{"id":182547,"date":"2015-08-15T20:33:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-16T01:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/15\/an-interesting-point-about-donald-trump\/"},"modified":"2015-08-15T20:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-16T01:33:00","slug":"an-interesting-point-about-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/15\/an-interesting-point-about-donald-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interesting Point About Donald Trump\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ian Welsh notes that &#8220;The Donald&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ianwelsh.net\/the-obvious-but-unsaid-about-trump\/\">has many policies that place him at the left of the Republican field<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Let\u2019s state the obvious about Trump.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">No, not that he\u2019s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense.  His policies aren\u2019t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren\u2019t as stupid as the media pretends.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">He doesn\u2019t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does.  Obama has talked this up.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he\u2019s badmouthing it from a position of, \u201cGive them the real thing.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they\u2019ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages.  This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism\u2019s history. Disagree if you like, but it\u2019s not crazy.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don\u2019t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one.  Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">I\u2019m not a fan of Trump, there are plenty of reasons why he\u2019s problematic, but he\u2019s actually an economic populist on many issues.  People shouldn\u2019t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism, but I\u2019m tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting point, and it actually places Trump in what has been a common meme in American politics, the racist populists, also known as the &#8220;Dixicrat.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There has been a long tradition of politics who promise benefits for their communities while promising to keep them from perceived outsiders.&nbsp; (No Irish need apply is an example)<\/p>\n<p>So, Donald Trump reduces to Strom Thurmund with a flamboyant hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ian Welsh notes that &#8220;The Donald&#8221; has many policies that place him at the left of the Republican field: Let\u2019s state the obvious about Trump.No, not that he\u2019s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren\u2019t as crazy as people &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[963,1002,1011,1003,977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump","category-good-writing","category-history","category-philosophy","category-presidential-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}