Oh, I thought this newsletter was going to be an insightful analysis of rising authoritarian attitudes throughout American institutions, which is clearly a bipartisan phenomenon to anyone paying attention, especially around the issues of free speech and censoriousness. While there is a good argument to be made that Trumpism is more traditionally authoritarian than Woke Leftism, casting BLM as a movement opposing authoritarianism, rather than a movement pushing a quasi-Marxist totalitarian agenda in the name of "equity," is intellectually dishonest or deluded.
While the authoritarian right may carry more of the traditional trappings associated with authoritarianism (like recognized leaders), the authoritarian left carries with it far more institutional and cultural power, making it at least as dangerous. You reveal your extreme bias by casting the BLM "protests" as "96% peaceful" while in the next breath characterizing the 1/6 as "riots" and a "shock event." By any objective measure (damage to property, damage to immigrant-owned small business, loss of life, uptick in violent crime, etc.), the "fiery but mostly peaceful" BLM/Antifa riots were far more destructive than the 1/6 riots. Percent of "peacefulness" is a completely meaningless, and thus propagandistic, metric. Most wars are also "mostly peaceful" by the same measure, especially long-simmering civil wars, as most people in most wars do not spend most of their time in the act of killing each other. If you took MAGA rallies over the past five years, you would also find that they are overwhelmingly peaceful, almost surely exceeding the 96% mark.
While the attack on the Capitol was disturbing, so was the months-long coordinated assault on a federal courthouse in Portland and all of the other damage and destruction during the summer of 2020. The Capitol and federal courthouses are both symbols of our constitutional democracy. To condemn an attack on one while effectively praising or at least minimizing an attack on the other is the very height of the sort of naked tribal partisanship that is exacerbating American decay and dysfunction.
This newsletter is just more partisan cheerleading from another conformist academic rallying behind the authoritarian left. Get out of your ivory tower and get to know some working class Americans in fly-over country who are fed up with decades of liberal elite urban coastal sneering and condescension and active subversion of working-class interests. You might end up with a more nuanced conception of authoritarianism and its sources and causes in contemporary America. Until then, goodbye!
If there was some charismatic leader of BLM, or even any organized attempt to harness the energy from the summer of 2020, you might have a valid point. But as it stands BLM has a lot more in common with the current protests in Iran - would you call those responses to political repression a leftist authoritarian movement as well?
Trump organized rallies to promote his authoritarian goals. Trump lied about the fair elections to promote himself and it is an attack on our democracy and freedoms. Trump attacked BLM and peaceful protestors to appeal to White Nationalists. For his benefit. Its disingenuous on your part to call BLM Marxist. Which only shows how easily your mind was fooled by propaganda. What are liberal elites? You mean people that study subjects and read books? Let's blame educated people for non-educated humans emotional fears of change that authoritarian tap into. Maybe you should advocate to working folk to plant in the fall because crops grow better under the snow. Please tell car mechanics to use black paint instead of oil. It works better. Thanks for showing many that authoritarianism relies on telling people what they want to hear while scapegoating others.
David, lying to the base, using fear, propaganda and conspiracy theories to assume power, purging the party and America of dissenters, trying to overturn elections, isn’t American. You’re pushing a fake narrative to say that all political opposition to trump is leftist socialism. Democracy is not an all or nothing game, that the trump cult is making America out to be. Trump is nothing but a con artist and a psychopath, please learn from history instead of marching lock step with a demagogue. Nothing good can come from trump.
