What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following…
“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”
(proofread version of comment at Crooked Timber) Mr. Timberman @125 [Italics in original comment], “converting freedom into political [or any kind of] obligation” appears to translate as “converting freedom into its opposite.” If I’m obligated to you and yours at…
The Roosevelt-Marshall welfare-warfare state and the global regime it fought and worked into existence remain intact but under pressure. They still depend on an ability to project beyond themselves, both economically as well as militarily, and both morally as well as practically.
not Burke, but a crude satire of Burke, a parody of natural law reasoning that happens to reverse the very concept of culture, the immortality of ideas, telepoesis across centuries and millennia, that produces and that would justify, if seemingly a little bit less this morning than the day before, distinguished Harvard professors, and for that matter the production of new generations of potential students, at all.
The comforting exaggerations and ideological short-cuts, historical curse words, the imputation of the the worst imaginable intentions to all political adversaries, reflect an unreformed, self-defeating desperation. Maybe, as Goldberg writes in the last paragraph of Liberal Fascism, when protesting the other side’s insulting tactics, it’s past time to cry, “Enough!”
Plus fascistique…
Trump is many ugly things, but he’s not a very developed ideologue. In a way, that might even make him more authentically fascist than the fascists, who merely talked about power for the sake of power and about the rejection of intellectualism.