08-24-2018, 12:13 PM
Although we are in a Crisis Era and were in one eighty years ago, we are in very different ones. The 1930s led Americans into an omnibus culture that homogenized tastes. People were not looking for ways to offend sensibilities in their cultural expressions. Just consider the American cinema of the late 1930s and early 1940s -- it is still highly watchable. Music was gravitating toward Big band, arguably the greatest popular music ever, the only challenges to that label being whether Strauss waltzes are "popular" or "classical" or whether the music of Haydn and Mozart were considered "popular" in their time.
The big political difference from eighty years ago could hardly be more different. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the calming effect of Barack Obama -- on a far-wider swath of Americans. Maybe it helped that expectations of most Americans were far lower because by 1932 they had far less to lose than they now are. I look at some of the approval ratings of Donald Trump and I see a country in which a huge proportion of the American people are dissidents. FDR was as good at appealing to the best in human nature as Donald Trump is at offending it. Add to this, the Great Depression humanized Americans (better be nice to others, because you may need their help) while the Lesser Depression brought out the worst in economic elites.
Are we objectively worse than we were in the 1930s? No. We have long rejected Jim Crow practices, although we have some loud, abrasive racists and (even worse and more dangerous) religious bigots. We have largely accepted same-sex marriage. If we have more exposure of sex scandals it is because we have less certainty of concealing them, and no tolerance of such. Women obviously have more choices in life (if they are reasonably competent) than they used to have. Crime rates are much lower than they were forty to fifty years ago.
But -- American politics have not been any worse in a very long time. We have polarization rivaling that that preceded the American Civil War, and that analogy scares anyone who can connect the polarization of American politics 160 years ago to what happened 157 years ago. American political life eighty years ago was comparatively placid. .
From an essay by Sean Wilentz "George W. Bush -- Worst President Ever?"
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...ry-192899/
I'll go further with Trump: this is the first President to give us more than a non-zero chance of a military coup. Dubya may have created a bigger economic mess by supporting a corrupt boom in real -estate lending than the recession that America had gotten into due to the implosion of the dot.com industry and Enron Corporation... but it seemed sensible enough to a majority of Americans. He might have bungled America into a pointless war in Iraq, but he did so with the best intentions if perhaps flawed info.
But consider what Dubya never did, or at least did less of. He did not mock the disabled. He did not promote ethnic or religious bigotry. He did nothing to divide NATO. He may have had some losers in his cabinet, but nowhere near the collection of fanatics and self-serving profiteers as Trump. Dubya seems to have been loyal enough to his wife that he would never risk a big chunk of money and, worse, its exposure in a court of law, to cover up involvement with a porn star. Although the Bush-Cheney administration had its own Orwellian turns of phrase (like "clean coal", an oxymoron, and "healthy forests", which means that the forest is clear-cut -- horrible for conservation, but good for one-time profits), Donald Trump has turned even more words into Orwellian lies.
If we Americans had been a bit more patient, maybe we would have given Obama more of a chance to solve some of our problems. Maybe conservatives would have been more willing to improve Obamacare or to create a more solid foundation for it, perhaps imposing or increasing some 'sin taxes' or pushing tort reform to make it less expensive, or removing the ban on negotiating pharmaceutical prices. Maybe they would have recognized that shoring up the financial system without sending hordes of bankers to prison just because they did what all other bankers had to do to stay in business that the President deserves a little leeway. Maybe they would have decided that rational thought achieves more than does demagoguery as with the Tea Party Movement and then Trump.
But haven't I gone a long way from "Singles and Dating" by explaining how dangerous and unpromising our world is?
The big political difference from eighty years ago could hardly be more different. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the calming effect of Barack Obama -- on a far-wider swath of Americans. Maybe it helped that expectations of most Americans were far lower because by 1932 they had far less to lose than they now are. I look at some of the approval ratings of Donald Trump and I see a country in which a huge proportion of the American people are dissidents. FDR was as good at appealing to the best in human nature as Donald Trump is at offending it. Add to this, the Great Depression humanized Americans (better be nice to others, because you may need their help) while the Lesser Depression brought out the worst in economic elites.
Are we objectively worse than we were in the 1930s? No. We have long rejected Jim Crow practices, although we have some loud, abrasive racists and (even worse and more dangerous) religious bigots. We have largely accepted same-sex marriage. If we have more exposure of sex scandals it is because we have less certainty of concealing them, and no tolerance of such. Women obviously have more choices in life (if they are reasonably competent) than they used to have. Crime rates are much lower than they were forty to fifty years ago.
But -- American politics have not been any worse in a very long time. We have polarization rivaling that that preceded the American Civil War, and that analogy scares anyone who can connect the polarization of American politics 160 years ago to what happened 157 years ago. American political life eighty years ago was comparatively placid. .
From an essay by Sean Wilentz "George W. Bush -- Worst President Ever?"
Quote:How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.BushTRUMP, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly,BushTRUMP has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...ry-192899/
I'll go further with Trump: this is the first President to give us more than a non-zero chance of a military coup. Dubya may have created a bigger economic mess by supporting a corrupt boom in real -estate lending than the recession that America had gotten into due to the implosion of the dot.com industry and Enron Corporation... but it seemed sensible enough to a majority of Americans. He might have bungled America into a pointless war in Iraq, but he did so with the best intentions if perhaps flawed info.
But consider what Dubya never did, or at least did less of. He did not mock the disabled. He did not promote ethnic or religious bigotry. He did nothing to divide NATO. He may have had some losers in his cabinet, but nowhere near the collection of fanatics and self-serving profiteers as Trump. Dubya seems to have been loyal enough to his wife that he would never risk a big chunk of money and, worse, its exposure in a court of law, to cover up involvement with a porn star. Although the Bush-Cheney administration had its own Orwellian turns of phrase (like "clean coal", an oxymoron, and "healthy forests", which means that the forest is clear-cut -- horrible for conservation, but good for one-time profits), Donald Trump has turned even more words into Orwellian lies.
If we Americans had been a bit more patient, maybe we would have given Obama more of a chance to solve some of our problems. Maybe conservatives would have been more willing to improve Obamacare or to create a more solid foundation for it, perhaps imposing or increasing some 'sin taxes' or pushing tort reform to make it less expensive, or removing the ban on negotiating pharmaceutical prices. Maybe they would have recognized that shoring up the financial system without sending hordes of bankers to prison just because they did what all other bankers had to do to stay in business that the President deserves a little leeway. Maybe they would have decided that rational thought achieves more than does demagoguery as with the Tea Party Movement and then Trump.
But haven't I gone a long way from "Singles and Dating" by explaining how dangerous and unpromising our world is?
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.