Everything I Needed to Know About the Trump Campaign…

…I learned from watching The Walking Dead.

  • When the world they’ve been living in and depended on is disrupted, people may become angry, desperate, and fearful.
  • Desperate times call for desperate measures.
  • When they are fearful people will do things they wouldn’t have imagined doing otherwise.
  • Under those the conditions the strong may become authoritarian, violent, and tyrannical.
  • Under those conditions even nice people will do bad things.
  • Those who are adapting to the new environment successfully may appear cruel or even insane to those who aren’t.

I’m accepting contributions to this list. Leave your suggestions in the comments.

29 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    Yes, there has been a pretty brutal streak this year, in which people’s best instincts (such as, understanding, forgiveness, nonviolence and maternal love) often pose the greatest risk to survival.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    The disruption in the Walking Dead is projection–it’s pure fantasy and cheapened apocalypse. Audiences eat it up and escape into it because life in stark before/after terms has no corollary in the real world. The fact that people are identifying with this wreckage with Trump is the same thing. There’s no new environment in America unique to Trump supporters. We all live here. This obsession with how the elite in the cities spit on flyover country as they coast over in their jets is becoming hysterical. It’s insulting. When jobs moved out of the Rust Belt and to the south, when factories closed in union states and went to places were unionization was ‘discouraged’, it was all part of a master plan. I don’t recall Donald Trump in Seattle in 1999. Pat Buchanan and some jerk talking about real Americans wasn’t there either. When Trump supporters use their smart phones, what do they think they’re doing but using a product of very cheap labor, a product they would not be able to afford if Apple located its factories in America under President Trump?

    Poverty is traumatic, but it’s traumatic for everybody who is poor, not some unique special vagabond class of survivors.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    As far as the bad things part goes–

    I remember an account of a woman in Brazil being tortured by the regime in the 70s. There was an American diplomat/CIA guy present. What she recalled as being the most painful part of her memory was the fact he took a phone call in the midst of the torture session and told his wife that he would be home late for dinner.

    In Guatemala, the death squads had their trainees adopt and care for a puppy, and then kill and eat it, all as preparation for their real work.

    So yeah, people do terrible things in the name of power–they aren’t Eichmann-like cogs and they are normal as hell, and there is no justification for any of it.

  • CStanley Link

    So my suggested addition to the list is:

    The fear that some of the people we once trusted have turned against us can quickly lead to the collapse of civilization so we really ought to take care to examine the premise.

    I find myself, surprisingly, with MM here. Things are crappy, and it fuels paranoia when leaders try to paper over the crappiness….but this isn’t a zombie apocalypse.

  • Assembling iPhones in China saves Apple about $4 put unit which I doubt would have any measurable impact on sales. Everybody who can afford one now would still be able to afford one.

    What they save by not paying U. S. taxes is considerably more.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Dave,
    I had no idea. Is the iPhone an isolated example, or is this true for most imported and allegedly cheaper goods?

  • I’ve posted on this subject before. Typically, the per unit savings realized by manufacturing in China are quite small and that’s true for everything. When you’re talking about 150 million units of something, you’re starting to talk real money.

    In fairness I should add that there are other costs beyond the per unit labor costs. The Chinese have become excellent production engineers and we’d be hard put to match them on that. The costs of regulation here are enormously higher. And the taxes that a larger industrial organization would be subject to including property taxes, etc. considerably outweigh the labor cost savings.

  • steve Link

    Zombies now come in orange.

    Steve

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