1. #22576
    Mighty Member 4saken1's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarman View Post
    At this point, it is just a needlessly self-inflicted wound. They might as well give people the additional $600, make it clear they are working for the people, and move forward to something else for a while. Allowing people on the left to whine and cry about Biden and "centrists" isn't helpful, especially since you want to keep the party together to avoid getting hit hard in 2022.
    Other people moving the goalposts isn't a self inflicted wound. Why not just give everyone $10,000? I'm not even sure if $2,600 was on the table. From where I stand, $2,000 is better than the $600 that Republicans were proposing. Yes, it should be more. I think that it's likely Democrats will start working on getting the next stimulus bill in the near future, though. Pretty sure it will be significantly better than what, if anything, the Republicans will go for.
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    There was even the flag of India in that crowd (no doubt because of Trump's anti-Muslim policies appealing to the very right-wing government by Modi, a good contingent, not majority mind you, of Indian Americans support Modi and Trump for that reason).
    https://theprint.in/india/shameful-u...ctions/581299/

    As for South Vietnam's flag being there, I sympathize with the outrage but I have to raise an eyebrow at the South Vietnamese flag being a symbol of democracy because South Vietnam's government was never democratic. It was a bunch of military dictatorships and coups. In fact that makes its presence there quite apropos.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Wayne View Post
    Most people both online and offline can't seem to grasp the idea that America is an Empire or the idea that all states are innately self only looking out for their best interests. I think Obama's inability to deal with the former resulted in mistakes in foreign policy in both the MENA and in East Asia. His attempts at trying to build the TPP against China was just never going to contain a rising China given China's geopolitical goals such as rebuilding the Sinosphere and forcible reunification with Taiwan. Likewise his overtures with Iran ignored the fundamental geopolitical realities and alliances that historically existed between the US and the Arab states or that fundamentally that Iran and its ideology was antagonistic to America/Arab State and that Iran had imperial ambitions in Lebanon/Syria/Bahrain/Iraq. I think in particular, there seems to be a disconnect that Pot-Revolutionary states like China and Iran were never going to be satisfied with the American lead international order given that both states were founded in opposition to American backed regimes (the Shah in Iran, Chiang Kai-Shek in China).
    Well I don't entirely subscribe to that because that assumes that peace is impossible and I don't think that's true.

    It's not a case that every government founded in opposition to America is doomed to be an enemy. Vietnam today is the government of the victorious North Vietnamese army that defeated and opposed colonialism and defeated America...and today it's a reliable American ally in that region, and in fact the peace deal to open up American-Vietnamese relations was done by the two Johns, Kerry and McCain during the Clinton administration, one being a veteran and another a POW in the fight against that government.

    So I don't see why Vietnam can't be an example for dealings with Iran and Cuba. China...yeah that's a different story. But China makes peace with peace with Iran, and Cuba more pertinent.

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    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarman View Post
    these are more menial than having a consensual affair in the Oval Office
    I'd like to point out that this was also wrong. I don't know that impeachment was the answer, but sheesh, Bill. Ya gross dick.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Joker View Post
    I'd like to point out that this was also wrong. I don't know that impeachment was the answer, but sheesh, Bill. Ya gross dick.
    In retrospect, I think Bill Clinton should have resigned for the sake of the party. He should have resigned and had Al Gore be President. If Gore had been presiding incumbent (and if he didn't do Ford's asinine mistake of pardoning Nixon), he might have prevailed in 1999.

    Obviously Newt Gingrich's partisan impeachment was gross, absurd, and a blatant trampling of constitutional norms for the sake of mudslinging but...Clinton's argument and defense against that didn't work. To put it simply, on that front he really should have taken a "when they go low, you go high" approach. Clinton used his power to have sex with a junior colleague and an intern, he publicly cheated on his wife, his first lady who was also an aspiring politican (and to be honest, HRC would have had a better career had she divorced Bill)...and while the moral clause is lame and silly and so on, he really should have fallen on the sword for the sake of the party.

