04-18-2019, 11:54 PM
(04-18-2019, 08:03 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I think a stumbling block for many of us (me especially) is that, because the Republicans are so obviously biased in favor of the wealthy (the only actual policy they pursue anymore is tax cuts) the Democrats must be for everyone else. Obviously, the rich are very influential and will always demand (and get) a party that looks after their economic interests, so it is understandable that they have the GOP as an advocate for their economic interests. The very fact that some 80% of Americans are not either rich (top 1%), affluent (91-99%tile) or upper middle class (81-90%tile) implies that the other party would then look after the interests of this group (lots of votes there).
The split among the rich used to be between northern industrialists and southern agrarian interests. Both were largely reactionary in their politics, but they had dissimilar interests on economics and especially race. They did not see each others as partners as they do now. Southern agrarians wanted ultra-cheap, dependent labor on their great estates; northern industrialists wanted ultra-cheap labor in manufacturing and trade. Southern agrarians had no stake in the greatest profitability of northern industrial interests but used northern industrial workers and their unions as counterweights to the power of industrialists and financiers. Northern industrialists and bankers sought to improve the lot of poor farmers and farm laborers just to get them to join the consumer market. This is analogous to the split between Tory agrarians who challenged the upstart Liberal industrialists with reforms of working-class life while keeping farm laborers under the thumb -- with the Liberal industrialists trying to protect the low wages that made maximal profits possible.
That largely ended in the 1960s in America, when working people decided to no longer support the racist Southern agrarians.
Quote:But the fact is that the top 1% (rich) are pretty much equally split between the two parties (for example, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of very richest Americans, are Democrats). And more people with advanced degrees, who mostly fall above the 80th percentile in income, are Democrats. Why on Earth would these rich people be voting Democrat?
American politics have become tribal -- a very bad thing. Republicans have gone from having a strong hold on educated people (Goldwater got a majority of college graduates in his disastrous run in 1964) to having lost them. Maybe the best-educated were more strictly WASP in the 1950s, and thus more closely connected to capitalist profit and privilege. Of course part of the connection could be that well-educated people like a certain temperament among politicians, which partially explains why the Obama vote looked much like an Eisenhower vote. This said, the intellectual content of the Republican Party has been on a steady downward slide to Donald Trump, who said "I love low-information voters!" This would have been shameful to Gerald Ford.
American tribes divide on ethnicity, occupational group, region, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and level of education. Such is tribalism, a bane of democracy.
Quote:Could if be that the Democrats offer a more moderate version of the economic policy Republicans offer, and that there is NO party that looks out for the economic interests of the bottom 80%? For a brief period between 1935 and 1968 Democrats DID look out for the interests of the bottom 80% of white people (they were considerably less assiduous with black people). When they corrected their racial error, they started to lose some of their bottom 80% (white) support who decided to vote for the Republicans even though they knew they did not look out for their economic interests. It did not happen overnight. Carter was elected with a solid majority in Congress, but with stagflation, high unemployment, flat wages and a white-friendly social message, so-called Reagan Democrats were willing to vote of Reagan. And when inflation and (eventually) unemployment fell a great many of white middle and working class folks began Republicans.
Poor white people see poor non-white people as economic competitors -- and alien, often for reasons other than appearance. In my case (my ancestry is about half English/Welsh/Scots-Irish and about half German and Swiss scattered throughout my family tree) I would not expect a huge cultural divide between myself and a Japanese-American. But between poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics I would expect huge shibboleths of culture. They have little in common except poverty and low educational achievement -- and regrettably the GOP has chosen to turn poor whites against poor blacks and Hispanics.
Quote:With the bottom 80% split on racial and class (poor vs everyone else) lines the two parties are balanced and politics is based on the struggle for elite support. Hence the basic post-Reagan economic paradigm is not challenged by any party. The other battlefield that can exists is the social one.
A huge difference: in the 1930s the economic elites from the Gilded Age to the Crash of 1929 lost much of their wealth and economic power, and hence political influence. Although America underwent about half the sort of economic meltdown that gutted wealth and economic power of the upper part of the capitalist class, the super-rich recovered first and got their political power back. It is conceivable that with a President more astute a political leader than Donald Trump, the super-rich could be consolidating even more political as well as economic power to the point that everything goes their way, with others existing solely to enrich, pamper, and enforce the power of the economic elite. All others would be stripped of their assets and rendered poor and dependent in a new feudalism differing from plantation societies in having high technology. Ten years after the Crash of 1929, most Americans were materially better off. Ten years after the Crash of 2008, most of us simply pay more for what we get, with on the net all of the fruits of greater productivity and innovation going to the upper 2%.
What can we do?
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.