Gennifer Flowers.

[Dill]

(10-11-2016, 10:23 PM)hollodero Wrote: That might be true. I still believe you kind of overestimate this aspect, though. You see the ocean of intellectual sluggishness in your country, you might have missed out on ours.
Of our 8.5 million people in this country, over 3 million read one and the same newspaper. Guess what kind of newspaper this might be. If your guesses lead you to a word like "sophisticated", you're on the wrong track.

I know Gary Johnson. He seems funny, a nice little funny meaningless clown. I don't know why you brought him up, I'd say people like him don't prove much - you have not seen what ran for president in OUR country. At least Johnson gets called out for knowing nothing, so that's a good sign.

The appeal of "outsiders" is a strange thing. It's almost as if people would not recognize the hard work a politician, let alone a president has to do. They would not trust a plumber without at least 5 years job experience to fix their toilet, yet they go for someone with no track record whatsoever to run the country. This kind of belief is strange. But maybe that's why her expertise and experience don't help Hillary - many people simply hold it against her. They found a magician who can fix stuff she and other politicians have learned to unintentionally sabotage. I know of course it's an empty smokescreen and the job is really about being knowledgeable, being insistent and working hard for small evolutional steps in an environment full of unpleasant facts and boundaries. Trump cannot change that. He can ignore it and cause complete chaos or he can let Pence run the show, but that's that. But I think people do not grasp any of these realities, which incidentally is also quite an American thing. (See: Climate change.)

I confess I probably know more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire than I do about contemporary Austria.  But I have assumed Austrians were not appreciably less "informed" than Germans or English.

Re: the allusion to Johnson--how likely is it that the leader of any Austrian party polling 9% would be unable to name the leader of a bordering country like Germany or Italy? How likely that he/she could retain that level of support if this were publicly known?  Just wondering.  Trump's grasp of international politics is not appreciably greater than Johnson's, and he has won the nomination of the Republican Party--a shot at the presidency. Only his vulgarity has put his election in doubt, not his ignorance.

Segue now to the puzzling "appeal of outsiders" you refer to; the failure to "grasp realities" you mention is an aspect of that general incuriosity and consequent low level of information regarding foreign policy I have been discussing.  Certainly every modern industrial nation has a substantial population (many rural) whose lives are secure and routine enough that what happens elsewhere doesn't much interest them, as well as proudly ignorant petit bourgeois nationalists and an unhappy portion of down-and-outs with Brownshirt tendencies, whose numbers can rise with stresses like immigration and recession.  I'm hardly implying such don't exist in European countries, and in greater proportion in some than others; I'm just pointing out that there seems to be 1) a larger number of "well-informed" to leaven policy discussions in European countries, and 2) I'll now add there is more deference (in general, despite exceptions) to knowledgeable leaders than one finds in the U.S.