11-03-2016, 10:59 AM
(11-03-2016, 12:27 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-02-2016, 08:33 PM)Einzige Wrote: You know, most polls show that Republican voters (who skew elderly and poor) favor New Deal-Great Society social programmes at nearly the same level as Democratic voters, who are connected to those programmes through an aging political tradition.
I can easily envision the GOP becoming the Party of selective economic interventionism, American liberal policies directed towards illiberal ends: expanding Affirmative Action to encompass the white working class, for example, or heavy spending on jobs programmes in poor Red States like Oklahoma and West Virginia.
They'd have to ditch their libertarian wing, but it's not as though libertarians have ever won an election for the Republican Party anyway.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is increasingly resembling a high-tech version of last century's GOP.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/opinio...ngine&_r=0
Quote: For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been making steady gains among upper income whites and whites with college and postgraduate degrees. This year, however, is the first time in at least six decades that the Democratic nominee is positioned to win a majority of these upscale voters.
According to the Oct. 20 Reuters-IPSOS tracking survey, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 5.6 points among all whites earning $75,000 or more. This is a substantial improvement on the previous Democratic record of support among upscale white voters, set in 2008 when Barack Obama lost to John McCain among such voters by 11 points.
According to an Oct. 23 ABC News poll, Clinton also leads among all white college graduates, 52-36. She has an unprecedented gender gap among these voters, leading 62-30 among college-educated white women and tying among college educated white men, 42-42.
What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney won among well-educated whites by 14 points. In 2008, McCain won college-educated whites by four points.
The data reflects an ongoing evolution in the composition of the two parties.
This situation, to the extent that it exists (and it does to some extent) seems to have no connection to the actual policies pursued by the two parties. The Republicans are still dedicated heart and soul, lock stock and barrel, to libertarian economics, and have now brought the racist dog whistle associated with it more into the open. The Democrats are still dedicated to policies that help the poor and middle class rise economically through government action. Nothing has changed. It's still 1964.
So why the switch among some white people?
As Bob Dylan said, they have become pawns in the game. Quite a profound song, it turns out.
https://youtu.be/KY2lQV3ADfc
In the long run, lack of education promotes ignorance, which means poor and lower middle-class whites can be more easily swayed by the clever propaganda of libertarian economic dog whistles. They have been trained, literally, to blame their status on other ethnic groups (and men on women) who are competing with them for the diminishing pie, rather than the bosses that feed them the propaganda. They use appeals to values too, the religious right values, which have a larger appeal to less-educated voters. Trump has added various kinds of resentment against feriners, especially the trade issue on which he has a solid argument. But ironically, the crony capitalist Mr. Trump is using it to further advance libertarian economics in all other respects. And since his voters are more easily convinced by emotion and sloganeering, he can talk a game of "change" when he actually represents more of the same thing that has kept the middle class and poor down for 35 years: libertarian economics.
Earlier populists like Bryan and FDR and LBJ were able to convince many poor and middle class, less-educated whites to support them, because these leaders really had the country's and the peoples' interests at heart, and the labor movements had prepared the way for decades. But today's populists are deceivers, paid for by the cronies and greedy libertarian capitalists who have fought back for 40 years against the movements for real change that began in the 1960s. They have used their superior education over folks like WJ Bryan or Father Caughlin and so on to scheme and plot their way to deceive the people, and they have new weapons given to them by the 60s movements-- resentment against the new welfare programs that provide opportunities for non-whites to compete with the poorer whites, and resentment over the challenges to their traditional values like national military greatness and traditional religion and traditional lifestyles and cultures.
Maintaining the old New Deal and Great Society programs for the elderly is good policy for keeping the votes of elderly people -- even as the Republicans seek to privatize everything to the detriment of all but the super-rich. Of course others are to find that instead of getting Social Security they get to make mandatory investments, most likely in life insurance policies -- low yield, long term, illiquid assets for the holders that must then be exchanged for annuities that are a very poor compensation to poor people who ordinarily live short lives after retirement. Of course the cash invested in insurance policies becomes a slush fund for economic elites. That's the Chilean solution promoted by the fascistic military junta of the ultra-reactionary Agosto Pinochet who believed much that the American Right believes -- that no human suffering is in excess so long as it churns a profit for economic elites who happen only economic actors who have legitimate interests in prosperity.
Well-educated people might be better off investing in brokerage assets... but that assumes that they get such a chance. The non-rich will be obliged to pay about 15% of their income into schemes with a return on investment of about 2% while building the annuity while those who get custody of the funds get to invest for perhaps 7% on private toll roads (many of them built as freeways and practically given away to profiteering investors) to 30% on licit loan-sharking. Count on the System keeping pay abysmal and in need of 'supplements' by predatory lenders, as there will be no welfare for people not already rich.
