cars posted:the fact that it strikes you as absurd should answer that question for you
it wouldnt be the first (or second, or...) time someone here advocated "recruiting" the literal KKK
c_man posted:it wouldnt be the first (or second, or...) time someone here advocated "recruiting" the literal KKK
yeah but me??
cars posted:okay but how is it irrelevant that it hasn't sunk him if what i'm talking about is a lack of support for it? i'm not talking about support for ending it, i'm talking about lack of support for it.
i mean first, goes without saying, but most of his success can be chalked up to the particular characteristics of his race and the ability to use online media and self-funding to do an end-run around the regular gatekeepers to maintain a plurality that has always been around (see Perot). if trump in any way represents a desire to reorganize imperialism it's a very minority viewpoint opposed by almost every relevant institution.
second,
c_man posted:thats true but the actual policy of a president and the things they said in the runup to the elections have basically zero correlation in basically every case.
yes but usually the voters don't realize it, and they do vote in part based on those positions. with trump, even his supporters don't really care about the positions. the pitch is pretty much never "trump will fix this with policy X because policy X is a good way to fix things" it's always "trump will fix this because he's great and i trust his discretion/skills because he willfully ejected himself from polite liberal society to prove his true love for we volk." they love the idea of building a wall, not because they've been pining for a wall (otherwise they would have nominated Tancredo in 2008) but because it broke a taboo. affinity politics are always part of the game of course but here i don't think there's anything else there at all
add into that that any trump person who is troubled by anything isolationisty he says can easily reach to not-at-all-isolationisty contrary statements to satisfy any concerns and the fact that every republican does this, Bush II himself made opposition to "nationbuilding" an important part of his 2000 campaign, and you have me seeing no silver in this lining
cars posted:yeah but me??
yeah thats why i asked you a question instead of just swearing at you like i would with baby newton or whoever
cars posted:its a good chance that if BAR has covered a topic then my position is closer to them than to another interpretation after accounting for my obviously impeccable marxist theorizing that i do all the time using various complicated charts and things like you would see getfiscal post.
i, too, basically defer to BAR in more or less everything that goes on in current events
thirdplace posted:i mean first, goes without saying, but most of his success can be chalked up to the particular characteristics of his race and the ability to use online media and self-funding to do an end-run around the regular gatekeepers to maintain a plurality that has always been around (see Perot).
perot had way less "weird" (in the bourgeois debate club sense) opinions and didnt have shit on trump's sustained support even in '92. his peak support flew all over the map and even the barest hint that he was kind of wacko or that his running mate was the same was easily exploited by both parties to roll him over. not to mention perot was successfully trolled to shitsville by both parties' leadership and operatives, like when he suspended his campaign, which is kind of the reverse here with both trump and sanders.
thirdplace posted:if trump in any way represents a desire to reorganize imperialism it's a very minority viewpoint opposed by almost every relevant institution.
yeah well that's why i say he doesn't represent that, thats what i just said.
i dont really give a shit about trump as a person or candidate, and i dont have any interest in analyzing his claimed positive positions on what to do next like how much extra taxes he wants to put on american car companies to destroy them directly if they don't keep jobs here which will in turn destroy them competitively, since both will just get finagled out of through other means and will just demonstrate which capitalists and their money managers & lawyers are quickest on their toes this decade or know the right people.
what i give a shit about is what statements are failing to destroy him based on his own statements, statements where it was considered dogma etched in stone tablets by the "discourse" in this country that you can't do that on television. because it shows that the discourse as understood is a goofball fantasy to a lot of workers in the u.s. and has been for a while. and the numbers between cruz/clinton/trump/sanders in the match-ups reflect how thoroughly these statements are not destroying him and how every time both Fox and liberal blogs blurt around shit trump says like that, it helps him rather than hurting him and both sources are just unable to wrap their heads around it and can't stop helping trump out.
glomper_stomper posted:i think glen ford's analysis was lacking in the same way that most analyses of trump have been. there's been a fundamental lack of distinction between trump's actual political lines and the potential of social forces that are actually responding to them.
