{"id":2064,"date":"2015-08-31T08:12:44","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T12:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2064"},"modified":"2015-08-31T08:19:20","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T12:19:20","slug":"you-read-it-here-first-department-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2064","title":{"rendered":"You-read-it-here-first department"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve said for a long time that if George Wallace were alive today he’d campaign as a Republican<\/a> so, naturally, I’m pleased to see the same observation in Salon<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

\n

He\u2019s [Donald Trump] a demagogic ethno-nationalist of the kind that\u2019s succeeded before in American history, especially during times of great upheaval and dislocation. Think of him as our Huey Long1<\/sup>, our George Wallace<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Besides a genius for self-promotion, what Trump has in common with those three men is this: He appeals to a large swathe of Americans who have not only lived through massive social disruption — the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement, respectfully — but who have had their fundamental assumptions about Americanness, and therefore themselves, challenged in the process. When his fans speak of \u201ctaking\u201d their country back, they are not being tongue-in-cheek. They are deathly serious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is the whole of modernity that the loony Right is upset about, especially the Teavangelicals. Their ethic of unthinking submission has been rejected, they’re not special, they are laughed at when they’re accustomed to deference — the world has become a place that they can’t understand and for which nothing in their experience has prepared them<\/i>. Our transient political brawls are merely proxies for a deeper fight over an epochal philosophical shift away from Platonism — our world is a poor copy of a perfect world somewhere else — toward some flavor of pragmatic realism. This is, withal, a good thing, though we’re not going to get there easily or without a lot of grief along the way.<\/p>\n

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\n1<\/sup>   The novel All the Kings Men<\/i>, by Robert Penn Warren, is based upon Huey Long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve said for a long time that if George Wallace were alive today he’d campaign as a Republican so, naturally, I’m pleased to see the same observation in Salon. He\u2019s [Donald Trump] a demagogic ethno-nationalist of the kind that\u2019s succeeded … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2064"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2070,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions\/2070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}