monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

There was a striking moment in the focus group that consultant Frank Luntz recently held with a group of Roy Moore supporters in Alabama. One of the voters said that the women who are accusing Moore of harassment are being paid to do so. Luntz asked the group how many people thought the women are being paid. A bunch of hands shot up and voices called out that all of the women are being paid.

That moment captures the radicalism of the current moment — the loss of faith in institutions, the tendency to see corrupt conspiracies, the desire for total change, the belief that sometimes you’ve got to hire the biggest jerk available to get that change, and you’ve got to be willing to ignore facts to justify it.

That attitude is evident on the pro-Trump right, but also on the left. The woke activists, the angry Sanders socialists and social justice warriors are just as certain that the system is rigged, that rulers are corrupt and that the temple has to be torn down. The moderate left is being decimated across Europe and that will probably happen here.

We’re living in an age of radicalism.

But today’s radicalism is unusual. First, we have radical anger without radical policies.

Stylistically and culturally, Trumpian populism screams “blow it up” and “drain the swamp.” But Donald Trump’s actual policies are run-of-the-mill corporatist. The left-wing radicals talk a lot against the systems of oppression and an institutionalized injustice. But they are nothing like the radicals of the 1930s or the 1960s.

Today’s radicals do not want to upend the meritocracy, which is creating a caste system of inherited inequality. They don’t want to stop technical innovation, which is displacing millions of workers. They don’t have plans to reverse individualism, which atomizes society and destroys community. A $15 minimum wage may be left wing, but it’s not Marxist-Leninism.

Second, today’s radicalism is more about identity than social problems.

Both the Trumpian populists and the social justice warriors are more intent on denouncing the people they hate than on addressing the concrete problems before them. Consider the angry commentary you hear during a given day. How much of it is addressing a problem we face, and how much of it is denouncing people we dislike?

Third, today’s radicalism assumes that war is the inherent state of things.

The key influence here is Saul Alinsky. His 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals,” has always been popular on the left and recently it has become fashionable with the Tea Party and the alt-right. One of his first big assertions is that life is warfare. It is inevitably a battle between the people and the elites, the haves and the have-nots, or, as his heirs would add, between the whites and the blacks, the Republicans and the Democrats, Islam and the West. If you’re not willing to treat life as an endless war you’re a cuck.

Fourth, there is the low view of human nature.

Today’s radicals conduct themselves on the presumption that since life is battle, moral decency is mostly a hypocritical fraud. To get anything done the radical has to commit evil acts for good causes. “The ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means,” Alinsky writes. “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times,” he adds.

“Ethics are determined by whether one is losing or winning.” That sentence could have been uttered by Donald Trump, but it was really written by Saul Alinsky.

What can we conclude about the radicals?

Well, they are wrong that our institutions are fundamentally corrupt. Most of our actual social and economic problems are the bad byproducts of fundamentally good trends.

Technological innovation has created wonders but displaced millions of workers. The meritocracy has unleashed talent but widened inequality. Immigration has made America more dynamic but weakened national cohesion. Globalization has lifted billions out of poverty but pummeled the working classes in advanced nations.

What’s needed is reform of our core institutions to address the bad byproducts, not fundamental dismantling.

That sort of renewal means doing the opposite of everything the left/right radicals do. It means believing that life can be more like a conversation than a war if you open by starting a conversation. It means collectively focusing on problems and not divisively destroying people. It means believing that love is a genuine force in human affairs and that you can be effective by appealing to the better angels of human nature.

Today’s radicalism is fundamentally spiritual, even if it’s played out in the political sphere. It’s driven by the radicals’ need for more secure identity, to gain respect and dignity, to give life a sense of purpose and meaning.

The radicals are looking for meaning and purpose in the wrong way and in the wrong place, and they’re destroying our political world in the process. But you’ve got to give them one thing: They are way ahead of the rest of us. They are organized, self-confident, aggressive and driving history. The rest of us are dispersed, confused and in retreat.

By CHARLES M. BLOW - The New York Times - Monday, December 11, 2017

If Alabama voters on Tuesday elect Roy Moore to the Senate, the Donald Trump-diseased party once known as the Republicans may as well call themselves Roypublicans.

There will be no way to shake the stench of this homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, racist apologist and accused pedophile. He is them, and they are him. Any pretense of tolerance and egalitarianism, already damaged by a Republican history of words and deeds, will be completely obliterated.

There will be no way to simply say that Moore is the abominable outgrowth of Alabama voters’ anger.

Moore has been fully endorsed by the Republican “president” of the United States, the leader of his party, and is now fully supported by the Republican National Committee. Last week, R.N.C. Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told CNN: “The president has said we want to keep this seat Republican. The R.N.C. is the political arm of the White House, and we want to support the president’s agenda.”

