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Official Trump: Dems favorability down to 31%! All time low! Sad!

Good article on Vox today about the state of American democracy

Another startling finding is that many Americans are open to “alternatives” to democracy. In 1995, for example, one in 16 Americans supported Army rule; in 2014, that number increased to one in six. According to another survey cited at the conference, 18 percent of Americans think a military-led government is a “fairly good” idea.
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Most obviously, there’s Donald Trump, who has dispensed with one democratic norm after another. He’s fired an FBI director in order to undercut an investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Moscow; staffed his White House with family members; regularly attacked the free press; and refused to divest himself of his business interests.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has tolerated these violations in the hope that they might advance their agenda. But it’s about a lot more than Republicans capitulating to Trump.

Ziblatt points to the GOP’s unprecedented blocking of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, in 2016 as an example of institutional recklessness. In 2013, Senate Democrats took a similarly dramatic step by eliminating filibusters for most presidential nominations. That same year, House Republicans endangered the nation’s credit rating and shut down the government over Obamacare.

There are countless other encroachments one could cite, but the point is clear enough: American democracy is increasingly less anchored by norms and traditions — and history suggests that’s a sign of democratic decay.
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Consider this stat: In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats objected to the idea of their children marrying across political lines. In 2010, those numbers jumped to 46 percent and 33 percent respectively. Divides like this are eating away at the American social fabric.
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Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and author of the book On Tyranny, gave one of the more fascinating talks of the conference.

Strangely enough, Snyder talked about time as a kind of political construct. (I know that sounds weird, but bear with me.) His thesis was that you can tell a lot about the health of a democracy based on how its leaders — and citizens — orient themselves in time.

Take Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. The slogan itself invokes a nostalgia for a bygone era that Trump voters believe was better than today and better than their imagined future. By speaking in this way, Snyder says, Trump is rejecting conventional politics in a subtle but significant way.

Why, after all, do we strive for better policies today? Presumably it’s so that our lives can be improved tomorrow. But Trump reverses this. He anchors his discourse to a mythological past, so that voters are thinking less about the future and more about what they think they lost.

“Trump isn’t after success — he’s after failure,” Snyder argued. By that, he means that Trump isn’t after what we’d typically consider success — passing good legislation that improves the lives of voters. Instead, Trump has defined the problems in such a way that they can’t be solved. We can’t be young again. We can’t go backward in time. We can’t relive some lost golden age. So these voters are condemned to perpetual disappointment.

The counterargument is that Trump’s idealization of the past is, in its own way, an expression of a desire for a better future. If you’re a Trump voter, restoring some lost version of America or revamping trade policies or rebuilding the military is a way to create a better tomorrow based on a model from the past.

For Snyder, though, that’s not really the point. The point is that Trump’s nostalgia is a tactic designed to distract voters from the absence of serious solutions. Trump may not be an authoritarian, Snyder warns, but this is something authoritarians typically do. They need the public to be angry, resentful, and focused on problems that can’t be remedied.

Snyder calls this approach “the politics of eternity,” and he believes it’s a common sign of democratic backsliding because it tends to work only after society has fallen into disorder.
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I'm no history buff, but the lack of knowledge as to why the list of other possible forms of government are bad is probably what irritates me the most about a lot of the "discussions" I see and hear these days. It's almost as though people think "well, if you just got the right guy, fascism wouldn't be bad" not realizing that even the right guy is going to turn into the wrong guy if you make him a dictator. It's the whole "absolute power corrupts absolutely" deal. It has happened every, single, time. It's sometimes as though America has gotten so spoiled, it's forgotten why we established a democracy in the first place.
 
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Demonwolverine said:
I'm no history buff, but the lack of knowledge as to why the list of other possible forms of government are bad is probably what irritates me the most about a lot of the "discussions" I see and hear these days. It's almost as though people think "well, if you just got the right guy, fascism wouldn't be bad" not realizing that even the right guy is going to turn into the wrong guy if you make him a dictator. It's the whole "absolute power corrupts absolutely" deal. It has happened every, single, time. It's sometimes as though America has gotten so spoiled, it's forgotten why we established a democracy in the first place.
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Even in Mugabe's case?
 
cville deac said:
Even in Mugabe's case?
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There will always be an exception to the rule; even scenarios where fascism may be needed. I simply don't believe it is a sustainable form of government if you want to progress as a society. Of course, many argue that democracy isn't sustainable either.
 
Demonwolverine said:
There will always be an exception to the rule; even scenarios where fascism may be needed. I simply don't believe it is a sustainable form of government if you want to progress as a society. Of course, many argue that democracy isn't sustainable either.
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Our used to be sustainable, but I really don't know how much longer.
 
I'm so confused. I remember reading on here that the Dems were the Santa Claus party.
 
BarcaDeac said:
I'm so confused. I remember reading on here that the Dems were the Santa Claus party.
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They are. But the Pubs are the Jesus party, and Christmas is the celebration of his birth. Has nothing to do pagan rituals or a guy in red giving out free stuff.
 
tintinisahottie said:
Amazing what passes as a good article in the liberal mind these days
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Feeling like your belief system is being poked and prodded from every direction?
Angry that racial tension has no basis in reality, but is created by outside liberal forces to divide us?
Thinking African Americans were doing just fine before the liberal welfare state began to destroy their families (and by extension would be much better if welfare went away)?
Disgusted that the liberal media keeps hiding the facts to push their agenda?

Congratulations!

You're a rube!
 
Donald Trump’s Fake Renoir: The Untold Story

“Donald, it’s not,” O’Brien said adamantly. “I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it’s hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago.” He concluded emphatically: “That’s not an original.”

Trump, of course, did not agree, but O’Brien dropped the conversation topic and moved on with his interview. He thought that he had heard the last of the Renoir conversation. But the next day, when they boarded the plane to head back to New York City, Trump again pointed to the painting, and as if the conversation had never happened, he pointed to the fake and proclaimed, “You know, that’s an original Renoir.” O’Brien chose not to engage, and dropped the conversation.
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Then, in 2016, the unimaginable happened: Trump was elected president of the United States. A few days afterward, Trump sat down with 60 Minutes for one of his first interviews as president-elect. O’Brien was watching the interview, which took place in Trump Tower. It was highly choreographed, with cameras set up precisely where Trump wanted them. O’Brien watched Trump seated in an ugly mini-throne—“the kind of furniture Trump loves,” O’Brien notes—and sure enough, in the background, hanging on a wall, was that fake Renoir. “I’m sure he’s still telling people who come into the apartment, ‘It’s an original, it’s an original,’” O’Brien told me on this week’s Inside the Hive podcast.
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