America Needs A Strong Man!

Not hardly.

What America needs is a stronger people.

I am now 63, growing up I heard the conservatives and the Republicans decry welfare as the nanny state. Liberals were out to make us subservient to the government. William F. Buckley, Jr. decried statism as a 16th-century Jesuit would decry Protestantism.

But who supports the Republicans now other than those who demand the government serve their needs as if they were toddlers? What are Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads now but thumbsuckers, thinking the government should protect them from their own bad life choices?

Hard to believe it is the Democrats who are talking about the virtues of a strong defense, hard work, of competence while the Republicans raise chaos to an art form, service to the country as secondary to making a buck, and all American traditions only worth for traducing.

Where is William Bennett when you need a lecture on the virtues?

As for statism, Donald Trump Has Serious Plans for the Mass Violation of Civil Rights indicates the Trumpists plan on raising statism to a level that would give Buckley the hives (I would hope).

Last week, after saying immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the country, Trump and his advisors unveiled the anti-immigrant plan for his next presidency, which would essentially turn the United States into a police state. In his proposed effort to deport millions of people per year, Trump would reduce due process rights for immigrants, dramatically expand internment camps near the border, and “deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states,” the New York Times reported. The plan would also “shift from the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.” (The average number of annual deportations is currently in the hundreds of thousands.)

In other words, Trump wants to hire police and reserve soldiers unfamiliar with immigration law to conduct public mass arrests of presumed undocumented immigrants with little or no probable cause. Trump’s advisors have not publicly discussed how police will determine how people at work or going about their business in public are undocumented — a pressing question if the goal is to arrest “scores” of people at once. The only plausible way to achieve this is to target people based on vague and unconstitutional judgments about their appearance or language skills.

Following their arrest, Trump wants to send detainees to vast detention camps far from where they live in the hope their lives in custody become so miserable that they give up their right to due process and simply agree to leave. He wants to do this to millions of people every year....

 He will need secret police to do that, not the FBI or ATF or DHS. He wants to invoke the military the day he is sworn in to put down any peaceful protestors: Trump wants to turn the government into a weapon for personal revenge.

Besides, why do people think Trump is such a strong character? Yes, he talks loud and nasty. That is the privilege given him by his money, and the press that has built him up. He runs out on a fight. When he drove his businesses into the ground, he went into bankruptcy court. His arrogance led him into a coup attempt. He could not stand losing - which is a whiners position, not a strong man. He sold out his employees, his followers, and his wives whenever a better opportunity presented itself. He will sell out this country when it will profit him. Furthermore, he mistakes Putin for a success when Putin has ruined his country. He mistakes Xi for a strong man when he is a man pretending not to be on the thin ice of demographic change and economic decline. One can praise Orban, but Orban's success lies in his being snug within the embrace of the EU instead of facing the world alone. 

Faced with his legal trouble, he does not say that he is innocent and will be vindicated at trial. No, he threatens court staff and the legal system itself, trying to distract us from the fact of his criminality.

Donald J. Trump is the reality TV version of a strong man. Reality has a sneaky way of destroying paper tigers.

Donald J. Trump had the best economy, and the best security situation of any President since Hoover. Yes, there was a war in Afghanistan; which had about as much effect on Americans' lives as our expeditions to prop up banana republics did a century ago. He left the country lying under the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu, the economy in tatters, and the rest of the world thinking he would stand up to attacks on democratic countries. He got played by North Korea, did all but kiss Putin's foot, and had Iran thumbing its nose at him on their war to a nuclear weapon.

Tell me, again, what he did that was so admirable?

Oh, yeah, he made it possible for the Supreme Court to knock down Roe v. Wade. 

He left the Republican Party winning so much, they should be asking for him to stay in Mar-a-Lago.

Sheila Kennedy's The Banality Of Crazy is an admirable discussion of the two problems with Trump: That he is nuts, and the mainstream press refuses to call him nuts.

But let's take a wider view. What is the attraction of a strong man - is it some sort of fetish, a submissiveness in the strong man's followers, a willingness to be taken by both the male and female Trumpists? Not a fetish or a fantasy that makes any sense to me. 

History does not show previous strong men such a success.

I have been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. Let me put down here the question that I asked myself: Who was the stronger man: FDR or Hitler?

Berlin looked like this in 1945:

Washington, DC looked like this in 1945:

As for Mussolini. Milan looked like this in 1944:

Is that not the look of success? 

Then how about his this, that Il Duce himself:

Then there were The Nuremberg Trials.

To me, the "strong men" crumpled under the likes of FDR and Churchill. I am not buying what is worse than worthless.

sch 11/25