    Part of the reason why 1999 was so close was that Gore and Lieberman ran a very moderate centrist campaign that in the eyes of undecided and independent didn't seem all that different from W.'s "compassionate conservatism". Ralph Nader mounted his sabotaging third party campaign of course...but it should never have been that decisive to start with. The Dems had a strong economy, a surplus and Bill Clinton's scandal led to need on Gore's part to not tout the achievements in the campaign and that tanked him. If he was the actual President for a resigned Bill, he could have ran on that message and won.

    Bill Clinton is I think a false dawn for the Democrats. He and his coterie in the party had this unearned reputation as this great figure and so on for bringing the Dems back into the WH in the '90s and that's a considerable achievement no doubt about it, but Clinton expected the Dem party to bend to him, and he put himself over party. And now it's clear that Obama is the transformational president, the defining President for the last 20 years in terms of policy, and it was Obama's VP who got to be President, rather than Clinton's VP and his wife. 2020 is the consolidation of the Dems as the Party of Obama, and it's no longer the party of Clinton.
    Last edited by Revolutionary_Jack; 01-16-2021 at 10:59 AM.

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    Mighty Member TheDarman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Not a coherent philosophical ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even some varieties of Conservatism.
    Right, the other policy positions are as window dressing--pulled, seemingly, from the wide popularity of these ideas among the wider electorate to make it more palatable to even less radicalized folks. That means that they don't come out of political philosophies of leftism or rightism. They are only there to make the movement more appealing and seemingly populist.

    But yeah, Trump does have ideas that people respond to[...]
    This is a really good breakdown of the primary tenets of Trumpism that the rest of the policies are basically window dressing for. This is a good analysis.

    In the most neutral sense, Trump's ideas do in fact respond to, or let's say intersect oddly with, issues in the real world[...]
    On a related note, what I found most fascinating about Captain America: Civil War was this very real discussion of unilateralism and multilateralism. This doesn't really relate to Trump, but it seems to be a discussion about foreign policy in the age of Obama vs. Cheney (the main man behind Bush's foreign policy decisions). Iron Man, in that film, is clearly understanding the need for others to "check" the Avengers and prevent them from acting unilaterally in places that they lack understanding of the consequences. In this way, Stark is reacting to Ultron, which would be similar to the invasion of Iraq (albeit with perhaps better intentions)--an action undertaken by an arrogant and overconfident party believing that they had all the answers about how to "fix" the world. Meanwhile, Captain America is trying to enable the Avengers to continue to act in this role. He claims that the Avengers are far more benevolent than others (a kind of analogous argument for "American exceptionalism") and shouldn't be relegated to cow-towing to others with "agendas" (as if the Avengers don't have agendas of their own--see his behavior with Bucky).

    Obama's ideas were about international liberalism--working with other countries to better secure our freedoms both here and abroad. It was about working with one another and trading with one another and creating a system of coordinated interdependence with one another to work towards cooperation instead of unilateral action by the most powerful military force on the planet. In a way, it was easing off of our responsibility, under a realist understanding of international relations, to police the world ourselves and making everyone police their own behavior. But, I think rightly, Obama understood that we had to ease off of that responsibility rather than immediately moving to a new international order. (Obviously, the analogy breaks down here with the Avengers case--it was all or nothing right away and I think that led to easily foreseeable issues in the film where Stark completely abandons his own views.) I think Obama's foreign policy legacy will look better and better in the rear view mirror with Libya being a shining example of one disastrous policy decision. The decision to have humility and understand that the United States can't unilaterally solve all the world's problems (see Syria and the diverse interests forming the rebels making it difficult to pick favorites therein) was wise and appropriate and a break from Cheney's decisions under the Bush Administration. Additionally, the understanding that things should first be worked out with diplomatic solutions being exhausted first (the Iran Nuclear Deal) was a fantastic way of re-visualizing the way we could use American influence. We could still the lead the world by more directly engaging with it rather than rebuffing it. At the root of Obama's foreign policy is a single phrase: benevolent pragmatism.

