Libertas 
International Playboy
Posts: 4,212
Joined: Sep 2013
Reputation: 85
|
RE: If Trump Loses, Do You Plan on Leaving the USA/Western World?
Since it's looking more and more like this will happen, I want to share a few things. Hillary winning isn't the apocalypse. Let me explain.
Hillary isn't like Obama. She's not persuasive. And she's incompetent. Even though the media mostly leans heavily Democrat, she won't be able to finesse the media the way her husband or Obama did. She's also going to walk into a minefield from day one.
Here's where we try not to get too hung up on definitions and see things in a new way.
http://theweek.com/articles/640676/antie...ry-clinton
Quote:The 2016 presidential election is almost a pure choice between the establishment and an anti-establishment candidate.
Hillary Clinton is the establishment. She's the candidate of think-tankers, wonks, and the established style of governance that has dominated the Western world since the end of the Cold War. She represents the standard managed capitalist vision at home. She's for big free-trade deals. And she is hawkish on defense issues in the Washington way, embracing the use of air power and proxies abroad to "shape" outcomes in America's favor. She sides with liberals in the culture war, but in a way that seems cautious and calculating. She is pious about gay rights now, but she was not pioneering then. She is politically correct, but not politically courageous. She says all the right things, once the left has made it compulsory for her to do so. The press is openly rooting for her in a way that is unprecedented in modern American politics.
That's because Donald Trump is the candidate running against almost all of the above. He pits himself against "globalism" — which is the populist word for what the establishment calls "internationalism." He opposes trade deals. He seriously questions the ever-freer movement of capital, goods, and people. He criticizes (sometimes hypocritically) America's post-Cold War foreign policy. He questions the utility of the NATO alliance. Hardly any think-tankers or policy experts work with his campaign. And Trump doesn't just question whether mass immigration is good for America. He questions whether the immigrants are really up to snuff as humans. For him, Mexicans are rapists and Middle Eastern refugees are terrorists in waiting. For his supporters, Trump's crudity is part of his broader assault on "political correctness," one that will pull down all the establishment's taboos and allow Americans to finally say what they really think again.
So it would seem to be straightforward. If you want to blow up the status quo and the system, vote for Trump. If you think the existing order and the existing direction of that order is worth defending, vote for Clinton.
But it's not that simple.
The intensity of populist attachment to Trump's candidacy is aided by his wealth, celebrity, and ability to dominate a news cycle. He seems to be the one populist who has a real shot to loosen the establishment's grip on both parties and cut a path to the White House. Many populists think Trump is their one shot.
But the better shot for the anti-establishment crowd may come if Hillary Clinton wins and torches whatever last shreds of credibility the establishment has left.
The post-Cold War political establishment is officially loyal to Clinton and hostile to Trump. But at the same time, the establishment must confront its own vices in Clinton: its fundamental clubbiness, its self-seeking, its overwhelming priority to "do well" while doing good, its habit of doing what is technically legal but obviously unethical. And at the same time, the establishment sees its virtues when it opposes Trump: its respect for facts, its liberality and graciousness. In other words, the establishment seems to be demoralized by having Clinton represent it. Correspondingly, it is re-moralized when it gets to oppose Trump. And its behavior in this election — siding overwhelmingly with Clinton in an election that is a referendum on the establishment itself — means that they will own the outcomes of her presidency.
Clinton seems positioned to fail spectacularly if elected. She does not have the ability to charm and quiet the press or the public the way Obama or Bill Clinton did. Her one political trick is trying to outwork her problems, and to show the public she is putting in lots of effort. But America may soon face another recession. Obama bequeaths to her America's involvement in four civil wars across the Middle East. America's involvement in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has no actual support from the American public beyond its indifference. Another bomb or riot that turns into American casualties, and already her presidency is put on the defensive.
Clinton is experienced at failing. She failed to get health-care reform in the 1990s. She failed to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 when the process wasn't tilted entirely in her favor. The one piece of policy entrepreneurship she brought to the State Department was her advocacy for intervening in Libya's civil war, an ongoing disaster.
A vote for Clinton is a vote for a status quo that, when left to itself, can barely hide its exhaustion, self-hatred, and incompetence much longer. H.L. Mencken said that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." The establishment deserves Clinton as its tribune. She reveals its competence as mere cleverness rather than wisdom. She is its idealism turned into a cold glare. She is the promise of revolution turned into a shoddy grift and a mirthless job.
Who will be left to defend the establishment when she's had her turn with it?
Another on her incompetence, and a warning:
http://theweek.com/articles/638440/new-n...mp-destroy
Quote:Across the Western world, post-Cold War politics have long been characterized by an orthodoxy of free trade, nurturing the service economy, neoliberal trading arrangements, and liberalized immigration policies. But now, in many of these countries, there is a broad nativist revolt against such politics.
