The New Politiics -- what it means today and in the future.

[pbrower2a]

(08-23-2019, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote: We've talked all around the subject of the new politics, but haven't addressed it as such.  There's a lot to unwind here, so let's make a list, expand on it, and discuss as appropriate.  In no special order:

• The end of the economy as we know it.  Whatever else we can say, it's now blatantly obvious that the economy is not going to return to anything resembling the form it held in the post-war era.  Sure, the titans of the universe swear that they're going to lead their economic behemoths in new more human friendly ways, but are they serious or simply cynical in the extreme.  In any case, how can they reverse the irreversible march toward automating away the productive work we all have assumed is the basis for a good and valuable life?
  
• Populism and the new political alignments.  This is now a worldwide phenomenon, one that didn't really start in the US but is now driven by the Trump Presidency.  The realignment is in full force, and seems to be the Know Nothings versus the Know-It-Alls.  Is this even viable over more than the short term, with both groups encompassing widely diverse belief systems (moreso among the Know-It-Alls).  And what happens to the obvious disconnect between the 0.1% and the rest of us, if that group of rare-air breathers also splits between the camps?
  
• Religion and tyranny. Here's a topic that still baffles me: how can the religiously committed be so firmly in the right-wing populist corner?  We've seen Trump, but what about other populists, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines or Erdogan in Turkey? How does the belief in feeding the hungry and lifting-up the poor align with autocrats and oligarchs?  Color me baffled.
  
• The total lack of vision.  Without pushing this too far, I can't see any political person or group that has a real vision of a viable future and a plan to get there, no matter how flimsy.  Everything is reduced to the next election, in democratic countries, and to a new stasis in the autocratic ones.  It's as if nothing that is happening is expected to have any impact on politics.  Nothing!  Which brings me to my last topic for now
  
• Rising war tensions and global climate change.  We all have been acting like these potentially society ending processes are either not happening at all, or are so easily managed that they can be ignored until some time in the not-too-immediate future.  This is irresponsible in the extreme, but voters seem totally disengaged.  Politicians that are engaged are marginalized.  Why?

The end of the economy as we know it. Such has been the result of every technological revolution which has caused a spike in productivity in one sector.  Mechanization of farming, first with reapers and then with motorized tractors, has led to a reduction in the number of people needed as farmers. Consider that Radical Republicans offered "forty acres and a mule" as the basis of economic independence of freedmen -- and the freedmen saw that as wholly adequate. That was the late 1860's, and it would have been adequate at the time. About forty years later, 80 acres was adequate for a family farm, at least in the South (where the climate allowed one to grow three crops in two years. Farm output reached incredible heights in the 1910's when the Great War (as it was then called) created an unprecedented need for farm output. The problem? As people get out of poverty they do not consume more calories. Farm productivity increased due to the tractor, and farm incomes severely lagged others in the 1920's. The 1920's were already Depression years for farmers who stayed farmers. Many farmers ended up as factory workers.

But -- electrification of assembly lines boosted industrial productivity in the 1920's, and market realities (plenty of cheap labor by former farmers and especially farm laborers, as well as the great number of children of the wave of immigration around 1900 entering the industrial workforce) kept wages down. 

It's nothing new. We no longer need the labor of forty hours a week to produce what we need, but real wages are down despite technological innovations since the 1970's, so more people need to do two ill-paid jobs to survive. The forty-hour workweek customary in office occupations has resulted in much make-work activities. Consider all the meetings, and all the expenditures on "motivational" events to spur productivity. I could make the case that such are worthless -- but the increase in office politics is worse than worthless when people on the autistic spectrum are involved.  A more human workplace? Sure -- compel workers to become more servile toward bosses and clients. 

The retail trade sopped up large numbers of people who in earlier times did factory work but instead had to put on a suit and tie and an air of forced sophistication -- and a surfeit of college graduates who had followed the advice that whatever one does, avoid being an assembly-line worker. There were plenty of people to work in shopping malls and restaurants (fast-food or casual dining), and for a while, America had some excellent workers pushing stuff on people that most people did not need. By now... Americans have more than their share of gag gifts ("Billy Bass", the "talking and singing fish") and questionable status symbols. Many of us are drowning in clutter, as shown in the profusion of storage units. (A comment on that: if you must store stuff, you clearly have more stuff than you need!) Forty-year-old shopping malls, to be sure at the end of their projected lifespans, are often being shuttered  or repurposed. 