David forgot to mention the intent of those who vandalized the Capitol and sought to hang Mike Pence and others(?) on 1/6 was to overthrow the results of a legitimate and fair election and democracy itself. The George Floyd and Portland protests were against the repeated and unaccountable and murderous abuse of power by police and a criminal injustice system awash in double standards and not about scary Marxism. Also, there are many documented assaults on peaceful protestors by the police and federal goons during those events which actually precipitated more protests.. Also David forgets to mention that those charged with murders of a federal officer and a deputy sheriff during the GF protests were racist right wing boogaloo bois who were trying to frame BLM protestors for violence. Other right wing extremists were perpetrating acts of vandalism for the same purpose. BTW Marxism survives because it is a largely accurate critique of capitalism, not a totalitarian ideology. Also, never forget that capitalism too is compatible with authoritarian and gangster dictatorships. Also, odd that David's fellow defenders of 1/6 "tourists" are falsely implying they were peaceful when clearly many of them were violent and had violent intent , but we won't see David making his incoherent counterargument about proportionality of peacefulness when it comes to property destruction and violence by a white crowd. If David and his kind really wanted to preempt protests against police and cared about government overreach, they would be clamoring to hold police who behave as gangsters accountable for their abuses of power and unwarranted violence. Instead they want them to retain qualified immunity and absolute power to take the lives of feared and despised others with impunity. But I suspect they find it more to their liking and own propagandistic usefulness to over-emphasize the vandalism during justly motivated protests and to falsely conflate a murder-minded mob with patriots as they assaulted their own democracy in order to gain absolute power for their authoritarian-minded idol.
I think Edmund Burke has the majority of contemporary academics pretty well figured out:
“It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride and cruelty, are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.”
"96% peaceful in nature"? So were Stalin's speeches when he was starving millions to death in Ukraine. If you're the best the Commiecrats can do to spread your left-wing propaganda, you're worse off than we thought.
Democracies in order to survive need robust system of transparency and accountability of institutions and constant education of people on the perils of complacency
It’s a representative republic but you don’t have to make personal attacks just because you’re ignorant of the facts. Democracy is collectivist mob rule. That’s why democrats always fail. You can’t hide from your racist slave owning past.
And comparing Trump to Hitler or any other collectivist, only reveals your ignorance. There are 80 million plus "strongmen" standing against your anti-American propaganda. Deal with it.
Thank you, Dr. Ben-Ghiat, for undertaking this enterprise on Substack in service of democracy. I’m sold and a new subscriber!
In the name of being solution-oriented with clear analysis, I have a wish for more clarity in regard to the term “good crowd.” I did a cursory Internet search in case I missed something, but found no results that were informative. Is this a term in academic literature?
As is, the term “good crowd” is too generic and gives no hint of its linkage to autocratic manipulation for social control or building power. A (pre-Covid) bar owner at the end of the night could say, “We had a good crowd tonight.” I could come home from a progressive rally and tell my friends, “A good crowd turned out.”
In order not to be the intellectuals sitting in a café (wearing our masks) who see it coming but are found by historians of the future to not have stopped the replacement of democracy by autocracy, we do need clear language. Words matter. Democrats continue to be criticized for not having the effective messaging that the Republicans have been utilizing for the past 40 years since coaching by Gingrich—and continue as they undermine democratic process by perpetuating the Big Lie and barriers to voting.
Brainstorming here. Autocrats utilize:
Engineered crowd?
Manipulated crowd?
Produced for PR crowd?
Image influencing crowd?
Image controlled crowd?
And the term has two components: (1) How the crowd was assembled, and (2) For what intention and effect.
What are the parameters of a crowd? The Jan. 6 insurrection started with online organizing of a Trump rally that turned into a march to the Capitol that turned into a deadly mob. By Florida Statute § 870.02, unlawful assembly is defined as when “three or more persons meet together to commit a breach of the peace,” for which each person can be convicted of a misdemeanor.
This is not an idle exercise. We the people are the government who make our voices heard though our votes, how we spend our money, and our communications. Historically, mass rallies, protests, and marches have been a means of effecting social change, as they have also been tools for autocrats to build power. We need to be crystal clear in calling out the signs of autocracy. We need to be crystal clear in planning social actions. Identifying a problem is the first step in coming up with solutions.
We also need to broaden our perception of the term “crowd.” Exerting influence and control is not just a public assembly or physical gathering of a mass of people. How influence and control operate through media is another discussion. And that is not just contemporary social media and video chats, but tracks through the history of pre-literate storytelling, the artwork and stained glass windows of churches and cathedrals, print media (newsletter/newspaper/book/magazine readership), radio, television, and today’s Internet.
