The Trumpenfuhrer and Mein Kampf

by philg

Based on my Facebook friends, whom I believe to be a reasonably representative sample of American Democrats, I’d say that their explanations for the Deplorable Result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election haven’t moved much. Here’s a recent musing from a wealthy Volvo driver:

I used to think more free speech was the answer to Mein Kampf but I’m not so sure. People choose to buy into the Fox TV narrative and are avoiding more information.

A response from his friend:

I believe that when Trump is gone we will need a New Reconstruction, or a de-nazification. Whatever you want to call it. The poison needs to be drawn out.

Some of my other distraught Hillary-loving friends can’t find enough anti-Trump articles in today’s news media so they are re-posting year-old items, such as this USA Today article about how Trump’s real estate entities didn’t pay some contractors (the article itself is an illustration of the recycling phenomenon: the vast majority of the disputes cited by USA Today in 2016 stem from the Taj Majal casino project that went bankrupt in in the general real estate collapse of 1991, 25 years earlier).

According to Atlantic, Hillary Clinton blames her loss on Russia and misogyny. (The $2 billion tax-free family slush fund (“Clinton Foundation”) did not come up.)

As a libertarian, I don’t have a dog in the Democrat v. Republican fight, but it is interesting to me to see that Democrats are still working the Trump as Hitler, Russia is Responsible, and Americans hate Women angles. I guess one possibility is that these angles are correct. Trump actually is Hitler, but somehow much less effective in getting laws changed. Vladimir Putin persuaded a majority of white women (but not black women or Latinas) to hate their sister Hillary and vote for the Trumpenfuhrer. (Or maybe Russians rigged the voting machines so that white women’s votes were not correctly recorded?) The Americans who handed over crazy amounts of cash to see Wonder Woman don’t want to see a powerful real-world woman.

If Democrats want to win the next two elections, and these angles are not resonating with voters (other than their fellow passionate Democrats, of course!), won’t they need to start coming up with some new talking points soon?

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7 thoughts on “The Trumpenfuhrer and Mein Kampf”

  1. Even crazier, I think most Democrats still think they won the last election, and that Trump only got in on a technicality.

    At this point, I’d give 4:1 odds that Trump cruises to reelection in 2020.

    And that’s not even considering the possibility that they’re dumb enough to run Hillary again? I think they might be exactly that dumb.

  2. “and these angles are not resonating with voters (other than their fellow passionate Democrats, of course!), ”

    Passionate Democrats are the ones who contribute to the Party. It’s all about the Benjamins.

  3. For those of us who are pleased with the President’s performance so far, it’s very good news that the Democrats are unable to learn from their mistakes.

    Upper-middle classers who talk about “people [who] buy into the Fox TV narrative” and “de-nazification” are really talking about white working-class Americans and the descendants of the Englishmen who founded the USA. Although they’re assiduously careful never to frame their enemy in class terms, it’s easy to read between the lines and hear what they really think: they think that white working class salt-of-the-earth legacy Americans (and all Americans who lived 100 years ago) are a bunch of racist sexist xenophobic homophobes, morally lower than serial killers, who ought to be sent to gulags by their moral superiors, the elite managerial/globalist small-souled bugman class.

  5. It can be darwinian species thing: some kind of specie-protecting schizophrenia on part of democrats to prevent democrats from winning to protect the specie of democrats. Either Sanders or H Clinton or whoever democrats can master can be way more deadly and more quickly destructive then Trump or anyone republicans can master.

  6. Perhaps Trump’s critics are being unfair. He’s an oligarch, not a politician.

    Johnny Caustic: I’m reminded of Chris Arnade’s description in October 2016 of the US as a Third World country in the making.

    With this election, this country is feeling more like Mexico, or Brazil, Nigeria, or Venezuela. …

    Why has the US worked so well relative to these countries? Lots of reasons, but there are four main features responsible for the dysfunction in these countries.

    A) Extreme inequality. There exists a very wealthy minority that controls almost everything: Politics, business, and social structures. There is a completely disenfranchised group— economically & socially. Often defined by race. Between the two exists a very small middle class.

    This leads to….

    B) No compromise. The wealthy minority, and the much poorer majority, have two entirely separate realities, two sets of experiences and facts. Both sides see things fundamentally differently. In the process they dehumanize the other side. Which of course is conducive to political extremism, and violence.

    It is also means almost no compromise. When you cannot agree on the basic facts, then it means someone has to do something irrational within their framework if they are to compromise.

    The other Donald: The Rebecca Solnit article is great. I particularly liked the comparison to the tale of the fisherman’s wife.

    In the Snow, by Charles Simic, is surprisingly sympathetic:

    Tracks of someone lost,
    Bleakly preoccupied,
    Meandering blindly
    In these here woods,

    Licking his wounds
    And crunching the snow
    As he trudges on,
    Bereft and baffled,

    In mounting terror
    With no way out,
    Jinxed at every turn,
    A mystery to himself.

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