What were they thinking?

[UnseenParticipant]

The attempted Trump coup had several legal masterminds behind it. Here’s one of them explaining the need to overthrow the will of the people because there’s something even important (to him and all right-thinking people) than giving the people what they’ve chosen. As a bonus, you get some commentary from the folks at The Young Turks.

[RichRaelianParticipant]

Hi! A even better way to put is,”What was I thinking?”

[jakelafortParticipant]

What was i thinking when the ship was sinking and the sailors stinking?

[UnseenParticipant]

RichRaelian wrote:

Hi! A even better way to put is,”What was I thinking?”

I think this is how most of the right-wingers helping Trump in his effort to stay in office rationalized their actions. Trump, of course, never bothers to think in terms of what’s best for anyone other than Trump himself.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

To me, there’s a strange, cultish feel to this “movement”. There’s an egotistical, narcissistic guy at the top who cares more about loyalty and support than about government competency and the majority of voting people in the democracy, the democracy itself being a pain in the ass for him. I think he wouldn’t have been elected if it were not for Bannon having his own ideological spin on how to fight what is an evil is historically cyclical, calling for desperate acts of taking political control for the nation to survive. Bannon’s a true student of history, perhaps actually, correctly predicting rises of totalitarianism around the world.

They both energized malcontent populists and pulled them out of their closets. Remember Trump saying before the 2016 election that the system was rigged. He was already preparing the public for a big lie to explain why he lost, in 2016, all the way up to the final electoral count. His win shocked America, while empowering people honestly feeling that liberals/progressives have been destroying America.

What’s scariest, to me, is how many GOP jumped on the bandwagon. Some surely felt the same malcontent and were energized by the GOP win, but many took up anti-progress/liberalism as a higher, righteous political cause, perhaps even feeling God is on their side. Populists certainly were/are ready to steal power. Denying Obama’s SCOTUS nominee with the lame excuse that it’s too late in his term to approve anything for their president, while later in Trumpian times approving a nominee even later in his term. It was another power move these politicians felt they had a moralistic right to make, some probably even feeling a God-given right to prosecute. Now we have a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS, loss of abortion rights, and a not-so-independent judicial branch of government, in denial of the spirit of the US Constitution written to keep three branches independent.

Which all feels righteous and earned, by the pro-GOP minority of our population that live in the less populated red states, able to win due to electoral college rules giving population-disproportionate power to the lowest populated states.

How can we explain “what were they thinking”, other than in terms of the hunger for power, the willingness to think of opponents as lesser people who destroy their world and deserve to lose, while willingly throwing monkey wrenches into the democracy as an acceptable strategy. Maybe “what were they thinking” could be better understood in terms of how other countries around the world are also willing to cede power to politicians and oligarchs, maybe for short-term “remedies” to fix their systems, while not thinking far enough into the future to see how they’re going to lose power in the long run to self-serving autocrats, who can even change their constitutions, courts, and voting systems to make their power more permanent.

I don’t know man, there’s part of human nature that leads to very incompetent decisions, largely based on political opportunists and populist feelings conspiracies around every corner, rigged against them. Modern “news” agencies, and social networks (and so on) also profit with their outrage machines getting the clicks from short-term thinkers reacting to up-to-the-minute stories. One of those “perfect storms” that come around to moderinzed humanity now and then?

I cannot overstate the toxicity of this outrage machine mentality that aims to blame other people, without offering any systemic solutions. It’s yet another pandemic of not dealing with bigger picture solutions in imperfectly designed human institutions.

[UnseenParticipant]

@popebeanie

I agree, mostly.

Trump’s fiercely powerful reality distortion field makes Steve Jobs’ look like amateur hour. Jobs’ RDF only extended to engineers and the design department of Apple. Trump’s extends to vast swathes of America where people habitually vote GOP.

