Regardless of how this turns out, the United States and especially the office of the POTUS have been significantly diminished. Reagan's shining city on a hill is gone forever. We are entering a new dark age of propaganda on a massive scale. Truth is not just elusive it has become indecipherable.
Tell me this does not perfectly describe the rise of Donald Trump and especially the Trumplings in this very thread:
It was characteristic of the rise of the Liberal movement in America and of the Communist movements in California after 2000 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people like Obama whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.
- Donald Trump The Origins of Liberal Democrats in America.
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