Ellie, thank you for your support of Lucid! You raise valid points. The "good" crowd/"bad" crowd is overly binary (a point I made in last week's live chat) but it serves to call attention to the importance of labels - one person's protester is another person's rioter. There was a lot more to say than could fit into the essay!
Group hatred is at the heart of creating a bad crowd, as you say about Trump and Black Lives Matter. Can be racism in US, as well as India. Or more around virility and homophobia, as in Philippines and Uganda.
I’m always anxious for your work to reach wide and far. It’s so important, and your presence & style links so nicely to Heather Cox Wilkerson’s work. I become better educated w/o a lot of outrage. These times are so difficult as it is, and I really appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you.
Another very insightful piece from Ruth. It’s all about optics...Many Republican supporters said and thought Trump crowds good ...BLM crowds bad. I fear for the next five to seven years in the USA. While Biden manages to get many things accomplished, the Republicans are making all kinds of power moves. It won’t surprise me that the combination of voter suppression, Fox News and Facebook will create total chaos. Americans will soon discover that it can indeed happen here.
Your essay reminded me of J.M. Post's description of the charismatic leader/follower relationship. "The sense of grandiose omnipotence of the leader is especially appealing to his needy follower. A hallmark of the destructive charismatic leader is absolutist polarizing rhetoric, drawing his followers together against the outside enemy."
The fact that you don’t see any of this in Biden who has been doing the exact same things for over fifty years is just another example of your denial. But there’s no way you can revise history. The truth will always come out.
Biden is not charismatic and I'm not a Dem. In your binary world, you only see Dem and Repub voters. Trump's grandiose omnipotence stems from his being a sociopath. But you will deny that he is a sociopath, as a defense mechanism because if you admitted that he is a sociopath, it would mean that you are a horrible judge of character. Trump is a proto-fascist and if you support him, then you are as well.
Are you hopeful or depressed? I mean that sincerely. Your book Strongmen and subsequent efforts to mobilize the public feels like the intellectuals in Europe who sat in coffee shops seeing this coming years and decades ahead of time and most didn't listen. My husband's beloved uncle was a history professor, black history professor and college president who died 4 years ago. I loved talking with him. He was dismissed by many. But, a decade ago he spoke about the current day exactly as it's unfolding. My husband and I went to Turkey and stayed with a dear friend in Istanbul in 2011. I remember being somewhat detached as she 'grumbled' about what was unfolding then with Erdogan's rise. It almost seems as if democracies inevitably die, because most don't heed the warnings, no matter how broadly they are shared. I literally follow you and 4 others who seem to be warning us all. The larger public seems checked out or relieved about the new administration. Media is back to both sides. The Republicans are overtly broadcasting their determination for authoritarian leadership and the Democrats seem largely to want to hold to 'principle' and 'civility'. How does this get better?
Our experiment with neoliberal economics that started 40+ years ago, escalated our plutocracy to the point that the middle class became battered, as there was austerity put upon them. Real wages did not improve for the majority of the electorate, so they chose a bombastic sociopath (Trump) to save them from economic ruin. They chose proto-fascism as the solution. But the solution is to get rid of neoliberal economics. In many cases, economic disaster is the root cause of fascism. The Green Party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have all suggested a need to move away from neoliberal economics.
Let's get a bit of balance, Trump may have been bombastic...but "sociopath"...hardly.
I wouldn't say he was even a "strongman".... hell, Biden signed 17 executive orders in the first day or two of taking office....that's a strongman. I see Trump as a businessman who found himself caught up in politics...at times saying he didn't even really like the job. Just a businessman trying to do the best for the economy and the American people.
As for crowds?....well I remember there were huge crowds for President Kennedy... there were crowds even lining the streets to see him. He was treated like a god. Was Kennedy ,with his crowds, a "strongman"?
Trump lost the election. He attacked our fair election system and tried to overthrow it. Excusing his behavior is a problem of your mind's inability to see what is obvious to so many. Can't find a moral Conservative? Tribalism makes it easier for you to support Trump. It's why he is trying to equate Republican with himself. Or better yet create a Trump Party. He attacks Conservatives that don't go along with his lies. Once an authoritarian has others in positions of power and laws changed to give themselves more power democracy fails.
