Fighting The Fourth Reich

[pbrower2a]

(08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:



A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative.  I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.

WTF is "Generation Z?"

"X" -- what Howe and Strauss call the Thirteenth Generation for being the thirteenth generation to know the United States of America. "Thirteenth" never took off, and "X" has entered commercial use for describing the generation as a demographic.

"Y" or Millennial -- "Millennial" has been in far more common use in commerce, mass culture, and academia.

"Z" -- sometimes called the Homeland Generation. The generation to know a Department of Homeland Security. "Department of Homeland Security" sounds like a great name -- for a secret police. One distinction is that it has always known having had to use a passport, or at least an 'enhanced driver's license', to get through American borders. At this I put its first years of birth  in the twenty-first century and not in 1996 or so.

So far as I can tell, nobody has ever called Boomers "Generation W".

It is difficult to discern the politics of this generation. If the Silent are any indicator, I expect it to begin very conformist as a "me too" generation, ratifying what its next-elders say once it reaches adulthood. We don't have any voting record. With Generation X we saw a voting pattern that made the difference in the 1980 election by going more sharply toward Reagan than most expected, turning what might have been a somewhat-close Presidential election, at least in electoral votes (maybe like 2012 for Obama) into an electoral rout. Generation X became less conservative with time as Republicans doubled down on such social issues as abortion, gay rights, anti-feminism, and the Fundamentalist agenda, but it was more attuned to free-market ideas and less hostile to corporate power than any generation since the Lost Generation. Few conservatives predicted that X secularism and libertarian values on sexuality would be an open door for liberalism within Generation X. 

....The hack that Kinser shows in this video seems to express wishful thinking more than anything else about politics. "X" and "Millennial" will be the strongest influences upon this generation, with Boomers likely to appear either as having grandparent-like influence as relics of a time when black-and-white television was the norm and before the Interstate Highway System was largely built or as old political figures (like Donald Trump this time or FDR in the last Crisis Era) to be recognized for greatness or to be rejected for awfulness.

Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth are yet to enter adulthood. Unlike Generation X, which was clearly much less pretentious about its culture having any educational or moral content and was much more reactionary on economics than its elders, the current child generation (Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth) have yet to graduate from high school. For most whom we can expect to become leaders they have yet to enter college, and there they get to encounter adult ideas generally unavailable to those who go no further than High School or take a strictly-vocational course. They have yet to recognize the superficiality of the digital world.  They will get some hard knocks in the workplace and in economic life.

That hack does suggest a positive in recognizing thrift as a merit in a world of debt. But the solution to personal debt is not self-denial. We need remember that government debt allows personal saving. That's not to justify waste as in show projects, patronage, and sweetheart deals -- or wars for profit. It is difficult to save if rents and taxes are both high. I can see the next adult generation finding ways to cut corners in the cost of living, and the most effective way that I can see is to move away from high-cost areas. If they must move from California to Ohio to take Grandma with senile dementia or Grandpa with Parkinsonism and find that they can do better economically working as a retail clerk in Dreariness, Ohio than as a technician in Silicon Valley because the rent is a third as much in Ohio, then maybe they will stay in Ohio. If you can live better in Dreariness, Ohio because the rent is as third as much and your wages are cut by a half, you might tolerate the ugly urban scene, the monotonous expanses of farmland, and having to shovel snow.

Yes, I understand that Kinser now sees Donald Trump as the most wonderful thing to have ever happened to American political life and to be the wave of a glorious future of national pride and of economic growth predicated upon extreme inequality.

Donald Trump is not a free-enterprise advocate. He is an advocate of an order in which the expression of economic virtue is that the Right people (like he who has been a spoiled, privileged, irresponsible brat all his life) get whatever they want and everyone else yields to them -- even in rejecting reason and learning. Even if he gets away with it, his successors might not. In the latter part of the 18th century, people who rejected faith and class privilege over reason had a quick and dramatic cure for people who believed that peons existed to indulge and enrich them.

 

Marie Antoinette, object of this scene, was the definitive snowflake. She was not the most culpable person of the  Ancien Régime, but she was one of its more obnoxious exponents, and thus particularly vulnerable when the political climate became hostile to her type. Of course we would be more technologically sophisticated -- maybe we would use nitrogen asphyxiation. Maybe it will lack the drama of a beheading...

Just a reminder. Trump is doing far more harm than good, and if history doesn't do something bad to him it will do so to some of his successors. I can't say whether Kinser is a true convert to American reaction or has found it a marvelous destroyer of a capitalist order that he recently disparaged -- sort of like some Vietcong who seemed to sell out Communism on behalf of a corrupt régime as a fanatical supporter who discredited the order and made as Commie takeover possible, selling out again to the Commies. Or maybe that was the 'game'. Sort of like Victor Ippolitovich (why am I tempted to call him 'Ipokritovich') Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago?