I hope I didn't necro this thread, but I already asked someone another question so here goes:
1. Are you talking about the magazine or the people?
2. If you're talking the people, well I'll tell you that the reason is that there's SO MUCH dishonesty built into the modern Western political discourse that the cognitive dissonance is causing people to short circuit. Obama was disingenuous, but we haven't had an honest president who wasn't a fool since Reagan, and even Reagan was a fool to a degree. Note I don't mean fools are optimistic, I mean fools have faith in a paradigm that is demonstrably false and built on bad conclusions.
The issue is race politics. See, we keep telling ourselves because biological racial hierarchy doesn't exist (including ZOG-style antisemitism) that human ethnic groups aren't inherently antagonistic to each other, because of the basic structure of humans as apex predators, as well as the fact that previous systems worked with far less ethnic and racial antagonism because it operated on a naked class antagonism and used elite dominance to fold other groups of people into the ethnic fold over time (Magyars in Pannonia, the Medium level Latininzatation of Western Europe, Illyria and Moesia [Balkans and northern Bulgaria in modern times] in the Roman Empire, the creation of the Spanish Empire, the partial Normanizing of England and the English language, despite the Normans being a tiny, tiny minority). The problem in that both nationalism and democracy are designs as COUNTERS to elite dominance, by not just the bourgeois but the petit-bourgeois and franklins/free peasants in order to stop the pillaging of state resources to satiate the endless egos and appetites of the oligarchic elite.
There are two kinds of conservatives, hose who believe that societies are composed of atomized individuals, as per the Enlightenment, and the others who understand that society is composed of FACTIONS, in a functionally amoral struggle for power and influence. Both political parties have their heads up their asses, at least in rhetoric, and Trump wins as FDR won before him and Jackson before him, by understanding that CORRUPTION is the point, Corruption and consolidation are one and the same in terms of holding power. And all the abuses of so-called late-stage capitalism are a testament to the success of businessmen. Cheating is a part of the game. Screwing over people is a part of the game. This is because power is always relative, no one gains without someone else losing, and this includes expanding the franchise.
Hardcore Trump supporters are nascent white nationalists, not out of a sense they are better than POC (some are biological racists, but those are rare, cultural bigots are the bulk of POC haters), but because POC are the wedge the elite on all sides uses to divide and rule and thereby appropriate all the resources, and this is why real wages haven't increased since the 1970s, well that and mass female emplyment doubling the labor pool without ANY immigration. The left understands this and thinks if people could only concentrate on their common enemy, the enemy could be overcome. This is the Yalta mistake. There is no end of history, there will always be spheres of influence, there will always be a struggle for territorial and prestige and status. Defeat the current elite, and the state will devolve into a civil war where the biggest factions will fight for control of the levers of state, and like the Rusian Civil War and Revolutionary France and every Arab Civil War in the 20th century, will lead to the most despotic and brutal and bloodthirsty people taking charge. The state can only exist in one of two ways: the tyranny of an elite who's worst members will brutalize more and more to gain more power against their fellows in the elite (this is the danger of Imperialism) OR a relatively ethnically homogenous society in which everyone is treated well, but only because they are considered kin. When you have ethnic or religious minorities that do not want to integrate, or cannot, you take all the horrors of the anarchy of international politics and recreate it inside the state. This is why ALL empires collapse along ethnic lines
Conservatives as a mess because most of the leadership, including French, thinks that politics is morality. Trump understands politics is about POWER, and only POWER protects, and therefore, power must be sought out almost as if it were for its own sake, but really, just to keep from being brutalized and exploited in turn. This is not nihilism, this empathy, and political consciousness. It is about understanding what is the naked best interest of others are, even when naked best interest is robbing you blind, putting you in chains, or putting you in a death camp. The Democratic elite t least understand the difference between nihilism and pragmatism, which is why they screw over Bernie every chance they get. Because the elite wants to continue to appropriate state resources for their own benefit. Trump's greatest virtue is his lack of moral vision: the man is TERRIBLE at building consensus, but he's honestly trying to save the country from economic and racial civil war. Won't work, but he's trying to steer the Titanic straight for the iceberg and hope the destruction is total on less than four compartments rather than slicing open six.
