The New Yorker -- "One Hundred Days"

[ancianita]

Editor David Remnick best sums up this president's character and the 2016 election within the larger frame of democracy's diminishment, even endangerment.

four hundred and eighty-nine of the wealthiest counties in the country voted for Clinton; the remaining two thousand six hundred and twenty-three counties, largely made up of small towns, suburbs, and rural areas, voted for Trump. Slightly fewer than fifty-five per cent of all voting-age adults bestirred themselves to go to the polls. That statistic is at least as painful to process as the Comey letter, the Russian hack of the D.N.C., the strategic failures of the Clinton campaign, and the over-all darkness of the Trump campaign. It’s a statistic about passivity, which is just what a democracy in the era of Trump can no longer afford.

The Trump Presidency represents a rebellion against liberalism itself—an angry assault on the advances of groups of people who have experienced profound, if fitful, empowerment over the past half century. There is nothing about Trump’s public pronouncements that indicates that he has welcomed these moral advances

The stakes of this anti-democratic wave cannot be overestimated...Freedom House...has identified an eleven-year decline in democracies around the globe and now issues a list of "countries to watch"... South Africa, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and, the largest of them all, the United States.. The reason...Trump's ... 'approach to civil liberties and the role of the United States in the world...'

In 1814, John Adams wrote to former US Senator, John Taylor, that democracy '...soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.' As President, Donald Trump, with his nativist and purely transactional view of politics, threatens to be democracy's most reckless caretaker, and a fulfillment of Adam's dark prophecy...


Trump forces us to recognize the fragility of precious things. Yet there are signs that Adams and the doomsayers of democratic values will be proved wrong.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/a-hundred-days-of-trump

[longship]

1. A substantial editorial. Recommended click-through.

R&

[MBS]

2. Remnick gives eloquent voice to my deepest fears.

Not just about Trump - but about those segments of the electorate who (a) still think that Trump is A-OK and are either clueless or indifferent to the danger he poses to our democracy and to our country's personal and natural resources and (b) (to use Remnick's words) "did not bestir themselves to vote."

Freedom House is correct in listing the U.S. as a country to watch.

[ancianita]

3. I read somewhere that the views of DT's supporters are pretty much ineradicable, baked into this

country's xenophobes to the point where their exclusionary assumptions don't even have words, just "feelings" which don't translate in public discourse.

[wcast]

4. I agree with your response!

Xenophobia has been part of our country since it was formed and that is also baked into the cake. Franklin is reported to have worried about Germans and how we would become a German nation.

We were built on eradicating or enslaving any culture not WASP. Even my Italian forefathers, who came here over 100 years ago were treated like we treat Mexicans today.

Some Whites are fighting for several reasons. Some believe in their superiority, I think many do without realizing it, some are afraid to be a minority themselves, and some have grown very fat off of the have and have not society that is our economy. All of this has been reinforced since 1620 or so and until we have honest discussions about race, we will stay a fractured nation.

[Dan]

5. Sad smile

Define what an honest discussion about race would entail, just curious...

[wcast]

6. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[Dan]

7. Sad Smile 2

It would appear that your plan is to educate Whites... good luck.