(January 16, 2022 at 12:45 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: Back to the OP: I live on the border of Pennsylvania in the Appalachian mountains. This area is fairly conservative. Anyway, we get a lot of Pennsylvania political ads here. And it's worrisome how many ads are pounding the Trump drums to rally against the Democrats. Like he's being quoted and everything. On the left, we like to say, "You can't kill an idea." But, if that's true, it's true for conservatives as well. Whether or not Trump gets reelected, the idea of Trump is already a political force... an ideological force. That, to me, is even more worrisome than Trump's reelection.
What a lot of people seem to not understand is that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. he may have sped up some processes a bit, but the anti-intellectual, anti-rational, conspiracy theory laden, bigoted aspect of American society has always been there. And, it has been growing for at least the last 50 years.
The conservatives have had a plan: get into lower levels of government and work up, blocking opponents from voting at every opportunity. And they have won on those grounds.
One thing that concerns me is that liberals don't seem to have anything close to a plan for how to get and keep power over the next 50 years or more.
