Reaching out to your inner Donald

Woebot

Well-known member
ok! so we're all basically pinko liberals. me too more or less.

so what to do about the donald?

do we rail against his madness which now threatens to do nothing less than destroy the world?

that's definitely one sensible approach.

however that's not going to do anything but enforce the already toxic culture wars.

to me it seems that we need to reach out to trump with love.

the august liberal pinko institutions need to try and befriend trump.

they need to ask themselves not what they hate about donald. but what they LIKE about the daft bugger.
 

droid

Well-known member
Macron has shown how to deal with Trump. Praise him, massage his ego, appeal to his narcissism, placate his insecurities.

The problem is that he reverts to type very quickly, and his attention span is so short that nothing sticks.

The fact also has to be accepted that he's been a scumbag for pretty much his entire life. No amount of love will change him.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid's reaction upon learning that he is a 'pinko liberal':

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firefinga

Well-known member
I am a staunch conservative and I don't think anybody can reach out to Trump on any other terms than offer him financial gains. That's the only thing that clown is interested in. And of course he is a total fraud and showman. Only real interest: lower the taxes for the (ultra-)rich.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I am a staunch conservative and I don't think anybody can reach out to Trump on any other terms than offer him financial gains. That's the only thing that clown is interested in.

I think that's a misreading of him. As someone pointed out here recently, he could have carried on making money more effectively by not becoming president (leaving aside the fact that, by all accounts, he never expected to win and was, initially at least, not particularly pleased that he did win). His need for adulation, for attention, for never not being in the news, is more important to him than mere money.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Jonathon Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is essentially about reaching out across the liberal conservative divide. He roots the book in interest in social psychology so it's pretty welcome - cuts against the idea that people are rational actors, can be reasoned with or they're stupid which is the level that most online discourse functions. He kinda takes an embodied look at our moral reasoning, rooting some of - say - our politics in pre-rational feelings like fear, disgust etc. I think he maybe missed his moment, 'cos immediately post-Trump, people lost interest in trying to communicate with those on the other side of the divide, and wanted to run around in a panic instead.

Long interview here: Morality is obviously innate; it exists in some form all over the world. So we identified six candidates for being those foundations. I’ll just list them briefly: issues of care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

So with my colleagues at YourMorals.org, a group of really talented people who came together with me to study this stuff empirically, we created a website, put up a lot of surveys, collected a lot of data. And we found that liberals mostly endorse this care foundation—also fairness and liberty, but especially care. Whereas conservatives endorse all six. So a lot of the culture war comes down to: are loyalty, authority and sanctity really foundations of morality, or are they just atavistic, ancient psychological systems for tribalism and racism?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Nothing irrational about fear or disgust per se. Someone in a pre-modern society who doesn't think large predators are scary or shit is gross is unlikely to pass on their genes.

The problems for modern politics arise when the object of fear or disgust becomes 'immigrants', 'Republicans' or whatever.
 
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vimothy

yurp
But it's "pinko liberalism" in some (wider, non-partisan) sense that's given rise to Trump. And dealing with that will not be easy.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But it's "pinko liberalism" in some (wider, non-partisan) sense that's given rise to Trump. And dealing with that will not be easy.

I think Trump is a product of the worst tendencies of both main parties, filtered through (and multiplied by) twenty years of internet conspiracy-theory bollocks.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
social liberalism is in itself a product of (neo)liberalism.

I did consider starting a thread a while ago to ask whether social liberalism is ever possible without economic liberalism - I dunno, is it? Is democratic liberalism inherently self-defeating because it leads ineluctably to the sort of inequality that drives people to vote for authoritarian alternatives?
 

firefinga

Well-known member
I'll define social liberalism here as political correctness, which is the norm in western societies in the 2010s, at least officially. I also have the impression those who call the shots in those (our) societies the ruling class - the pressure groups, the rich - just realized it's an excellent way to hand over that symbolic victory to the lefties. In the meantime, the fat cats reap higher profits than ever, while the lefties are obsessing over "identity politics".
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A big part of it is the dominance of identity politics over traditional (i.e. economics- and class-focused) socialism, because the former is a product of the academy, which is inherently bourgeois. So you have all these university-educated leftists who quote Marx but despise the working class as an ignorant racist rabble.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
dismissing the "basket of deplorables" as racist, useless idiots. A cop out if I ever saw one.

To be clear, some of them obviously are exactly that, but these are the people who'd have voted for Trump even if he'd "shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue". The damage was done in alienating a lot of people who were probably going to vote for Clinton (or at least were thinking about it) but who in the end either switched to Trump, voted third-party or just stayed at home. Recall that she lost by a margin of some 70k votes in three states.

A comparable thing happened here where so many people on the Remain side made up their minds from the moment the EU referendum was announced that "Leave = racism" and that was that.
 
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