making sense of things (and not)

I usually just write my own stuff (with a quote here and there), but this piece in New York Magazine really struck a chord with me and since nobody seems to have the attention span to read a long article anymore, I've pulled a few paragraphs to summarize Mr. Sullivan's point (or at least, my perceived point of the article):

"American democracy has been able to thrive with unprecedented stability over the last couple of centuries even as it has brought more and more people into its embrace. It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional craftsmanship and cultural resilience. There is no place I would rather live. But it is not immortal, nor should we assume it is immune to the forces that have endangered democracy so many times in human history." [...]

"In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, 'The True Believer', he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise." [...]
"But the most powerful engine for such a [mass] movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. [...] And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics [...] is his response to all [...] enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. [...]

[Trump's] movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion."
____

It's an older article but the analysis is still (tragically) on point...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

why all the hate?

I usually don't post whole articles I read into my blog ...but the link seems to not be working so I am making an exception:

In Iraq, reverence for ancient tomb of a Jewish prophet
by Peter Ford

The bearded worshiper moved slowly round the shrine in his bare feet,
uttering Muslim prayers and pausing every few steps to bend his head
and kiss the golden cloth that covered the holy tomb.

The dome above him, though, bore the painted floral traces of a very
un-Islamic past. And the script running around the walls also bore no
relation to the flowing Arabic calligraphy that decorates most mosques
in the Middle East.

It was in Hebrew. The body lying in the tomb that this devout Muslim
was venerating is that of the prophet Ezekiel. And until just 50 years
ago, the building sheltering it - first recorded by a 12th century
Jewish pilgrim - was a synagogue.

I knew Muslims revered many Jewish prophets, and Jesus, too. But to see
this Shiite Muslim paying respects at a site of Jewish pilgrimage more
than two millenniums old was a striking reminder of how universal
Iraq's heritage is.

Ezekiel, who preached to the Jews in exile by the waters of Babylon
during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, lived here relatively recently, by
Mesopotamian standards. At the time he wrote down his ecstatic visions
in the 6th century BC, local people could already trace their history
back 2,500 years, to the dawn of our civilization.

In contemporary terms, these last few weeks have been historic for the
Middle East. And over the month and a half that I have been reporting
from Baghdad, I have come to realize what an extraordinary privilege it
has been to witness historic events in the land where mankind's
recorded history began.

I have watched Iraqi society start to recreate itself, bereft of
central authority, on the same soil where society as we know it first
emerged 8,500 years ago - when nomadic hunters in northern Iraq stopped
wandering and began to plant crops around the settlement of Jarmo.

Because for North Americans and Europeans it all began here, it is not
surprising that the Garden of Eden was reputed to have been in Qurnah,
near Iraq's outlet to the Persian Gulf. Abraham came from Ur, near
Nasariyah.

The first human settlements, the first writing, one of the first-known
legal codes, the first use of zero: the land now known as Iraq (which
means "firmly rooted country") can boast them all. Those of us who saw
the place through two-dimensional glasses that reduced it to Saddam
Hussein and weapons of mass destruction have a lot to learn.

Not that we have not already learned. Few people superstitious about a
black cat crossing their path know that they could trace their fear
back to a Babylonian belief. Nor do many of us think of the Babylonians
when we look at our watch faces, divided into 12 segments.

The average Iraqi, of course, is no more aware of his debt to ancient
Mesopotamians than is the average Westerner, although Saddam Hussein's
megalomanic propaganda made constant references to Iraq's glorious past.

But in Kifl, at any rate, the older people do remember the Jews,
despite Mr. Hussein's efforts to obliterate and vilify their memory.

Until the early 1950s, when almost all Iraqi Jews moved to the new
state of Israel, Ezekiel's tomb was a popular pilgrimage destination,
attracting Jews from as far away as Calcutta.

The Muslims coveted it, too: 20 yards from the shrine, above the ruins
of another mosque, stands a brick-faced minaret - built more than 1,000
years ago. A late 19th-century mayor of Kifl claimed it was evidence
that the tomb was an Islamic holy place, because Jews didn't build
minarets.

The Turkish sultan - who ruled the region at the time - first
dispatched a team of officials from Baghdad, then a commission from
Istanbul to get to the truth of the matter. Sitting in the shade of the
antique tower (which today leans alarmingly), both sets of
investigators compiled reports stating, contrary to the mayor's claims,
that they had seen no sign whatsoever of a minaret.

Two contemporary chroniclers, one Jewish and one Muslim, suggested that
this extraordinary oversight owed more than a little to the generosity
with which the Jewish community of Kifl received the officials, and to
the gifts with which they were sent on their way.

It is hard to see how the Jews might ever reclaim their synagogue
today, however the new Iraq may turn out. But one can hope that all
Iraqis, divided as they are into many ethnic and religious groups, will
come to share the straightforward wisdom of Haji Hadi Mitaeb, a
resident of Kifl for the past 88 years.

"I am an old man, I cannot read and I cannot write," he replied when I
asked what he would think if the Jews returned to his town. "But a good
man is a good man."

(c) Copyright 2006 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
Click here to read this story online [if it works]:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0602/p08s01-woiq.html