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The piece by George Lakoff on Trump’s twitter wars that is circulating at present has brought back to me debates that were held in Qld in the 70s & 80s when we activists were accused of playing into the hands of the far right state Premier Bjelke-Petersen. The latter banned street marches and when we held the marches and were arrested in our thousands, liberals told us we had walked into a trap. Meanwhile they who were infinitely more intelligent than us did not protest at all. Similarly Matt Zarb-Cousin (whom I admire) has tweeted that the appointment of the execrable Toby Young to the post of Universities Overseer is a “dead cat”. That is, it is designed to distract us from the troubles that the Tory Government is experiencing over the Brexit negotiations and the crisis in the National Health System. I describe the arguments here as the manufacturing of dissent. Basically Lakoff maintains that reacting to Trump’s twitter feed is playing Trump’s game. In this analysis Trump emerges as some master manipulator and we are the pathetically manipulated that allow him to get away with his true program. I much prefer to see Trump’s tweets not as the work of a political genius but as provocations or probes from the enemy that test out our strength. As such if we do not respond then the enemy becomes emboldened. Thr frantic restless quality of Trump’s presidency is due at least in part to the fact that he has been elected in what Reinhart Koselleck called a “saddle time”, that is a time when a new consensus is being forged in struggle. The old neoliberal centre is in terminal decline and it is very unclear at present what will replace it. So for me there is no master plan to trap and distract us, just a multitude of attacks which we ignore at our peril. Comradely Gary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