    Trump, however, is neither Cheney nor Obama. It is not about maintaining "American exceptionalism" on the world stage. It is not about thinking that we are heroes in the story and can save everyone else. His policy is, thusly (ironically like Obama's), not rooted in the fundamental understanding of us as a benevolent actor who can single-handedly solve everyone else's problems as well as our own. At the root of Trumpism, however, isn't benevolent pragmatism. Much like the rest of Trump's leadership on issues, his policy positions are rooted in a deep selfishness. Every international crisis is framed with, "What do we get out of this?" and "Do we get enough from this arrangement?" It is a deeply cynical worldview that has a lot of credibility among both of the more entrenched wings of the left and the right. The fundamental question becomes how to make sure that we are better off, either at the expense of everyone else or ensuring that we avoid any kind of moralistic stance if it means we engage in statecraft when the outcome isn't truly perceived as worthwhile. It is a retreat from the world stage and a complete forsake of our prior role as "leader of the free world" and an attempt to make us just the largest player in a reorganized international scene where everyone is merely out for themselves. At the root of Trumpism is cynicism and I think we ignore a good portion of that.

    Likewise "America First" and so on, globalization and so on is an easy enough villain for both the right and the left, and Trump's response to that which is a radical nativism is obviously false but again a real problem in society can have both a right-wing and a left-wing response. The Taliban and various fundamentalist outfits in the Middle East are quite valid in responding to imperialism and colonialism of various kinds but they are a right-wing extreme response to that real problem, and the problem in the Middle East is that there aren't significant left-wing alternatives of comparative political force. One of the few was the Kurds and now that's gone.
    It is a reasonable response that people don't really understand in America because we have been so disconnected from our foreign policy.

    Since Truman, America's role has been to be the benevolent imperialist. Unfortunately, after Truman, we stopped being that and were overtaken by a ton of paranoia and concern about our adversaries all being out to get us. Johnson being led into Vietnam, in spite of the fact that it was a war that was only made that much messier by our involvement and would only prolong a war that the South Vietnamese were ultimately destined to lose, was a byproduct of that and really hurt what was a really positive domestic agenda. Nixon and Ford carried that forward by, instead of focusing on the world's security, we turned instead back to "realism"--the very doctrine whose natural consequence is getting people like Trump on the extremes of that understanding. By the time Carter was in office, it was so engrained in our foreign policy is virtually impossible to reverse and it led to foreseeable consequences with the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Reagan promised to return us to Ford and Nixon's understanding of foreign policy rather than Carter's, a man who was crippled by seeming paralysis because he couldn't reasonably be expected to act within a framework of policy that he didn't agree with.

    By the time Clinton was president, it simply wasn't worthwhile to fight that fight. Domestic politics made it difficult to retreat after we viewed the world as simply more "secure" with our presence in it. There were virtually no more wars left to fight and we could just stagnate, with our troops simply "there". Of course, this ended up being a huge mistake. There was no purpose to keep American troops in the Middle East after the Soviet Union had collapsed and was no longer threatening our former allies. Our constant oversight ended up leading to radicalization of the same people we had depended on to fight back against the Soviets--and their reasons for fighting the Soviets were the same as the reasons for fighting us.

    That led to a more virulent version of American exceptionalism under Bush and Cheney--a natural consequence of Reagan and Bush Sr. after the 9/11 attacks. The simple conclusion being that we could crush terrorist insurrections easily because we had decimated countries. Ironically, the most successful operation was against the country of Iraq (at least militaristically, the enemy had been eliminated, but the foreseeable consequence of creating a power vacuum with no one there remotely ready to confront which direction the country should go in). The truth is that intelligence organizations and special forces are far better equipped to combat terrorism than the United States military. But there was this false and derivative idea that somehow our exceptional military could do anything and was as versatile as it needed to be.

    Obviously, I already covered Obama and Trump above, but, in many ways, the continued problems with terrorism come from the history that we had here.

    The question of citizenship...well that's just nonsense, but it's a logical enough escalation from the two.

    So I'd say that's the ideology of the Trump base and Trump himself.
    And the domestic ideology is, frankly, far more alarming. The kind of foreign policy Trump has is an understandable reaction to a realist framework. Sanders isn't even that dissimilar from Trump in his view of our role in the world and that we should be retreating from it unless we get some kind of clear benefit from being there.

