[Peace-discuss] How to Build an Autocracy?

[Szoke, Ron]

A bagatelle for those who think that maybe ever larger, more militant & aggressive mass protests are the way to advance anti-war & equalitarian policies under Trump:

Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.

Calculated outrage is an old political trick, but nobody in the history of American politics has deployed it as aggressively, as repeatedly, or with such success as Donald Trump. If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.

— from
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/>
How to Build an Autocracy
By David Frum  in the March 2017 Atlantic magazine.

———

Recently, it has seemed (to me) that the only thing that may rescue the Trump regime is a wag-the-dog attack on N. Korea or a big terrorist attack at home — both of which can be arranged.

~~ Ron






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