Republicans have embraced an ideology of grievance and it’s a threat to public safety // Four-star US army general compares Trump to Mussolini after ‘watershed moment’ for America
Republicans have embraced an ideology of grievance and it’s a threat to public safety
Four-star US army general compares Trump to Mussolini after ‘watershed moment’ for America
A decorated retired US Army general has compared Donald Trump to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and said the president’s actions over the past week are a watershed moment for America. Mr Trump ordered his administration to cancel subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post at the start of the week, a move that Barry McCaffrey
called ‘deadly serious’. The four-star general wrote: “The White House Trump statement telling the entire Federal Government to terminate subscriptions to the NYT and Wash Post is a watershed moment in national history. “No room for HUMOROUS media coverage. This is deadly serious. This is Mussolini.” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has attempted to play down the move as a cost-saving measure...
Nate Kalmoe, an
assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University
and an expert on political violence, explained to me in 2017 that regardless of whether
people lean right or left, those whose ideological positions are at least in
the neighborhood of the mainstream tend to “have a greater commitment to
nonviolent approaches to politics” than those on the fringes because
they “are socialized into nonviolent norms of how participation is supposed
to work.”
Kalmoe is one of a
number of scholars whose research has found that violent political rhetoric can
incite violence by people who already have aggressive personality
traits. But the connection between embracing a conspiratorial view of how
the world works and political violence is less well understood. Intuitively, if you
are a maladjusted person who believes that dark, unseen forces are arrayed
against you and your political tribe, it would make you more likely to reject
“nonviolent norms of how participation is supposed to work.” If the game is
rigged, and normal politics are just a sham, you may well be inclined to take
matters into your own hands.
The
politics of nostalgia
Donald Trump is an
unlikely conspiracy theorist. It’s hard to understand how someone who became a
millionaire at age 8 and has never been told “no” could think that the world is
against him, but he has relentlessly mainstreamed and validated what once would
have been fringe conspiracy theories–first as a dedicated Birther and since his
election as the top salesman for a sprawling storyline about the “Deep State”
conspiring to undermine him at every turn. The “paranoid style” in
American politics, as historian Richard Hofstadter referred to it, is not
new. He wrote about it in 1964. What is new is the president* of the United
States indulging in it publicly every day….
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/republicans-have-embraced-an-ideology-of-grievance-and-its-a-threat-to-public-safety/Four-star US army general compares Trump to Mussolini after ‘watershed moment’ for America
A decorated retired US Army general has compared Donald Trump to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and said the president’s actions over the past week are a watershed moment for America. Mr Trump ordered his administration to cancel subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post at the start of the week, a move that Barry McCaffrey
called ‘deadly serious’. The four-star general wrote: “The White House Trump statement telling the entire Federal Government to terminate subscriptions to the NYT and Wash Post is a watershed moment in national history. “No room for HUMOROUS media coverage. This is deadly serious. This is Mussolini.” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has attempted to play down the move as a cost-saving measure...
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