    But the white nationalism that Trump inspired is what is truly problematic. That ideology is what is truly demonstratively dangerous, but it is, also, a natural consequence of the overall world view: selfishness.
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  6. #22581
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    Quote Originally Posted by Malvolio View Post
    Looks like someone can't do basic math. $600 + $1400 = $2000
    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarman View Post
    Right, the other policy positions are as window dressing--pulled, seemingly, from the wide popularity of these ideas among the wider electorate to make it more palatable to even less radicalized folks. That means that they don't come out of political philosophies of leftism or rightism. They are only there to make the movement more appealing and seemingly populist.



    This is a really good breakdown of the primary tenets of Trumpism that the rest of the policies are basically window dressing for. This is a good analysis.



    On a related note, what I found most fascinating about Captain America: Civil War was this very real discussion of unilateralism and multilateralism. This doesn't really relate to Trump, but it seems to be a discussion about foreign policy in the age of Obama vs. Cheney (the main man behind Bush's foreign policy decisions). Iron Man, in that film, is clearly understanding the need for others to "check" the Avengers and prevent them from acting unilaterally in places that they lack understanding of the consequences. In this way, Stark is reacting to Ultron, which would be similar to the invasion of Iraq (albeit with perhaps better intentions)--an action undertaken by an arrogant and overconfident party believing that they had all the answers about how to "fix" the world. Meanwhile, Captain America is trying to enable the Avengers to continue to act in this role. He claims that the Avengers are far more benevolent than others (a kind of analogous argument for "American exceptionalism") and shouldn't be relegated to cow-towing to others with "agendas" (as if the Avengers don't have agendas of their own--see his behavior with Bucky).

    Obama's ideas were about international liberalism--working with other countries to better secure our freedoms both here and abroad. It was about working with one another and trading with one another and creating a system of coordinated interdependence with one another to work towards cooperation instead of unilateral action by the most powerful military force on the planet. In a way, it was easing off of our responsibility, under a realist understanding of international relations, to police the world ourselves and making everyone police their own behavior. But, I think rightly, Obama understood that we had to ease off of that responsibility rather than immediately moving to a new international order. (Obviously, the analogy breaks down here with the Avengers case--it was all or nothing right away and I think that led to easily foreseeable issues in the film where Stark completely abandons his own views.) I think Obama's foreign policy legacy will look better and better in the rear view mirror with Libya being a shining example of one disastrous policy decision. The decision to have humility and understand that the United States can't unilaterally solve all the world's problems (see Syria and the diverse interests forming the rebels making it difficult to pick favorites therein) was wise and appropriate and a break from Cheney's decisions under the Bush Administration. Additionally, the understanding that things should first be worked out with diplomatic solutions being exhausted first (the Iran Nuclear Deal) was a fantastic way of re-visualizing the way we could use American influence. We could still the lead the world by more directly engaging with it rather than rebuffing it. At the root of Obama's foreign policy is a single phrase: benevolent pragmatism.

    Trump, however, is neither Cheney nor Obama. It is not about maintaining "American exceptionalism" on the world stage. It is not about thinking that we are heroes in the story and can save everyone else. His policy is, thusly (ironically like Obama's), not rooted in the fundamental understanding of us as a benevolent actor who can single-handedly solve everyone else's problems as well as our own. At the root of Trumpism, however, isn't benevolent pragmatism. Much like the rest of Trump's leadership on issues, his policy positions are rooted in a deep selfishness. Every international crisis is framed with, "What do we get out of this?" and "Do we get enough from this arrangement?" It is a deeply cynical worldview that has a lot of credibility among both of the more entrenched wings of the left and the right. The fundamental question becomes how to make sure that we are better off, either at the expense of everyone else or ensuring that we avoid any kind of moralistic stance if it means we engage in statecraft when the outcome isn't truly perceived as worthwhile. It is a retreat from the world stage and a complete forsake of our prior role as "leader of the free world" and an attempt to make us just the largest player in a reorganized international scene where everyone is merely out for themselves. At the root of Trumpism is cynicism and I think we ignore a good portion of that.



