VickyCaramel wrote:BillHampReturns wrote:jet_lagg wrote:John Oliver nailed it with his piece on Trump. The man was born into money. He's not that great of a businessman, with several spectacular failures and bankruptcies under his belt. He is an exceptional self-promoter, wildly inflating his net worth and thus giving the impression he's such a great businessman. And finally, he views the truth the same way a lemur views the supreme court vacancy.
I don't believe Oliver will ever understand how much he embodies the smug liberal attitude that made Trump a success, but he's spot on in his assessment of the man.
Trump is a success not just because of smug liberal attitudes, but because a lot of people are tired of being called bigots, racist, and worse simply because they don't share liberal opinions. SJWs are just an extreme form of liberalism, but the basic tendencies to silence others, shout them down, and resort to violence (it's okay when they do it) is always there. Every liberal movement I have ever watched has been filled with anger that is either barely contained or not contained at all and spills over into violence. They aren't interested in debate, discourse, or discussion. Their philosophy is that they are right, evidence be damned, and they will ensure that everyone else believes as they do even if they have to bludgeon them to death to demonstrate it. Liberals are bullies and many people, both conservative and middle-of-the-road types, are tired of it.
You realize that most of the people on this forum would identify as liberal, with a fair few of us straying further to the left into socialism?
Unlike the word 'feminism', the word 'liberal' cannot so easily be tainted by a few fringe loonies, especially as they are decidedly illiberal.
"Liberal" is a strange word. In the UK, it means anything from "vaguely well-meaning" to "supports civil liberties". In most of Europe it means "pro-free market capitalism". Among the American right it seems to mean something like "totalitarian".
In the UK, I think there are four main political tribes. There are the traditionalists, the economic liberals, the social liberals, and the socialists. The Conservative Party is a coalition of traditionalists, who love queen and country and old-fashioned values, and don't much like foreigners, minorities, or new-fangled attitudes, and economic liberals, who love the free market and don't want anything getting in the way of people making money, like worker's rights or environmental protection. The Labour Party is a coalition of socialists, who resent the fact that some people have more than others and think they can fix it by taxation, redistribution, nationalisation, and if all else fails, naked spite, and social liberals, who advocate equality in terms of supporting marginalised minorities and opposing discrimination, which at its worst becomes the divisive sectarian identity politics we all know and love.
From the outside, in the US, the coalitions are much the same only more extreme. The Republicans are a coalition of the religious fanatics, the economic liberals and the don't-tread-on-me libertarians who think all governments are Hitler, and the Democrats are a coalition of social liberals who have gone further down the identity politics rabbit hole, and Occupy-style socialists who don't seem to believe in anything but hating bankers.
That's my take anyway. Where I come from in Northern Ireland, there are Protestants, who hate Catholics and want to stay in the union with Britain largely to spite them, and Catholics, who hate the Brits and want to be part of a united independent Ireland, but don't realise the Brits are about the only thing protecting them from Protestant spite.
