(10-14-2018, 10:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-13-2018, 03:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Millennials find themselves with huge student loan debts, face the highest real rents in American history, and encounter class-based rigid ceilings to advancement in bureaucratic organizations. They pay heavily for living in what looks increasingly like an aristocratic plutocracy, and the current majorities in the House, Senate, and most state legislatures in no way represent Millennial sensibilities or interests. Donald Trump is about as antithetical to Millennial sensibilities as any politician could be short of an out-and-out Nazi, Ku Kluxist, or Marxist-Leninist. Excellent electronic gadgets are poor compensation for being competent but having little chance to get ahead.
I do not doubt that the recent Millennials have been schrod by the ruling elites. I was just saying that the GIs were schrod worse by their ruling elites. Revolution today is far less likely given the failure of the old Soviet Union. The see saw encourages those looking for change away from violence. The spiral of violence is showing no movement towards a violent solution.
I do agree with your opinions on timing and who will be held responsible. We can only hope that as the Millennials take their place in power, they can overcome the current stalemates.
Like all sane people, I do not want war or revolution. I'm not saying that we will avoid war. Most warmongers have proclaimed that their people want peace -- but war happens when the warmongers have the effective veto. The stratification of society creates political instability as well as economic distress, but I can see the elites deciding that dishing out a dole is wiser than creating an angry populace that has a revolution like that of France in 1789, let alone that of Russia in 1917, happen.
The French Revolution followed an ecological calamity without human agency -- the eruption of the volcano Laki in Iceland which put highly-toxic fluorine and sulfur dioxide (a gas that undoes the grenhouse effect)into the atmosphere. This caused famine and poverty in France that may have destroyed the credibility of Louis XVI. The February Revolution in Russia could have never happened had it not been for Nicholas II waging a bungled war against the Axis Powers that caused the complete breakdown of the shaky social order.
I am not as rosy in my prediction of how Millennial adults will behave. They prefer reason to morals, and as shown in the French Revolution, they can be merciless in disposing of those who get in their way. Obedient soldiers, they were the rank-and-file of Nazi paramilitary groups (especially the SS) and some lethal administrators (Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Mengele, and Ohlendorf) as well as numerous brutal guards in the concentration and extermination camps of Nazi Germany. Civic generations are weak at providing moral leadership on their own as a group, and tend to operate on moral autopilot. They will be wise to keep some Boomers around to keep them from their worst tendencies.
....The Millennial generation will have no stake in Boomer culture wars except to find sympathetic ears to Millennial desires. Most likely it will appeal to Boomer interests that have so far lost in the Culture Wars against right-wing interests that so far have proved inimical to Millennial values. X values? Millennials might find X pragmatism welcome, but not cynicism and penny-pinching. What enterprises X start on a small scale, the Millennial generation will do on a bigger scale. Laboratory, meet factory.
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.