American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

Trump has now gone on a course to destroy 4th of July. It will be 100% Trump Rally.

There is a good chance he will not make it to 2027. But also, he could just croak now in the 2026 ceremonies. We will bring back Squeaky Tank for the funeral.

[Brian Peacock]

There is a good chance he will not make it to 2027.

Waiting for him to die is not a reliable political strategy, nor a viable approach to bringing about political change in favour of ordinary US citizens. Trump's political brand is now baked in and there are any number of people ready to pick up the MAGA banner and to 'honour of his legacy' with even more extreme nonsense.

[L'Emmerdeur]

I agree. Whatever satisfaction/elation/relief may arise for non-Trumpists from his demise it'll be nearly irrelevant to the political stance of his followers. He's a figurehead around which xenophobes, jingoists, and bigots rally but pretty much all of them held those beliefs before he got into politics.

The Republican Party has long been a home for many who became Trumpists and will remain so after he's gone. Republican politicians have seen how effectively his unadorned nastiness works to motivate a significant percentage of their voters and the party will likely continue along the same lines until it stops working for them. Practically all of the policies he's been pushing align with those of the party as well.

[Tero]

No. When Trump is gone, it is all gone. Nobody inherits trumpism and carries on. MAGA crawls back to beating their wife

[L'Emmerdeur]

No. When Trump is gone, it is all gone. Nobody inherits trumpism and carries on. MAGA crawls back to beating their wife

You could be right, but I know people who're now Trumpists--their views haven't changed much because of that, only their sense of the possibility that their views can dominate the politics of the country. Doesn't seem to me they're likely to let that go easily.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Though the word 'hate' in the title below may be a bit overblown, it's not completely off base. Trump has exacerbated something that was already existing, and it's going to continue to be a problem.

'Do Americans really know how much the world hates us?'

It isn’t news to anybody reading this that America’s massive internal fracture, which shows no signs of healing in any of our lifetimes, is leading an increasing number of people with adequate resources and flexible lives to ponder their options. At least three former colleagues of mine have uprooted their families, changed jobs and moved overseas within the last few years. More to the point, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t thought about it.

But what’s really happening, I suspect, is much bigger than a minor demographic shift among a handful of educated libs. It’s more that the deeply ingrained toxin of American narcissism — the conviction, long shared across nearly the full range of political opinion, that this is an exceptional or “indispensable” nation, endowed by God or history or Thomas Jefferson with a unique destiny — has begun to fade.

That creed is certainly still part of the ideological atmosphere in this country, but multiple generations of Americans since the 1960s have grown up surrounded by contrary evidence. Despite the defensive proclamations of country music stars and the willful naïveté of mainstream Democrats, I have a hard time believing that anyone under 60 really, truly believes that anymore. (Or at least believes it for non-terrifying reasons.) The entire premise of the MAGA movement, after all, is that America used to be awesome, and that some version of a primitive fascist dictatorship can bring that back.That creed is certainly still part of the ideological atmosphere in this country, but multiple generations of Americans since the 1960s have grown up surrounded by contrary evidence. Despite the defensive proclamations of country music stars and the willful naïveté of mainstream Democrats, I have a hard time believing that anyone under 60 really, truly believes that anymore. (Or at least believes it for non-terrifying reasons.) The entire premise of the MAGA movement, after all, is that America used to be awesome, and that some version of a primitive fascist dictatorship can bring that back.

...

Polling data on how people around the world view America inevitably makes for dry reading, but still exposes startling differences between how Americans see themselves and external perceptions. Almost half the U.S. citizens surveyed for a Politico poll in February agreed that “the U.S. protects democracy,” while only 18 percent of respondents in Germany, 21 percent in France and 25 percent in Canada agreed. A semblance of shameful reality began to creep in with a question about whether “the U.S. is mostly a force for stability in the world”: Just 36 percent of Americans agreed, while the number was below 20 percent in Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. But 57 percent of Americans still agreed that “the U.S. can be depended on in a crisis,” which seems like a psychotic delusion fueled by Hollywood action movies. Fewer than half that proportion agreed in Canada, France or Germany.

If you want it darker, to quote the late Canadian shaman Leonard Cohen, consider this year’s Democracy Perception Index, a massive survey of 94,000 people in 98 different countries conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, a Danish think tank founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. It was released in early May and largely ignored by U.S. media, possibly because it found that “net perception” of the U.S. around the world has fallen by an astonishing 38 percentage points in the last two years, from a plus-22 rating to minus-16. According to all those people surveyed, the self-described Land of the Free was ranked as the third-greatest threat to world peace, after Russia and Israel. And I mean, what’s the counterargument?

That precipitous collapse in global perception is, without question, an aspect of the Trump effect. But if we understand anything at all about the last traumatic decade or so, it should be that the rise of Trump — not once but twice — is itself a symptom of the catastrophic decline of America over the last five or six decades, both as a coherent, functional democracy and as an intermittently constructive force in the world. (Assuming, for the moment, that it ever was either of those things.) Whether that trajectory can be altered this late in the day, and whether Americans are ready to stop lying to themselves about how the rest of humanity sees our country, is hard to say.

[Tero]

The changes that Trump produced will not be erased. Red states will go redder, blue states will attempt to keep democracy. It will loosen up and the supreme court may help it along. State rights will dominate.

In the big picture, US military dominance will lose a lot. We will keep a big army but not do much. Nobody after Trump will invade much.

[Brian Peacock]

I agree. Whatever satisfaction/elation/relief may arise for non-Trumpists from his demise it'll be nearly irrelevant to the political stance of his followers. He's a figurehead around which xenophobes, jingoists, and bigots rally but pretty much all of them held those beliefs before he got into politics.

This warrants emphasis I think. The bigots are there already - the Trump project just licences their views and legitimises their grievances.

... The Republican Party has long been a home for many who became Trumpists and will remain so after he's gone. Republican politicians have seen how effectively his unadorned nastiness works to motivate a significant percentage of their voters and the party will likely continue along the same lines until it stops working for them. Practically all of the policies he's been pushing align with those of the party as well.

There's no better example of how the Trump Project has legitimised and licenced bigotry, white supremacy, and state violence and cruelty than with the party under whose flag it nominally sits. Turns out that ultra-conservatives are actually deeply radical in their outlook.

[Tero]

The hatred of Europe will go with Trump. His succerssors can do a good bit of repair there.

[Brian Peacock]

No. When Trump is gone, it is all gone. Nobody inherits trumpism and carries on. MAGA crawls back to beating their wife

I guess you see Trump as representing ideas that will die with him.

We routinely analyse Trump ideologically -- and generally find those ideas somewhat wanting! -- but we often forget that the ideology is actually making choices, achieving things and changing the world.

Trump's real impact on the world is a consequence of the social, political and structural action the US state has carried out on behalf of those particularly Fashy ideas. The various Fashy brands of popularism generally ask 'the people' to consider things on moral grounds, framing things in terms of fairness (or righteousness) while pointing and blaming others for the moral nightmare 'the people' are being forced to live through. Once embedded those moral frameworks don't just stop when Dear Leader joins the choir invisible. What the Fash never really say very much about are their actual plans for power; the actions they will take. They don't have to: if you buy into the moral argument then all action in support of it because moral by default (remember how religion works?).

Fascism in action looks more like coalitions of interests and networks of relationships than a definitive fixed essence. Just as the moral landscape won't sudden flip back into a 'better' steady-state when Trump had shuffled off this mortal coil, those coalitions and networks of interests won't simply evaporate into the aether either.

[Brian Peacock]

The hatred of Europe will go with Trump. His succerssors can do a good bit of repair there.

But is it in their interest to do so?