    It is a reasonable response that people don't really understand in America because we have been so disconnected from our foreign policy.

    Since Truman, America's role has been to be the benevolent imperialist. Unfortunately, after Truman, we stopped being that and were overtaken by a ton of paranoia and concern about our adversaries all being out to get us. Johnson being led into Vietnam, in spite of the fact that it was a war that was only made that much messier by our involvement and would only prolong a war that the South Vietnamese were ultimately destined to lose, was a byproduct of that and really hurt what was a really positive domestic agenda. Nixon and Ford carried that forward by, instead of focusing on the world's security, we turned instead back to "realism"--the very doctrine whose natural consequence is getting people like Trump on the extremes of that understanding. By the time Carter was in office, it was so engrained in our foreign policy is virtually impossible to reverse and it led to foreseeable consequences with the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Reagan promised to return us to Ford and Nixon's understanding of foreign policy rather than Carter's, a man who was crippled by seeming paralysis because he couldn't reasonably be expected to act within a framework of policy that he didn't agree with.

    By the time Clinton was president, it simply wasn't worthwhile to fight that fight. Domestic politics made it difficult to retreat after we viewed the world as simply more "secure" with our presence in it. There were virtually no more wars left to fight and we could just stagnate, with our troops simply "there". Of course, this ended up being a huge mistake. There was no purpose to keep American troops in the Middle East after the Soviet Union had collapsed and was no longer threatening our former allies. Our constant oversight ended up leading to radicalization of the same people we had depended on to fight back against the Soviets--and their reasons for fighting the Soviets were the same as the reasons for fighting us.

    That led to a more virulent version of American exceptionalism under Bush and Cheney--a natural consequence of Reagan and Bush Sr. after the 9/11 attacks. The simple conclusion being that we could crush terrorist insurrections easily because we had decimated countries. Ironically, the most successful operation was against the country of Iraq (at least militaristically, the enemy had been eliminated, but the foreseeable consequence of creating a power vacuum with no one there remotely ready to confront which direction the country should go in). The truth is that intelligence organizations and special forces are far better equipped to combat terrorism than the United States military. But there was this false and derivative idea that somehow our exceptional military could do anything and was as versatile as it needed to be.

    Obviously, I already covered Obama and Trump above, but, in many ways, the continued problems with terrorism come from the history that we had here.



    And the domestic ideology is, frankly, far more alarming. The kind of foreign policy Trump has is an understandable reaction to a realist framework. Sanders isn't even that dissimilar from Trump in his view of our role in the world and that we should be retreating from it unless we get some kind of clear benefit from being there.

    But the white nationalism that Trump inspired is what is truly problematic. That ideology is what is truly demonstratively dangerous, but it is, also, a natural consequence of the overall world view: selfishness.
    To be fair to Johnson, Kennedy was led into Vietnam first. After he was assassinated, Johnson made the conscious decision to continue Kennedy's policies, and as a result he was dragged further into Vietnam.

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    Quote Originally Posted by 4saken1 View Post
    Other people moving the goalposts isn't a self inflicted wound. Why not just give everyone $10,000? I'm not even sure if $2,600 was on the table. From where I stand, $2,000 is better than the $600 that Republicans were proposing. Yes, it should be more. I think that it's likely Democrats will start working on getting the next stimulus bill in the near future, though. Pretty sure it will be significantly better than what, if anything, the Republicans will go for.
    I have to disagree. I think this is a was of money for people that didn't lose their jobs. This money should have gone to extend the unemployment benefits further because (from the last time I checked) they only extended the unemployment benefits for 11 weeks.

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    Quote Originally Posted by AnakinFlair View Post
    To be fair to Johnson, Kennedy was led into Vietnam first. After he was assassinated, Johnson made the conscious decision to continue Kennedy's policies, and as a result he was dragged further into Vietnam.
    That itself goes back to Truman and "who lost China" (as if, as Chomsky so memorably pointed out, China was America's to lose).