The election was rigged and stolen from Trump and the US is going to have to more stringently oversee its voting count and outlaw the corruption in the Dominion voting machines. It's a wonder 1/2 the country didn't turn out in the streets ... not just the "deadly" Jan 6th incident in which one woman was murdered.
You don't believe that Trump is a sociopath, but do you have an education in Abnormal Psychology? If you did, it would be pretty clear what is wrong with Trump.
TDS is not a psychological disorder. It is a contrived mental ailment, invented by those with absolutely no education in Abnormal Psychology. Those who cheered on Mussolini had no idea that he was a sociopath. The talent that sociopaths have is to appear normal, while building a following of sychophants around them. They use these people to protect themselves from attacks, once their facade starts to crumble. This technique is called narcissistic triangulation. This was seen on Jan 6th, where he sent his sychophants to do his dirty work for him. Trump lacks a conscience, which is one of the characteristics of sociopathy. Josef Mengele was also a sociopath, so Trump is in good company, don't ya think?
Well, I'd say that everybody who enters, or gets sucked into politics, would have a narcissistic personality disorder. The mere fact you aspire to be a politician should preclude you from being one. But the relentless 24hrs/day 7 days a week attack and vilification of this man, for 4 years, by the world's mainstream media and all the envious, political hack, backstabbers., perpetually hounding him... probably did lead to a certain lack of human empathy...I'll concede that...but he's no Mengele nor Jack the Ripper.
Oh, I thought this newsletter was going to be an insightful analysis of rising authoritarian attitudes throughout American institutions, which is clearly a bipartisan phenomenon to anyone paying attention, especially around the issues of free speech and censoriousness. While there is a good argument to be made that Trumpism is more traditionally authoritarian than Woke Leftism, casting BLM as a movement opposing authoritarianism, rather than a movement pushing a quasi-Marxist totalitarian agenda in the name of "equity," is intellectually dishonest or deluded.
While the authoritarian right may carry more of the traditional trappings associated with authoritarianism (like recognized leaders), the authoritarian left carries with it far more institutional and cultural power, making it at least as dangerous. You reveal your extreme bias by casting the BLM "protests" as "96% peaceful" while in the next breath characterizing the 1/6 as "riots" and a "shock event." By any objective measure (damage to property, damage to immigrant-owned small business, loss of life, uptick in violent crime, etc.), the "fiery but mostly peaceful" BLM/Antifa riots were far more destructive than the 1/6 riots. Percent of "peacefulness" is a completely meaningless, and thus propagandistic, metric. Most wars are also "mostly peaceful" by the same measure, especially long-simmering civil wars, as most people in most wars do not spend most of their time in the act of killing each other. If you took MAGA rallies over the past five years, you would also find that they are overwhelmingly peaceful, almost surely exceeding the 96% mark.
While the attack on the Capitol was disturbing, so was the months-long coordinated assault on a federal courthouse in Portland and all of the other damage and destruction during the summer of 2020. The Capitol and federal courthouses are both symbols of our constitutional democracy. To condemn an attack on one while effectively praising or at least minimizing an attack on the other is the very height of the sort of naked tribal partisanship that is exacerbating American decay and dysfunction.
This newsletter is just more partisan cheerleading from another conformist academic rallying behind the authoritarian left. Get out of your ivory tower and get to know some working class Americans in fly-over country who are fed up with decades of liberal elite urban coastal sneering and condescension and active subversion of working-class interests. You might end up with a more nuanced conception of authoritarianism and its sources and causes in contemporary America. Until then, goodbye!
If there was some charismatic leader of BLM, or even any organized attempt to harness the energy from the summer of 2020, you might have a valid point. But as it stands BLM has a lot more in common with the current protests in Iran - would you call those responses to political repression a leftist authoritarian movement as well?
