Trump is lesser of two evils

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Democrats now have too much power. Power is not limited just to what we think of as "the government". Regardless of how that power is used (i.e. policy differences), this concentration of power is extremely dangerous, and we are witnessing the results.

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My reasoning is what I will term “meta-political”. In other words, in making the statements below, I try to the best of my ability to put aside the policy positions of both sides, step back and look at the big-picture meaning of a Biden victory.

Forget for just a moment what either side stands for. They are simply two sides vying for power. For the sake of this argument, I am not interested in the ends toward which they intend to put that power.

I am against concentrated power. That is my stand, coming from the classic saying “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This forms the root of the separation of powers built into our constitution (itself remarkably now becoming a controversial document).

Trump didn’t actually have very much power. He never controlled the propaganda organs (a.k.a. large news organizations with global reach or the controllers of social media); he never controlled the universities; he never controlled the primary education system; he never controlled the bureaucracy. In fact he is loathed by all four. Even more importantly, he is loathed by leadership in the “intelligence community”, which is a group that has far too much real power, seemingly completely unchecked. Corporate leadership leans more against him than for him. As a result, Trump has always been fighting for existential political survival. He has faced multiple overt attempts to unseat him from all of those power sources, channeled through the House of Representatives. Most of his energy was devoted to fending off these attacks against him. For that reason, we had - to a first order approximation anyway - a great deal of gridlock for the past four years as his opponents wasted energy attacking him and he wasted energy defending himself from political annihilation. This is hardly the picture of the “dictator” portrayed. He's able to dictate very little. He has never had the real power to do so.

Significant portions of the attacks against him, meanwhile, were and are explicit lies. I like Glenn Greenwald’s summation that while Trump is certainly a liar, he is simultaneously the most lied-about president we have ever seen. Please note that Glenn Greenwald is far more left than right in his policy positions. When attacked, Trump was attacked for the wrong reasons. While there are lots and lots of legitimate attacks against Trump, rarely were those the avenues used. Instead, his followers were branded as “racists” and this was the painting of his character. The evidence against this one particular attack, however, is overwhelming, particularly in the most recent election, where he gained a much greater percentage of the minority vote than any Republican has for decades. It seems fewer people with black/brown skin think he hates them or find the positions he takes or the things he says “hateful” than they thought of other prior Republicans, none of whom was accused of being racist. Are there some racists who support Trump? I'm sure there are, but that is not what he is about, and it does not remotely explain the broad quality of his support among many many different regions and groups.

I am deeply concerned that, assuming Biden and the Democrats gain control, they are not nearly so constrained. They now wield the power of all institutions. They control the universities and primary school teachers, without a doubt, and the universities are the feeders of the bureaucracy which is where direct exercise of power over citizens occurs. The large-scale press has lied and obscured for Biden and the Democrats more times than I can count. Even Fox - owned by Murdoch - has turned and betrayed Trump. Corporate power senses which way the wind is blowing, and corporations are falling over themselves to be perceived as following the liberal agenda being birthed in the Democratic strategy sessions. International organizations and governments are explicitly anti-Trump.

Another fascinating group - demonstrating the almost-completion of the Democratic takeover - is the group who call themselves Republicans, but who view the establishment power - defended by the Democratic core constituency - as equally sacred as do the Democrats themselves. It's not clear to me what they think distinguishes their views from those of the prior Democratic administration when they are fighting so hard for the re-establishment of what that administration stood for in opposition to the majority of the constituents of "their" party.

The shrinking of “acceptable” worldview is palpable. Trump’s supporters are being fired from many positions. Being openly pro-Trump in a university these days is professional suicide. Children who wear gear supportive of Trump are considered “divisive” and disciplined. The same would never happen if a child expresses support for Democratic-approved candidates.

The more that the Democratic establishment talks about “unity” and “tolerance”, the less I see it.

The range of acceptable discourse is shrinking alarmingly fast. Trump supporters have many well-reasoned and intellectually-defensible positions for which they find themselves labeled as “racists” if they speak. They are not racists (in fact many of the subjects that interest them were never in the past considered even remotely “race-related”), but the Democratic establishment has decided this is their go-to term for all opposition.

Rarely are Trump supporters permitted to present their case and argue the merits of it in any venue with popular reach - as the explicit strategy of the Democratic party for the past two years has been censorship. Corporate censorship is censorship, especially when used with a particular political philosophy in mind, as this censorship most certainly is.

