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December 1, 2016 2:26 AM   Subscribe

 
or, “Goodbye Milton Friedman, hello Alexander Dugin”
posted by acb at 2:42 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


Figuring out the influence the End of Anglo-American Order would have on the position of China in the world is left as an exercise for the reader, as this piece was long enough already.
posted by hat_eater at 6:14 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Like other parts of the world, South East Asia has been under the spell of populist authoritarians who have been rendering once vibrant democracies into effective dictatorships. I refer to Phillipines, Malaysia and Thailand in particular. They all have been moving towards China for reasons too numerous to mention.

But with the Rise of Trump, though, they presumably find it easier to deal with America than before. All you need to do is stay in the Trump Hotel in DC, and build something with the Trump brand in your town.

So I'd actually disagree that Brexit and Trump mark the end of Anglo-American hegemony. We live in a world where China just arbitrarily clamped down on Singapore's tanks that were passing from Taiwan to Singapore through Hong Kong. There will be a need to counter-balance China; just that, Uncle Sam will be wooed not through appealing to values or such nonsense, but through good ol' corruption and flattery.
posted by the cydonian at 6:38 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


I find this article to be just a little too palatable - it seems to belong to the long standing tradition of grand think pieces, the kind that make a lot of pronouncements about grand narratives through history with the intent of the reader ending up thinking that they have learned something when actually they just went on an amusement park ride. I know the New York Times is trying to change its editorial point of view after Trump's election, but this navel-gazing kind of article doesn't really cut the mustard. I understand that a thousand -mile view of things is important, but I don't feel I learned anything new having read this, it doesn't inspire me to go change the world, it just kind of sits there as what feels like a narrative picked out of a hat to draw a straight line from history to present.
posted by Dmenet at 7:18 AM on December 1, 2016 [12 favorites]


Well, sure, but it's a pretty elegant summary of what we're all thinking.
posted by Mocata at 7:28 AM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


I feel like the more we see Trump as an unfortunate aberration due to a lackluster Democratic candidate, and the less we see him as some manifestation of a totalitarian zeitgeist, the better we are.

We help define the narrative here, and this is the wrong narrative to push

For good or bad, we shouldn't be building him up, we should be mercilessly tearing him down. Ridiculing him and rendering him comical.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [12 favorites]


Acting like the cat is not a cat does not protect us mice, at all.
posted by Goofyy at 8:04 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


Mod note: Couple comments removed; let's really not wander needlessly into a side-argument about how you feel about how you think MetaFilter feels about Hillary Clinton or whatever.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:02 AM on December 1, 2016


Making fun of Donald Trump, a massive narcissist beyond the dreams of all but the wildest egomaniacs, hurts him deeply. This has been made very clear by his own behavior. So I say keep it up. But don't be fooled -- he is not a joke. Never imagine he is without real power. But treat him like an assclown, absolutely.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:22 AM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]


Making fun of Donald Trump, a massive narcissist beyond the dreams of all but the wildest egomaniacs, hurts him deeply.

Though does it do anything to stop him? Or does it simply reinforce his image as Defender of the Common Man against the sneering liberal elites?
posted by acb at 9:26 AM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


Though does it do anything to stop him? Or does it simply reinforce his image as Defender of the Common Man against the sneering liberal elites?

Maybe among his base, but I don't think the man himself has the least interest in Defending the Common Man against the sneering liberal elites. I think he just wants to make the liberal elites stop sneering at him and admit that he's pretty fucking great. Just as good as they are. Better even.
posted by Naberius at 9:39 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Though, intentionally or not, his gross lack of taste and decorum and general obnoxiousness, and the way his actions are a red flag to an urbane bull, is a very effective wei wu wei move, using the energy of all those sneering, sniffy NYTimes readers and fancy coffee drinkers and non-churchgoers and cyclists and passport holders and bisexuals and multilinguals to push the people who aren't like them into the unified mass, all as one, converging to smash their precious snowflake liberal order. (See also: “basket of deplorables”.)
posted by acb at 9:50 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Making fun of Donald Trump, a massive narcissist beyond the dreams of all but the wildest egomaniacs, hurts him deeply. This has been made very clear by his own behavior. So I say keep it up. But don't be fooled -- he is not a joke. Never imagine he is without real power. But treat him like an assclown, absolutely.

