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Re: POTUS 45:55: Wow, @CNN RATINGS HAVE CRASHED. LOST ALL CREDIBILITY!
This is interesting:
In the Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt says similar things about how fascism works:
This is interesting:
If some garden variety GOP senator had gone off on this rant I doubt he’d have survived it. So what we’re seeing here is not only the white nationalist grievance politics that Trump has made explicit and open and really at the core on present-day GOP politics. Just as much and perhaps more this episode is an example of the ‘leader principle’ at the heart of the Trump GOP. If Trump says it, the GOP will fall in line behind him, either with cowed silence or explicit assent, usually trending from the former to the latter. That applies to really anything Trump says. No matter what.
What we’re seeing here is more the authoritarianism of Trumpism than the racism, though of course it’s both. Like all personality cult political movements, party or movement ideology is defined by what the leader is saying on that given day. Think about Trump/GOP policy today on North Korea and how mind-bogglingly different that is from anything any Republican has said over decades or what Trump himself was saying until he decided to switch. The limits of the acceptable or standards of behavior are defined simply by what the leader does. Period.
What we’re seeing here is more the authoritarianism of Trumpism than the racism, though of course it’s both. Like all personality cult political movements, party or movement ideology is defined by what the leader is saying on that given day. Think about Trump/GOP policy today on North Korea and how mind-bogglingly different that is from anything any Republican has said over decades or what Trump himself was saying until he decided to switch. The limits of the acceptable or standards of behavior are defined simply by what the leader does. Period.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
“To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”
) wont go Trump because of Health Care and other such things he rails against.
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