CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: The Degenerate Left’s Algorithmic America  Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:01 am | |
| Wokeness is an ideology that unites two of the unlikeliest allies ever in defense of it: high school girls, and software engineers.
Donald Trump may or may not prevail in his battle to secure reelection. To his supporters, it appears that fraudulent city machines are churning out reams of false ballots designed to secure a victory for his opponents that they did not earn, but which the establishment is nevertheless determined to grant them. To his opponents, Trump is waging a pathetic rearguard fight against a repudiation of his personal repulsiveness that so thoroughly disgusted persuadable voters that they would not reelect him despite four years of improving personal circumstances and a reelection agenda with which they otherwise would have agreed.
Whoever turns out to be correct—and there is evidence for both that only the courts will be able to sift through—it is time we take stock of something more important: that is, the sheer absurdity of what has happened over the past four years.
Even if Trump prevails in his reelection bid, this election has shown something important: he can bleed. He is not an unstoppable voice of nascent fascism in America, nor is he an indomitable force of vengeance against liberals who are begging constantly to be owned. He is a mortal man and a normal politician who can lose states he won, and win votes he lost in the past election. He is not a Putinesque autocrat who can fix the vote in advance, suppress it out of existence, or strongarm his way to a second term by calling in the military. He is a phenomenally persuasive, and deeply polarizing man, who nevertheless refused to install an authoritarian regime even when confronted with a deadly pandemic that would have given him a ready-made excuse to do so, and who refused to send in the military to quell violent protests out of respect for federalism, despite having every reason to disregard it.
Whatever you think of his decisions in those cases, this is not the résumé of a budding fascist. Whatever authoritarianism liberals and NeverTrumpers hear in the president’s words, his actions are those of a man who respects and abides by process: in short, those of a small-l liberal, albeit one who sang from a more populist and nationalist arrangement of the standard American political hymnal.
Even within the American tradition, Trump does not rank in even the top-10 most authoritarian presidents America has had. There have been no Jacksonian rebukes of court decisions against him, no Wilsonian censorship of the press, no FDR-style wartime central planning, no Obama-style weaponization of intelligence services against his opponents, no Nixonian Saturday Night massacres, not even any Theodore Roosevelt-style trustbusting (much to the consternation of his many muzzled supporters).
Trump has governed much as you would expect a former reality star and real estate mogul to do: with a focus on interpersonal, economically driven dealmaking at home and abroad, and a modest domestic agenda given the flavor of radicalism by his attention-grabbing antics to promote it.
And yet, despite being ultimately only a loudmouth with a relatively modest set of disagreements with the governing GOP consensus, Trump ended up as something much more alarming in our public consciousness: that is, he has ended his first term as nothing more or less than a Rorschach test for the anxieties of liberal America.
More: https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/08/the-lefts-algorithmic-america/
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