The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

This will grow

Up to now crowds have been small gaggles of organized nutbags.

But that is changing.

This could get really big.

The overwhelming majority of the antiwar demonstrators against the Vietnam war did not share the revolutionary ideologies of the organizers.

They were really in very large measure anti-draft demonstrators.

Hence when Nixon stopped sending draftees to fight the demonstrations faded to obscurity.

And now?

The leadership is nutbags of various kinds and very hard core right wingers.

But the big supporting crowds, if eventually there are big supporting crowds, will be made up almost entirely of people who cannot afford not to work, people whose small businesses are failing, people who have no insurance if they don't work, and so on.

These are people who, being now unemployed, have the time but not the means to travel to faraway sites to demonstrate, absent the helping hands of willing donors.

And, again, the ideology of the donors is one thing, while that of the individual participants is another.

The majority of them will not be far right in their overall politics and will be less radical than the leadership or the donors in their desires concerning the rollback.

An unknown proportion of them will not even be voting for Trump or other GOP candidates this fall.

Thousands of Americans backed by right wing donors gear up for protests

Fury and despair: behind the viral image of Americans protesting against lockdown

A lot of people are convinced that for them and their families taking their chances is safer and better than the lockdown.

Who is to say that not a lot of these people are right?

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