It Didn't Come Out Of Nowhere

If we are so lucky as to see Donald Trump defeated and the Republicans made to pay a severe penalty for their promotion of fascism we can't let his percentage of the popular vote not serve as a serious warning of how dangerously close we've come to allowing a fascist strongman to take the presidency. With everything that has come out of his mouth and the mouths of his surrogates this election cycle, there is no mistaking what a vote for him means, that a dangerously large percentage of the American People are prepared to vote for someone like him.

We already knew there were places in the country prepared to vote for fascist demagogues.   Seats in the House and the Senate, Governor-ships, statehouses and courts are already staffed with people as bad or, all too imaginably, worse than Donald Trump.  Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, etc. should have served as a warning before Trump even made noises about running for President and the warning has gone unheeded.

We have had a serious undermining of the most basic concepts of democracy in this country, not only among those parts of the population who get their ersatz information from FOX, CNN and hate talk cable and radio, but also among the more elite segments.   There is no mistaking the pro-Republican messaging of NPR and allegedly up-market venues of print media.  The moronic Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe, once a major voice of intellectual liberalism, was on the radio after the Vice Presidential debate singing the praises of Mike Pence, a governor so bad that even the members of his own party were eager to be rid of him.

The undermining of democracy in the United States among the college educated is, I believe, largely due to the ideological program of materialism.  You've heard me on that over and over again.  I think that immediately for some, gradually for many more, that program has eroded the concepts of human beings, our minds, our possibilities, the possibilities of our fellow humans to act for the common good with some reliability.   It has eroded a view of human beings sufficiently generous to elevate our motives or to trust the motives of other people.  It has presented people as masses to be channeled or those parts of the population that would resist channeling to be marginalized or, in the worst cases, to be destroyed.  That is certainly not a style of thinking that is exclusive to academic materialism, it has been the predominant thinking just about anywhere where it is impossible for The People to maintain a representative democracy in a decent society.   Democracy has certainly been the exception than the rule, as such it is necessary to cultivate the necessary prerequisites for it to happen.  Materialism, both in the vulgar form and its pretentious academic form, undermines those.

Our mid-brow media have certainly swallowed the line of bilge I'm talking about and it has exercised its influence to produce the situation we are in now.  IT DIDN'T COME FROM NOWHERE.  As I will never stop pointing out,  Donald Trump is a creation of the free press relieved of any obligation to serve the interests of The People in exercising their right to make informed votes.  The media certainly created Mike Pence, who had a talk show and many other of the worst of those who were elected to office in the United States.

In my worst fears, this election might only delay outright, overt fascism by a few years.  If something isn't done to turn around the conditions in the media, in the economy, in the world that have created this rolling crisis for American democracy, we will face a likely more effective fascist challenge within a decade.  We got here with the theories, slogans and bromides that have allowed the media to lie us into this crisis,  just allowing those to go unchallenged will guarantee that the next time will come and it will likely have learned enough not to have their candidate be as big a pile of garbage that it was easy to expose him.

And who knows, maybe we won't be lucky this time.

Update:  Obviously I was criticizing the mid-brow media, which you like to imagine yourself to be a part of.  No, your brow doesn't get that far up.   You only repeat what the mid-brows say and it's generally not the higher mid-brow range you graze on.