05-17-2018, 09:08 AM
...or another possible interpretation: an unusually-slow transition from a 3T to a 4T instead of the usually-abrupt one.
A 1929-like or 2008-like market crash (they were very similar in cause and level of destruction after a year and a half) could be even more protracted than the 2008-2009 meltdown. Personal, public, and commercial debt are far higher while savings are practically non-existent. We have been spending our grandchildren's inheritances for about fifty years, and we could easily end up with no means of meeting an economic meltdown. There will be little to borrow for the usual infrastructure projects that put people to work in construction products and supplies for those construction projects. Selling stuff off? What if there are no buyers of something like the Interstate Highway System?
Whether the Republicans get to a filibuster-proof Senate will matter little, and it is practically impossible unless Donald Trump should get and remain especially popular. I can see Republicans picking up Senate seats in states that Trump won handily of the 2016 election marks a radical shift in public attitudes. But did that radical shift stick?
...After Trump, America will need a Lincoln or an FDR to set things right. As for the right-led Culture Wars... the Right has largely lost those. Obergfell v. Hodges is settled. If anything, the Right may have tried to use antipathy toward same-sex marriage in 2004 to win one Presidential election, only for it to backfire about ten years later.
The Hard Right has ethnic and religious bigotry, superstition, and economic inequality to offer for a country that shows little use for this.
A 1929-like or 2008-like market crash (they were very similar in cause and level of destruction after a year and a half) could be even more protracted than the 2008-2009 meltdown. Personal, public, and commercial debt are far higher while savings are practically non-existent. We have been spending our grandchildren's inheritances for about fifty years, and we could easily end up with no means of meeting an economic meltdown. There will be little to borrow for the usual infrastructure projects that put people to work in construction products and supplies for those construction projects. Selling stuff off? What if there are no buyers of something like the Interstate Highway System?
Whether the Republicans get to a filibuster-proof Senate will matter little, and it is practically impossible unless Donald Trump should get and remain especially popular. I can see Republicans picking up Senate seats in states that Trump won handily of the 2016 election marks a radical shift in public attitudes. But did that radical shift stick?
...After Trump, America will need a Lincoln or an FDR to set things right. As for the right-led Culture Wars... the Right has largely lost those. Obergfell v. Hodges is settled. If anything, the Right may have tried to use antipathy toward same-sex marriage in 2004 to win one Presidential election, only for it to backfire about ten years later.
The Hard Right has ethnic and religious bigotry, superstition, and economic inequality to offer for a country that shows little use for this.
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.