Contributors

Monday, March 27, 2017

Learning the Hard Way

Over the years, I've interacted with many folks like Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor and current senior adviser to the president. The right wing blogger/commenter mentality has a few key characteristics that have been on display quite often during the young, Trump presidency.

They are absolutely convinced they are right about everything, issuing imperial edict after edict on how they would "fix" Washington. They view liberals as being autocratic dictators who constantly are telling them how to live their lives. They are xenophobic, nationalistic to a fault, resistant to any sort of new information and truly believe that bullying folks will win them the day.

Last week's health care debacle showed just how ineffective all of these qualities are and it was summed up quite nicely by John Podhertz.

"I'm Steve Bannon. i've been in politics since August 2016. You will bow before me, elected Republican officials! I ran a website!"

If you peal back each one of these traits that the right wing blogger/commenter has, you see insecurity, projection, and poor people skills. More importantly, you see an arrogant belief that they can beat Washington DC and their ongoing enemies, the press.

They can't.

And they never will.

Sure, they have their candidate in Trump, that was ironically elected by a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans, but he's simply not all powerful. That's a lesson the Democrats should learn from all of this. They have an opening now to work with the president and pass bipartisan legislation. They could get all sorts of things passed that the right wing blogger/commmenter would hate but most Americans would love. Things like actually fixing the issues with the ACA, tax reform, and expanded background checks for all gun purchases.

Of course, none of this may happen because I don't think the president is going to be in office for his full term. He might not even last the year given the ongoing investigations into his campaign and the Russian government. I'm still baffled that his supporters are ignoring all of this and calling it a witch hunt. But that's cognitive dissonance for ya!

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