01-07-2017, 12:09 PM
(01-07-2017, 02:10 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:If you are who I think you are, someone who admits that our country may be lurching toward an American-style fascism, I'm not sure why you voted for Trump. He checks off more than a few boxes of an emergent fascism in the body politic. If he does not lead us directly into the funhouse of fascism, might he not lead us, at least, into its antechamber? Is that not dangerous enough? You give evidence of nuanced thought from what I've seen in previous posts. I'd like to think that I do, too. (The older I get, the less I tend to see the world in binary terms: you know, war or peace, capitalism or socialism, "You're either with us or against us.") God knows you don't have to explain your rationale to me or anyone else. But I just don't get it, especially with you.Quote:Thanks for the grammatical correction. Shame on this retired English teacher; I must be getting sloppy in my old age.
No worries, it's more a question of semantics than grammar. Syntactically, it's perfectly valid, it just doesn't mean the same thing.
Quote:Can you explain what you mean by "in terms of turning placement, and role in history"?
Well, unless you're like Mikebert and ready to throw the whole theory to the winds because it isn't working out the way you thought it would (a little gratuitous, I know, but I mean it in good fun, Mike), you have to look not just at the man, but at the point in the saeculum in which each gets elected. If Trump had actually run and gotten elected in the 90s, yeah, sure, they probably would have turned out pretty much the same, politically (well, not really, you'd still have to account for the exorbitant scope of powers the one position has versus the other). But here we are, well into the 4T, and Trump is taking the helm of an almost wholly Republican government, a bitterly divided public hungry for dramatic change, and a sensitive geopolitical position. Berlusconi, by contrast, was the head of a government that was pretty much designed not to work, in a time and region where nothing much was going on. The outcome is just likely to be different, even if you assumed they were actually the same person in different wigs.
That's what I meant.
Quote:Your point about my beating the subject of "neoliberalism" with a cudgel is well taken. But I'll not stop and here's why--
Strauss and Howe make liberal reference to the "old civic order," or some such words to that effect, that is defeated or cast aside in each Fourth Turning. By civic order, I think they meant the prevailing political/economic system that, however long it may have endured, or how well it may have served the ruling class, reaches a point where the subjugation or oppression of a people, class of people, or country becomes so dire that it precipitates an existential crisis. What would we call those political/economic systems of our past turnings? The Revolutionary War: colonialism; the Civil War: slavery; the Great Depression/World War II: laissez-faire capitalism/fascism.
Don't we similarly have to put a name--some name--to the current political/economic system that has become so pathological that it, too, must be overturned and replaced with something better? If not the term "neoliberalism," then what? Again, I prefer we attack its basic tenets--like privatization--which the public can more readily get its arms around.
As much as I object to Trump's insistence that we label the jihadism of ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc. as "radical Islamic terrorism," he is simply doing what every leader does in a time of war, that is, naming the enemy. That can be done fairly or in propagandistic terms. I much prefer "neoliberalism," as confusing as the term may be to the masses. I believe it fairly describes the civic order that has prevailed here and abroad for nearly four decades now. It is part ideology, part political project, but above all the predominant civic order in much of the Western world. It has reached the point of morbidity, though it yet lives on, like the Walking Dead...
Dude, I, like a lot of other people in this country and elsewhere, am all about getting rid of the present order. It's a big part of why I actually voted for Trump. I don't think you and I necessarily see eye to eye on what exactly we'd like to see, instead, but neither of us seems to have much desire to maintain the status-quo. We should be mindful that what comes after might not necessarily be better, but that's a fight for tomorrow.
I just think, as you said, that you might be better off placing a little more emphasis on specific points you'd like to see addressed (in so far as you are using a message board filled with awkward geeks as a political rally), and less on pounding away at a term of art that the vast majority of people here in the States instinctively think means the exact opposite of what it does.
Just a little more subtlety, if you please. I hate being barked at, or even being in the vicinity of people barking.
Anyway, the problem with downplaying "neoliberalism," and attacking its individual planks instead, is that that political tack comes off as so much "scattershot" to the public: the very problem that hindered Hillary Clinton and--to a much lesser extent--Bernie Sanders, who at least offered a half-formed vision to the voters. The Republicans, I hate to admit, do a much better job of characterizing their policies as a whole. The Democrats have to roll all the way back to LBJ and his Great Society to find a succinct summation of their policies. "Hope and change"? (Way too nebulous for me, Obama.) Trump at least gave Americans a ball cap slogan they could understand; Hillary gave us "I'm With Her." (By the way, if you're at all interested, I'll tell you sometime about a coffee shop conversation that I overheard about Her in my conservative small town prior to the election. It was as illuminating as it was disgusting.)
I think where you and I really part ways is that you envision Trump as a departure from the "present order" or "status quo," which I've characterized as neoliberalism. From the policies that he's proposed, and the administration that he's now assembling, it sure looks like neoliberalism to me: privatization? (check); deregulation? (check again); tax cuts for the rich? (big check), austerity for everyone else? (We'll see). You rightly mentioned Trump's stance against free trade as a break from neoliberal orthodoxy, but I see that as a mere sop to the working-and-middle class voters that he had to woo to swing a narrow victory his way. In the main, his policies amount to little more than reconstituted Reaganomics, in my humble opinion.
I readily concede that Trump might prove transformational, though enough time remains in this Fourth Turning for him to merely prove transitional, paving the way for something better (some kind of post-capitalism)--or worse (neo-feudalism or fascism, God forbid).
I apologize for the "barking." Don't mean to come off like some drill sergeant. Chalk it up to political passion...