12-28-2016, 03:06 PM
(12-28-2016, 02:16 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-27-2016, 12:44 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: I believe it is time to revisit this ideology by beginning a separate thread on this relatively new 4T forum, which I now intend to do, if for no other reason than the fact that the Trump administration promises to deliver "neoliberalism on steroids."
Every success holds the key to its own undoing. I would have preferred another alternative than the GOP dominance we're about to endure, but it's the solution that happened. The blame? There's plenty to share, but fully 90% of it resides with the Democratic Party, and its habit of excessive self absorption. Now, they get pulled into the street, and have to find their way. If they fail, then they dissolve and are replaced. In the end, the neoliberal model will fail, because it has no structural integrity, but in the interim, we will suffer the indignities we fully deserve.
I am tempted to believe that the GOP 'happy time' of political lockstep in which solutions not offered from outside the GOP are rejected completely will become a political disaster. People who will get hurt or left behind in the transformation of America into a "Christian and Corporate State" will go to the street, and they will organize politically.
The success of the Tea Party demonstrates that successful causes do not require well-honed politicians to change the majorities in Congress. It is about time for younger politicians in their 30s (by 2020 almost entirely Millennial adults) to have success in reaching high elective office. If Boomers like Hillary Clinton cannot excite them, then a Boomer like Donald Trump can offend them. Oh, so America is to be 'great' by becoming a high-price, cheap-labor country in which education is derided and partisan politics of one side shapes everything?
I see little evidence that Millennial adults would on the whole make political choices that hurt their children.
I expect that Donald Trump will replace the Awakening ditty "All you need is Love" with "All you need is Work"... there will be plenty of work, as is the norm in any fascist society. The problem is that the pay attached to the work is a travesty, and that the work becomes destructive of human qualities.
If there is a dark side to the Millennial Generation is that it could morph into the reason-is-everything ethos of Jacobins and introduce the 2020 version of the guillotine (nitrogen asphyxiation?) as the solution to the presence of people unduly connected to the discreditable past.
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.