He’s a symptom of the rot at the core of our democracy. We should be treating him as such.
That rot is ‘people being allowed to vote for a platform of explicit hatred and totalitarianism’. That platform is popular enough to get many popular votes, and take the EC because the EC is shit. You can’t throw that away without dismissing the ‘concerns’ (i.e. ‘I want to hate Mexicans!’) of a substantial chunk of voters. I’m not sure that’s easy.
Yes AND that’s the same got systematically breaking poor, vulnerable people for decades to architect this moment. Starts with maybe around a third of the country being purposefully undereducated from birth by republican state legislatures working to gut our public education offering to create an ignorant, fearful population that’s easily manipulated to act against their own best interest.
It’s sustained by a social media engagement loop that hyper-efficiently delivers the exact propaganda required, exactly when people are most susceptible to its impacts.
Ends with our for-profit health care system access being tied to employment as blackmail. Choice is to literally show up and get in line or risk bankruptcy and death with a single bout of illness or injury.
The balance that the systems of power here work to strike is keeping enough people just distracted or comfortable enough to have something worth losing. And then trying to distract/divide us with fake cultural outrage and petty ignorant racism based in that same cultivated fear.
That rot is ‘people being allowed to vote for a platform of explicit hatred and totalitarianism’. That platform is popular enough to get many popular votes, and take the EC because the EC is shit. You can’t throw that away without dismissing the ‘concerns’ (i.e. ‘I want to hate Mexicans!’) of a substantial chunk of voters. I’m not sure that’s easy.
Yes AND that’s the same got systematically breaking poor, vulnerable people for decades to architect this moment. Starts with maybe around a third of the country being purposefully undereducated from birth by republican state legislatures working to gut our public education offering to create an ignorant, fearful population that’s easily manipulated to act against their own best interest.
It’s sustained by a social media engagement loop that hyper-efficiently delivers the exact propaganda required, exactly when people are most susceptible to its impacts.
Ends with our for-profit health care system access being tied to employment as blackmail. Choice is to literally show up and get in line or risk bankruptcy and death with a single bout of illness or injury.
The balance that the systems of power here work to strike is keeping enough people just distracted or comfortable enough to have something worth losing. And then trying to distract/divide us with fake cultural outrage and petty ignorant racism based in that same cultivated fear.
The only war is the class war.