Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
Many of the Trump voters voted for Obama in 2008. They were seduced by his rhetorical commitment to hope and change. As you recall, the slogan of the 2008 election was “Hope and Change,” and there were plenty of working-class people, middle-class people, in fact the majority of the population, who had been pretty badly hurt by 25 years, maybe 30 years of neo-liberal policies. They have every right to call for change and to call for hope, so they voted for Obama. They pretty soon found that there was no relevant change and not much hope. Now they’re voting for someone else who is calling for hope and change. “I’m going to make America great again. I’m going to change the things that are harming you.” How?
What’ll happen, to get to your question, is when they find, with him, that there’s little hope and not much change, there could be a number of possibilities, some of them pretty ugly. One of them would be a standard move that’s made by authoritarian figures and authoritarian structures when the promises to their constituency can’t be fulfilled, mainly scapegoating. “Let’s blame it on people who are even more vulnerable and who are suffering even more than you are. Let’s make it their fault.”
He’s already done plenty of this. “Make it the fault of immigrants, the fault of welfare cheats and Reagan’s trick, bad people, Muslims. Let’s make it their fault.” That can lead to pretty ugly consequences. We’ve seen that in the past over and over.
Another possibility is that a constructive alternative could be developed by progressive forces, maybe the kind that mobilized for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and that could lead to real policies of hope and change. Real ones, not fake ones, which could bring in more of those people.
https://psmag.com/news/noam-chomsky-talks-trump-free-speech-and-the-virtues-of-resistance
Noam Goatsky
What’ll happen, to get to your question, is when they find, with him, that there’s little hope and not much change, there could be a number of possibilities, some of them pretty ugly. One of them would be a standard move that’s made by authoritarian figures and authoritarian structures when the promises to their constituency can’t be fulfilled, mainly scapegoating. “Let’s blame it on people who are even more vulnerable and who are suffering even more than you are. Let’s make it their fault.”
He’s already done plenty of this. “Make it the fault of immigrants, the fault of welfare cheats and Reagan’s trick, bad people, Muslims. Let’s make it their fault.” That can lead to pretty ugly consequences. We’ve seen that in the past over and over.
Another possibility is that a constructive alternative could be developed by progressive forces, maybe the kind that mobilized for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and that could lead to real policies of hope and change. Real ones, not fake ones, which could bring in more of those people.
https://psmag.com/news/noam-chomsky-talks-trump-free-speech-and-the-virtues-of-resistance
Noam Goatsky