That is the tricky balancing act, isn't it? Mocking him with all the pitilessness he certainly deserves, without losing sight of the very real threat he embodies. Ridiculing without dismissing. It's definitely part of how he won the race, our collective inability to do that. How do you?
posted by gottabefunky at 9:55 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Cydonian, the African timelines having a field day with pointing out through their experience and expertise exactly what is going on and what to expect.
posted by infini at 9:55 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Maybe among his base, but I don't think the man himself has the least interest in Defending the Common Man against the sneering liberal elites. I think he just wants to make the liberal elites stop sneering at him and admit that he's pretty fucking great. Just as good as they are. Better even.

Something I learned from watching Gamergate blow up a couple of years ago: Never underestimate the ability of awful people to interpret your scathing criticisms and denunciations as ironclad proof of their own heroic monomyth.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:36 AM on December 1, 2016 [6 favorites]


Making fun of Donald Trump, a massive narcissist beyond the dreams of all but the wildest egomaniacs, hurts him deeply. This has been made very clear by his own behavior. So I say keep it up. But don't be fooled -- he is not a joke.

For good or bad, we shouldn't be building him up, we should be mercilessly tearing him down. Ridiculing him and rendering him comical.

Though does it do anything to stop him? Or does it simply reinforce his image as Defender of the Common Man against the sneering liberal elites?


My view is that it's not so much about "making fun" of him per se, but about de-legitimizing him as a leader. It just so happens that, historically, (we've believed that) ridiculing such a person has the effect of de-legitimizing them, and just that in this specific case, ridicule may have played into the legitimization of such a ruler, as per acb's comment. It seems important to figure out something else, which is one of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking and reading about, after the election. Since his campaign was centrally rooted in an appeal to get rid of the [Them Who Pretends to Be Us], we might do well figuring out how to frame him that way to his supporters. But this seems very tricky, given all the immediately obvious and overt ways he already should look like an outsider to his support base.
posted by obliterati at 11:37 AM on December 1, 2016


Regarding the conclusion of the article, as a southern european in a country economically laid to waste by Germanic Ordoliberalism and non-stop austerity imposed by economic blackmail on us PIIGS for reasons including petty internal German politics , I cringe at the prospect of being led anywhere by Angela Merkel. I would prefer living under Attila's hordes to such a future.
The author fails to include in the picture he presents the slow unraveling of the EU project, led by the massive failure of Merkel's obsessive austerity politics across the continent, the EU's blind, arrogant and clueless - on so many levels- technocracy, and the increasingly undemocratic nature of EU decision making. That this is never a part of his discussion of the rise of the right-populist parties (but also the left in many parts of Europe, a fact that he also ignores) makes his points much less convincing, in that this political dynamic does not need any kind of exceptionalism to keep it running (this might contribute of course), but simply the increasing disempowerment (political and economic) of the popular classes through the natural evolution of neoliberal globalization. Generally when similar political phenomena emerge across the Western World (and beyond it, actually) at the same time, this is a strong indication that the driving forces behind them share a transnational cause or origin.

[BTW "rootless cosmopolitans" was something that Joseph Stalin never said but Joseph Goebbels did, a typo I assume]
posted by talos at 1:03 PM on December 1, 2016 [9 favorites]


Since his campaign was centrally rooted in an appeal to get rid of the [Them Who Pretends to Be Us], we might do well figuring out how to frame him that way to his supporters.

He's a bad guy and he should feel sad. I really wouldn't waste my time trying to get his fans to see reason any more than I would try to teach a gerbil how to read.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:19 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


"rootless cosmopolitans" was something that Joseph Stalin never said but Joseph Goebbels did

I don't know about Stalin personally, but this phrase ("Безродные космополиты") has been used during the Soviet antisemitic campaign ("war on cosmopolitanism") starting from 1948. I can't find any sources linking it to Goebbels.
posted by hat_eater at 4:44 PM on December 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


Capital...uh...finds a way.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:45 PM on December 1, 2016


hat_eater: I stand corrected
posted by talos at 1:04 AM on December 2, 2016


Stalin was only a Communist by circumstance. Had the Whites won the Russian Civil War, he could have just as easily gone from his seminary in Tiflis to leading a fascist/reactionary nationalist party, and his rule wouldn't have differed by much in that timeline.
posted by acb at 2:22 AM on December 2, 2016


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