Particularly poignant in Andrew Sullivan' s
"Democracies End when they are too democratic are: "And right now, America
is a breeding
ground for tyranny" is the paragraph: In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951
tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass
movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half
of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s
core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a
collective sense of acute frustration.
Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with
rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before
him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say,
2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future
seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally
gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread
that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or
unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the
future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who
helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed
fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo."
Continuing:
"The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find,
although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to
ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain
the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction
or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages.
The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union
hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more
common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more
relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to
compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers
throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the
future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many
economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the
white working poor are spiking dramatically."
And: “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. "Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded."
More: "This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate."
And
finally: For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control.
Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early
hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants
and raves as he surfs an entirely
reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A
tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule
others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having
little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the
greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of
fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is
as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter
stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.
Read the whole thing which I sent out link below:
My Thought: America, see what you have wrought and then if you are a praying person pray our nation survives this horrific man, Trump and if you are not a praying person then sit in hope that those who pray our nation survives have their prayers answered!
http://nymag.com/.../04/
