Friday, November 22, 2019

When a level-headed guy like Victor Davis Hanson says it looks like a coup...

...then you can bet it's a coup.
A "coup" is no longer proof of right-wing paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of resistance to Trump.

In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

4 comments:

JeffS said...

This:

Oddly, both had little clue that their demeanor and thinly disguised self-importance were a perfect example of why Trump got elected -- to come up with new ideas antithetical to the conventional wisdom of unelected career bureaucrats.

I ran into this attitude far too often before I retired -- arrogant bureaucrats more interested in getting their normal slice of the pie (a/k/a "annual budget") than in doing their job. The contortions they went through just to put up the facade that they were highly trained and competent professionals was more work than actually being one. In some cases (and I do not exaggerate here), the people in question firmly believed that they knew what they were doing -- their "mentors" lead them to believe that.

The fact that they were setting themselves up for failure, or just looking stupid to anyone outside of their bubble, was quite immaterial.

bruce said...

My professor actually wrote a book on this problem.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Democracy-Dictatorship-South-Asia-Robert-W-Stern/9780275970413

'Democracy and Dictatorship in South Asia : Dominant Classes and Political Outcomes...'

He defined democracy as 'When a party is voted out, they hand over power to the winners, basically...' which doesn't always happen. That book is his magnum opus, product of 40 years study of the problem in specific cases. My brief thesis for him along the same lines was the role of women, but I just scratched the surface and (male) reviewers asked 'Why is an older white guy studying this?' Heh.

bruce said...

You can read the book's first chapter here:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Dictatorship-South-Asia-Bangladesh/dp/0275970418

'Dominant Class Coalitions'.

And the ebook is much cheaper than the print one!

I sat through a term of lectures in which he set out the argument in his book while he was writing it, 25 years ago, when the Soviets had just collapsed and we never imagined this would be applicable to the US.

Spiny Norman said...

we never imagined this would be applicable to the US.

It was already applicable to the US even then. The Perpetual Bureaucracy resisted Ronald Reagan as much as they possibly could. The sort of insubordination bedeviling Trump today was a pain in Reagan's side 35 years ago.