Comment by aebtebeten
6 days ago
> ...decent people who have to accept to live under their rule...
On one hand, there's the option of voting with one's feet, which Zweig describes in "Die Welt von Gestern" (1942)
On the other hand, another alternative is "inner emigration", eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278
Maybe there are more possibilities of which I am unaware; of these three, I chose the first.
Maybe you've been outside for too long.
Both those who voted for Trump or abstained from Harris believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians.
(BB was kinda fiction-in-a-fiction and would have provided no clue either for Harris and against Trump-- and 1984 (/Schachnovelle) didn't give a clue on how you might recognise an inner party-goer if you ran into one? Maybe Animal Farm would be better?)
<anger>
Maybe it looks to you as if those who voted for Trump believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians, but I've lived among them.
I was still living in their midst when they tarred and feathered the Dixie Chicks (as they were then) for having the audacity to say GWB's Iraq Adventure might not be the most wonderful thing since sliced mayonnaise. (could we say they "cancelled" the Chicks?)
Then they claimed to be voting for DJT (a public figure whose bully bona fides go back at least 4 decades, eg https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6131533-trumpdeathpe... ) on an "isolationist" platform.
But now they're cheering Operation Southern Spear as if it were a homecoming game, as they did for GHB's Iraq. My local paper even had https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2007541679293944266 (sorry for the X link) in it this morning.
They may say they're voting on a mind-your-own-business-principle, but whenever you look at what they do, they've consistently been voting on a leader-principle.
</anger>
Q. How do you describe a principled authoritarian follower?
A. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind"
you are talking about the base that Trump knows he can always count on. they don't matter as much these days. (I completely forgot about them no airquotes) I'm not sure David Graeber ever publicly got angry at these guys, however*
Ask PH (or Algolia it) about who he is angry with on the left. Those who drove the Swing voters (the prole equivalent of interchangeables) over to the other side or got Biden to "abdicate" . Loosely reminds me of the turncoats at Sekigahara and Bosworth Field
https://www.hkml.net/Discuz/viewthread.php?tid=125577
(*The rival camps that the Trump "inner corporatists" take seriously are SV "inner-outer party" (Shu Han?) and WallStreet/Fed (Wu?). With their bands of incorrigible rationalists/technocrats.
Imho Trump _wants_ leftist intellectuals distracted from his true strategy, and this is why he's more careful with Mamdani-- enemy of my enemy yada yada)
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How you might recognise an inner party-goer? In the case of the US, I think long-tenured legislators were part of it during my tour, but in DJT's time I'd guess they, alongside silicon valley owners of various social graphs, are to be found among the interchangeables*.
Certainly casual Trump-watching is even less useful than the old days of Kremlin-watching; his inner circle changes so often (cue Bueno de Mesquita & Smith) that it's a good thing we have the web now — the airbrush artists probably would've organised and gone on strike if they'd had to keep up.
(I guess I should give DJT his due: I had thought the two party system was a structural problem, yet he's delivered an existence proof that it is indeed possible to do something about it)
* should someone send all 535 members of congress a copy of the snakebite article? It's not going to be me; that's their problem.
Yes!!