Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

There's probably an extent to which the Bushes' nebbishdom is akin to Reagan's kindly-old-fartdom in that classic SNL sketch.

xp my bad, this is probably the right interpretation

Bush I isn't irrelevant. "wimp" was the Democratic attack line on him. they said it as often as they could. it was the media narrative. he won the election.

tbf it was kinda a wimp-off

https://campaignrhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/tank-ride.jpg

Trump's self-presentation as a tough guy is theater, too, though. He's all mouth. I'd love to see how he reacted to someone actually coming at him (bro).

anyone read Meacham's valentine to Poppy? I read a few pages in Target -- I think that's who it's for, the impatient Xmas shopper who remembers he hasn't bought a present for his sister's asshole conservative hubby ("Bush? Fuck it. In the car it goes").

i agree with crut fwiw

but, from a distance, jeb is clearly unfit to lead conservatives in 2015

trump falls apart and turns into a baby on a fairly regularly basis. he doesn't even need someone to 'come at him', he does it every time he sees a poll where he's down 2 points in iowa or whatever. but none of the candidates are gonna out-macho him - he's already some grotesque parody of unbridled machoness - and nobody would look good trying.

i'm sort of enjoying the thought of trump giving a speech in a time of national tragedy or attempting to give a solemn state of the union address

Trump's self-presentation as a tough guy is theater, too, though. He's all mouth. I'd love to see how he reacted to someone actually coming at him (bro).

As I recall, Trump is a major germophobe who won't even shake people's hands. The fact that none of the other candidates have done anything with that is proof of how pathetic they are.

Never mind; Bush brought it up in September, and it went nowhere.

Bush should approach Trump at the podium holding a Purell dispenser.

yeah I am not sure that germ thing would ever have legs. but trump has a lot of skeezy shit in his business career / linked to his name. I think bringing up stuff like trump university would be a better angle, though who knows, maybe his supporters are proud alums.

fascist supporters aren't deterred by charges of corruption, immorality, stupidity, etc. they revere strength above all - it's only when the illusion of strength is punctured that their support wavers.

and then they string up the corpse of their fallen leader and pelt it with shit

so when Cruz wins Iowa it'll be interesting how Trump and his supporters handle the blow - if he doesn't win in New Hampshire after that the taint of "LOSER" may be hard for him to shake

it's funny cause for a normal person getting 2nd in iowa as a not-religious candidate would be fine even good, but - as a human being, but also as a campaign - there's no way he has the ability to leverage 2nd place into 'success'

fascist supporters

not that it matters but: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

avoid being labeled a fascist with this one simple trick

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

obv not a new problem

he bears enough similarities to classic fascist movements imo, that article is p lazy and draws a number of distinctions without a difference while repeatedly insisting that the characteristics that Trump shares with fascists don't *make* him a fascist. I'm familiar enough with the academic discourse around fascism to know that a) no one agrees on a hard and fast definition (everyone agrees that Mussolini, Hitler, Peron and Franco were fascist but good luck finding characteristics that can be consistently ascribed to all of them) and b) scholars tend to prefer to tie fascism to the specific historical era when it was successful, and bend over backwards to differentiate it from modern movements.

He's a racist, nativist populist demagogue that glorifies strength and power while exploiting the fears and insecurities of a populace that feels it has been wronged and robbed of its country. He is obviously fine with political violence. He has been adopted by neo-fascist organizations. He has not advocated for the overthrow of democracy (yet) but hey he's just getting started, wait til he starts contesting election results.

xp

Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (p. 218)

with so few real actual 100% legit fascists running around it's p useful to look at how many of these boxes trump is checking off

i don't think an american fascism of today would look like a european one of 80 years ago either; the whole concept of american individualism probably throws the 'fasce' concept out from the beginning. so what!

yeah I feel like that article and the scholars cited are like "well he meets only 4 out of the 6 criteria, so no fair calling him a fascist!"