i get the impression he was playing to his audience.
but in this case I don't think that knowledge is limited to irony stalinists. it's something everyone understands, and that fatally undercuts, in my respectfully humble opinion, what you're saying in that last paragraph. that is, the transgressive social context of the statements help him for the "sacred-cow-slaughtering" reasons, while the actual content doesn't hurt him because no one is taking it seriously as anything besides a social transgression
glomper_stomper posted:cars posted:i get the impression he was playing to his audience.
some working class white dude is going to vote for trump on the basis that he has no job security and he doesn't really give a fuck about america's imperialist order. he may well be a racist pig or not.
Aside from knowing someone who was injured or killed fighting for that imperialist order... no investment there at all. The middle class perma-student LARPing as a revolutionary is much more in tune with these things, and doubly immune from cognitive dissonance due to his high intellectual skill level.
glomper_stomper posted:cars posted:i get the impression he was playing to his audience.
i think trump's audience is fairly diverse in terms of class.
oh i meant ford. as in, ford knows the first line much of his audience is going to receive is, "trump is a racist so vote for the democrats who will save us from racism".
swirlsofhistory posted:Aside from knowing someone who was injured or killed fighting for that imperialist order... no investment there at all.
right because none of us here know those people, sure thing buddy.
The middle class perma-student LARPing as a revolutionary
this also describes almost no one on this forum as you already know.
cars posted:like the orthodoxy is, massive tariffs on u.s. companies means "shit on the u.s. flag". anything other than the approved line on israel or putin means "shit on the u.s. flag and rub the constitution in there on top of it" and so on. and i am also not really going to accept "well it was always obvious that wasn't true in action" because while the politicians in the major parties may be unobservant idiots their thugs who play the press are really not. it does matter that certain statements are not bridging the circuit like they were assumed to do.
that's an elite orthodoxy, tho. regular people don't care about tariffs and have always had more diversity of opinion on israel. i don't say this because i don't think you know it but to focus on the real question: why has elite control failed in this case? but i don't think you need a more complicated answer to that question than the humdrum liberal "doesn't need major donors or sympathetic media because twitter and exploiting clickbait journalism."
thirdplace posted:that's an elite orthodoxy, tho. regular people don't care about tariffs
yup
Aside from knowing someone who was injured or killed fighting for that imperialist order... no investment there at all.
right because none of us here know those people, sure thing buddy.
You probably embarrass them.
The middle class perma-student LARPing as a revolutionary
this also describes almost no one on this forum as you already know.
hahaha
swirlsofhistory posted:You probably embarrass them.
Hmm, much like your posting.
cars posted:swirlsofhistory posted:You probably embarrass them.
Hmm, much like your posting.
He came home from the war broken from his experiences, but it was a revolutionary who went by the handle cumdaddies who finally opened his eyes to the true nature of the capitalist-imperialist system and the shameful role he played in it
glomper_stomper posted:which is something concerning the precise potential of agitated masses that others have typically rebuked.
im not sure what you mean by this, could you explain a bit more? i generally take ford's line to be basically that a crisis of legitimacy of the major political parties is a benefit to organizing outside of electoral parties, so i'm trying to read this in that context, if that helps
glomper_stomper posted:well, yeah, but also there's some hoping that the white supremacists would break apart the republican party over trump in the same way that he hopes white left-liberals would break apart the democratic party over sanders. which is something concerning the precise potential of agitated masses that others have typically rebuked.
the night is young so i'm willing to wait and see. i mean, i'm with you, i'm an optimist but not enough of one on this particular angle to think that even some sort of semi-official split in either party would change the status quo within the parties in the u.s. for the better, or that even a lasting non-overt split is likely, but i don't think we know yet how that will go down since it looks like sanders will try to contest at the convention regardless right now and it seems guaranteed that the republican leadership will try to torch the results completely if they feel they can't enforce on trump, even if people outside never know the details. i agree though that the most likely outcome for the democrats at least is that sanders goes down and endorses clinton like he said he would, then the dsa/liberal-left back pats themselves like mad for "moving" clinton somehow and endorses her too. which i think may actually piss some sanders supporters off in an enduring way, we'll see.
