11-20-2016, 06:08 PM
Bad times promote bad solutions like fascism, Marxism-Leninism, revivalist fundamentalism, and systemic racism. It should hardly surprise us that the parts of America in which economic distress is most severe have been the homes of sundry KKK movements.
Nobody wants to be a loser, but severe inequality makes far more people losers -- people struggling just to survive despite competence within a productive economy.
When I was a child I was told "Don't fear technology, for it will create more jobs than it takes." Anyone with the capacity to do trade school or college would have opportunities at jobs paying better than manually entering transactions onto a pegboard ledger or making repetitive calculations. The technology came, but the jobs disappeared.
To be sure we were all told, "to get a good job get a good education", which was basically "don't drop out of school". Unskilled workers, typically high-school dropouts, would be out in the cold. Technology would bring more opportunity and make life better for all but the dullest of dullards, just as in the Gilded Age. Tough luck dullards -- just get your lazy derrieres on welfare, and try to find some meaning in life.
But something got in the way -- the income from augmented production did not trickle down as pay for even the knowledge-based workers who were to prevail in the new, glorious age. Knowledge workers eventually competed for fewer jobs, and even at times the 'dumbest' of jobs, the ones that used to be relegated largely to dullards. Economic elites took all the net gain.
Instead of knowledge-based and manual (or low-skilled) workers joining in solidarity against the economic elites that have exploited everyone, the elites have turned the middle class and the working class against each other in economic competition in a drive to the bottom for wages and treatment. Donald trump is not the cause; he is the symptom.
Nobody wants to be a loser, but severe inequality makes far more people losers -- people struggling just to survive despite competence within a productive economy.
When I was a child I was told "Don't fear technology, for it will create more jobs than it takes." Anyone with the capacity to do trade school or college would have opportunities at jobs paying better than manually entering transactions onto a pegboard ledger or making repetitive calculations. The technology came, but the jobs disappeared.
To be sure we were all told, "to get a good job get a good education", which was basically "don't drop out of school". Unskilled workers, typically high-school dropouts, would be out in the cold. Technology would bring more opportunity and make life better for all but the dullest of dullards, just as in the Gilded Age. Tough luck dullards -- just get your lazy derrieres on welfare, and try to find some meaning in life.
But something got in the way -- the income from augmented production did not trickle down as pay for even the knowledge-based workers who were to prevail in the new, glorious age. Knowledge workers eventually competed for fewer jobs, and even at times the 'dumbest' of jobs, the ones that used to be relegated largely to dullards. Economic elites took all the net gain.
Instead of knowledge-based and manual (or low-skilled) workers joining in solidarity against the economic elites that have exploited everyone, the elites have turned the middle class and the working class against each other in economic competition in a drive to the bottom for wages and treatment. Donald trump is not the cause; he is the symptom.
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.