By Marc Cooper (July 23, 2019)
No question that the monkey-see-monkey-do footage from Trump’s North Carolina rally is chilling. The sweaty chanters are clearly prime recruits for an explicitly fascist movement. No defense of Tump or his supporters, but the heated and over the top rally goers are a very small percentage of actual Trump voters.
i am not (yet) worried that we are about to succumb to Nazism or anything like it. Almost 70 percent of Americans found Trump’s tweets about The Squad to be racist. That’s the good news. Yes, he is whipping up his base, but that it is to be expected. and that alone is not enough to win anything except maybe a set of steak knives.
But….
I’ll tell you what I DO worry about. It accomplishes next to nothing to characterize the rally mobs as this or that… deplorable, racists, fascists etc etc. it makes no difference what you call them and nobody really cares.
What is worrisome is that Democrats have almost no candidates who can evoke as much (positive) energy as Trump invokes the negative and the dangerous. The Dem candidates, compared to Trump, are mostly like dead fish. I make an exception for Bernie Sanders who is, in fact, the only opposition candidate that generates any real passion and who, at the same time, has a 100 percent clear program for change. Unfortunately, it seems that a major if not a majority chunk of Democrats have decided in their infinite wisdom that Bernie is some kind of devil and will not support him. Um.. like always…they are afraid (unlike the Trumpista core). If Democrats didn’t have such a miserable record in picking losers, i might be more convinced by what seems the — cautious– conventional wisdom. But they do not and therefore I do not.
Ok, fine. Pick somebody “safe.” Once your bed is made, you can then take a nice rest in it… if you are real unlucky you might even get another 4 year long nap.
The more loathsome you find the Trump rallies, the more you better start thinking about what political weapons you want to bring to this ugly fight. If you think you can get people to stand and cheer and race to the polls to soundly knock out Trump, you better show up with something more impressive than a rotting mackerel and a bunch of jibber jabber about pronouns and your frickin’ identity.