swirlsofhistory posted:He came home from the war broken from his experiences, but it was a revolutionary who went by the handle cumdaddies who finally opened his eyes to the true nature of the capitalist-imperialist system and the shameful role he played in it
you have weird ideas about how people spend their time, probably because you keep coming back to this forum to get owned
cars posted:i think we're agreeing here and you are just saying it doesn't have an impact on you that it's coming from trump's numbers.
you mean that there's that many people responding to the bypass?
i actually think it's hugely significant in a lot of ways, for the record. i think that pouring vast amounts of marketing into empty liberal politics have caused those politics to become fetishized into cultural markers, that trump represents the final shedding of the vestigial remnants of pretending that these empty liberal politics are at all genuine, and that the subsequent full embrace of the group-affinity politics can, at least in this form, genuinely be referred to as fascism and/or a more concentrated and overt form of fascism than already existed. but i'm a liberal, sooooooooo
thirdplace posted:i actually think it's hugely significant in a lot of ways, for the record. i think that pouring vast amounts of marketing into empty liberal politics have caused those politics to become fetishized into cultural markers, that trump represents the final shedding of the vestigial remnants of pretending that these empty liberal politics are at all genuine, and that the subsequent full embrace of the group-affinity politics can, at least in this form, genuinely be referred to as fascism and/or a more concentrated and overt form of fascism than already existed. but i'm a liberal, sooooooooo
i dont necessarily disagree with any of that. i think what im saying would fit into your "final shedding" clause up there.
cars posted:swirlsofhistory posted:He came home from the war broken from his experiences, but it was a revolutionary who went by the handle cumdaddies who finally opened his eyes to the true nature of the capitalist-imperialist system and the shameful role he played in it
you have weird ideas about how people spend their time, probably because you keep coming back to this forum to get owned
I'll get my flame suit heheh. I'm glad someone's keeping score of internet points!
Something I admit I still don't get is the no caps thing. Is this weird twitter influence? An LF thing? Very bell hooks. I thought that would have died out... 5 years ago. People put effort into posts and make them look like unreadable text messages.
glomper_stomper posted:i mean, to the extent that there are anti-imperialist analyses of trump, they are too gullible, too mesmerized by bourgeois media dysfunction
or too cynical about the gullibility of their intended audience, which ends up with them saying the same thing. which i think is sometimes ford's mistake, trailing his audience.
thirdplace posted:i actually think it's hugely significant in a lot of ways, for the record. i think that pouring vast amounts of marketing into empty liberal politics have caused those politics to become fetishized into cultural markers, that trump represents the final shedding of the vestigial remnants of pretending that these empty liberal politics are at all genuine, and that the subsequent full embrace of the group-affinity politics can, at least in this form, genuinely be referred to as fascism and/or a more concentrated and overt form of fascism than already existed. but i'm a liberal, sooooooooo
my personal pet theory is that trump represents a crisis of the lee atwater-style "abstraction" strategy for the development of dogwhistle politics. the increasingly disaffected cracker class isn't even nominally interested in "fiscal responsibility" beyond what will explicitly benefit them over nonwhites anymore and trump "telling it like it is" is an expression of him rolling back those layers of abstraction. i think this also explains why he's unpopular with the right wing pundit posse because they only have jobs to the extent that they can navigate and develop those abstractions and dogwhistles. if those stop being relevant they're out of work.
there's an obvious danger there though, especially since some petit-bourgeois vacillating between trump and sanders while responding to polls is thinking too hard about nothing at all in the most dangerous fashion available to a class mentality prone to it, it means they dont know what they want, theyre unusually angry about it in a relative sense and it doesnt matter that they don't know because they agree to be told what they want, and that has telling historical significance when it comes to who gets mobilized. that is an argument we've had before on here though.