06-20-2018, 07:13 AM
(06-19-2018, 09:38 PM)political Wrote: Americans seem to have forgotten US history.
Overstatement. Americans may not know the names of all the Presidents, let alone those of the British or French and Spanish monarchs (the latter important to large parts of America), and may not be as knowledgeable about the Napoleonic era as Europeans are. We tend to have narrow focuses on The Civil War and World War II, and much of the rest that we know comes from some form of entertainment. OK, the movies Spartacus, Gladiator, 1776, Amistad, and The Last Emperor aren't all bad, and anyone who has ever seen Fiddler on the Roof recognizes that Imperial Russia was a horrible place in which to be a subject of the Tsar. Likewise, anyone who has ever seen Cabaret (my favorite horror movie, even if it is conventionally seen as a musical) knows what happens to a depraved society under the economic stress of a Great Depression. We have plenty of cinematic films about World War II from such spoofs as You Nazzty Spy and The Great Dictator to the more recent Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour, the latter two depicting the most ominous time in human history, with psychodrama the propagandistic but masterful Casablanca and battle movies (take your pick of then) in between. We Americans are experts on World War II and to a lesser extent the American Civil War, but not on much else.
We could stand to pay more attention to antiquity. People who know their history can learn its lessons the easy way instead of having to find out the hard way -- if they survive. Surviving as a galley slave isn't worth it. Yes, there are fates worse than death. Between breaking at the wheel, being burned to death, and being fed to predatory animals (bears and Big Cats in the Roman arenas, dogs in Nazi concentration camps), there are deaths worse than sword or bullet.
The first lesson that we need to remember is that brute force is not enough. We should have learned that in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yes, brute force of the American armed forces played its role in destroying Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, but it may be surprising that the fascist powers themselves had enough brute force with which to beat the United States -- had it not been for American and British leadership having the moral compass that the fascists did not have. The second is that antiquity is far from irrelevant. The Founders of our country well knew the political struggles of the ancient Hebrews (our President functions much like one of the elected 'kings' of ancient Jewish states) and much of the ethical debate (to know more about them they would have had to have been scholars of the Torah and Talmud, which would have required that they be what they weren't -- the Founding Fathers were not Jewish), the philosophical debates of the ancient Greeks and Enlightenment-era political thinkers, the heroism of the Roman Republic, and -- as a warning -- the depravity and decline of the Roman Empire. The third is that history is far from an inevitable progression from the hunter-gatherer way of life to technological modernity and cultural sophistication.
It may be my opinion, but we are wiser to fortify and maintain our institutions than to destroy them in revolution, let them rot to the point that we no longer have a society, or start some disastrous course of perverse expansionism that leads to the physical destruction of the basis of our prosperity -- only to have to reconstruct it all the hard way. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain relevant -- if with some healthy grains of salt.
We are in a Crisis Era, one potentially even more dangerous than World War II to the world or as destructive to America as the Civil War. We have close to the worst possible leader as President and a majority of politicians acting as if this President is the Heaven-sent savior of America. Some of us see what is wrong, and the broader the scope of one's understanding of history, philosophy, and economics, the more wrong one sees in contemporary America. We will need to go back to what we used to do well. Crony capitalism, superstition, and politics that say the equivalent of "F--- you!" to the side that just lost the most recent election get bad results no matter how skillfully a leadership applies them.