Trump organized rallies to promote his authoritarian goals. Trump lied about the fair elections to promote himself and it is an attack on our democracy and freedoms. Trump attacked BLM and peaceful protestors to appeal to White Nationalists. For his benefit. Its disingenuous on your part to call BLM Marxist. Which only shows how easily your mind was fooled by propaganda. What are liberal elites? You mean people that study subjects and read books? Let's blame educated people for non-educated humans emotional fears of change that authoritarian tap into. Maybe you should advocate to working folk to plant in the fall because crops grow better under the snow. Please tell car mechanics to use black paint instead of oil. It works better. Thanks for showing many that authoritarianism relies on telling people what they want to hear while scapegoating others.
David, lying to the base, using fear, propaganda and conspiracy theories to assume power, purging the party and America of dissenters, trying to overturn elections, isn’t American. You’re pushing a fake narrative to say that all political opposition to trump is leftist socialism. Democracy is not an all or nothing game, that the trump cult is making America out to be. Trump is nothing but a con artist and a psychopath, please learn from history instead of marching lock step with a demagogue. Nothing good can come from trump.
David forgot to mention the intent of those who vandalized the Capitol and sought to hang Mike Pence and others(?) on 1/6 was to overthrow the results of a legitimate and fair election and democracy itself. The George Floyd and Portland protests were against the repeated and unaccountable and murderous abuse of power by police and a criminal injustice system awash in double standards and not about scary Marxism. Also, there are many documented assaults on peaceful protestors by the police and federal goons during those events which actually precipitated more protests.. Also David forgets to mention that those charged with murders of a federal officer and a deputy sheriff during the GF protests were racist right wing boogaloo bois who were trying to frame BLM protestors for violence. Other right wing extremists were perpetrating acts of vandalism for the same purpose. BTW Marxism survives because it is a largely accurate critique of capitalism, not a totalitarian ideology. Also, never forget that capitalism too is compatible with authoritarian and gangster dictatorships. Also, odd that David's fellow defenders of 1/6 "tourists" are falsely implying they were peaceful when clearly many of them were violent and had violent intent , but we won't see David making his incoherent counterargument about proportionality of peacefulness when it comes to property destruction and violence by a white crowd. If David and his kind really wanted to preempt protests against police and cared about government overreach, they would be clamoring to hold police who behave as gangsters accountable for their abuses of power and unwarranted violence. Instead they want them to retain qualified immunity and absolute power to take the lives of feared and despised others with impunity. But I suspect they find it more to their liking and own propagandistic usefulness to over-emphasize the vandalism during justly motivated protests and to falsely conflate a murder-minded mob with patriots as they assaulted their own democracy in order to gain absolute power for their authoritarian-minded idol.
I think Edmund Burke has the majority of contemporary academics pretty well figured out:
“It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride and cruelty, are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.”
Wow your work earned the attention of a right wing troll! Congrats! 👏👏👏
So all you can do is call me names? I win!
Your fascist leaning sociopathic hero had lost the election, so now your mission seems to be vengeance.
"96% peaceful in nature"? So were Stalin's speeches when he was starving millions to death in Ukraine. If you're the best the Commiecrats can do to spread your left-wing propaganda, you're worse off than we thought.
Another cry baby fascist, longing for the greatness of Mussolini.
Democracies in order to survive need robust system of transparency and accountability of institutions and constant education of people on the perils of complacency
Exactly. I flag the principles of transparency and accountability in Strongmen
That's why America is a REPUBLIC. But we don't expect a collectivist to understand that.
It's both a Republic *and* representative DEMOCRACY. Look up the term since you're claiming to be so smart.
It’s a representative republic but you don’t have to make personal attacks just because you’re ignorant of the facts. Democracy is collectivist mob rule. That’s why democrats always fail. You can’t hide from your racist slave owning past.
A Republic is a *type* of democracy. Look up how Ben Franklin described it. Next thing you’ll be trying to claim Lincoln was a Democrat!
And comparing Trump to Hitler or any other collectivist, only reveals your ignorance. There are 80 million plus "strongmen" standing against your anti-American propaganda. Deal with it.
Thank you, Dr. Ben-Ghiat, for undertaking this enterprise on Substack in service of democracy. I’m sold and a new subscriber!
In the name of being solution-oriented with clear analysis, I have a wish for more clarity in regard to the term “good crowd.” I did a cursory Internet search in case I missed something, but found no results that were informative. Is this a term in academic literature?