What is next? A sane life means less consumption of stuff. The middle-class way of life of suburban America of the post-WWII era that many of us have taken for granted may be impossible.       

Populism and the new political alignments. Donald Trump is the symptom and not the disease. Economic orders that create mass distress create a vacuum for populist movements Left as well as Right. Someone not a populist can at most impose some sanity for a time. Someone so pre-seasonal as Obama could easily be seen as post-seasonal if one refers to a style that suggests Dwight Eisenhower. Was Obama ten years ahead or the times of sixty years behind the times? He was certainly not in phase even if he was more than adequate in many ways (integrity, caution, clarity of thought, principle, and respect for legal niceties).

I have suggested that Donald Trump is a catastrophic failure due to his personal vices and his incendiary rhetoric. But think of the scene in Evita in which Evita Peron is allegedly shown in a duet with a revolutionary with an odd resemblance to Che Guevara. That it might be an anachronism matters less than does the reality that one sort of populism prepares a nation for another kind on the alleged opposite side of the political spectrum.  Evita's husband Juan was a populist generally seen on the Right side of the political spectrum who had some radical-Left tendencies. 

Populism is incompatible with an Eisenhower or Obama. The mature Reactive as a leader promises little and lets people be surprised by the good that happens without wild promises. 

Religion and tyranny. The Hard Right seems to be compatible with religious dogma for several reasons. First, religiosity is often a substitute for intellectual curiosity that one associates with what the economic elites and the ill-educated masses considers an exploitative elite: the educated. Most religions offer an interpretation that allows people to believe that suffering (as deprivation, mistreatment, and exploitation) in This World is a way of earning eternal bliss well worth having to endure starvation, illness, and personal tragedies resulting from poverty. The educated Mittelstand finds such lives completely unattractive and evade them to the extent possible. On the other side, the economic elites would be perfectly happy to establish an order of severe inequality and repression -- one which turns people into helpless debtors and thralls. The economic elites, if they cannot quite recover slavery or serfdom, can seek debt bondage for all but themselves -- and that implies the ruin of what passes as the middle class. 

Second, religiosity establishes a mental regime suited for making workers passive -- and unreceptive to union organizers and especially Marxist ideology. Note well that whatever the culture of economic elites that resemble the pigs of Animal Farm  those economic elites are mirror-image Marxists, the sorts of people who recognize as reality every vice that Marx and his successors attribute to capitalism -- but endorse those vices! 

Third, the majority religion has its most obvious enemies -- other religions. Thus at the least Islam in Christendom and Christianity (or secular humanism) in the Islamic world. Marxism-Leninism may have perished as an active threat to monopolistic capitalism, but there are always other menaces. Liberalism is a nemesis of religious fundamentalism of any kind.

Fourth, many religions promote a high rate of childbirth which creates plenty of cheap labor for the "dark, satanic mills", people who can be fleeced for exorbitant property rents, and above all plenty of cannon fodder for the most lucrative of all enterprises, wars for profits. Tens of millions of youth dying for a few trillions in profit? What could be more wonderful for plutocrats devoid of any moral compass! Notice also that a population boom and inadequate funding for schools means that the populace can become so dim-witted that it can accept the weak rationales of totalitarian regimes.  

Fifth, certain currents in religious life are anti-intellectual. Both ultra-plutocratic elites and some religious authorities see independent thought as threats to their orthodoxies, one of which is that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it at the same time creates a profit or leads people to Salvation.

This is an unsavory connection, one that can easily end in ruin for both plutocrats and for religious hucksters. As far as I am concerned, both deserve to go to Hell.

The total lack of vision.  We may have to muddle through this Crisis Era without one and hope for the best. The orthodoxy of our Master Class, that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it allows opulent excess among those elites and enforces an economic and political hierarchy, is flawed in the extreme. The alleged antithesis of Marxism-Leninism will not make a comeback except if a political order breaks down completely in a war that goes too far for one of the defeated. 

Rising war tensions and global climate change.  If you think climate change is already a threat, then consider what the world could be like in the next Crisis Era (about 2100) when the oceans start inundating some of the world's most productive farmland, when tropical diseases start appearing in places that go from cold-temperate (the American Midwest, central Europe, east-central China, Korea, and Japan) to subtropical. When food shortages start causing starvation, people will get desperate. That of course is if people decide that it might be nice to banish winter.

If any American in Greater Chicago hates the local winters, there is safer relief than having the subtropics move north. 


     

The grain crops that need the harsh winters of the American Midwest go through Chicago and make its prosperity possible.