The pre-Trump Republican Party is dead; The zombie Trump party now lives in its stead, devoid of principle, feasting on fear and rage, foreign to moral framing.

Trump was the gateway to the Roypublicans.

When supposedly religious conservatives were able to look past Trump’s bullying, his clear lack of religious conviction, his appearance in pornos, his lying, his provocations to violence, his adultery, his three marriages and his professed — taped — propensity for sexual assault, they became blind to bawdiness. That was when the hands that toted the Bibles stopped toeing its line.

Now, unmoored from any fundamental morality, Republicans have a situation where a professed horndog is boosting an accused pied piper.

Republicans have surrendered the moral high ground they thought they held, and have dived face-first into the sewer.

The Trump agenda is the Republican agenda: hostility to women and minorities, white supremacy and white nationalism, xenophobia, protectionist trade policies, tax policies that punish the poor and working class and people living in blue states.

Trump is a white man on a white stallion fighting to preserve white culture and white power. People who support this point of view and cheer the Trump charade forgave his failings because they believed so deeply in his mission.

Even the orchestration of Trump’s weekend appearances was replete with the symbolism of racial disdain.

Does Trump not believe that observers register the compounding offense of showing up to deliver a speech at the opening of a civil rights museum — already offensive because of Trump’s history, rhetoric and policies — a day after holding a political rally for a man who holds forth the days of slavery as halcyon days?

When asked by one of the only African-Americans in attendance at a September campaign event in Florence, Ala., what Trump means when he says, “Make America Great Again,” Moore responded in part:

“I think it was great at the time when families were united, even though we had slavery, they cared for one another. People were strong in the family.”

Yes, that’s an actual quote.

United, strong families in which people cared for one another, huh?

As one Southerner to another, Roy Moore, let me tell it to you the way the old folks used to tell it to me: Let me learn you something.

Slavery was no respecter of the family. Mothers were frequently, and without warning, sold away from children and vice versa. When marriage among slaves was allowed it only existed at the so-called masters’ discretion, as partners could easily be sold away from each other.

And sexual harassment, sexual assault and even rape were routine acts of horror visited upon the bodies of enslaved women and girls, often by the so-called masters who were married.

See folks, this is how racism’s reasoning works: It requires a revisionist view of history, with stains removed and facts twisted. It strips away ancestral horror so that the legend of the lineage can be told as hagiography.

The sheer audacity of this historical lie, the depth of the deceit, is galling and yet it is clear that fabulists and folklorists have so thoroughly and consistently assaulted the actual truth, that this bastard truth has replaced it for those searching for an easy way out of racial responsibility.

If you can’t deal with it, lie about it.

Slavery was unfortunate, but tolerable. It was brutal, but people were happy. Enslavers were wrong, but their families were strong. These are all lies racists tell.

The same thing is happening with Roy Moore. These Republicans are willing to sacrifice Moore’s then-teenage accusers, because they believe in his fundamentalist zealotry.

Polls in Alabama are tight, but Moore is seen to have momentum. The Republican Party is approaching a moment of reckoning, which traditional Republicans are dreading. Other Republican voters remain defiant.

If Roy Moore is elected to the United States Senate, Trump will solidify his position as the author of the rewritten conservative. He will have led to the rise of the Roypublicans.

The pre-Trump Republican Party is dead; The zombie Trump party now lives in its stead, devoid of principle, feasting on fear and rage, foreign to moral framing.

The problem with that is: the system IS rigged.

'Non-radical leftists' -- if that's a thing -- may wish that life was not a struggle but it IS, for billions of people on this planet.

More raw, completely unsubstantiated assertion (opinion) presented without either evidence or argument?

There's a difference between a "struggle" and a "war". 

This appears to be Finn's missing link:

Quote:

More raw, completely unsubstantiated assertion (opinion) presented without either evidence or argument?

Did you even read the complete article?

I wouldn't characterize it as a "completely unsubstantiated assertion presented without either evidence or argument".

The article largely reported on a recently published memo prepared by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which argued, based on their own investigation, that the theft of the DNC e-mails was not a hack, but some kind of inside leak that did not involve Russia.

VIPS, formed in 2003 by a group of former US intelligence officers with decades of experience working within the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and other agencies, previously produced some of the most credible—and critical—analyses of the Bush administration’s mishandling of intelligence data in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

for the system to be "rigged" there must be agents doing the rigging.

My contention is that institutionalization is at the base of non-responsive, ineffective government, not behind-the-scenes manipulation.

Wow. This Newsweeek piece on Stephen King, Trump's appointee to ambassador to the Czech Republica, is an incredible read. The guy was part of the Nixon CREEP group of criminals. He kidnapped Martha Mitchell (and apparently beat her and threatened her with a gun) to prevent her from talking to the press about CREEP's criminal activities. Newsweek

I don't, and never did, claim to know who's right (as you do).