There is a segment of the powerful far-right that knows what’s wrong with America (they think) and when Trump came along, a useful idiot, they rode him like a hobby horse. Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney “Kraken” Powell, et al. Only, now it looks like their useful idiot is sweeping them into prison or at least ruining their lives.

What they used in promoting Trump was a deep dissatisfaction with a future many voters see on the horizon and fear or feel an intense revulsion toward. Darker skinned non-Europeans using government programs to replace more qualified or deserving whites (I’m giving you their POV, not mine), people with strange non-European names ending up in powerful positions in business and government and the judiciary, creeping atheism and non-Judeochristian religions, and the exploding trans phenomenon with the attendant controversies (pronouns, trans “women” in women’s sports, taking healthcare decisions away from parents, etc.) all of which is just viewed as weird.

“We have seen the future and we don’t like it” is a common sentiment, especially away from the urban centers, where (as you noted) there is disproportionate political power.

It was a situation ripe for the taking. It still is.

Sadly, by contrast with the antidemocratic, elitist right wing which knows what’s best for the country, there is a similar phenomenon on the left. Of course, the extreme right and left both have solutions they know will set things aright. Sadly, however we now find similar views in the center left. They know what’s needed to set things aright as well: supervise what normal people are allowed to read in the name of controlling disinformation, force highly-disruptive limitations on daily life tied with shaming people who resist government control during the pandemic, promote highly-dubious programs taking parental control over children’s healthcare away from parents as mentioned above. All programs that contributed to further dividing the country because mainstream America never asked them to do it. Don’t want them doing it. They do it because they know what’s good for us. That makes them little better than the January 6 conspirators who wanted to set things aright whether we want them to or not.

The left has drifted far from its raison d’etre: to make life better for the average working person be they in farming or IT. NOT to force some agenda down the public’s collective gullet and expect them to like it.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Now they even have a song 🙂

 

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

This also comes to mind.

[UnseenParticipant]

@Reg

And the weird thing is, that song expresses things that both right- and left-wing listeners think was written just for them. Just go on line and watch some of the reaction videos.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

I have my own more classic standards summing up the messed-up State of the Nation and the World:

What gets me about the Jason Aldean song is not the “racism” everyone is reading into the song–which it doesn’t have–but simply that it is not accurate.

To my experience, small towns have all the same problems of big cities, just in smaller batches.

Over the past few years, my own small town has seen my own store boarded up and on shortened hours for a week prompted by the nationwide rioting over George Floyd.

To this day, we still have to lock up even staples like men’s socks and Dove Soap because of a slow-motion version of big-city looting. The Karen and WorldStar videos depicting the fraying of civilization could just as easily happen here where I live and there is probably a lot of Facebook posting of such from my hometown.

There was a demonstration near an ice cream parlor with both rifle-armed members of The New Black Panther Party and police lined up with riot gear from multiple police departments because a parlor employee may have given a hairy eyeball to a customer’s Black Lives Matter button.

We’ve had a Antifa vs. MAGA confrontation over a giant American Flag at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Not a MAGA fan, but I am at least glad the Antifa crowd were too chicken-shit to wreak their usual arson and mayhem.

And, of course, we have our own street crime, homeless encampments, junkie squats, and shit in the streets just like mega-metropolises nationwide.

Alas, Jason, a small town does not insulate one from a small world.

[UnseenParticipant]

@Reg

Jimmy Dore did a segment on the Oliver Anthony song and a liberal criticism of it:

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

He ain’t no Jack Kenn John Lennon!

From 10:00-14:00 was interesting on the topic of organizing in order to protest or affect change.

[UnseenParticipant]

@Reg

I prefer The Tin Machine’s cover. The Tin Machine was a short-lived band fronted by David Bowie and for a brief period of time they might have been the best rock band in the world.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@unseen – yes, I like the Tin Machine cover too. I had forgotten all about them even though I heard that very song being played outside his house in Lower Manhattan a month or so after he died.

One of my fav covers by him is Cactus by The Pixies (best love song ever!)

[UnseenParticipant]

[Author]

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