As is, the term “good crowd” is too generic and gives no hint of its linkage to autocratic manipulation for social control or building power. A (pre-Covid) bar owner at the end of the night could say, “We had a good crowd tonight.” I could come home from a progressive rally and tell my friends, “A good crowd turned out.”
In order not to be the intellectuals sitting in a café (wearing our masks) who see it coming but are found by historians of the future to not have stopped the replacement of democracy by autocracy, we do need clear language. Words matter. Democrats continue to be criticized for not having the effective messaging that the Republicans have been utilizing for the past 40 years since coaching by Gingrich—and continue as they undermine democratic process by perpetuating the Big Lie and barriers to voting.
Brainstorming here. Autocrats utilize:
Engineered crowd?
Manipulated crowd?
Produced for PR crowd?
Image influencing crowd?
Image controlled crowd?
And the term has two components: (1) How the crowd was assembled, and (2) For what intention and effect.
What are the parameters of a crowd? The Jan. 6 insurrection started with online organizing of a Trump rally that turned into a march to the Capitol that turned into a deadly mob. By Florida Statute § 870.02, unlawful assembly is defined as when “three or more persons meet together to commit a breach of the peace,” for which each person can be convicted of a misdemeanor.
This is not an idle exercise. We the people are the government who make our voices heard though our votes, how we spend our money, and our communications. Historically, mass rallies, protests, and marches have been a means of effecting social change, as they have also been tools for autocrats to build power. We need to be crystal clear in calling out the signs of autocracy. We need to be crystal clear in planning social actions. Identifying a problem is the first step in coming up with solutions.
We also need to broaden our perception of the term “crowd.” Exerting influence and control is not just a public assembly or physical gathering of a mass of people. How influence and control operate through media is another discussion. And that is not just contemporary social media and video chats, but tracks through the history of pre-literate storytelling, the artwork and stained glass windows of churches and cathedrals, print media (newsletter/newspaper/book/magazine readership), radio, television, and today’s Internet.
The term that was eluding me was impression management. Manipulation of a "good crowd" is impression management on a large scale.
Ellie, thank you for your support of Lucid! You raise valid points. The "good" crowd/"bad" crowd is overly binary (a point I made in last week's live chat) but it serves to call attention to the importance of labels - one person's protester is another person's rioter. There was a lot more to say than could fit into the essay!
Group hatred is at the heart of creating a bad crowd, as you say about Trump and Black Lives Matter. Can be racism in US, as well as India. Or more around virility and homophobia, as in Philippines and Uganda.
Absolutely
Or political like communist China and N. Korea?
Lynn Roundtree22 min ago
I’m always anxious for your work to reach wide and far. It’s so important, and your presence & style links so nicely to Heather Cox Wilkerson’s work. I become better educated w/o a lot of outrage. These times are so difficult as it is, and I really appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you.
Do you mean Heather Cox Richardson or Isabel Wilkerson? I'm sure both would be honored by a mash-up with the other!
Thank you!
Another very insightful piece from Ruth. It’s all about optics...Many Republican supporters said and thought Trump crowds good ...BLM crowds bad. I fear for the next five to seven years in the USA. While Biden manages to get many things accomplished, the Republicans are making all kinds of power moves. It won’t surprise me that the combination of voter suppression, Fox News and Facebook will create total chaos. Americans will soon discover that it can indeed happen here.
Your essay reminded me of J.M. Post's description of the charismatic leader/follower relationship. "The sense of grandiose omnipotence of the leader is especially appealing to his needy follower. A hallmark of the destructive charismatic leader is absolutist polarizing rhetoric, drawing his followers together against the outside enemy."
The fact that you don’t see any of this in Biden who has been doing the exact same things for over fifty years is just another example of your denial. But there’s no way you can revise history. The truth will always come out.
Biden is not charismatic and I'm not a Dem. In your binary world, you only see Dem and Repub voters. Trump's grandiose omnipotence stems from his being a sociopath. But you will deny that he is a sociopath, as a defense mechanism because if you admitted that he is a sociopath, it would mean that you are a horrible judge of character. Trump is a proto-fascist and if you support him, then you are as well.
