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Mc Mike

(9,106 posts)
14. Recced.
Sat May 28, 2016, 01:15 PM
May 2016

Any attempt to explain the ineffable phenomenom of that nazi weasel's popularity with his fans is welcome, and trying to understand and analyze it is important. Agreed that the supporter shows extreme cognitive dissonance in the examples brought up by other post-ers, and the cogdis can help explain things.

The polite one-on-one interaction with the interviewer seems like it softens the edges on dRumpf's followers' image too much. For every polite cog dis person like this one, there are 10 screaming aggressive yahoos. It's not just watching them as a group screaming their approval for his applause lines that are attacking other people and nations, it's watching his individual followers interacting with others, telling them to 'go to auschwitz', 'go back to me hi co', physically assaulting peaceful protestors, stuff like that. So the polite 22 year old is part of that mob anyway, and even if he remains polite, he's drowned in a sea of crazy belligerents.

Every hate filled and aggressive thing he's said and done just made his polls rise among the small percentage of voting Americans who decided the repug primary. They really like the fact that their hero is disgusting and repellent to the people that the repugs regard as their 'enemies', they're blissfully happy that he's trolling Dems, Women, progressives, Blacks, Hispanics, Moslems, Labor, Chinese, the poor, scientists, intellectuals, etc. They relish the negative reaction dRumpf provokes in people that his followers hate anyway.

One recent online Nation article summed up the appeal of his stump speeches by saying the key idea is that America has been 'cheated and humiliated', and his followers are furious about it. He's just trying to rally the dirtbag brownshirts with this idea, but it's a key underlying tenet of his campaign, epitomized by the 'make america great again' key slogan, (though he's trying to resurrect the 'America First' lindbergh slogan also, like McCain did in '08). The idea is that his followers get to say they feel the've been attacked first, or that they're threatened with attack, so they should strike back, or strike pre-emptively against their enemies. Some of them may have been attacked, by dRumpf and his bloated plutocrat repug buddies, but they're too brainwashed or unintelligent to see that, so there's not much that can be done for them.

Another article link from this week's Media Matters e-mail analyzed the authoritarian nature of drumpf, and his supporters' response to it. All of the constant anti-factual lying flip flopping he exhibits about the wall, barring muslims, whether he likes his opponents or thinks they're losers, his tax cut plan, his energy plan, self-funding his campaign, opposing Goldman Sachs and pharma execs, debating Bernie, releasing tax returns, being John Barron and John Miller -- every open lie and 180 degree contradiction is either swallowed whole by his followers, or allowed to occur completely un-noticed by them, because once he said what they wanted to hear, they stopped paying attention and are willfully ignoring coverage that would undercut the reason they claim makes them back him. The appeal here is that to people who want an authoritarian strong-man, there's no such thing as factual objective truth, all power to decide what reality is rests in the hands of their leader, who can contradict himself openly from moment to moment, from sentence to sentence, in the same stump speech. His followers hate reality, because reality is unfriendly to repug policy positions, so they want a strong man to say 'screw actual reality, reality is what I say it is'.

It seems like what he's doing is giving his followers the go ahead to be as hateful & belligerent as they want, to believe whatever freakishly insane and fascist lying conspiracy theory ideas they want to, and then he's allowing them to act on those feelings and beliefs. Telling them it's ok to feel that way and think that way, and that it's time to take the gloves off, he's letting them off their chains, he's 'freeing' them to act -- act like nazis. And it's exhilarating to them.

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