Make America Hate Again

[DemocratSinceBirth]

They didn’t riot in the streets of Cleveland, as Donald Trump said his supporters would do had things not gone his way. But you saw the raw essence of a riot, the madness and loss of reason, on display in four days of chaos at the Republican National Convention.

For a campaign now devoted to “law and order,” the launch was mob rule: in spirit, in tone, in words. Long after we’ve forgotten Trump’s closing speech — that paean to self, that nightmare portrait of an America where the lights have gone out — we will remember the savagery just below the surface.

Starting on night one, when Republicans chose to manipulate the grief-deranged mother of a terrorist victim, the build-up to the hanging of Hillary Clinton was never subtle. Imagine if one party had exploited a widow of one of the 241 service members killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of Americans in Beirut — the deadliest single attack on marines since World War II — as a stick against Ronald Reagan, whose administrative negligence was much to blame.

...


On one level, this convention was Fox News on steroids — the half-truths, the grievances, the demonizing, and certainly the elderly audience, as overnight ratings for the first nights showed. But what a strange irony it was that the mastermind of all that broadcast polarization — and, arguably, of the party that gave us Trump — was forced out on the night that should have been Roger Ailes’s apogee.

Ailes will be an asterisk. When the convention closed, fear had won the hall. And we should fear — for the republic, for a democracy facing its gravest peril since the Civil War.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/opinion/make-america-hate-again.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=1

[pinboy3niner]

1. K&R

[malthaussen]

2. I dunno, I have a problem with pushing the "fear" button.

At its base, the GOP strategy seems to consist of convincing everyone that the sky is falling. And the opposition strategy is thus... to do the same thing? Is it wise to reduce the Presidential election to a contest about who can scream the loudest and most convincingly that disaster is inevitable if one votes for the Other Guy?

The hyperbole has already escalated to almost unprecedented heights. And unlike previous occasions when the hyperbole has been as great or greater, the tools with which it is disseminated function on overdrive, all the time, louder and louder. If they work it just right, they will achieve a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing a panic by constantly telling us all to panic.

Rational analysis should make the upcoming election the biggest no-brainer in recent memory, because never has a candidate been so obviously unsuited for the office as Mr Trump. Of course he has his followers. And they are loud, and possibly violent (as individuals, indubitably violent), but they are also terribly disorganized, and one would think them incapable of hosting a child's birthday party, let alone overthrowing the government. All that is required to defeat them is to vote against them, they do not exist in any quantity sufficient to mount an electoral threat. Unless, that is, so many of the electorate are turned off by the whole circus, the whole disgusting program of name-calling, threats of disaster, and scorn and dismissal of those who might have differing opinions that they decide not to participate. Then, indeed, we could have a President Trump.

But from the standpoint of tactics, have we reached the point where the only way we can sufficiently motivate the electorate is by scaring them to death? If so, what does that say about the system? And again, is it wise to let the opposition define our tactics? The Democratic Party continually makes the mistake of allowing the GOP to shape the discourse. Shall we do so again?

-- Mal