> At this point I just hope enough of our economy remains functioning so I can eat, and that the orange dumbass doesn't nuke someone and kick off the end of the world.
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. But a lot of people really want you to focus on him, to deflect the blame from themselves hopefully return to their prior "self-serving neglect of popular welfare."
For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
> For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think it goes back to him being a symptom. Trump has some personality defects, but those defects seemed to allow him to speak to real issues that prior political consensus wanted to ignore (e.g. questioning globalization and free trade orthodoxy, immigration). He got elected because he spoke to those things, but then that put his personality defects in power.
If the prior establishment had listened and addressed those issues, Trump would have never been viable. His existence as president is due to them arrogantly leaving those issues unaddressed.
Take a look at this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. But a lot of people really want you to focus on him, to deflect the blame from themselves hopefully return to their prior "self-serving neglect of popular welfare."