My hatred of him stems from the fact that I don't want avenues of US trade to be stopped by a combined Chinese-Russian fleet either here or perhaps in the future in space.
Why would that happen though?
You live in a bygone era where morality mattered, in the real world vying for power matters.
Again, you are literally paraphrasing Mussolini, which is probably not the way to go if you're trying to defend posting fascist memes.
In what bygone era was geopolitics guided by transparent and sincere moral convictions? Pinochet was put in power with material support from the US government. CIA agents were sent into south America to train secret police in how to torture people. One particular agent used to have random people grabbed off the street and then he'd torture them to death to demonstrate the techniques. Are those representative of the values of the USA?
I think it's you who lives under the delusion that the USA is a "good" country and that US global dominance has moral value. Because if it doesn't, why does it matter?
Mussolini was wrong, and so are you. It's power that doesn't really matter. Power is a largely ineffective motivator of people. Morality can make people sacrifice their own lives or torture other human beings to death. It doesn't matter to me, on the level of pure power, whether the USA or China is global hegemon. It only matters in that the consequences of one or the other might be good or bad, and for many of us that question has a degree of complexity precisely because the historical actions of the USA are not in line with its own moral pretentions.
The left fights for power for moralistic reasons, and the right wants power for its own sake, but the common idea is this.
I don't think that's necessarily true. The right is often guided by explicit and open morality. Sometimes that morality can be so extreme that torturing people and throwing them out of helicopters becomes the morally correct action.
What I will say is generally true is that people on the right tend to empathize less with people who don't have power, for example by laughing at people who have been tortured and thrown out of helicopters.
JC has also been shown to be very unpragmatic, he didn't oppose Brexit as strongly as he did because he hates the EU over dumb policy issues that don't affect him or his country and has treated his country better than Greece for example, he also didn't pick soft power/morality over leverage in that he wasn't willing to threaten EU residency in the UK over better trade conditions.
Everyone hates the EU.
I voted remain. I have never questioned my decision to vote remain. I love to roast the gammon. But anyone who says that they like the EU in its present form either doesn't really understand it or is just dumb. It's a deeply, deeply flawed institution. It enforces the worst excesses of neoliberal capitalism onto its members. It's full of literal nazis because people keep electing them in EU elections because they hate the EU.
The reason people voted remain has nothing to do with liking the EU. It's about broader ideas of European intergration, economic self-interest and the fact that the EU serves as a political bulwalk to the kind of unchecked nationalism we've seen since Brexit. I wouldn't have voted to remain in the EU if I believed it was going to remain the same institution forever. In fact, I think it is so flawed that it
will not be able to remain the same institution forever and will either collapse completely or be forced to reform.
Wanting to remain in the EU is not a pragmatic position. It requires a willingness to buy into the ideals of an institution that does not in any sense live up to those ideals.
Had he been sober-minded he would have either anti-Brexited hard or Brexited hard in the opposition against the EU hard.
Except of course, as the Euroskeptic leader of a pro-European party, he was in an impossible position either way. If he had anti-Brexited he would have been accused of betraying his own principles. If he had Brexited he would have lost the support of much of his party, and the media would have torn into him regardless because they did literally nothing else during the time he was leader.
Remaining as neutral as possible on the issue was a bad policy, but it was still the best policy.
