Andrew Sullivan: This is very Weimar
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@jon-nyc said in Andrew Sullivan: This is very Weimar:
Honestly I think people here say to themselves “but these rioters aren’t by and large Trump supporters” and from that facile comment completely absolve him from any causal role.
What I say, and what I have said repeatedly, is that Trump-the-Great-Divider is an all time great self fulfilling prophecy. When one side of the aisle hates the guy a priori because of his human phenotype, the division is baked in. Everything else is retconning that division to be the fault of the guy with the repellent phenotype.
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Which presidential power should Trump wield to halt the cycle of white cop shoots black guy on video->everybody becomes as hysterically outraged as they can be because hysterical outrage is a virtue signal->rioting?
Which power could CNN wield? Which power could the democrat political leaders of the cities being rioted against wield? Who's wielding their power appropriately and nobly in this situation? To whom are we to look, other, of course, than people who miraculously are able to find fault with both sides? (Wow what an intellectual feat! So special!)
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@Mik said in Andrew Sullivan: This is very Weimar:
You said he had a causal role. Do you have anything to back that up other than you don't like him?
I didn’t mean literally the proximate cause of the initial protest, obviously that was the Floyd death. I mean that he personally as well as his actions and words were a key part of the very complex set of circumstances that has fueled their intensity and duration.
His divisiveness obviously played a role in the political tensions leading up to it (Horace agrees here with the causal chain, but assigns moral responsibility for his divisiveness to the outgroup).
But once they started you could think of myriad ways he could have dialed down the temperature or tried to give the protesters a voice. Heck, even inviting some of them to join a bipartisan group to make recommendations for municipal, state and federal rule changes. Presidents do that kind of thing all the time. It’s kind of what politics is. Instead he antagonized with words and deeds.
It just didn’t have to be this way.
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@jon-nyc said in Andrew Sullivan: This is very Weimar:
His divisiveness obviously played a role in the political tensions leading up to it (Horace agrees here with the causal chain, but assigns moral responsibility for his divisiveness to the outgroup).
And you simultaneously revel in the TDS orgy while taking no moral responsibility for it, because well of course good people hate Trump, I mean duh, it shouldn't need justification.
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Here’s what I’m not doing, largely because it’s impossible:
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laying out a specific causal chain from Trumps actions to the behavior of several million protesters and a few thousand rioters.
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claiming that I know what the mitigation effects would be for particular actions that trump could have taken
What I am doing is saying that
(1) his general divisiveness feeds this
(2) his words and deeds have served to fan the flames
(3). Different words and deeds could have cooled the flames or at least fanned them less
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jon, it's ok and par for the course that you actually have no interesting points to make here, and are really only attempting to establish the phenotype of a clear headed calm appraiser of the situation. We are all as impressed with it as you are. Now please feel free to go eat lunch.
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I agree it’s vacuous. Stop saying that.
Maybe phrase it as ‘Trump fanned the flames in word and deed because he’s not up to the job of being presidential. He’s just the leader of a tribe’.
And then maybe take some responsibility for why you guys elected someone like that.
