no need to write an essay or anything

some libs and baby leftists are kinda baffled by the trump banter here and don’t know what’s serious and what’s irony

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    This will echo what others have said: I think Trump was a horrible president, and him being of the capitalist class means I oppose him in a political economy sense. However, the stuff that he did that was bad was bog standard Republican shit: any other Republican would have also cut taxes, deregulated industry, and installed far right whack job judges. And I also think Democrats have done horrible shit; better/worse comparisons are mostly useless as they brush over specifics.

    However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.

    For liberals, it’s that he exposes the lie that elite education credentials stewed in urban culture must always produce socially progressive and competent technocrats, which is why they steadfastly insist he’s some Manchurian Candidate Russian plant because they need to see him as an abnormality and not reflective of the gross underbelly of the meritocracy. For conservatives, he exposes that for all their rhetoric they really love the idea of elites and hierarchy and being lessers to the titans of industry and the state. They just don’t want those titans to be brown, Jewish, or female. So they need to built a weird, cultish mythology around him as an ubermensch, anti-elite elite as to keep up the illusion of them being against hierarchy. All this neurosis is both highly illuminating, and really fucking funny.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.

      This is actually an interesting point that I hadn’t considered. There’s a lot of analysis about Trump that sometimes goes a little off the deep end for my tastes but this is a good explanation for why he’s such a magnet of attention beyond just being a hilariously grotesque figure. He’s like a walking embodiment of contradiction. He’s like the Missingno of American political figures, a glitch in the simulation. The code of society took in all the correct inputs and yet spat out Trump. This isn’t to say that other politicians aren’t similarly contradictory in a couple ways, just that he manages to do it in many ways.

      • Crowtee_Robot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        He’s like the Missingno of American political figures, a glitch in the simulation.

        Except instead of unlimited items in your bag he provides unlimited posting.