Raw Story’s David Edwards has a great little post up highlighting one Trump supporter’s unique explanation of why he supports that terrible, terrible man.
Ernie Boch Jr., billionaire CEO of Subaru New England, offered his take on Trump in an appearance on CNN earlier today. Taking a look at him, you might assume that he’s supporting Trump out of a feeling of solidarity for a fellow billionaire with bad hair.
Nah. He has a somewhat different, if no less silly, explanation.
You’ve got to think of it like this, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and there’s a few girls at the bar, you have to go home with one of them. So, you have to pick who you are with. And I think that Mr. Trump is the best qualified.
That’s right. Trump is the political equivalent of the drunk gal you approach at a bar two minutes before closing time. Trump is Ms. Right Now.
When CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked him to explain this rather unique take on Trump, Boch insisted that
If you’re single you understand this. You know, it’s the end of the night, you want to go home with somebody. You know, the bar is about to close. You have to pick somebody! You have to pick somebody!
Here’s the whole interview:
Huh. I guess Trump gets the supporters he deserves.
@Falconer:
Oh, lord, rolling coal idiots. Chris Christie signed a law against that in New Jersey; then again, people already considered him a RINO for being glad that federal money got allocated to New Jersey after the hurricane.
Yeah, there’s a truly disturbing social group which seems to have an outsized influence in U.S. politics (not that they don’t exist elsewhere, but much of the national ‘rugged individualist’ legend in the U.S. helps reinforce it) whose entire attitude can be summed up as ‘You can’t tell me what to do!’
I remember hearing a radio interview at one point where someone was talking about a book he’d done on individualist approaches to environmentalism, all about little things you could do to make things around you cleaner. And how he got a whole lot of people who were active Republicans coming up and saying how they hadn’t thought of it that way, that they’d always thought of ‘environmentalism’ as something forced on them from a group perspective.
I think that was the time when I realized that if people were really treating ‘don’t throw your junk in somebody else’s yard’ as a partisan issue, it was no wonder the political discourse in the U.S. was broken.
He did commission an adulatory movie about Ivan the Terrible.
Alan Robertshaw
Which is why I get so annoyed by people (including Bernie Sanders) who persist in describing Bernie Sanders as a Socialist (Democratic or otherwise).
Infrastructure being under the control/operation of the government is NOT SOCIALISM. It is a fundamental requirement for a vaguely functional economy, regardless of what basis said economy is organized on. Any supporter of capitalism with the tiniest shred of a clue understands this (people who match this description are unfortunately thin on the ground in the States). In a socialist economy, the government also owns all the businesses, factories, etc. It’s a pretty crap way to run an economy, as the Soviet Bloc amply demonstrated.
katz
They never were. The Soviet Union were State Socialists all the way, and a classic example of the many flaws of that economic style. Communism (which is to say, a situation where the businesses and factories are owned by the people who operate them) is a horse of an entirely different colour, and has been working exceedingly well where it has been tried (The largest scale and longest term implementation of which I am aware is in Italy’s Emilia Romagna province).
@Amused:
I got (possibly incorrectly) the impression that Lenin at least thought that the repression should be a temporary condition as the country was restructured into something better approaching the Utopia he thought should be possible. So he was operating more from idealism, as opposed to Stalin who made the repression an end unto itself.
Of course, there’s a C.S. Lewis quote suggesting that’s even worse…
@ amused
Thanks for that! Really interesting and as you know what you’re talking about I’ve upgraded the theory from ‘quite compelling’ to ‘yup’.
@Dalillama,
You’re right about the definitions in a formal sense, but I don’t think that’s how those words are referred to in normal everyday speech – at least that’s the case here, and in the perceptions of the people I usually interact with. ‘Socialist’ in a western democracy is a common descriptor for a mixed model in my understanding – like, we Canadians can be found saying that we are a socialist democracy because of our health care and some of our public corporations. ‘Communist’ is a reference to the failed socialist states of the 20th century.
I know that these terms aren’t technically true, but it’s the way that the words are used. Language is fluid, dictionaries aren’t perscriptive, etc, etc.
I’m comfortable with calling Bernie a socialist, though I agree that he’s not all that radical about it – heaven forbid the government have a little infrastructure to actually accomplish something good! I honestly think that the Republican “government is incompetent” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s certainly going to be incompetent if you cripple it by removing its funding and infrastructure!
