So I was thinking - what exactly is it that liberals find so exceptionally scary about Trump? Well, the obvious answer is that he’s rather far to the right. And I do think it’s reasonable to say (correct me if I’m wrong) that Trump is the furthest right GOP candidate for at least several decades. But a lot of liberals seem to see his influence as sort of unprecedented, which you can see from their apparent nostalgia for the “good old days” of sorts when the big bad evil guy was Mitt Romney or George Bush. I think liberals have a tendency to think of Trump as a fluke, a flaw in the system of sorts, who by all accounts should never have been a mainstream politician. I also don’t think this way of looking at it is correct. Trump seems like the culmination of where the GOP was already headed before him, with the final nail in the coffin being how much he appealed to the older, whiter, more racially resentful coalition who were fired up from the Obama years. In short, the system is what brought us Trump; he is a symptom of a flawed system, not a flaw in an acceptable system.
So this brings us to the upcoming election. As everyone knows, liberals have been begging people to vote for Biden, using the “lesser of two evils” and “most important election” rhetoric a lot. I’m starting to wonder if the implicit assumption here is that if Biden wins, Trump and his base will be essentially defeated. And yeah, they won’t get the presidency, and Trump will probably die before the next election, but it’s not like the supporters and the ideas will just go away. When Biden became president-elect liberals were saying things like “the nightmare is over”, only for Biden to basically continue a lot of Trump’s policies with better optics and for Trump and his goons to continue trying to reclaim power with Biden doing little to stop it. Likewise, if Biden wins again, it’s just going to be four more years of the status quo with the MAGA types struggling for power. And if things keep going in this direction, Trumpists are going to get that power back eventually. (Democrats haven’t won three consecutive presidential elections since the 1940s.) Suddenly its not project 2025 but project 2029 or 2033. You can vote for Hindenburg and Hitler might lose but he’s not going to give up there.
And the worst part about this is that liberals will cling onto the “lesser evil” argument to the point of excusing Biden’s support of Israel despite their atrocious actions (which many libs even openly recognize as such!) as well as his fulfillment of the core promise, “nothing will fundamentally change”. For the former they usually claim Biden is actually sympathetic to Palestine (see this comic) and for the latter they usually fool themselves into believing the “most progressive president since FDR” line by pointing to things like the IRA, completely ignoring the lack of any meaningful change. All of this because “he’s better than Trump” despite everything in the second paragraph and the absence of substantial policy differences.
So to summarize, liberals see Trump as an exceptionally extreme figure despite the rise of such a figure being unsurprising in retrospect, and use that to justify supporting a man with policies that are hardly any better, despite neither that man nor liberals themselves doing anything meaningful to fight back against Trump and the far right.
What do you think? Have I generally reached a good conclusion here or am I mistaken on some points? Perhaps both? Please inform me, I am relatively new to leftism and only recently escaped the liberal mindset I have attempted to describe.
And I do think it’s reasonable to say (correct me if I’m wrong) that Trump is the furthest right GOP candidate for at least several decades.
Trump just says the quiet part out loud. He’s more or less a traditional republican, just more outwardly racist. In some ways, the fact that he’s an idiot with no loyalty beyond himself has lead to him being slightly less horrible in a few ways than a competent republican would be.
I’m starting to wonder if the implicit assumption here is that if Biden wins, Trump and his base will be essentially defeated.
Liberals have been pulling the “lesser of two evils” shtick since the 70’s. I’m not saying your wrong, they certainly do think this way. But they would think so regardless of whom the republican candidate would end up being.
It’s also useful to know that liberals aren’t actually anti-racist, but they love to refer to how mask-off racist Trump is to gaslight BIPOC leftists into thinking that liberals actually care about them. Thankfully, it doesn’t work on many of us. Liberals literally see marginalized groups like women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people as pawns they can use to get ahead politically and nothing more.
they don’t like he is crude and dumb. everything else they will eat, its basically reagan. And bush was further to the right i feel with evangelicals humping, although trump did deliver more via courts.
Dont forget that he is a goddang cheeto
Liberals only care about how the president looks on the news*. They want to think the country is run by serious important people with serious important disagreements, it makes them feel safe. Trump makes the office of the president look like a joke, instead of a serious important thing. It’s entirely aesthetic.
What’s worse, he’s also attention-grabbing and charismatic, so news companies want to run coverage of him to boost their ratings, so the liberals have to look at him more often.
* And buying things. The rampant consumer price inflation might sink Biden anyway.
I think you’ve got it mostly right. I would add the Dems participation in the rightward ratchet to this as well. They are constantly pivoting ‘to the center’, while the right wingers are constantly trying to set themselves apart from ‘the center’, which just results in the rise of Trump and others in the same vein.
The ‘center’ keeps drifting rightward over time, and the Dems do nothing to change that and everything to facilitate it. See Bernie, Bowman etc.
Sounds right to me.
While you didn’t say anything wrong here, I think you are missing an important aspect that makes liberals particularly dislike Trump.
It is not merely Trump’s right-wing politics which upset liberals.
The thing that most upsets liberals is his open disdain for the institutions of the American state. Every American learns that the government was carefully crafted by genius founding fathers who tried to establish a perfect system of checks and balances to prevent tyranny. This is why there are so many override mechanisms like the electoral college, veto power, Supreme Court decisions, etc.
Trump is the first modern president I can think of who views these institutions negatively, that they reinforce the status quo and prevent necessary change (never mind what he thinks needs changing). So where possible, he ignores institutions or abuses them as a means for his own political or personal ends.
So Trump is not merely right-wing. His policies are indeed quite similar to many of his predecessors on either side. He is right-wing but in a way that undermines the very foundation of liberalism, which is liberal institutions.
Couple all of the above with the incorrect liberal identification of fascism with “authoritarianism” as such, and you end up with a population that literally believes that Adolf Hitler was elected. Now, that’s kinda true, but the reason is his politics (which are not functionally that different from Biden) and not the means by which he achieves his politics.