    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarman View Post
    This is a really good breakdown of the primary tenets of Trumpism that the rest of the policies are basically window dressing for. This is a good analysis.
    Thanks. Your response is pretty awesome too.

    At the root of Trumpism, however, isn't benevolent pragmatism. Much like the rest of Trump's leadership on issues, his policy positions are rooted in a deep selfishness.
    Absolutely.

    Reagan promised to return us to Ford and Nixon's understanding of foreign policy rather than Carter's, a man who was crippled by seeming paralysis because he couldn't reasonably be expected to act within a framework of policy that he didn't agree with.
    That feels simplistic, IMO. Nixon was the one who went to China and started Detente with Brezhnev. Carter continued and extended that, and he also managed to oversee the Camp David Accords. Reagan was the one who went Cold War Extra at the outset.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Joker View Post
    I'd like to point out that this was also wrong. I don't know that impeachment was the answer, but sheesh, Bill. Ya gross dick.
    And it goes without saying that Clinton was far from the first president to have some hanky panky going on....he was just more careless than the others. Warren Harding had an affair in the White House (his mistress said they would have sex in a closet in the White House and on a couch in his office in the Senate) and he only was president for 2 years. He died of a heart attack in 1923. FDR had a mistress even before becoming President and that affair continued after he was elected. With JFK there was Judith Campbell Exner. The press knew about a lot of these but just never covered it. It was like a boys will be boys attitude was prevalent with reporters.

    JFK didn’t need a sock on the door, he had Secret Service
    JFK’s affairs stayed out of the press not necessarily because journalists wanted to protect him, but because they just didn’t consider such things to be news. At one point during JFK’s presidency, the Secret Service tackled CBS journalist Marvin Kalb so he wouldn’t get a good look at a woman entering the president’s hotel room.

    Even though he’d been manhandled, Kalb later wrote: “never for one moment did I even consider pursuing and reporting what I had seen and experienced that evening.”

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    Quote Originally Posted by Iron Maiden View Post
    And it goes without saying that Clinton was far from the first president to have some hanky panky going on....he was just more careless than the others. Warren Harding had an affair in the White House (his mistress said they would have sex in a closet in the White House and on a couch in his office in the Senate) and he only was president for 2 years. He died of a heart attack in 1923. FDR had a mistress even before becoming President and that affair continued after he was elected. With JFK there was Judith Campbell Exner. The press knew about a lot of these but just never covered it. It was like a boys will be boys attitude was prevalent with reporters.
    Well regardless the issue of a President having an affair with an intern at a white house screams "HR disaster" at the very least and workplace sexual harassment at another end. Obviously, Bill wasn't seriously in love with Monica Lewinsky and basically saw her as an office fling of the week. So quite obviously you have a sitting president using his office for some kind of sexual favors from his co-workers. Sure Bill Clinton wouldn't have framed things crudely, and he had a personal level of charm and was attractive, but the power differential was kinda glaring and obvious.

    My feeling about sex scandals in office and power is the same as espionage on foreign powers...don't get caught. Every government, democratic or totalitarian, spies on each other and have done so for decades...but if you get caught it's understood you will be disavowed and left to fend for yourself unless there's some diplomatic points to be scored. If you conduct a sex scandal and are married and presented as part of your campaign an image of a nuclear family as part of your package rather than be honest...I simultaneously feel it's unfair and overblown while also feeling "don't do the crime if you can't do the time".

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tami View Post
    Trump had an ideology?
    Does toxic masculinity qualify as an ideology? It's 'America First" boiled down to its most basic elements.

    Quote Originally Posted by DrNewGod View Post
    That's interestingly thought out. I struggle to believe that Trump has any philosophy above a naked, primitive self-interest coupled with an unquenchable thirst for adoration, and an equally irresistible need to crush anyone who bruises his ego, even if accidentally.