– EDIT – I’m no expert in any of this, and there are people far better educated than I in the conversation. Just my opinions. Fascinating reading, as always!
I feel my original comments may have derailed this a bit XD maybe if we stick with the definitions of our own experience some how we can still see the main point. Which is to see it like a boat. For example sinc we are talking about it take the tsarists. They are all sitting on the one side of the boat with their serfs and their regime. The boat is listing over and even though it still floats as soon as a storm comes the waves will easily get over the edge and sink it. So one bolshivek notices this and says hey if we all go to the other side then we won’t be leaning over anymore. So they all go over. Only now it’s still leaning over just as much just to the other side. And the storm is still coming. What they need to do is not go on either side but sit in the middle and the boat will float best. Sure storms will still shake it and the people will still be sea sick but it will not sink. XD
@Scildfreja
I’m aware of this, but I keep fighting on this point for two basic reasons. The first is that calling capitalism with infrastructure a ‘mixed economy’ (between capitalism and socialism presumably) makes having a coherent discussion about implementing infrastructure in a capitalist economy very difficult (this confusion is at least partially due to deliberate efforts on the part of the right wing, most of whom have very little idea of how a capitalist (or any) economy works, and tend to break them if they’re left in charge), and leads to the kind of stupid BS we hear in the States about Sanders’ ‘far-left’ plan to hand out ‘freebies’ to everyone. It also interferes heavily in certain kinds of economic development programs which call for limited socialism (in the form of considerable state investment in private firms; see Ha Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and Globalization, Economic Development, and the Role of the State for more on this). The second is that ceding the term Communist to referring to the State Socialist polities of the Soviet Union, PRC, et al. makes it completely impossible to have a discussion about the virtues of actual fucking communism, which , as I noted above, is a viable economic system which has the additional benefit of reducing the hierarchicalization of society generally.
Boch’s logic is no better or worse than when people state that they vote for the politician with whom they would like to share a beer. Always thought that was silly when I heard people say that about President Bush, our 43rd President.
My favorite thing that the right in the US gets upset about just to be contrarian is the concept of Meatless Mondays. It’s not like anyone ever suggested outlawing meat eating on Monday. It’s merely a suggestion that it’s better for the environment to not eat so much, so why not go vegetarian one day a week? Far from being fascistic, it’s an acknowledgment that pressuring people who like meat to go entirely vegetarian is unrealistic. But boy do they get mad.
@ Valentine – certainly the big scary thing in the East is still pretty big, and pretty scary, though it is far more dangerous to people who live there or in adjacent countries than it seems even here in the UK, parts of whose capital city are still gently radioactive after what appears to have been a targeted assassination on a British citizen.
I have taught the children of Russians and Ukrainians, and they seem as keen to get them out as anyone could be. I don’t mean to underestimate how bad it can be or how troubling.
But what Russia isn’t anymore is big and scary in pursuit of an identifiable ideology. I mean, is there such a thing as Putinism? With intellectual purchase internationally, which might appeal to fifth columnists in other countries? It seems no different (from where I am sitting, anyway) from standard oligarchical crony capitalism, which is not an insult that gets thrown around as much as it probably ought to.
Calling someone a Communist used to mean, over here, pretty much that they were a potential traitor to a rival superpower who (we thought) threatened us not only with weapons, but also with *winning the argument* about how we should all live. That hasn’t been the case for decades, so the insult has really lost its sting.
Nearly 40 years ago, I knew someone, from a tiny left wing groupuscule who called themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party, who claimed with a straight face that the USSR was a workers’ paradise. I couldn’t tell whether she was putting me on or actually believed it (I sometimes wonder whether she’s a Conservative MP now…).
You wouldn’t meet anyone now who would say the same about Putin’s Russia and expect to be believed, I think. Nobody can seriously imagine that anyone would want build a society along the lines of North Korea. The Chinese own most of our utilities, are building our nuclear power stations for us, and are big chums with our Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn, supposedly a dangerous red Communist Stalinist Maoist etc etc cat owner was reprimanded when he insisted on raising the subject of Human Rights during a state visit from the Chinese Premier!
@ Alan
Sometimes longer.
