I’m a member of a social media site called Quora. I’m sure it has more to do with my reaction to the regiment of loyal followers of Donald Trump who called themselves Trumpian or MAGAs.
To blame this on one person is giving Donald trump too much credit. As one author pointed out the idea of populism has been around since William Jennings Bryant and Adolf Hitler. The idea is to create power in the masses that for years did not have power. Then someone like Trump comes around and tells these frustrated people they too have a voice and all they have to do is stand up to those in power—the elitists—and overthrow them. In the minds and hearts of these people it’s about scapegoat and separating them from those true Americans.
In 1967, a social studies teacher created an experiment called the Third Wave. It was a social experiment designed to teach high school students how easy it was to fall into fascism and Nazism from a stable democratic government. The entire emphasis of the experiment was that democracy focused too much on the individual and not on the community.
If Trump’s own political views weren’t so out of my beliefs then I too might have shared in his rhetoric
But, I have views that are more in line with the individual not the populists who rather have a dictator telling them what they want to hear and going with the flow. They want to believe that their voice matters and the elitists, the journalists, and the minorities, who they believe are the enemy need to be silenced.
Eventually populism will fade away from our social consciousness, as did many other voices of the past that believed in change. We as a society can’t blame the MAGA populists for wanting their voices heard. Obviously for too long one party catered to one group that promoted all these changes that didn’t fit in their belief system and another group that pandered to the Wall Street tycoons, the doctors with their million-dollar mansions and other elitists who opposed changing the status quo.
As I have stated in past blogs, there needs to be a middle ground where everyone can have a voice and affect change that means something for all.
Jerry Schellhammer 