So the New Deal and Great Society programs wither away while the plutocratic dream of a New Serfdom takes hold. Think again if you think that unions can help -- Big Business wants them eviscerated, if not outlawed in the Corporate State that the new Benito Mussolini wants. (Do I avoid Godwin's Law by referring to Mussolini instead of his deplorable stooge in Italy?) Government will represent economic power instead of the People, a trend that began when lobbyists became the real power in the legislative process in Congress and most State legislatures.
Make no mistake -- Donald Trump will be a break from the American political tradition. He already has shown much anger toward those who oppose his ideas, and I can imagine him seeking to turn the FBI and other government agencies (including the IRS and the BATF) against his more clever opponents -- people who have some principles and learning. Like other politicians of the past he will seek to expand his base -- but he will do so by making more people poor, ignorant, gullible, and helpless. Those are his supporters -- if white. While other politicians seeking to expand their base have sought to improve the lot of their voters and align themselves with those who want to improve the lot of their constituents (thus liberal blacks aligning with liberal Hispanics and white organized labor), Donald Trump seeks policies that will make his voters worse off and make more people poor. To expand his base he must make more people poor, ignorant, helpless, and destitute.
Model minorities? They will be in deep trouble, as usually happens in 'nationalist' dictatorships. A group that he has yet to attack rhetorically, Chinese-Americans, distrusts him enough to be for Hillary Clinton even if its demographics largely fit those of upper-income white people. But we need remember that any middle-class people not fitting the pattern of "white, Anglo, Christian, and straight" have good cause to distrust a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot on religion and crony capitalist who can do them no good. It is practically impossible to be part of the large black middle class without being well educated. Even small business owners are beginning to recognize that customers' revenue matters more than taxes... and such a black or Hispanic physician or dentist may recognize that much of his income comes from the welfare system -- and is not going to butcher the goose that delivers the golden eggs.
American Jews, arguably the oldest model minority in America, surely recognize that however precarious the situation of their kin in Israel, bigotry against Muslims in America bodes ill. Would you prefer that Palestinians move to America and succeed here or fester in refugee camps in Arab countries? Add to this -- the same base material for the counterfeit coin of old-fashioned anti-Jewish bigotry is the same being used against Islam today. Pam Geller, who expresses hysterical fear against Islam, is very unpopular in most Jewish circles. Islamophobia can easily metastasize into the antisemitism that murdered six million Jews in Europe. After all, German Jews were also a model minority before 1933.
Donald Trump may not be the brightest mind in American politics, but he certainly has some cunning, cynical people behind him. His campaign is all platitude "Make America Great Again"... "Believe me!" ("Believe me!" suggests to me much the same as the words "Trust me!" which indicate that the person asking for trust has done nothing to earn trust). Those cunning, cynical people want to reshape America into an economic order of ruthless efficiency and abysmal wages, perhaps the sort of America that was indeed great -- if one was a plutocrat of the Gilded Age. High technology will allow American plutocrats to reap maximal profits off workers who might as well be in China or Mexico as in the Corporate States of America.
There's nothing libertarian about Donald Trump unless it is to allow the super-rich to follow the dictum of the demonic mystic Aleister Crowley: "Do what thou wilt". For everyone else, the Corporate States of America will be a nightmare of abysmal pay, horrible working conditions, brutal management, surveillance, internal passports, and quite possibly a secret police.
I look at the Tea Party that the "Establishment" Republicans created to weaken the influence of what could have easily been one of the greatest Presidents in American history and create a new base of support for the GOP. The Tea Party cost the GOP "Establishment" practically nothing in 2010 and gave it great rewards. Now the sorts of people who war 18th-century costumes while failing to understand what the American Revolution was about and putting up signs that read "The Zoo has an African Lion -- the White House has a Lyin' African" (really, Barack Obama is one of the more scrupulously honest figures of high office in a very long time) now have a bill to collect upon. That bill is a cynical, unscrupulous demagogue named Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump is defeated on Tuesday, then we are still in the "dark woods" with "lions and tigers and bears -- oh, my!"... he will not be the last ignorance-pushing, anger-wielding, morally-depraved demagogue to challenge the System. If he does win.... it is too bad for me that I am too old to start over somewhere else. A slum in Calcutta is far preferable to a labor camp for political prisoners in America. And that's before I mention Berlin or Montevideo.
So "Truck Fump" on Election Day... and prepare yourself for the necessary struggle to maintain the freedom that people from Samuel Adams to Martin Luther King have risked everything to achieve. We are entering times as definitive for America as 1776, and this time the enemy is not a distant king trying to tighten control on loyal subjects in the Colonies as it is economic royalists who want us to be their serfs. Remember the immortal words of the doomed Nathan Hale:
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my country".
On Tuesday most of us have only one vote to give for this country... ideally so that nobody will ever be put in the same position as Nathan Hale against a vile, oppressive, unjust tyranny. Demagogues have an unsettling record of becoming tyrants, and Donald Trump does nothing to give me hope for anything else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.