@ Dallilama
There is a wonderful German book about the history of different radical left attempts to change the world in the style of a children’s story. It’s written in a deceptively simple childish prose, but really brings the point across about what went wrong with the different attempts, while still retaining hop for the project as a whole. It seems to be in the process of being translated into English, here are some excerpts:
http://thenewinquiry.com/features/advance-fragments-communism-for-children/
@bluecat
I agree atually that it’s really only a monster to it’s own people. I don’t live in Russia but you could say there is a sort of Putinism there. There is a lot of support for him almost universally but that support looks weird to outsiders so again you’re right about that. I was born in 1992 after socialsm apparently eneded and also my parents live in the UK now with my brothers. But I agree there is a big desire to leave eastern block and balkan countries which I find very sad because I think every normal cidizen loves their country even if their government sucks. I find people want to leave mainly for stuff like better health care and such rather than a love of another country.
this is what I get for posting and not refreshing: a page of missed discussion relevant to my post.
Valentine
This appears to be at least partially a cultural thing; tax evasion is a much bigger thing some places than others.
The thing is that, to Americans born after ca 1985, there hasn’t been a ‘big scary enemy to the east’ in their memory. There’s been a collection of dismal kleptocracies (I’m speaking of American perceptions here, note, not necessarily reality in either case). The collection of dismal kleptocracies, however, aren’t a credible threat with which to beat one’s political opponents.
The problem you’re describing isn’t extremism per se; rather it is authoritarianism, which is problematic no matter what clothing it wears. The authoritarian-democratic axis is largely tangential to the capitalist-socialist axis; one’s about politics, the other’s about economic models. Both capitalist and socialist economies go well with authoritarian politicsm though, since in both cases economic life is principally organized on top-down hierarchical, authoritarian lines. In a communist economy, by contrast, democracy is the rule for economic activity, which tends to bleed over into political systems in the same way.
katz
Which is why I’m so adamantly opposed to describing him as a socialist; his economic policies and proposals are entirely oriented towards maintaining a functional (insofar as that term can be applied to any) capitalist economy in the U.S. by means of massive investment in much-needed infrastructure.
Amused
This, a lot.
@dalillama
For medical care (in Ukraine at least) people who can afford it choose to go to places like Prague. Also if you can get away with it people won’t pay taxes. And they can get away with it. Travellers coming to Ukraine are atually warned that the healthcare is not a good standard.
I feel that both those opinions exist, the ‘dismal’ and the ‘scary’. It suits the us and the uk to keep Putin scarey and as if he’s going to build a new socialist Republic. But it also helps to call eastern Europe countries as failed states because the more right wing politicians can use it as an example against ‘communists’ and ‘socialsits’ who they like to say Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are.
And I suppose what I was describing was the ‘far left’ that aumused explained. I said in another comment about going full circle.
How does the stupidity of Trump supporters keep surprising me?
@Chaos-Engineer
because he’s not a reluctant trump supporter, he’s probably one of the most passionate (he’s the loudest) Trump supporters in Massachusetts, so the whole reluctant Trump supporter thing is probably because he’s realized that he doesn’t want to come across like a Nazi or something so he’s going for “he’s the best of the worst argument”
@ Valentine
Yup, that’s pretty common in dismal, broken, kakistocracies; I live in one myself. What I’m saying is that in places that arent’ dismal, broken kakistocracies things like tax evasion are much less of an issue.
@dalillama
I certainly agree that tax evasion is not so much of a problem in West Europe. But I’m pretty sure its the government not managing money rather than the people not paying enough that is responsible for our medical care. Also I know you said it is the stereotype to say that the eastern European countries are dismal but I’m still not fond to hear it. Ukraine is very beautiful and a proud country. At the start of the Maidan there was also a lot of hope which is still there even now. It is not anything like America will try to make you beleive. Andrey Kurkov published a book about the Maidan which I think gives a much better understanding of how Ukraine is now. It is published in Germany I think and maybe also the UK. The German one is ‘Ukrainisches tagebuch’ if you want to look it up.
So’s the U.S., but that doesn’t make the political or economic systems here any less dismal and broken.
@dalillama
The problem with saying dismal to describe East Europe is that it is already a stereotype. Like that time in euro trip where they go to bratislava and it’s a shit hole where they’re millionaires just for having one dollar and everyone thinks they’re awesome. I love that moive and I think it’s funny, a bit cos the stereotype type is wrong. I laugh at people for seeing it that way. Ukraine is firey and proud, especially politically. Euromaidan proved that.
Guess what Donald Trump just called Ted Cruz?