I have watched reasonable question after reasonable question be censored because it doesn’t fit the new orthodoxy. This is not political debate anymore; it's religious. Believe the new orthodoxy or be labeled a heretic. Trump supporters are considered “inherently evil” by Democrats just as heretics were considered under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The irrational and emotional quality of the rejection is identical.

I don’t have to support Trump to sympathize with his supporters. They are angry. Very angry. These are the people who have been left behind by the policies of decades which a mostly Democratic power structure has established. There have been many losers from the economic policies of the past 50 years, but now to express disagreement with those policies is to be accused of being “racist”, then banished.

A hegemony is forming, and hegemony is inherently dangerous and despicable. Democrats are no longer looking to win; they are looking to crush dissent. If you forget about Trump’s policies for a second and ask yourself simply “does this voice deserve to be heard?", what he says speaks to more than 70 million people. According to Democratic propaganda (explicitly so), those 70 million people are now defined as racists for rejecting Democratic orthodoxy in favor of the message he presents. As said above, however, either there is an explosion in 'self-hating' blacks / latinos / general 'minorities', or maybe, just maybe, there’s more going on in this disagreement.

How can disallowing genuine dissent lead anywhere good? There is already far too much power in the hands of people who are increasingly willing to use it to intimidate their opposition (Biden took a knee to an organization whose members - explicitly acknowledged in the clothing they wear and the slogans they chant - physically intimidate people based on the color of their skin). The concept of free speech itself is now considered anachronistic and needs to be “limited”.

This is a supremely dangerous direction to go, and it will now be the policy direction of all our institutions. There’s nobody left - institutionally speaking - to resist. 70 million people have no remaining institutions in which they are allowed to speak their mind.

I am 100% anti-hegemony. Trump never had it or even approached it. The Democratic party wants it and is getting alarmingly close to having it. This makes the Democrats far more dangerous than Trump has ever had the potential to be. If the roles were reversed, I would write precisely the opposite message. But the roles are what they are.

This is the evil I fear.

When he takes office Biden would not "control" the media, the universities, and etc anymore than Trump does.

The Democratic Party wouldnt "control" all of those institutions either. In fact the Democratic Party doesnt even control itself.

And complaining about how all of the media, including Fox now, loathes Trump, is like complaining about how "the whole media loathes Jack the Ripper, and loathes Jeffry Epstein". With some individuals there maybe good non partisan reasons for loathing them.

Last edited by Feyokien on 19 Nov 2020, 6:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.: offensive terminology

Didn't Richard Spencer endorse Joe Biden?

Is the other evil Hitler?

If so then yeah I guess he is.

Would you say that the media in general slants even slightly left of center?

Maybe yes. Maybe no. There are plenty of rightwing vloggers on Utube. And rightwing radio hosts.

And Trump doesnt even get along with Fox anymore. So Trump is starting alienate even the right leaning media these days.

And if the media as a whole is slightly left of center its not "controlled" as mouthpiece for Biden.

Considering Trump's dull wits, his nepotism for his equally dull witted brood, his criminal mishandling of the Covid plague, how dangerous white nationalist terrorists have gained the courage to go public under him, his overtures to anti-democratic strongmen around the globe at the expense of our allies, etc, I'd say Trump is one special evil all his own, while Biden can't be declared evil by any reasonable, thinking person.

As has been said, the Democrats do not control the media and they do not control the universities. The media and academia do slant left. For the media, being openly conservative is bad for business and alienates more people than it appeals to. Academia slants left bc conservative ideas do not hold up as well to academic scrutiny. It's hard to make it in academia if you cling to the idea that America is the most specialest country in the history of the whole wide world. If college conservatives want to know what it's really like to have dissent unfairly crushed, they should ask the students of Kent State.
Academia is also not wholly friendly to Biden or the democratic establishment. They're both fairly moderate capitalist and just pay lip service to left social causes for publicity--just like corporations who advertise themselves as liberal. I voted Biden, but I am no fan of his.

The Democrats do not even have full control of government. They barely have a majority in the Senate and the SCotUS is 6-3 in favor of conservatives. The majority of state legislatures and governors are currently Republican, not Democrat.

Republicans crying foul at corporate censorship always makes me chuckle. Is this not the free market you wanted? Any time conservative businesses discriminated against [group], Republicans held it up as an example of market freedom. Republicans just did not consider that they might ever be on the losing end of that deal.

Socially conservative views becoming less acceptable over time is nothing new. This is not dissent being crushed, it is society forming collective consensus and moving on. People aren't trying to publicly argue that we should deny women suffrage, or reinstate segregation, or revoke gay rights--not because dissent is being suppressed, but because a majority of society has concluded that the socially conservative views of the past were wrong and immoral.

