“The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state…is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.”
And
“The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:
Christians are persecuted in this country.
The government is coming to get your guns.
Obama is a Muslim.
Global Warming is a hoax.
The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
Schools push a left-wing agenda.
Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
Obama hates white people.
The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
The safety net contributes to poverty.
The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.
One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners.”
I’m not going to say all trump voters are racist or bad people. But I do think that virtually all of them are “gullible dolt[s] unable to tell truth from bullshit.”[/quote]
You seem to be congratulating yourself on having the clear sightedness to see that people who disagree with you are stupid. It reminds me of the title of my favorite book: “A Confederacy of Dunces”. The title is taken from the following quote by Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” The humor is that the main character believes himself to be intellectually superior, which he is in many ways, but he has significant shortcomings.
When are people going to get tired of feeling so self righteous? I think the ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state is someone who wants very much for others to think that s/he is good, but does not care whether it is true. Not to beat a dead horse, but the Germans are pretty bright, and you know what happened there. And I won’t start on the Cultural Revolution.
And here’s the other thing, and I’m not a Trump lover, but if intellectual good hearted people were guaranteed to make good presidents, Carter’s administration would not have been such a debacle – and if the opposite were true, the Reagan years would have been much worse.
I do not believe that I can predict the future – those of you who believe that you can are either lucky or misguided.
