11-09-2018, 01:59 PM
We are undergoing a transformation in that we may be approaching the end of a line for the ideological polarization that began in the 1960s with traditionalist white people going from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and the more cosmopolitan white people going from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.
Southern white people more trusted politics than they trusted capitalism from the New Deal Era to the 1960s, which may explain why they were progressive by the standard of the time on economic relationships while being reactionary on race. Big Government had served them far better than the agrarian elites did, but the agrarian elites long kept Northern-style industry and commerce out because manufacturing would compete with agriculture for laborers. Southern agriculture still had the organizational style of the plantation. Northern whites had a less stormy relationship with capitalism unless they were 'ethnic'; the North was less agrarian in political domination (because small farmers could never be an economic elite), and mercantile and manufacturing elites could be. The combat zone between the North and the South was in the Appalachians and Ozarks, where mountains made large-scale farming impossible. Note well that the Confederacy had a tough time holding onto Appalachia even if mountains usually provide excellent defenses.
That is the political transition. The economic transition has been from economic inequality in moderation to economic inequality as a crushing reality. The old economic elite of ownership was small and politically splintered when retailing, manufacturing, and even banking were often cottage industries. Cottage industries might vote in lockstep, but they are unable to buy politicians and hire lobbyists. The consolidation of industry has given Americans an economy in which economic elites are the biggest heirs and the managerial elite -- and perhaps the greatest disparity between economic elites and workers since the Civil War. If a brutal overseer like Henry Clay Frick was widely hated in his time, he was a freak. Today, someone like him is the norm as a top executive -- someone paid very well for treating the common man very badly. Crony capitalism has replaced competition in business, and it recognizes a new frontier in exploitation: privatization and monopolization.
Enter Donald Trump, who represents everything wrong in America. He has been successful only to the extent that he has made easy money as a landlord. He is crass and uncouth, and having never had to make deals with the common man, he has no empathy for them. He is a smooth con man, affecting empathy for the people that he fleeces. He wants to rule them as a dictator, and he has learned to appeal to bigotry, fear, and resentment -- just like a fascist demagogue while seeking power. Once in power, he seeks to use the State to enrich either existing elites or to enrich crony capitalists.
"Make those others suffer" quickly becomes "Suffer like them!"
People catch onto him, or he destroys their liberty and any residual dignity. Regimes operating under principles like his turn youth into mill fodder as employees or cannon fodder in wars. If such happens, with Trump's ideology becoming the unassailable orthodoxy on politics and economics, then the best thing for America will be to lose its next big war -- and it won't take long as war is extremely profitable for economic elites. Think of the elites of Germany who funded the Bismarck coalition in Germany and then Hitler; ours are little better. Wars for profit? What do we have to lose?
Everything.
Southern white people more trusted politics than they trusted capitalism from the New Deal Era to the 1960s, which may explain why they were progressive by the standard of the time on economic relationships while being reactionary on race. Big Government had served them far better than the agrarian elites did, but the agrarian elites long kept Northern-style industry and commerce out because manufacturing would compete with agriculture for laborers. Southern agriculture still had the organizational style of the plantation. Northern whites had a less stormy relationship with capitalism unless they were 'ethnic'; the North was less agrarian in political domination (because small farmers could never be an economic elite), and mercantile and manufacturing elites could be. The combat zone between the North and the South was in the Appalachians and Ozarks, where mountains made large-scale farming impossible. Note well that the Confederacy had a tough time holding onto Appalachia even if mountains usually provide excellent defenses.
That is the political transition. The economic transition has been from economic inequality in moderation to economic inequality as a crushing reality. The old economic elite of ownership was small and politically splintered when retailing, manufacturing, and even banking were often cottage industries. Cottage industries might vote in lockstep, but they are unable to buy politicians and hire lobbyists. The consolidation of industry has given Americans an economy in which economic elites are the biggest heirs and the managerial elite -- and perhaps the greatest disparity between economic elites and workers since the Civil War. If a brutal overseer like Henry Clay Frick was widely hated in his time, he was a freak. Today, someone like him is the norm as a top executive -- someone paid very well for treating the common man very badly. Crony capitalism has replaced competition in business, and it recognizes a new frontier in exploitation: privatization and monopolization.
Enter Donald Trump, who represents everything wrong in America. He has been successful only to the extent that he has made easy money as a landlord. He is crass and uncouth, and having never had to make deals with the common man, he has no empathy for them. He is a smooth con man, affecting empathy for the people that he fleeces. He wants to rule them as a dictator, and he has learned to appeal to bigotry, fear, and resentment -- just like a fascist demagogue while seeking power. Once in power, he seeks to use the State to enrich either existing elites or to enrich crony capitalists.
"Make those others suffer" quickly becomes "Suffer like them!"
People catch onto him, or he destroys their liberty and any residual dignity. Regimes operating under principles like his turn youth into mill fodder as employees or cannon fodder in wars. If such happens, with Trump's ideology becoming the unassailable orthodoxy on politics and economics, then the best thing for America will be to lose its next big war -- and it won't take long as war is extremely profitable for economic elites. Think of the elites of Germany who funded the Bismarck coalition in Germany and then Hitler; ours are little better. Wars for profit? What do we have to lose?
Everything.
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.