The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-12-2020, 04:43 AM)pbrower2a (updated and corrected) Wrote:

(01-11-2020, 10:58 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I am tempted to translate.  The extremists have vile stereotypes for whomever opposes them.  Criticism should be allowed.  Neither faction is perfect.  Vile stereotypes should not be allowed.  That leads one into not listening and stalemate.

Vile stereotypes are nothing new -- always ugly and grossly unrepresentative. Most people are complicated enough that simple, crude stereotypes fit them badly. When one sees ugly stereotypes of a whole group one might as well discount them. Maybe a subculture such as the Sicilian Mafia, Hell's Angels, MS-13, or the Klan neatly fits a stereotype but that invariably relates to a group that develop common behaviors to consolidate identity -- usually a vile one. Then, and only then, do vile stereotypes fit.   

Quote:The “hardcore Americans” are a strange alliance.  There is a deal of evangelical white male tribal thinking.  There is an evolved from Scottish militaristic fighting culture.  There is a streak of racism.  There is a desire to keep manufacturing jobs in the US, which is understandable, assuming somebody can counter the elite’s stranglehold on the government.  Quite a trick.  That is one place where they could make common cause with the progressives if they were not so locked in their perspective.  There is a more rural culture of being self reliant rather than committing to teamwork and specialization.  That is just a function of where people live and how is is best to be in their environment.

Those Appalachian whites were good factory workers and miners, and they did unusually well for their heritage when the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity and unprecedented opportunity to a big chunk of the Mountain South. Coal mining well served their work ethic, their low demands for satisfaction on the job, their materialism, and their limited education. Tennessee exemplifies how well things went at one time: it was the most progressive of the former Confederate states in economics and politics. That is past. 

Quote:The “quasi socialists’ are looking back at when America was great, towards stepping back to the 1950s and 1960s.  Much less wealth is slowed (sloughed?) off to the elites as division of wealth.  There is a commitment to everyone, not just the white male evangelicals.  The amount of things that must be done in terms of infrastructure is less than what was done in the 1950s and 1960s.  Then there was a belief that America could do anything it set its mind to.  I see the current vision of how much America could and should do today as smaller than in the heyday of tax and spend liberalism.  At that time the opposition was the Soviet Union, there was a War on Poverty, and we were flying to the moon.  Current plans are smaller and doable.  It is just that we are living in a small government time where we are far less confident and ambitious.

In some respects those were the best times for many Americans. Well, maybe not for women unless they sought to be homemakers; certainly not for Southern blacks who still endured the strictures of Jim Crow practice. The generational cycle suggests that the 2030's will be parallel in many ways to the 1950's -- material and bland, with comparatively good opportunities for work as such. The current reality of people holding multiple jobs to make ends meet because elite indulgence is the key principle of the time will be no more. People will more likely save than go into hock. Such was a more conservative time in the better sense of the word -- a time in which more people had a stake in the status quo, a consequence of liberal policies of the recent past that gave people more of a stake in the status quo. Small-scale creditors (savers with  a few months' income socked away in a bank account or with a whole-life insurance policy) have the desire that their assets not be gutted in inflation but that the economy be vibrant enough that people not need to eat those away or borrow against them in a depression. Neither inflation nor depression? That is a good thing, and people with a stake in the system tend to become moderate conservatives. If only a few people have a stake in the system because they can restrict economic opportunity for everyone else to near-peonage, then those people become reactionary extremists who exploit the helplessness of others to the fullest while others have nothing but fear.   

Quote:Do we believe in that all men are equal under law?  (The alternative is being a bigot.)  Do we believe that there should be a smaller division of wealth.  (The alternative is that a very few should have larger yachts.)  Do we believe that the younger generations, working multiple jobs but unable to save towards retirement are being given a bum deal?  (Is there an alternative to that one?)

