Many times, Trump's saving political grace is his ridiculous opposition. They're utterly convinced, 100%, that he's a racist, for example. I find the evidence un-compelling; a lot of Trump's mishaps on racially-charged issues has to do with political inexperience. It's a simpler, better explanation than the increasingly reality-defying mental acrobatics leftists tend to do these days on "progressive, intersectional social justice" and just about anything else having to do with what actually works in the Western tradition (the more Aristotelian the better, for instance?), as opposed to their fevered typically socialist(-lite) utopian dreams. Look, Tucker Carlson, who's been in the town and the business for decades, can't keep up with with the latest leftist attempts to rewrite and pervert the basic concepts and values of Western civ for the sake of . . . political advancement? Not eudaimonia ffs? We'll get to more of the politically-really-stupid leftists in just a bit, but I just thought I'd point out that every time Trump does something unbecoming of a president or just generally disappointing (or "a disgrace, frankly," heh heh...), just consider what a bunch of (political, not necessarily in life generally) clowns, jokers, losers, etc., his opposition is.
You want to understand a major part of Trump's political success? The opposition. Learn the nature of that opposition and you understand just how easy it is to defeat them. Just click the "leftist loser" label below for more of the frankly doubly disgraceful details. These people have the nerve to appropriate the "progressive" label? They had their chance in the 20th century with the socialism experiment and they blew it, just as Mises predicted in 1922 that they would. (Mises was wise on the topic of socialism, as his book demonstrates. You know who, among others, was unwise, i.e., smuggled in anti-West perversities under the heading of philosophy? Marx. And Marx is supposedly the "best" leftist thinker in history! Mises' commentary on Marxoid "philosophy" specifically is devastating, and if Marxists did their homework they'd have answered him as well as Kolakowski, or stop being Marxists ffs.)
(The provisional title for my upcoming blog entry on leftists is: "Leftists as intellectually lazy: hypothesis or confirmed theory?" I'll proceed to confirm it in perhaps excruciating detail. If you observe the intellectual behavior of leftists and then analyze(/induce) the concepts of "leftist" and "intellectual laziness" for explanatory understanding, you come to the unavoidable conclusion: to be a leftist is to be intellectually lazy, since no one who does his homework thoroughly remains a leftist for long. They would read and digest Mises' socialism book, for example, the way the young then-socialist Hayek did. They would make an effort - an act of mental clarity and focus - to actually demonstrate a grasp of Ayn Rand's basic political ideas at the very least, even though she was not primarily a political philosopher (as see the link about focus, for instance). But the leftists could at the very least have demonstrated the slightest working familiarity with her concept of capitalism. But they don't, because they're lazy. The laziness is born of a certain complacency or smugness, a belief in the overwhelming superiority, moral or otherwise, of the leftist worldview. Now, how about a counter-example to my thesis, a leftist who does his homework? Well, there was a quite prominent philosopher who started out as a leftist, then . . . well, did his homework. Among his homework-doing activities was a long conversation with Murray Rothbard about individualist-anarchist theory (you really should do your own homework and google this yourself if need be), which conversation sparked his desire to write a book refuting that theory. In the end, the book he wrote rejected Rothbardian anarchism but also advocated something far from leftism. In fact, this philosopher ended up advocating a position known as libertarianism, a view espoused by (first Libertarian Party presidential candidate) John Hospers, among others, to the effect that each individual's life belongs to himself only, and that the point (if any) of politics is to secure that life against forcible intrusions, not to become an agent of such intrusions itself. (Well, duh.) But that idea didn't exactly originate with Hospers, or with Rothbard. They both got them from Rand, or in their finer moments would certainly defer to Rand as a supremely qualified expositor of that idea. (Rothbard, student of Mises, was blown away by Atlas Shrugged, but didn't get along personally with Rand and/or members of her Collective. Mises for his wise part was an admirer of Atlas, certainly considering it a breath of fresh air after half a century of having to respond to bad political and economic ideas. What's not so wise about Rothbard was his refusal to acknowledge or credit Rand in print for the strength of her formulations. This actually gives prima facie credibility to the claim that he had problems giving proper credit to members of the Collective for ideas he credited instead to other scholars. Rothbard for his part didn't answer those claims directly, and then wrote a piece about Rand, not to address or properly credit her ideas, but to play up the "cult" charge against Rand. This piece was written in the early '70s, at the height of his influence in libertarian politics and therefore inevitably only a brief dip in Rand's relative influence.) Certainly Hospers received tremendous edification about the core principles of libertarianism or laissez-faire from many hours of conversation he himself had with Rand. (Leftist losers basically imply about Hospers that he was a time-waster for having anything to do with Rand. But who really did their homework here - Hospers, or them? Hah.) And it's reflected in the language and phrasing he uses in his essay on libertarianism, and he explicitly does credit her essay "Man's Rights" as a beacon of philosophical clarity. And he wasn't inclined to give her high praise on just anything. So anyway, this homework-doing leftist philosopher who included in his dialectical set - check the bibliography of the book for details - the likes of Rothbard, Hospers, Mises, Hayek, Milton and David Friedman and, of course, Ayn Rand, ended up being a libertarian. The philosopher is Robert Nozick of Harvard, his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). My question, now, is why anyone after 1974 who did his homework should ever remain a goddamned leftist. Even if they were to be Rawlsian - and see Nozick's commentary on Rawls - it doesn't sound like a or the most justifiable version of such a theory would have a leftist flavor. Why wouldn't it have more of a Tomasi flavor? Also, just as a general point about leftist laziness, I find the standard leftist narrative about capitalism generating inequality and poverty to be like oil to the water of ourworldindata.org. I have yet to observe a leftist volunteering any data from that site while they go all doom-and-gloom about the current state of the world (with the orange man being used as Exhibit A, no less). And that's a certain sense-of-life thing with a great many leftists, too - the doom and gloom, quite malevolent-universy. So lazy and malevolent-universe, both of which can be cured by doing intellectual homework, i.e., better living through philosophy.)
