- Brian
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Re: Trump is the Republican Nominee
iwpoe wrote:
Trump is a businessman. That's argument enough against him, or at least it should be.
Why? You prefer the proxy oligarchy we have now?
Why? Because the life-long pursuit of money is shallow and pathetic. Americans are already obsessed with the idea that wealth is the natural goal of life which is one of the reasons are popular "culture" is so ridiculous. Electing someone who has done an overwhelmingly good job at pursuing wealth is not likely to make our nation great again.
Do I prefer Trump to the proxy oligarchy we have now? Yes, but that is like saying I prefer drinking bleach to drinking sulfuric acid. I am not going to do either one. One being "better" that the other, is barely relevant in this situation.
- Etzelnik
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Re: Trump is the Republican Nominee
Trump is a businessman. That's argument enough against him, or at least it should be.
Why? You prefer the proxy oligarchy we have now?
I would - the proxy oligarchy at least has some notion of how to operate the gears and bolts of the State, while Trump is a complete ignoramus.
Additionally, if America is to have any hope of recovering from the current state of affairs, they must elect leaders with at least a pretense of respectability, which Trump clearly lacks.
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- iwpoe
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Re: Trump is the Republican Nominee
I agree with you both philosophically, but we simply aren't dealing with a proper process. If I expected real politics to live up to the highest things, then I'd simply be apolitical in this context. The democratic process is fundamentally disordered, and everyone who has ever thought about it from Plato to today knows so. Even Rawls requires that the democratic process be thoroughly constrained by principles of legitimacy that obviously exist in no polity on the face of the earth.
What I want is a candidate that's straightforwardly part of the monied class so that they might go under politically. The "pretense of respectability" is important only when the candidates are themselves respectable in fact and their constituency has false or superficial standards of respectability: you must fake false respectability to preserve true respectability, e.g. you must make a show of popular superficial piety in order to preserve true piety in private amongst those who know.
Should a disreputable class come to rule, the best thing for justice is not that they hide behind a veneer of respectability as Clinton would continue to do but that they be so confused ethically as to deludedly assert their own corruption as the good itself. This progresses their own destruction. If, in the meantime, he decouples conservatism from neo-liberalism, which is and has been a corrupting factor for republicans for decades, all the better.
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Thread Starter- Timocrates
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Re: Trump is the Republican Nominee
Well, about Trump's money, I will say this much: today I think it is almost necessary in politics to have access to your own wealth and that not a finite supply (like a saving account). It gives the politician some freedom and independence; but that being said, when we look at the modern media, who cannot see that it is - in terms of a political career - just a gatekeeper. I mean, who could possibly withstand a sustained media assault on your reputation or character?
Saint Augustine, in his City of God, spoke of how the Romans differed from the Greeks in that they made it illegal to satire a politician (at least while he was still living) because this had the effect of whipping up mobs of hatred and destabilizing the body politic in the state (he brings this up because it was a pagan 'divine' ordinance to lampoon even the gods sometimes). The Romans drew the line in their pagan piety with tumults like that. America has no such safeguards. We also have to deal with blackmail and bribery.
That being said, Trump's careerism may just as well make him see the federal government and the office of the President as nothing more than a business venture that could be used to further aggrandize himself and to make a profit.
Trump does, in my mind, represent a possibly clear signal vote by the U.S electorate that people really are sick and tired of the status quo - and if the President really was restrained to the actual, Constitutional powers of his office, this would indeed make for a fitting valve for popular, democratic anger and frustration. Unfortunately, the President is more of an Emperor in practice than a symbol of the authority of the American people, and I think that is exactly why any number of people can be rightly concerned about him.
I have heard, for instance, that President Obama at least once openly joked about his power to order people killed vis-a-vis drone strikes. At the end of his political life, he isn't even making pretenses anymore and decided to pick up his pen and determine public school bathroom policy. It's completely ridiculous.
Last edited by Timocrates (7/23/2016 3:24 pm)
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