Tornado Alley (PROG)

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The Banality of Trumpism

Paul Krugman
December 9, 2015 2:47 pm December 9, 2015 2:47 pm

Brian Beutler has a good piece about the liberal reaction to Trumpism .. https://newrepublic.com/article/125353/trump-proves-liberals-right-along — which is that the phenomenon

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was neither unexpected nor the source of any new or profound lesson.
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But I think he casts it a bit too narrowly. The basic liberal diagnosis of modern conservatism has long been that it was a plutocratic movement that won elections by appealing to the racism and general anger-at-the-other of whites; there’s nothing too surprising about an election in which the establishment candidates continue to serve plutocracy .. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/pandering-to-plutocrats/ .. while the base turns to candidates who drop the euphemisms while going straight to the racism and xenophobia.

Beutler says that

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The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.
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But surely the people most taken by surprise, least able to handle the phenomenon, are the self-proclaimed centrists, the both-sides-do-it crowd, who denounced the plutocrats-and-racists diagnosis as “shrill,” insisting that we are having a real debate with just a few fringe characters on either side. Some of those people are still trying to portray the parties as symmetric: Bernie Sanders calling for single-payer health insurance is just like Trump calling for mass deportations and a ban on Muslims.

That was always a silly position.

[ INSERT: the latest example from our present manifestation of the "both-sides-do-it crowd" .. is conix's,

Sad state of affairs for both parties.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119113338 ]

And as Beutler says, those of us who were clear-headed about conservative politics are almost bored [see below] by the repeated revelations of what we already knew.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/the-banality-of-trumpism/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body

See also:

conix -- nag, nag, nag -- geez louise
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119111609

EDIT .. add one later silly false equivalence from conix

Whether it is Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or the lesser known Allinsky, they are all the same. Manipulative and Machiavellian.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119113557

conix, at the very least you could have checked the spelling of Alinsky's name.