As for the orange man himself, not a leftist loser but not exactly one who has adhered to the standards of decorum and dignity of the highest office (just for instance, on at least two separate occasions he made gratuitous and lookist points about women's faces, one of them GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and the other Stormy "Danials" (sic), a.k.a. "Horseface"), he has this worldview supposedly summed up in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. (Tremendous book, one of the best, it's doing so much for the country, I haven't read it.) Trump makes the best deals, he's the Bobby Heenan of deals. But if that's his entire worldview, then when it comes to being a president it looks crudely transactional. But realize that deal-making can only be done where there is a deal to be had, and in a business contexts whether or not there is a deal can only be decided voluntarily. As president of the USA, he also has a mighty arsenal of weapons at his command in cases where there is no deal to be had. So that changes the dynamic a bit. He wasn't going to make a deal with ISIS. His "deal-making" in supposed progress with the Kim regime is in the context of a regime of sanctions backed by military force. So if Trump is tout his strengths in such foreign-policy areas, they can't be on the basis of his dealmaking abilities per se. He also has to have a set of values and principles that define his foreign policy (hopefully more in substance beyond "America First" and such sloganeering), and also would define such virtues as courage within that context. (Within the context of Commie values, Stalin had great courage to break so many eggs.)
Speaking of Stalin, the USA allied with the Soviets in World War II, due to the nature of the enemy. Had Trump known his political history - you see, this is where his domain-specific inexperience rears its not-very-pretty head - he could have cited that example as part of his defense of his continuing to do business with the Saudi regime that likely ordered the murder of a journalist. Instead he cited the transactional need for Saudi's oil (and to get really realpolitik about it, think of the literally thousands or millions of people that would die from a sharp increase in oil prices), and also their help in containing Iran. So his value-principles in foreign policy at this point seem like, "Well, you brutalize your own people and we just have a fundamental difference about that but we also need to work together on things, except if you're also pursuing nuclear weapons or forming a terror network in which case it is definitely our business to intervene and punish." Well, it does seem to have some logic to it; I just don't think I've seen this administration articulate it quite that way. And it has to be made clearly distinct from deal-making strengths.
Back to Trump's opposition. In 2020 they're going to nominate someone who might have a good chance of beating him (Uncle Joe Biden from Scranton, PA, a key battleground state in the Electoral College) but is also old, white and male. Otherwise they will nominate someone who doesn't have nearly the battleground-state appeal but is a woman and/or person of color in which case it checks off "progressive" "diversity" boxes (don't be fooled by "progressive" appeals to diversity; they're not into intellectual diversity as per their ignorance of key non-progressive ideas and thinkers, several of them mentioned above already) and would thereby help fuel the current "progressive" fever for casting Trump as anti-woman and anti-people of color. Then there's the one who has no battleground-state appeal, is old, white, and male, and nearly won the Democratic nomination in 2016 against someone far more qualified, Bernie Sanders.
The "progressives" will have to decide between ideological purity (socialism / -lite) and electoral viability in the general election, which means they are faced with the tough choice between Biden (again, he's old, white, and male, and may not be socialist enough, though he'd get Obama's endorsement...) and probably Sanders or Warren (both of whom are also old and white), neither of whom would be all that strong against Trump for the 270 electoral votes. (As for the "progressives" whining about the electoral college, remember that it's the United States of America. But even more important, remember that it's a union formed to secure inalienable individual rights which "progressives" are happy to trample on at seemingly every chance.) You have to be living in a left-wing ideological bubble of some kind or other, not only to think that these are great candidates as such but that they are great even compared to Trump or that it's somehow a no-brainer that they're better than Trump. I already demonstrated that (at the very least) it was not some kind of no-brainer in Hillary Clinton's favor in '16, as "progressives"/leftists all over the country delusionally (and arrogantly/smugly/complacently/lazily) accept.
The left, the "progressives," the Democrats, their ideological infrastructure in the universities and elsewhere -- they have done a piss-poor job showing how Trump is as bad as they make him out to be, much less that they have something better on offer. And if they do this piss-poor against Trump and mainstream Republicans, just imagine how badly they collapse when up against really strongly fortified intellectual opposition in the likes of Rand, Mises, Hospers, Nozick or Rothbard.
To quote Maverick Philosopher: And you're still a Democrat?
