12-15-2016, 12:36 AM
(12-14-2016, 07:53 PM)Bourbonista Wrote: Hi, new member here, long-time fan of 4T.
I think that the Trump election marks the beginning of the Regeneracy. The fact that most of the “establishment” media and political elites missed the strength of support for Trump among rural white voters and especially among educated suburban voters shows that Trump tapped in to a significant consensus among many Americans that the current system is irreparably broken and they are willing to bet on a crude, misogynistic, self-serving dilettante over any career politician, right or left.
But I don’t think Trump is the Grey Champion. He will precipitate the Crisis – trade war with China, Great Depression II, a likely constitutional crisis – but will not get a second term. It may be bad enough that a true Grey Champion, equal to Roosevelt or Lincoln will emerge.
God help us if not.
He will precipitate a Crisis through his own incompetence, moral malignancy, or both.... but he will have no means of solving anything. He could be the Neville Chamberlain to some tyrant who uses him. He could say so many offensive things that his Congressional and Gubernatorial stooges echo that he will cause mass demonstrations and protests that could make the Tea Party look like a garden party. He could get America into an economic meltdown with an All-For-the-Few economic policy that destroys the consumer economy that has underpinned capitalism since about 1900. He could foment ethnic and religious strife that could make America into a new Yugoslavia.
The system was already broken before November 9 because ruthless people found ways in which to game a political system intended for people who (like our Founding Fathers) were unwilling to cheat for power. We have a culture (mostly among white people -- blacks, Hispanics, and Asians generally reject this pattern if they are in or want to be in the middle class) that disparages education and is willing to make education necessary for anything other than a peon-like existence fiendishly costly. The legislative branch of the federal and most state governments is e4ffectively responsible to lobbyists and not constituents; gerrymandering ensures that the Right gets a huge advantage in the House. News coverage on one side is beginning to resemble Pravda at best and the Voelkischer Beobachter at worst. Politics has become an extremely expensive sport that only people who already have huge vested interests can win.
Now we have a President who has stoked ethnic divisions while flattering the 'Real (that is, White) America', disparages science when it runs afoul of his favored interests, uses elementary-level language, treats objective reality as disposable, calls for violence and harassment against opponents, and claims to know more than the experts with years of experience.
Can religion save us? Not if we can vote for a President who bragged about grabbing women by their crotches without their consent and walks into women's changing rooms when females are there.
Our best hope is that 2016 is a fluke that we can undo and transcend in 2021 or later. Maybe we need to short-circuit the Electoral College when a Presidential nominee gets a plurality with more than 45% of the vote. Maybe we need to have proportional representation in Congress, as Congressional districts have become artificial entities that make no sense except as political choices of those in power at some time.
So that we can compete -- more specifically, so that All Americans can compete -- with a world in which intellectual sophistication is the cause of economic wealth and have a social order in which mass ignorance does not pervert the political process and hurt people, we need to put more resources into formal education.
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.