A somewhat backhanded lesser-of-two-evils endorsement, and quickly disavowed by the Biden campaign: see August 2020 news story here.

No President "controls" these things. That would be contrary to the First Amendment.

In any case there are some "large news organizations," e.g. Fox, that did support Trump during at least most of his time in office.


No President completely "controls" the bureaucracy either, or should, although the President does determine its overall direction (hopefully within legal limits) by appointing the people in charge.

By the way, the bureaucracy is not, by any means, completely controlled by Democrats. See There Are More Republicans in Federal Government Than You Might Think. And the military has been Republican-dominated for a long time, and still is, although quite a few people in the military have been alienated by Trump. See Military Veterans of All Ages Tend to Be More Republican.


Note that they loathe Trump personally, not because he is a Republican. In the past, the intelligence agencies have been viewed more favorably by Republicans/conservatives than by Democrats/liberals/progressives. See Democrats Now Give the CIA Higher Marks than Republicans Do. That's a Really Big Shift. And they hate Trump not because he is a serious reformer of any kind, but because he is an arrogant know-it-all who refuses to listen to them and refuses to respect their professional expertise.


In general, corporate leadership leans Republican. See A new study measured just how strongly CEOs lean Republican: "Though many leaders in corporate America have gone out of their way to distance themselves from US president Donald Trump, a new working paper shows that public company CEOs still heavily favor Republicans."


That is fortunate.


Actually, ever since the 1960's, Republican presidential candidates generally have been known to embrace the "Southern strategy," i.e. covert appeals to Southern white racism. (Before the 1960's, the Democrats had been the more racist of the two parties. See Encyclopedia and Wikipedia entries on the Southern Strategy.) Trump not only continued the Southern Strategy but made it more overt, e.g. attacking Obama on "birther" grounds, and then, during his campaign, occasionally re-tweeting propaganda from out-and-out white nationalists.

Some Black people may nevertheless support the Republican party and/or Trump because they agree on other issues.


Perhaps Trump and his anti-intellectual attitudes are one of the reasons why the Republican Party has become even less intellectually respectable than it was before? (Another, longer-standing reason is the Republican Party's several-decades old welcoming of science deniers of various kinds, including anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers, and, most recently and most deadly, COVID deniers.)


The "liberal agenda" is not "birthed in the Democratic strategy sessions." More about this later, in another post.


Well, of course they are, because Trump has been messing up the U.S.A.'s relations with its allies.


It's not a question of viewing the "establishment power" as "sacred." It's more a question of not wanting to be ruled by an incompetent, unqualified, narcissistic jerk with a long history of getting away with various crimes. (As a New Yorker, I can tell you that Trump has always had a very sleazy reputation around here, long before he decided to enter politics.)


If you're thinking of the Lincoln Project (of which my boyfriend, a former Republican, is a big fan): They are temporarily putting their policy differences with the Democratic Party aside in favor of electing a moderate and getting rid of Trump and his enablers.

As for the remainder of your post: If I understand what you are saying, you basically seem to favor Trump as a defense against what you perceive as a growing tyranny of "political correctness." Is that what you mean to say?

If so, I urge you to take a look at the following article: Why 14 Critics of “Social Justice” Think You Shouldn’t Vote Trump.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 20 Nov 2020, 10:59 am, edited 3 times in total.

That doesn't take away from his point that Trump didn't have much power. Remember that we've had four years of intrabranch gridlock.


That's a strawman. Joe McCarthy never controlled the media either, but they eagerly gave him a mouthpiece (and almost provoked a global war in the process). Nor did the "military industrial complex" or the "WASP establishment" have central leadership.

McCarthy was propped up by wealthy newspaper magnates who were terrified of communism, the second case was a back-scratching circle, and the third was incumbency defended by an information bubble. With Biden you'll have all three, and no, the progressive wing of the Democratic party won't get anything.

Hey, NobodyKnows; what is wrong with this picture?
 

If even Richard Spencer knows Donald Trump is an incompetent failure that says more about Trump than it says about Biden.

That 's a weird looking wolf-sheep

Sheep standing around in a place with no grass, no doubt after someone told them that gravel is much more sustainable.

I also see an apex predator trying to blend in with the masses... Is he named Bloomberg by any chance? Has he stopped and frisked all of the non-white sheep yet? And most importantly, when is he going to seek the Democratic nomination?

So ... you do NOT recognize a wolf when you see one ... interesting ...