Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

DrHarleyboy, Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump

"We sure did, a wrecking ball of action and results the American people want."

By Philip Gourevitch

March 15, 2016

[...]

No, Lincoln said, the only danger that America really needed to fear would come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

[...]

...Donald Trump personifies the mobocratic spirit; he fuels it and is fuelled by it, though it is doubtful that he can control it. All the elements are there: the incessant, escalating lust for violence; the instinct for mobilizing a mob to take the law into its own hands; the claim that whole groups are the enemy; the belief that those who are not with the mob forfeit all protection from the mob and invite attack; the attribution of hostile conspiracies to peaceful independent actors; the contempt for evidence, as if accurate information and honest adjudication of competing claims were dirty tricks contrived to disadvantage the mob; the vilification of the press as hooligans who deserve to be beaten, if not killed; an all-encompassing animosity toward the government and its institutions; in short, an ever-intensifying lawlessness.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/abraham-lincoln-warned-us-about-donald-trump