    The question then, perhaps, becomes "what do Trump's followers believe his ideology to be?" Their actions suggest a few things to me:
    • Restore American Dignity At Home (meaning white supremacy, and making somebody provide high paying jobs)
    • Restore American Dignity Abroad (meaning quit cooperating and impose American will)
    • Restore American Common Sense (meaning denigrate and silence experts who tell me that easily understood answers won't work on complicated problems)
    • Restore American Liberty (meaning don't tell me I have to care about anyone else if it interferes with my whims or superstitions, especially if those people arent like me).
    All of this screams toxic masculinity as policy to me.
    Last edited by Jack Dracula; 01-16-2021 at 12:03 PM.
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    Despite all the pearl clutching by the DC blob, Trump's foreign policy was not really a major departure in substance from what previous administrations have done, and just as with domestic policy, what got people offended was more of just him saying the quiet part out loud. All this hand wringing about Trump ignoring our allies and trying to prioritize American interests kind of ignores the obvious fact that America has NEVER treated any of our allies as equal partners and only ever supported them to the extent that it furthered our own interests. The only difference is that under Obama, we would butter them up with sweet talk in public while whipping them into line in private, whereas Trump as always demanded overt shows of fealty which many countries bristled at, not because it was some kind of sea change in substance but because it was just another confirmation that they have been subordinate to the US all along, and this just made it all the more urgent for them to start prioritizing their own agendas over just being loyal American clients.

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    Quote Originally Posted by PwrdOn View Post
    Despite all the pearl clutching by the DC blob, Trump's foreign policy was not really a major departure in substance from what previous administrations have done,
    Unilaterally exiting a treaty to spite the previous administration, like Trump did with the Nuclear Deal is certainly a break with norms. As is his stance towards NATO and subservience to Putin.

    All this hand wringing about Trump ignoring our allies and trying to prioritize American interests kind of ignores the obvious fact that America has NEVER treated any of our allies as equal partners and only ever supported them to the extent that it furthered our own interests.
    Everyone in this recent chain agreed consensually that America is an empire and it's an elephant in the room that nobody has addressed (and that includes Bernie Sanders, whose comments on the US Foreign Policy are slim even when he ran as President, since foreign policy is basically the jam of a POTUS). So I don't know what you mean by hand wringing that people here are denying. That feels like something you need to tamp down and correct.

    The only difference is that under Obama, we would butter them up with sweet talk in public while whipping them into line in private,
    If the end result of that is something like the Cuban Thaw and the Iran Nuclear Deal, it's still in advance to what was done before and after him.

    ...whereas Trump as always demanded overt shows of fealty which many countries bristled at, not because it was some kind of sea change in substance but because it was just another confirmation that they have been subordinate to the US all along, and this just made it all the more urgent for them to start prioritizing their own agendas over just being loyal American clients.
    Making people feel like s--t is not a nice thing foreign policy wise. Wars have been fought just for that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Malvolio View Post
    Looks like someone can't do basic math. $600 + $1400 = $2000
    Yeah.

    It's a bad faith argument for a good cause.

    However, that makes it harder to argue for truth on its own merits.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  15. #22590
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Everyone in this recent chain agreed consensually that America is an empire and it's an elephant in the room that nobody has addressed (and that includes Bernie Sanders, whose comments on the US Foreign Policy are slim even when he ran as President, since foreign policy is basically the jam of a POTUS). So I don't know what you mean by hand wringing that people here are denying. That feels like something you need to tamp down and correct.
    The fundamental reality is that the continuation of America as we know it depends on maintaining the power, influence, and access to resources that come with being an imperialist superpower, and somehow we have managed to delude no small part of our population into thinking that this influence comes from other nations admiring our prosperity and value system, not from naked displays of military and economic might. The Trump administration just peeled off that veneer and went about acting exactly like what everyone else knew America to have been all along, and while I'm sure that Biden will try and just hit a reset button just as he's trying to do with domestic policy, I'm not sure it'll be any more effective. Now, there is always that option of America actually becoming that shining city on a hill, but how exactly are we going to get other countries to trust us when we can't even get our own house in order? Not to mention, of course, that pretty much anyone with any actual diplomatic experience is sort of required to adhere to the longstanding "bipartisan foreign policy consensus" so unless you want to put rank amateurs in charge of everything you're going to end up with people who are hardwired to push for that same old imperialist agenda.

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