The wonderful Jonathan Calder has published my piece on what Europe’s oldest poem, the Iliad, can tell us about hate addiction.
How can Liberals argue with people who are getting a kick out of hate?
The Iliad on Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England Blog
From Herbie, St Albans:
Donald Trump is getting angry white men very excited. Unfortunately, they won’t decide the election.
In 2016, race trumps class in America.
The most important American political act of this year by some degree was Beyoncé’s performance at the Super bowl.
Her homage to the 1960’s Black Panthers and her Black Power salute brought the Black Lives Matter -– the protests about the disproportionate number of African American men who die at police hands – campaign to the mainstream. And she foregrounded the fact that the Presidential primaries are – in reality – about whether race matters more than class.
In all of the agonised analysis of what Donald Trump means for the Republican Party, apart from the fact that the GOP grandees have lost control, one fact is repeated again and again – this has been a long time coming. The Trump Supremacy is not an aberration in Republican history, it is the culmination of a strategy that started with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy; his 1968 law and order { rein in the black trouble-makers platform } which won the white working-class Southern voters back from the Democrats with a strong populist appeal rooted in values. And again repeated in 1972 his “Acid, Abortion, and Amnesty” assault on George McGovern saying that Democrats were hippies, un-Christian and pacifists who wanted Vietnam deserters pardoned to Reagan’s “Morning in America” optimistic patriotism (plus Guns, God and Abortion) that populism won over working class white voters. Again race was not off the menu: His “welfare queen” rhetoric referred to single-parent black mothers on social security.
Newt Gingrich even labelled Black President Barack Obama the “food stamp president” during the 2012 presidential election.
Adventures in Tory Land - Blog 