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by:

"obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood" yes
"and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity," not really
"in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants," not really
"working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites," definitely not
"abandons democratic liberties" not really
"and pursues with redemptive violence" not yet at least
"and without ethical or legal restraints" maybe partially
"goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." not really

can we agree he's an "asshole"?

yes for sure

he's not "politically correct"

the primary contest is the test of whether he will have collaboration from traditional elites

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, is abandonment of democratic liberties

removing 11 million people is cleansing

"not really"s doing a lot of work there

tbf shakey calling him "fascist" is doing far more work, no?

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, if that's indeed what he advocated is an abrogation of liberties for sure but obama has deported nearly 2 million plus people; would we call him a fascist?

we'd call him an asshole

you go to die on the dumbest hills

i don't even know how to respond to that. maybe grow up a little?

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, if that's indeed what he advocated is an abrogation of liberties for sure but obama has deported nearly 2 million plus people; would we call him a fascist?

wtf @ this

1) that is EXPLICITLY what Trump advocated
2) Barring citizens from their country is completely different from deporting non-citizens who are in the country illegally

mystified at yr cap'n-save-a-trump routine here tbh, bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt about his not being a cult figure or his eagerness to abandon democratic liberties or his support from committed nationalist militants (who are explicitly and publicly thankful for making their not-so-mass movements more appealing to the masses)

shakey for pt 2 i was referring specifically to goole's contention that deporting non-citizens in the country illegally is indicative of fascism. i wasn't sure if it was explicitly what trump advocated and still am not... "After the initial public uproar, Trump quickly clarified that he did not mean to include U.S. citizens in the ban and was referring only to foreigners." so idk maybe he backtracked.

i mean i wasn't sure if banning all muslims including citizens is explicitly, etc.

like idgaf about trump and i think his campaign is destined to flameout. but i care somewhat about use of fascism to describe political movements. i think it's intended to exploit people's [rightful] deeply negative feelings about historical fascism. it should be sufficient to call him a racist asshole without getting into whether his politics are similar to mussolini or hitler.

like idgaf about trump and i think his campaign is destined to flameout. but i care somewhat about use of fascism to describe political movements.

you have weird priorities sometimes.

his demeanor and public persona is definitely similar to Mussolini fwiw

like god forbid we fail to observe the largely academic/semantic distinctions re: the term "fascism" in the service of stopping a deeply dangerous person from fomenting racial and political violence in the general public, won't someone think of the poor words etc.

I don't think he's going to win either, but I would hope you would be more than a little disturbed at a major political figure having supporters chant "Sieg Heil" and beating up black people at a rally, disturbed enough to maybe not wring your hands about whether or not Trump has sufficiently aligned himself with a "cult of energy, unity and purity" or whatever

i feel differently. trump is deeply hated by huge portions of the electorate, the media, the republican party, and his supporters are mostly uneducated, powerless bigots. my voice on ilx is not going to help or stop him from fomenting political violence in the general public. but we do talk about politics here a bunch and it bothers me when ppl throw around the term fascism loosely (a trend that predates trump significantly) esp when idk i'm hoping for a better discourse. i don't plan to die today though, and certainly not on any hills.

I do think deporting eleven million people with a "deportation force" or whatever that was is "internal cleansing."

oh goole said that, sorry

I don't throw around the term fascist lightly and resent being lumped in as part of a trend that predates Trump and you can scroll back through my decade of posts if you like to verify that.

and if we're acknowledging the low stakes here re: how much ilx impact has irl, I think my usage of fascist degrades the term about as much as your voice on ilx inhibits Trump's fomentation of violence.

xp

That quote was from Robert Paxson and you left out:

"marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline" - yes
"humiliation" - yes
"or victimhood" - yes

i didn't leave it out - that was the first thing on the list

ok sorry. I do think that's three yesses, though.

lol shakey i took yr challenge and discovered this:

fascism is a pretty specific historical political phenomenon - and while there have arguably been fascist regimes from both the left (I'm thinkin Peron here) and the right (everyone else) - any and all claims to fascism in America are usually inaccurate and overheated hyperbole.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 5:56 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark