01-24-2018, 06:10 PM
We have over two hundred years of consistent respect by federal officials for the freedom of political and religious expression. In one day anyone who suggested curtailing speech hostile to his political agenda to George III; more recently we compare someone like that to Hitler or Stalin. What we cannot do is to advocate violence or a forcible overthrow of the government. Expression that leads to the formation of a lynch mob would not be protected under the First Amendment; it would be evidence of a crime, either conspiracy to violate civil rights or the violation of such civil rights if there were to be a lynch mob formed.
I am probably as sharp a partisan as anyone here, but even I have my limits. I would oppose what Donald Trump were doing if allegedly on my side or on behalf of my agenda. The essence of democracy is not that people participate in elections; it is that they are willing to lose elections. By losing, some people find themselves inadequate for their quest for elective office and go on to something else, including what they had been doing before then -- or finding out how to better play the game. And, yes, electoral politics is a game.
I see this time as particularly dangerous because many things are possible, and most of them horrible. If there is ever an opportunity to replace a heritage of liberal democracy with entrenched terror it is a Crisis Era. Just think of the most blatant example of the last completed Crisis Era -- the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Figuring that the German pattern of generations was close to ours (the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War) around 1932, Hitler could have never have risen to power without:
1. a war that scarred millions of soldiers and, if the cannon fodder of WWI died in a war whose purpose nobody can yet explain, their families; many saw defeat as shame to be avenged
2. hyperinflation that wasted the savings of the middle class; small savers, unlike debtors and big creditors, form the bulk of sane conservative movements and parties instead of extremist causes of the Right and Left
3. extreme inequality -- Germany may have had among the highest measures of GDP per capita, yet it also had among the lowest wages for industrial workers
4. the mass perception of people that believers in a religion that most Germans did not understand were more a conspiracy than a faith, and that had profiteered from all that went badly for most Germans
5. the discreditation of the Idealist generation for its role in WWI, leaving a gap for perverse moralizing by the Reactive generation
6. a vehement anti-capitalist movement that scared millions
7. the celebration of crank pseudoscience and pseudohistory because it soothed hurt national pride
8. an economic meltdown that hit just as Germany seemed to be recovering from the hyperinflation of the early 1920s
We are nowhere near that. We have not been defeated in a meat-grinder war; we have no experience with hyperinflation; there are plenty of potential Boomer leaders available should something go wrong with the Trump agenda and the Boom-led Religious Right; we have no Communists calling for violent revolution. (Indeed, an article on the website of the Communist Party of the USA reads "Do you want to slug a Nazi? Don't!", with a warning that violence that American KKK and neo-Nazi fascists get becomes a pretext for the violence that those fascists want to inflict).
Donald Trump is a nasty piece of work, but our heritage so far thwarts the worst aspects of his agenda. Of course this is a Crisis Era, and what can happen in such a time includes bad stuff impossible in other times. If there is ever an opportunity for a scenario resembling Seven Days in May or The Manchurian Candidate, it is now. If there is ever a time for political leadership to think that it can do thermonuclear warfare it is now. If any President could go down in a military coup, it is paradoxically the Chickenhawk who flatters the generals and admirals.
We also have big problems to solve. One is that manufacturing is in severe decline as a share of national output that the covenant between manufacturer and industrial worker ("You make the stuff; we pay you well; we expect you to buy it as if you were middle class") is over. Perhaps the great devaluation is of labor, and such will result in an economic meltdown as severe and as difficult to meet as the three-year meltdown that began with the 1929 Stock Market Crash. It could take a depression to rectify the inequality in America today as one rectified the inequality of the 1920s. A President who seeks to treat his demographic opponents as ungrateful enemies and tries to hurt them with questionable reforms of the economy may find centripetal and even secessionist trends.
I am probably as sharp a partisan as anyone here, but even I have my limits. I would oppose what Donald Trump were doing if allegedly on my side or on behalf of my agenda. The essence of democracy is not that people participate in elections; it is that they are willing to lose elections. By losing, some people find themselves inadequate for their quest for elective office and go on to something else, including what they had been doing before then -- or finding out how to better play the game. And, yes, electoral politics is a game.
I see this time as particularly dangerous because many things are possible, and most of them horrible. If there is ever an opportunity to replace a heritage of liberal democracy with entrenched terror it is a Crisis Era. Just think of the most blatant example of the last completed Crisis Era -- the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Figuring that the German pattern of generations was close to ours (the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War) around 1932, Hitler could have never have risen to power without:
1. a war that scarred millions of soldiers and, if the cannon fodder of WWI died in a war whose purpose nobody can yet explain, their families; many saw defeat as shame to be avenged
2. hyperinflation that wasted the savings of the middle class; small savers, unlike debtors and big creditors, form the bulk of sane conservative movements and parties instead of extremist causes of the Right and Left
3. extreme inequality -- Germany may have had among the highest measures of GDP per capita, yet it also had among the lowest wages for industrial workers
4. the mass perception of people that believers in a religion that most Germans did not understand were more a conspiracy than a faith, and that had profiteered from all that went badly for most Germans
5. the discreditation of the Idealist generation for its role in WWI, leaving a gap for perverse moralizing by the Reactive generation
6. a vehement anti-capitalist movement that scared millions
7. the celebration of crank pseudoscience and pseudohistory because it soothed hurt national pride
8. an economic meltdown that hit just as Germany seemed to be recovering from the hyperinflation of the early 1920s
We are nowhere near that. We have not been defeated in a meat-grinder war; we have no experience with hyperinflation; there are plenty of potential Boomer leaders available should something go wrong with the Trump agenda and the Boom-led Religious Right; we have no Communists calling for violent revolution. (Indeed, an article on the website of the Communist Party of the USA reads "Do you want to slug a Nazi? Don't!", with a warning that violence that American KKK and neo-Nazi fascists get becomes a pretext for the violence that those fascists want to inflict).
Donald Trump is a nasty piece of work, but our heritage so far thwarts the worst aspects of his agenda. Of course this is a Crisis Era, and what can happen in such a time includes bad stuff impossible in other times. If there is ever an opportunity for a scenario resembling Seven Days in May or The Manchurian Candidate, it is now. If there is ever a time for political leadership to think that it can do thermonuclear warfare it is now. If any President could go down in a military coup, it is paradoxically the Chickenhawk who flatters the generals and admirals.
We also have big problems to solve. One is that manufacturing is in severe decline as a share of national output that the covenant between manufacturer and industrial worker ("You make the stuff; we pay you well; we expect you to buy it as if you were middle class") is over. Perhaps the great devaluation is of labor, and such will result in an economic meltdown as severe and as difficult to meet as the three-year meltdown that began with the 1929 Stock Market Crash. It could take a depression to rectify the inequality in America today as one rectified the inequality of the 1920s. A President who seeks to treat his demographic opponents as ungrateful enemies and tries to hurt them with questionable reforms of the economy may find centripetal and even secessionist trends.
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.