And so it goes: Shitmentum

Posted bydatingjesus 4 Comments on And so it goes: Shitmentum

donald-trump-funny-look-alike-2__700Back in 2011, stimulated by I-don’t-remember-what, I coined a word I thought was worthy of the Urban Dictionary. I submitted it, it was accepted, and I hope that one day my obituary will include my contribution to the English language.

As you can see from the definition, shitmentum surpasses momentum, and it isn’t at all entertaining.

Sinners, we are in a state of shitmentum. As we can see from that link, Donald Drumpf is pulling even farther ahead from the wheezing pack to secure a place in history as Head Combover.

Here’s disturbing: During Super Tuesday, my neighboring state of Massachusetts went for Drumpf — which means that mini-vaca I was planning in the rolling hills of the Berkshires will have to be scrapped. I will not give my money to Massachusetts until it apologizes.

So buckle up, heathens. We’re heading into the brink. And thank you, Norine, for the reminder.

 

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4 Comments

  1. It appears the voter turnout trend before Super Tuesday continued yesterday. According to some media reports, anyway.

    And now we see defections from the Democratic Party in Massachusetts? To vote for Drumpf?

    Shitmentum indeed. We may be experiencing an American political singularity: dramatic and irreversible change due to a paradigm shift in our sociopolitical climate. (Yes. That’s right. Climate change. The part Matt Damon missed.)

    One of my favorite Republicans, Andrew Bacevich, says that if Trump wins the nomination it will spell the end of The GOP and of the two-party system itself. If he should win the Presidency?

    Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.

    And according to Samantha Bee, this all started in 2010 when Democrats, and their party, sat out the midterms and Republicans didn’t. Which resulted in the GOP takeover of Congress. Which resulted in Congress becoming slightly less popular than genital warts. Which opened the door for?

    It may not be as bad as Bacevich predicts, considering the two-party system has been little more than a sham for the last 30 years or so, and the whole constitutional republic thing has proven itself to be a bane to true democracy and democratic rights. We’re already Living The Dream™. Why not have a figurehead that represents that reality? Henrey Giroux way back in 2004:

    Neoliberalism is not simply an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue free trade policies, and free market forces from government regulations; it is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its moral, material, and regulatory moorings, and in doing so it offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside of the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to translate the privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own. As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfettered social Darwinism with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning in the United States.

    Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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