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I like that: "political debauchery" is a perfect description.Except it's not surprising. If you look at the recent heroes of so-called conservatism, you'll see an accelerating movement toward populism and demagoguery. Underlying that populism is a host of legitimate complaints and frustrations: the power of media, academia, finance, business, and politics are all in the hands of a relative few, clustered in a few zip codes on the east and west coasts, whose goals provide smug satisfaction to themselves at the expense of many others.It's the old dynamic of aristocracy vs. the underclass.
@r9etbIndeed. Trump is simply repeating history. Great Read from 2 days ago...The 1935 novel that predicted the rise of Donald Trump Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here features an antihero who whips up support among angry voters on the back of firebrand rhetoric, fearmongering populism and anti-Mexican sentiment. Sound familiar? If the US presidential campaign conveys a flavour of unreality, that may be because it is rooted in fiction. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a novel about political radicalisation and social upheaval in the depression-ravaged US. What emerged after four months of feverish work was It Can’t Happen Here, a runaway bestseller that quickly sold more than 300,000 copies.Lewis was alarmed by what was taking shape in the country. The New Deal had delivered a false sense of optimism to the Federal Reserve, if not to the millions queueing at the soup kitchens. The money supply was tightened in anticipation of a sustained rally, government spending was cut and taxes were raised. As a result, the US was pushed to the cusp of a double-dip depression, with manufacturing back to its 1934 level and unemployment up by 5%.This created fertile ground for Father Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, William Randolph Hearst and other fanatics to spread the gospel of bigotry. It was no fleeting backlash: on the eve of the second world war, the German American Bund packed more than 20,000 militants into Madison Square Garden in New York for a pro-Hitler rally. To wild applause, their leader, Fritz Kuhn, derided the US President as Franklin D “Rosenfeld”.more...https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2016/oct/09/it-cant-happen-here-1935-novel-sinclair-lewis-predicted-rise-donald-trump
