BigMike wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2024 8:17 am
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Alexis. I can understand where you're coming from—sometimes it feels like our votes are cast more against something than for a particular candidate. I think that speaks to a broader frustration many of us feel about the current state of our politics. We’re living in a time when it’s easy to focus on what divides us, but perhaps that’s exactly why it’s worth trying to dig into what we truly want for the future, beyond the four-year election cycles.
From your post, I get the sense that there’s a lot you feel needs fixing. You mention a lack of faith in the health of the Republic, and I agree that there are some deep-rooted issues that both sides need to address to bring us back to a stronger, healthier democracy. So maybe the question we’re both asking, each in our own way, is: what are the core values and practical changes we believe will improve things for everyone?
I’d be interested to know more about what you see as the root causes of the disarray and how you think the movement you see in Trump’s base could address them. For me, a lot of my beliefs about responsible governance come down to fairness, accountability, and ensuring that everyday people have a real shot at stability and success. If we could find some common ground there, maybe we could shift the conversation from personalities to principles.
I am not sure that my views, my comments, and my own background to the strange and discordant situation that we are experiencing in the American Republic's life will be of much use to you, or coincide with your own focus. I use the word "project" to describe what people focus on here on this forum (and in so many different areas). I would like to know more of how you see and define your own "project" though I recognize that you seem to have done this in your first post.
The work of Robert O Paxton came up recently in a NYTs article, naturally for the purpose of assigning to Trump and the Trump phenomenon (or phenomena) a Nazi-like motive. However, the book was written in 2004 so more or less before the relatively recent explosion of the (so-called) Culture Wars into the strangeness and discord we have all been witnessing for the last 15 years when things really started to boil. I got the book and began to read it. It is not at all hard to understand its principle thesis, nor to notice that there was certainly such a thing as *fascist tendencies* that appeared long before actual fascists could attain power in Europe in the most notable cases.
Now, I mention this because I have for many years now been undertaking an unofficial *study* of those populist movements, on both the Left and the Right, that express proto-fascist tendencies. Originally, and I mean longer than 15 years ago, I involved myself in reading all sort of Left-tending and Progressive political works, the central ones being those of Noam Chomsky. And naturally I became aware of the militant and revolutionary activism of certain sixties and post-sixties groups which, obviously, carried out revolutionary violent protest, organized underground militias, etc. In our present I can certainly say that those who call themselves "Antifa" are Left- and Revolution-tending semi-fascists or proto-fascists, and so my point is that, today in America, and for a whole group of reasons (causes that can I reckon by discovered and talked about), the ill-health of the Republic, a wide-spread and general social or political sickness (uncertain how to define or to talk about this) has led to conditions that, as at other historical points, produce fascist-like
reaction.
Though it is hard to define fascism with a set of initial phrases or points (Paxton takes this view) certain pre-conditions give it more latitude and freer reign. Now, we are certainly aware that there are extreme forms of
factionalism that divide the country. My impression goes like this: The very definition of what America is and what it should be is "up in the air" insofar as factions define America very differently. Their views do not coincide.
So let me take as just one example the recent (Left- and Progressive based) direct political action, which not long ago swept the nation, of toppling monuments. See
List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests. This type of 'direct action' corresponds to the sort of social rage that prefigures the manifestation of that proto-fascism I speak of (and Paxton speaks of). I include an example from the American Left to contrast it, as fairly as possible, with those examples from the American Right that we are aware of. For example January 6th.
Though we could proceed to adopt the standard model of analysis and say that the Left-faction represents what is *good* and *true* in the people's will and is most in alignment with America's values, and that anything that opposes this Left-manifestation is -- and naturally this is said -- Nazi-like and therefore anti-American and also *evil* -- my view is that this will not help us to sift through our present and to discern *what really is going on* and how and why things have come to this juncture.
I admit though, right at the start, that all of this is a perceptual project: a project of receiving, analyzing, processing and then organizing a *perspective* on what is happening and why, and then a
spiel which we then communicate to others in the positionisms that we all adopt (
especially on this oddball forum).
With that said, and to be sure my own position is clear, I most certainly notice within the general population of the US, and here I refer to the angry masses who become vocal in politics, in rallies, in protests, in street demonstrations, in attacks of symbols and institutions -- I
definitely notice those manifestations of unstructured action, the exact signs, the exact
reaction, that pre-figures the larger, solidified and organized mass-movement that we know as fascism proper.
The curious thing, from my own perspective, is simply to notice that if there are *tendencies* of this sort, they appear strongly on both sides of political factionalism and on both sides of the binary political divisions
Democrat-Republican.
It is pretty easy to see the utterly bizarre framing that has recently been expressed. It goes like this: Trump is described as 'fascist'. The rally at Madison Square Gardens is presented as being a Nazi rally as was the one that took place there just before the outbreak of WWll. Trump supporters, therefore, are comparable to Nazi supporters, and can fairly be described not only as 'garbage' but as a political demographic that is a supreme danger to the Republic. If this is true, then it can only be concluded that the proto-Nazi proto-Hitlerian figure Donald Trump, and perhaps others like him or close to him, should be "taken out". That is, if you follow through on the logic of what is presented as 'perceptual arrangement'.
You [I mean 'one'] cannot make these statements and then, when convenient, back away from them. Well, of course they
can, and they do, but what is left is the residue of what they really think and what they really believe. But here we must say, or propose: They do not know what they really think. And so much of what they say is not
really true. (The NYTs, in my view, transformed itself from a semi-responsible news agent to a propaganda-organ with a Maoist bent. But if I say this about the Times I will have to say something equally biting about Fox ... And what I do think is that it is this that is
our duty).
In response, or perhaps in reaction (?) the Republican faction finds 'enemies within' who can and who do make up such outrageous stories such as the one I just mentioned, and who have sought to curtail 'speech' that they feel is bad and dangerous (or hurtful, etc.) So in their own *reaction* they take it to the absolute limits. No insulation is to be held back from. And once the *mood* of seeing veritable enemies everywhere becomes fixed in a population, it is not at all hard to see how the various tools of propaganda can then be employed to channel their *feelings* and paranoia ( a deep, existential sense of loss, fear, lack of control, and many other things) into concrete political actions and directions.
So these are some of the things that seem interesting, and converse able, in my own view of the present.
Now, who created this framing?
