OK, here's part two of my post from last night.
Regarding the comparisons of Trump to Hitler: I'm glad that people are taking the threat posed by Trump seriously, but I don't like this rhetorical move.
I don't like it for the reason that making analogies between two atrocious situations is always a risky business (because it runs the risk of trivializing one or the other situation, because it's generally an exploitative move, etc.).
I don't like it because it ignores vast differences between 1930s Germany and contemporary America (Germany had just lost a major war and was in serious economic straits, it was the Great Depression, and Germany was a young nation-state with consolidated ethnic nationalism as its raison d'etre; whereas the US is currently the world superpower and doing relatively fine from an economic perspective and, however convincing it may or may not sound, is founded in explicit rhetoric about ethic diversity).
I don't like it because it is a kind of fear-mongering that seems inauthentic: if Trump is so scary, then he's scary enough by virtue of being Trump -- he doesn't also need to be Hitler.
I don't like it because dramatic tactics are by their nature short-term -- the focus here is on this person and this moment, not on the massive lead-up that got us here (like, if he loses, then everyone will be like "Yay, defeated Hitler/Voldemort! Now back to business as usual," which I don't think is the right reaction).
And I don't like it because it's a kind of avoidance of contemporary reality -- it's a kind of "othering" Trump to be part of another, "not us" era. But he is us. And it's harder to look at that than to call him Hitler.
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Sorry to say it, but I think Trump's gonna win
I'm not sure exactly why I feel the need to post this, but here it is:
I am expecting Trump to win in November.
It is very unlikely that after 8 years of a Democratic president, another Democrat will be elected. For that reason alone I expect Trump to win. Beyond that, I think that if he has been able to get this far, he is likely to get further. If there were going to be significant popular opposition to his election, we would have seen evidence of it already. I think that "Progressives" have a tendency to be a little bit naive about this type of thing, like "Oh, that couldn't POSSIBLY happen, it would be too terrible, America has its problems but we're not totally a lost cause."
Well, not wanting to imagine something undesirable doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely. Candidates that seem to many of us like buffoons have won before, in recent memory, and for some reason they generally seem to do well in elections. (Also, regardless of what I might personally think or wish about Clinton, I don't think she has the charisma or show(wo)manship to compete with a figure like Trump, apart from any of a zillion other considerations.) I think it's also important to keep in mind that the last few elections have been EXTREMELY close, and the person who won did not win because of having the support of a significant majority of the country, but because of a very minor tip in the scale. So to the degree that when Obama replaced Bush, many of us felt some sense of relief, "Oh, this country's finally beginning to see sense" -- no! It was not far from a fluke that he won and didn't reflect a real shift in public opinion in comparison with the previous two elections.
I think that these are all things that most of us are in denial about, and if and when Trump wins in the fall, there will be a lot of pearl clutching and "How could this have possibly happened?" It can and probably will happen because it's where we're quite clearly headed! I think that anything else is basically denial. I'm not saying don't fight it -- by all means fight it! But fight it knowing that it's a real possibility, it's a likely outcome, that reflects a giant percentage of American public opinion -- it's not an outlier or a fringe deviation.
I also have various thoughts about how Trump is being framed and feared as a particular type of threat in ways that seem to me to miss some basic points about how racism and xenophobia work in the US and how US imperialism works in the world, but I think I'll leave that for another time...
I am expecting Trump to win in November.
It is very unlikely that after 8 years of a Democratic president, another Democrat will be elected. For that reason alone I expect Trump to win. Beyond that, I think that if he has been able to get this far, he is likely to get further. If there were going to be significant popular opposition to his election, we would have seen evidence of it already. I think that "Progressives" have a tendency to be a little bit naive about this type of thing, like "Oh, that couldn't POSSIBLY happen, it would be too terrible, America has its problems but we're not totally a lost cause."
Well, not wanting to imagine something undesirable doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely. Candidates that seem to many of us like buffoons have won before, in recent memory, and for some reason they generally seem to do well in elections. (Also, regardless of what I might personally think or wish about Clinton, I don't think she has the charisma or show(wo)manship to compete with a figure like Trump, apart from any of a zillion other considerations.) I think it's also important to keep in mind that the last few elections have been EXTREMELY close, and the person who won did not win because of having the support of a significant majority of the country, but because of a very minor tip in the scale. So to the degree that when Obama replaced Bush, many of us felt some sense of relief, "Oh, this country's finally beginning to see sense" -- no! It was not far from a fluke that he won and didn't reflect a real shift in public opinion in comparison with the previous two elections.
I think that these are all things that most of us are in denial about, and if and when Trump wins in the fall, there will be a lot of pearl clutching and "How could this have possibly happened?" It can and probably will happen because it's where we're quite clearly headed! I think that anything else is basically denial. I'm not saying don't fight it -- by all means fight it! But fight it knowing that it's a real possibility, it's a likely outcome, that reflects a giant percentage of American public opinion -- it's not an outlier or a fringe deviation.
I also have various thoughts about how Trump is being framed and feared as a particular type of threat in ways that seem to me to miss some basic points about how racism and xenophobia work in the US and how US imperialism works in the world, but I think I'll leave that for another time...
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