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.
@bluecat:
God, I hope so. We’re certainly seeing a generation for whom capitalism has not paid off, what with all the talk of failure to launch and thirtysomethings still living with their parents.
@bluecat
I think the ‘great scarey enemy in the east’ is less gone than you suggest. Sure calling someone a commy is hardly an insult and will just make people laugh, but like I said up top, the balkan people and other eastern Europeans are still dealing with the effects of that stalinism/trotsky/leninism etc. It is not so much communism as corruption but you’d be much mistaken to say the ‘enemy’ has gone, it’s just gone back to what it most enjoys; harming its own people. But like I said too it is to do with extremism like Trump. Liberal socialism like in the UK and like jam-maker Corbyn seems to be most beneficial for the majority.
@ Alan, guest, falconer
Thanks for elaborating. WTHM: Come for mocking misogynists, stay for learning about other countries’ horrible politics and racist politicians. Yay!
I’m so influenced by British TV, I imagine British politics in two ways:
historically – Yes, Minister
today – The Thick of It
@kirbywarp
Even the leaders of our right wing parties supported Obama both times, as far as I can recall. Fredrik Reinfeldt, who was our conservative Prime Minister at the time, seemed to celebrate Obama’s reelection in 2012. From what I’ve seen in recent debates, all of the leaders for the various major parties agree that a Trump presidency would be a disaster. So, yeah, the Overton window is very different in some respects.
@WWTH: After Iowa this past week, I got more optimistic about Sanders’ chances. It seems to me that he’s managed to win the same slice of the youth pie that Obama had in 2008, if not in 2012.
@ bluecat
That’s what I keep saying!
“A week is a long time in politics”
@ falconer
I may have mentioned my mates work on his campaign. Apparently he got something like 84% of the youth vote, but only about 18% of eligible young voters turned out.
So that’s what they’ll be working on.
Oh — another thing — there’s a certain sort of white man in this country who’ll happily burn it all down if he thinks it’ll make a liberal cry.
He’s the sort who’ll buy the biggest pickup truck he can find, then modify the engine to produce large black clouds of exhaust just so he can fart on any hybrids who happen to be behind him at a red light.
He’s the sort to whom caring about an issue is tantamount to nagging. If you ask him not to do something, he’ll go ahead and do it while staring at you the whole time. What are you going to do about it? is his unspoken question. You and what army?
He also tends to suffer from Newspeak in the tradition of MURRICA FUCK YEAH.
They weren’t socialist. They were communist.
Uh, yeah. What katz said.
@kats
But what about cccp? (Союз советски социлстических Республик). To me when I hear socialist I still think CCCP because that is how it is reffered to. Between west and east socailsm you may make the destinction but as far as they were concerned it was socialsm. Also when talking people of former Soviet states (and even non Soviet but still communist/socialist like Romania) will use socialist to describe it. More often than communism (maybe because of the bad implications). Certainly is different from British socialist which was the point I was making regarding extremism. Sorry if it made some confusion there. To me I view Cccp as socialsm but far left.
@katz @dhag
I know a lot of people who defend communism by saying that those countries weren’t actually communist, they were socialist.
They also self-described as socialist countries, because in the realtivly crude historical stage model of orthodox Marxism, after capitalism (rule of the bourgeoisie) comes socialism (rule of the proletariat), and then communism (classless society).
Which doesn’t make the comparison better, because it’s moot anyway. Just because someone sees themselves as communist or socialist, doesn’t mean they underwrite every tenet of every group that used the same label.
I have the feeling that the meaning of the term “socialism” has become so muddled that it’s basically unusable as a descriptor. I mean, what American media (and even Bernie Sanders) consider socialism is, to me, left-wing liberalism, social democracy at best. Then you have all those little sects that put Socialist in their name, but I certainly don’t want anything to do with them.
@ Katz & dhag & valentine
I think valentine is from Eastern Europe where the communist regimes self described as socialist (USSR and all that) so it’s probably just a translation thing. Obviously the terms as we use them describe different regimes.
ETA: ninja’d (with more authority) by bernardo
@Valentine, Bernardo Soares, Alan Robertshaw
Labels aside, this makes it a false equivalence. Russia isn’t “recovering from” whatever Scandinavia is benefitting from.
I mean, Ben Ali and Mubarak were only excluded from the Socialist International after the Arab Spring was nearly finished. Similar with Laurent Gbagbo, authoritarian asshole from Cote d’Ivoire.
Yes, of course. However, I wasn’t aware that Scandinavian parties describe themselves as “Socialist” rather than “Social Democratic”.
Valid point. My comment was excessively reductive. Rephrasing:
What Sanders promotes is similar to the Western European model, rather than the USSR model. For instance, nobody is planning on putting the government in charge of the means of production or introducing collective farms.
And Russia is also recovering from being absolutely devastated in two consecutive wars and hundreds of years of tsars and slavery, so there’s that, too.
@Valentine: Having grown up in the “CCCP”, I’m always started to see Westerners refer to it as “far left”. Beyond pursuing a bizarre economic policy and paying lip service to being “government of the people by the people”, it was actually in many ways arch-conservative. For one thing, it was freakishly authoritarian. It promoted a classed society (despite saying the opposite). It also promoted ethnocentrism and the notion of a master race — in state-sponsored culture, if not law. And in terms of social policy, it was very much into what American conservatives praise as “traditional family values”. Whenever I’m bored or procrastinating, I like to tease Republicans online by listing all the ways in which modern American conservatives are equivalent to the classical Soviet ideologues. Drives them up the wall.
There’s an academic theory (which I find quite compelling) that essentially Stalin just reintroduced Tsarism (autocratic, centralist, disenfranchised populous) on the perception that what had lead to the downfall of the Romanovs was Nicholas’ abortive, and unenthusiastic, attempt to share some of the power.
z@katz&dhag
Yeah sorry for confusion. I think I didn’t mean to make an equivillency. My thinking was like this: trump is exreme and it doesn’t matter so much his political party. A vote for trump is a vote only for trump. What I meant is it is a dangerous situation and meant to say how socialism done right is a good thing (Uk danmark etc) and then CCCP was an example of socailsm corrupted by personality over values. You can see the same now with putin. The support for him in Russia is 80% and it is only for him not for United Russia.
@Bernardo Soares
In Sweden, the Social Democrat Party’s (Socialdemokraterna) official ideology as “democratic socialism” or “social democracy”, which they take to mean the same thing. The Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) self-describes as socialist since 1990, and as communist prior to that.
@Valentine
No worries. 🙂 I think I understand what you mean.
@Alan Robertshaw: This. Very much this. There is obvious continuity between the Soviet rule and Russia’s Ancien Régime , which suggests that regimes are shaped more by culture, history and prevailing collective mentality than novel economic theories.
The police state that Stalin reintroduced in 1936 had in fact existed since the Pugachev Revolt, designed originally by Catherine the Great. Stalin also reintroduced serfdom under a different name. Extreme censorship was always a constant in Russian life.
And by the way, none of this is to say that the period from 1921 to 1936 was all rainbows and hippy love. Lenin himself was very much into terror and repression (and defended them explicitly). One authoritarian government replaced another replaced another, usually on a wave of purges and mass persecution, but the essence of that relationship between the government and the governed always remained unchanged.
@amused yes my point entirely (although I’ve been making it very badly). Is once you get to one exteme or the other left or right it comes full circle. That trump would exist as trump no matter what party he was with is very certain. Any political exteme is designed to place restrictions on the people and put power into the hands of the few.
@Amused
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate your thoughts on this, and I have often thought the same things but without adequate experience/education to determine whether I’m making any sense. :p