Very nicely written essay. How does this end?
Are you hopeful or depressed? I mean that sincerely. Your book Strongmen and subsequent efforts to mobilize the public feels like the intellectuals in Europe who sat in coffee shops seeing this coming years and decades ahead of time and most didn't listen. My husband's beloved uncle was a history professor, black history professor and college president who died 4 years ago. I loved talking with him. He was dismissed by many. But, a decade ago he spoke about the current day exactly as it's unfolding. My husband and I went to Turkey and stayed with a dear friend in Istanbul in 2011. I remember being somewhat detached as she 'grumbled' about what was unfolding then with Erdogan's rise. It almost seems as if democracies inevitably die, because most don't heed the warnings, no matter how broadly they are shared. I literally follow you and 4 others who seem to be warning us all. The larger public seems checked out or relieved about the new administration. Media is back to both sides. The Republicans are overtly broadcasting their determination for authoritarian leadership and the Democrats seem largely to want to hold to 'principle' and 'civility'. How does this get better?
Excellent comment, we will discuss this in the live chat!
Our experiment with neoliberal economics that started 40+ years ago, escalated our plutocracy to the point that the middle class became battered, as there was austerity put upon them. Real wages did not improve for the majority of the electorate, so they chose a bombastic sociopath (Trump) to save them from economic ruin. They chose proto-fascism as the solution. But the solution is to get rid of neoliberal economics. In many cases, economic disaster is the root cause of fascism. The Green Party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have all suggested a need to move away from neoliberal economics.
Let's get a bit of balance, Trump may have been bombastic...but "sociopath"...hardly.
I wouldn't say he was even a "strongman".... hell, Biden signed 17 executive orders in the first day or two of taking office....that's a strongman. I see Trump as a businessman who found himself caught up in politics...at times saying he didn't even really like the job. Just a businessman trying to do the best for the economy and the American people.
As for crowds?....well I remember there were huge crowds for President Kennedy... there were crowds even lining the streets to see him. He was treated like a god. Was Kennedy ,with his crowds, a "strongman"?
Trump lost the election. He attacked our fair election system and tried to overthrow it. Excusing his behavior is a problem of your mind's inability to see what is obvious to so many. Can't find a moral Conservative? Tribalism makes it easier for you to support Trump. It's why he is trying to equate Republican with himself. Or better yet create a Trump Party. He attacks Conservatives that don't go along with his lies. Once an authoritarian has others in positions of power and laws changed to give themselves more power democracy fails.
The election was rigged and stolen from Trump and the US is going to have to more stringently oversee its voting count and outlaw the corruption in the Dominion voting machines. It's a wonder 1/2 the country didn't turn out in the streets ... not just the "deadly" Jan 6th incident in which one woman was murdered.
You don't believe that Trump is a sociopath, but do you have an education in Abnormal Psychology? If you did, it would be pretty clear what is wrong with Trump.
Ever heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)? Methinks you're a bad clinical case of that.
TDS is not a psychological disorder. It is a contrived mental ailment, invented by those with absolutely no education in Abnormal Psychology. Those who cheered on Mussolini had no idea that he was a sociopath. The talent that sociopaths have is to appear normal, while building a following of sychophants around them. They use these people to protect themselves from attacks, once their facade starts to crumble. This technique is called narcissistic triangulation. This was seen on Jan 6th, where he sent his sychophants to do his dirty work for him. Trump lacks a conscience, which is one of the characteristics of sociopathy. Josef Mengele was also a sociopath, so Trump is in good company, don't ya think?
Well, I'd say that everybody who enters, or gets sucked into politics, would have a narcissistic personality disorder. The mere fact you aspire to be a politician should preclude you from being one. But the relentless 24hrs/day 7 days a week attack and vilification of this man, for 4 years, by the world's mainstream media and all the envious, political hack, backstabbers., perpetually hounding him... probably did lead to a certain lack of human empathy...I'll concede that...but he's no Mengele nor Jack the Ripper.
I agree, and plan on writing about the toll of neoliberalism as a way of thinking about society