tillingborn wrote: ↑Thu Oct 06, 2022 10:31 am
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:56 pmI am thinking about the groups of people who get involved with what I have called paranoid theories in the US. The people who have things to say about *global elites* and about *globalism*, etc.
Where do they get the idea they are not in control? Or are being controlled (unfairly and against their interests)?
Here for example. Is their perception accurate? I think it is.
I think I might have read that differently to you. Michael Moore sets out a good case for why workers justifiably feel powerless and angry. The specific example he gives is the globalist car manufacturers of Detroit who would take their car factories to Mexico. Donald Trump's threat to impose 35% import tariffs was a vote winner with the people who had, or were about to lose their jobs. Roughly 14,000 people in the car industry did lose their jobs when General Motors closed several factories, in part because of the tariffs Trump placed on imported steel.
So yes, the workers perception that they are likely to be let down by powerful industries is accurate. What they failed to perceive, as Moore points out, is that a man with golf courses on 3 continents will also let them down.
Donald Trump, in my view, represents or brings onto the scene an inchoate force or perhaps *idea* is the right word. Though I would also include a word connoting sentiment. My view is that Donald Trump can be understood (one means at least) through a Jungian lens: he is one of those historical figures that rise up out of the body of the people and, though he may have designs and intentions of his own (subjectively) he represents a conscious, semi-conscious or unconscious psychological will. So if this view is correct, or at all useful, Donald Trump is cast (through projection) as a hero by those who called him forth (i.e. as a man of history) but simultaneously receives a very different content (of projection) from another sector of the demographic and is portrayed as *evil* or really any number of different projected images.
If one resorts, say, to the NYTs portrayal of Trump (I use NYTs as a general reference to a set of progressive/left journals of opinion) Trump is shown in his *demonic* aspect. The demographic that super-charges their projection onto Trump as Hero is, as Moore indicates, precisely that demographic class of disaffected white Americans who make up America's 'original demographic'. That class is now portrayed as high school educated yokels (the Deplorable) without a BA who, though they don't say it quite in this way, "don't know their asses from a hole in the ground". My own researches have led me to understand that there are élites (I apologize for the word but there is no other) who have an interest in demographically reconstituting the American nation. So this is why everything having to do with racial identity has so quickly rushed to the surface over the last 10 years or so. The issue, the reality, of shifting demographics (i.e. racial and ethnic composition) is thus one of the primary factors in civil conflict -- though it is almost impossible for this issue to be talked about openly or clearly. It is certainly not possible that those who are (as
they perceive) being replaced, or pushed aside, denegrated, etc., could be seen as having a valid perspective. For this reason their perspective is always presented in the worst possible light. And that is why terms like racist, Nazi, Rightwing extremist, terrorist are the terms-of-choice. These are the hottest of hot words and they have a
deadly function.
And naturally, when seen through this lens (and it is a veritable structure-of-view, an ideological-perceptual stance) Donald Trump is a social and cultural Satan and those who like him, elevate him as a hero, are portrayed as minions of Satan. Everything dark everything murky everything morally reprehensible is projected onto Donald Trump. The perceptual stance is there, pre-created and ready for anyone to step into it and inhabit it. And naturally this is what people do. Similarly, the 'hero' projection is there as well and has been established to be inhabited.
It is true, or I think it is true, that it would be possible for level-headed people to present a picture of what is going on in the United States through a realistic but also a fair and accurate lens -- but I have little idea who does this. Meaning that I do not believe that any larger media-system (purveyor of perspective, social and political interpreter)
can do this. There is too much at stake. All of the media companies are parts of constellations of capital interests which, I think necessarily, could not 'tell the truth'. My assertion is that *telling the truth* is itself, now, the chief heretical activity. But I do not profess, necessarily, to possess this 'truth'.
What I do suggest though is that more often than not any conversation on the topic immediately becomes a bitter, ideological struggle between people who sit on one side or the other of the *divide* I allude to.
So yes, the workers perception that they are likely to be let down by powerful industries is accurate. What they failed to perceive, as Moore points out, is that a man with golf courses on 3 continents will also let them down.
I think I get your point. I have researched the Republican establishment (that of Reagan and Bush) and though they (or it) was favored by the 'working class' of the regions we are referring to, those that a PR establishment manipulated, I am not at all sure that they were not *shafted* by powerful economic interests that don't -- can't really -- care about people. So your point (if it is that) is taken.
However, the
movement and the current of populism that Donald Trump has activated -- now that seems to me something different. Will it go on by itself without Trump? How will *the Establishment* react if the torch is handed to someone else?
Personally, I think Trump should step aside but endorse someone else and then remain powerfully behind that candidate. Trump is simply too contentious a character and the level of psych-social projection is really over the top. Let's suppose he did seek and got re-elected. God only knows, given the level and intensity of the *derangement* he produces within the psychological matrix of those who hate him with an unmeasured fury, God only knows what they would do!
But the real issue here is that in the very Halls of Power there are struggles going on which I do not believe we can actually see. Those struggles are hidden (or obscured) from our viewing.