Liberals may be catching on. They are beginning to recognize the importance of family, tradition, character, and civility, which used to be conservative strengths. They have quit believing that economic distress creates bad character. There are plenty of good people in the nastiest ghettos, barrios, and reservations; Donald Trump, who never lacked for anything, is a horrible person. Maybe liberals earlier defined same-sex couples as 'family' because such could protect children. (Paradoxically I became pro-homosexual after I was threatened with gay-bashing, and discovering that mainstream homosexuals are as hostile to sexual abuse of children as I am. But I have never had much sympathy for criminality no matter where I have been on the political spectrum). Traditions may differ by ethnicity and religion, but we can all pick and choose for ourselves. Character is the difference not in stepping on a twenty-dollar bill that blows past one at a gas station (I would have been a fool not to do step on it) but instead to go to the pumps, recognized that some woman was perplexed at having only two instead of three such images of Andrew Jackson. I could giver her the twenty back so that she could fill her pickup or that I might buy myself some beer. I ended up with a soft drink instead. Civility is the difference between working things out or proclaiming "My way or the highway!" (which, if things go badly could go "My way or the shooting pit!") Liberals may be catching on before conservatives. This said, conservatives can start to see the betrayal of their interests when the President is a crass demagogue with dictatorial or despotic tendencies. When conservatives and liberals can decide alike that liberal democracy is better than exploiting a temporary advantage for personal gain and indulgence, then we have solved the problem that most needs solving.
Character is destiny, said John McCain. So did Heraclitus. The simplest statements of reality are often found in antiquity.
Quote:Americans either believe the USA is the most free country in the world or think that the US never was a free country.
The United States was the first free country (with the qualification of male supremacy and of chattel slavery) in the modern world. We may have not been the first country to abolish slavery throughout its domain (Britain did that first, and in a way that I consider far better for its future -- I suspect that Lincoln was going to imitate the British in buying the freedom of slaves from their masters, which would have been far less costly than the Civil War) -- but even Britain did not become a full democracy until the Whigs gave the vote to the rural poor in the 1880s.
We have the formalities. We need to honor those formalities again. Then, and only then, do we achieve Abraham Lincoln's dream of a "New Birth of Freedom".
Quote:No one remembers that the US used to have freedom, but lost it.
I differ with your simplistic overstatement. I can think of a political system from which we could learn much -- that of Germany. The British, French, and Americans imposed upon defeated Germany a political system with no seams through which someone could impose a totalitarian ideology or practice. Having seen what Karl Rove tried to do with Dubya as President and what Donald Trump does today, I recognize that we will need to close some of those seams. It used to be that political figures caviled at the idea of anyone ever being indecent enough to exploit the seams in our Constitutional system, and politicians who knew of the seams pretended that they did not know about them -- and did not exploit them. That is over.
After Donald Trump is out to pasture, the generational cycle suggests that we will end up with a mature Reactive or two -- Washington, Adams, Truman, and Eisenhower. (The Civil War vets took on Civic character after the war, at least in the North). Those were above-average Presidents, all well into their fifties if not into their sixties when they became President. Obama fits the pattern well except for becoming President in his mid-forties. He was about as mature as any of the other mature Reactives, so age isn't everything. He fits the pattern except for being a bit young for a President and (for a Reactive) arriving in the Highest Office of our Nation before the Crisis Era is largely over. Generation X is now between 37 and 57 in age, and the President who follows Trump after the 2020 election could be of Generation X -- and not a Boomer. Of course there is one catastrophic sort of Reactive to avoid at all cost -- the cynical, misguided Reactive who uses his great power to settle personal, group, and national scores -- typically fascists and Stalin's Commie henchmen. In Hungary that was the Hitler-supporting Ferenc Szalasi (hanged as a traitor and Holocaust perpetrator) and "Stalin's greatest Hungarian student" Matyas Rakosi, a fanatical Communist who used his power to destroy non-Communists and eliminate his potential rivals. Rakosi fled before the 1956 Hungarian Revolution figuring that he could die with a rope around his neck if he had to account for his crimes.
Several of the possible Democratic nominees for President (and I predict that any winner of the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 will defeat President Trump because Americans whatever their ideological position loathe corruption and cruelty) are members of Generation X. We have a good taste of what a mature Reactive is like as a President even if we are too young to remember Truman or Eisenhower. Even though they have as different curricula vitae as they could possibly have, Obama is arguably more similar in temperament and political style... and results... to Eisenhower. Take away the 'excessive melanin' of Obama, and white America respects him more. We will be ready for that sort of leadership again, and we will work better with it.
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.