Sivad wrote:I'd agree if so many people weren't taken in by these personalities. Most of the people that voted for Clinton still have no idea what Clinton actually represents. They have to be shown how these personalities campaign as progressives and govern as neoliberals, they have to be shown what these characters are really about and how to recognize them. The system functions through these personalities, if the personalities lose support the system will begin to break down.
I suppose the question here is how we interact with an administration that uses the rhetoric of a revolutionary while doing exactly the opposite. Trump has been careful to paint himself as some kind of revolutionary outsider, and the capitalist press has jumped to help him do the same.
The refrain that he and his followers keep harping on was that Hillary was the system, and he is beating the system.
This is, of course, half right in that she was the system. What is incorrect—obviously—is the idea that he is somehow beating the system because this is some kind of radical binary instead of the dictatorship of a class.
So is it best to engage in this kind of rhetoric at the expense of justifying Trump and Bannon's rhetoric, or is it best to focus on the representative in power?
This is not a rhetoric question, I honestly don't know and think that this is something that has been tricky before. I've before said that Trump isn't a fascist as is often charged, and he's not a Bonapartist—but the latter is a much easier case to make.
Like the first Napoleon, he all but declares, "I am the revolution." Like the history turned farce of Napoleon III, he announces that he is "All things to all men." And his own farce proclaims, "I alone can fix it!"
We, on the left, tend to do pretty poorly when the right takes our rhetoric. Whether it be the Nazis marching around dropping the word, "socialist," and waving red flags, or one of the Bonapartes marching around explaining how they are freeing everyone by taking away their rights.
I'm not totally convinced that beating a fallen political rival that will never rise again is necessarily the best target. The living Democrat snakes still in power in their holes; the living Republican monsters in control of the dictatorship both seem like more effective targets to me.
But I can be talked out of that rather easily. I'm not exactly here to defend the Clintons in any way, shape, or form any more than I'd defend Obama or Romney. But we seem to have let the latter two off the hook easier and there was no real push to use them as a face of personalities in the way that their political rivals wanted us to after the dust cleared. Not like the two-minute hate the Trumpites want to keep encouraging.
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