I think the numbers your article used were probably right. About 15 % of Americans are “fundamentalists.” That means they believe every word of the bible is God’s word and without mistake. To me that idea is nonsense. Remember I am an agnostic. Their anti scientific ideas have said the universe I’d only 6,000 years old. Everything we have learned through science that challenges the word of god is suspect. The issue that brought this to a head was evolution. My problem with fundamentalists is that while they are willing to ignore science they seem equally willing to ignore the most noble ideas of Jesus that caring for the poor and shunning wealth and power is what brings life to Christianity.
The white south has resented the north since the civil war. Northern abolitionists decried slavery. They defeated the south and set up schools for freed slaves to disprove the slave owners argument that they were unteachable sub humans. They resented efforts to pass national anti lynching laws. They fought civil rights and resented white Christians who came to the South to help black southerners register to vote.
I think abortion gave the south an issue they could throw back in the face of northerners. We care about babies and you don’t. Because their party opposes so many laws and taxes that would help new born and children I am unimpressed with this attitude.
That answer doesn’t quite answer your question/questions but it is a start.
S. Its always dangerous to ask me a question