This revolt is the politics of the provinces against the capital cities. These nativists are trying to reassert their cultural and economic interests, which they believe have been denigrated by a political settlement that enriches the elite and provides opportunity to foreigners at the expense of the old industrial and rural heartlands. Let's call the phenomenon "the new nationalism."
In America, of course, the new nationalism is best seen in the ascendancy of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The new nationalism challenges our post-1989 political orthodoxies. It questions whether Western governments should continue to facilitate the ever-freer movement of capital, goods, and people. In America, it questions whether the U.S. should continue as an unchallengeable global hegemon, promising to defend the integrity of Estonia's borders against Russian invasion the same way it would Oregon's.
If the new nationalism is going to achieve real political power and influence in America, it will be a major paradigm change in our politics. And that's exactly why it is so dangerous for new nationalists to support such an obvious incompetent and charlatan as Donald Trump.
There is a strong and real case for the new nationalism. Don't let Trump destroy it.
Even if you could somehow swallow the ways in which Trump has made the pitch for American nationalism narrower, more exclusively white, and vastly more hostile to American minorities than necessary, there is the towering problem of Trump's sheer boobishness and incompetence. If anything, the bar for performance should be raised for leaders who promise to upend a generation of political certainties. A bunch of time-servers and idiots can make a well-established, existing system work reasonably well. They have the incumbent interests, the rentier classes, and the people who make their livelihoods off the old system to keep them in check. But a man leading a revolution should be able to reassure us with his discipline, his gravity, and even his caution. Trump has none of these.
Consider the interview he gave to The New York Times the week of his nomination, in which he casually put into doubt America's security guarantees for Eastern Europe. This was plainly dangerous. An American president who judged that the 1990s expansion of NATO left the United States with too much security risk and liability would have to begin untangling or reforming this alliance with great care. Putting the whole damn thing into doubt in a news clipping, without any warning or consultation, is an invitation to either Russian escalation or Baltic panic. Both of these increase the chance of catastrophic diplomatic or military miscalculation.
Like a lot of famous rich people, Trump is subject to many lawsuits. The problem is that these lawsuits aren't frivolous money-sniffing lotto tickets from the plaintiffs. Instead they are for the kind of fraud and abuse associated with late-night infomercial grifters. See the Trump University scam, where instructors were taught how to push customers into upping their credit limits to go deeper into debt for Trump. For a supposed billionaire, Trump lends his name and likeness to a lot of scummy businesses. His campaign is stuffed with people who think it is a good idea to share memes from racist Twitter accounts, or that you can win votes from Latinos by sending out a picture of a Trump Tower Taco Bowl.
If you support new nationalist ideas — like regulated immigration, renegotiated trade, and a more hands-off foreign policy — aren't you a little worried that Trump will do to these ideas what he did to Atlantic City? Champion them for a little while, try to build up his brand, and then leave a gaping disaster behind him?
Hillary Clinton is the candidate of big trade deals, liberalized immigration, and using America's military to manage civil wars and conflicts across the global. She, too, is incompetent. She chooses the wrong battles: See her intervention in Libya that has blown up in everyone's faces. She responded to queries about whether her email servers were "wiped" with the lame retort, "With a cloth?" Her homebrew email server was likely hacked by foreign intelligence.
If you're at all sympathetic to the new nationalism, wouldn't you prefer the incompetent Hillary Clinton discrediting her beliefs than the incompetent Donald Trump discrediting yours?
We all know Hillary is incompetent. She has proven that every day of her public life. She also, again, can't work the media or appear favorable to the public to save her life. Even George W. Bush had this loveable loser air about him.
What I'm hoping, and what seems very possible (likely, even), is that Hillary Clinton, if she wins, is so incompetent, unlikable, out of touch, and swamped by events that she detonates the Democratic Party the same way George W. Bush did with the GOP. Very, very possible. See it in that light and all isn't lost. It'll be bad, for sure, but your life should never depend on politicians anyway.
I also had the fear that SJWism would get much worse with her, but keep in mind that the only thing the Clintons care about is greasing their own pockets. They don't care about SJW's and "transformative justice" the way Obama did. She'll do something for political expediency, but may not throw her weight behind it when her focus is on skimming funds from the public teat.
Look for scandals to plague her corrupt and incompetent administration as well.
Like I said, it will be bad, but your plans shouldn't depend on politics anyway. I probably won't even pay as much attention because I can't stand listening to her. So that's more time devoted to more important projects (for me personally, that is).
Read Gorilla Mindset, and reframe your self-talk.
Read my Latest at Return of Kings: 11 Lessons in Leadership from Julius Caesar
My Blog | Twitter
|
|
Home
RooshV.com
Search (Via Forum)
Member List
/
If Trump Loses, Do You Plan on Leaving the USA/Western World?
![[-]](images/collapse.gif)
The following 2 users Like debeguiled's post:
![[Image: islandlife3_b.jpg]](http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/dailypix/2001/Aug/19/islandlife3_b.jpg)