Note well: today's young adults will be supplanting today's oldies-but-not-so-goodies as politicians as they enter midlife, and the Millennial generation already has its political values in place. It has no use for the idea that people are nothing but machines of meat on the job, and that an economy works first for the elites of ownership and management who get to decide that everyone else must be poor -- and almost invariably make the predictable decision for every all-powerful elite that has ever existed, whether the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Soviet nomenklatura: "Suffer, oh peon, for my indulgence!  

Quote:Today's conservatives are in a strange place.  The Republican Establishment has been identified as being tied to the elites.  The Republican Base will shoot down most anyone but a Trump or Palin as a candidate for national office.  Trump is busy demonstrating that he will betray his base.  He will run chants about locking Hillary up when it is his appointees that are being locked up.  Oh, he will flirt with bigotry enough to keep his rallies full, but he ends up losing every time he endorses anybody.  The base is wising up, but the big shots in the Republican Party seemingly have not noticed.  Well, some of them have noticed.  A lot of people are retiring from congress.  The rest are trying to keep the schema going for a few more years.

Nothing forces a reorientation of a party as do electoral defeats. Republicans relied upon the Gilded consensus (tellingly, the Gilded acted much like a Civic generation after the Civil War) for electoral victories as late as the 1890's. People familiar with the ideas of the Gilded Age could revive much of its ethos in the 1920's, only to see it implode once and for all.   Democrats used to rely upon the New Deal coalition; that is now impossible for obvious reasons. 

He is not losing the base through defections other than those resulting from death and debility. The problem is that that base is shrinking because it attracts few young adults.  For them, such a slogan as Make America Great Again means something very different -- an America in which people have a chance to not live hand-to-mouth due to low pay and high costs of commuting and rent. Just think of Trump's idea of how to improve transportation: add tolls where they do not yet exist.  Such is obviously unwelcome. Work harder, pay more, and get less... such is a raw deal, and people hate raw deals. 

Quote:Basically, if Trump continues to crash, what will the conservatives do?  Will they keep the core not despicable conservative values and try to find a replacement for Trump and Palin to push a small government, no elites, light on taxes, strong on defense agenda?  Will they be tempted to gain volume but reduce the size of their tent by stepping away from the evangelical, elite and racist elements?  Who can step up and copy Reagan and try to make his ideas work after many decades of diminishing return have made this virtually impossible?

The Republican Party will have to redefine itself or become irrelevant. Or it will have to become an outlet for people who have no chance of competing with entrenched machines, for those who challenge incompetence or corruption among existing Democrats -- much as the Republican Party became during the 1930's. Note well that as a group becomes more of a fringe entity its members become increasingly fanatical in support of the ideas that underpin their cause -- but such a group becomes increasingly narrow, and less likely to achieve electoral success. Electoral defeats of Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972 compelled the losing Party to seek new constituencies and deprecate extreme ideas. More damaging are the huge electoral defeats of an incumbent President whom voters repudiate, as with Hoover in 1932 or Carter in 1980. I do not yet predict that Trump will lose to a Democrat while getting only 50 to 80 electoral votes; such implies that strange things have happened this time that allow a Democrat to win states that either were once heavily Democratic but have swung fully Republican (most of the South) or have not gone for a Democratic nominee since 1964. Maybe this time Trump loses the farm and ranch vote? Mormons? Cuban-Americans?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Trump still has the advantage of incumbency, and he has supporters who would do anything for him. There are people who love roguish characters who get away with such, and many white people have severe resentments toward successful people either non-white or non-Christian -- not that they have any empathy for poor people unless those be white... maybe. I look at the pattern of about 1.5% of the electorate turning over each year as younger voters enter and older voters die off. Voters over 55 are about 5% more R than D, and voters under 30 are about 20% more D than R. With no other trend, such suggests an electorate that will be 1.5% more Democratic if nothing else changes between 2016 and 2020. Trump loses if nothing else changes. That is before I look at his erratic foreign policy, his abrasive dismissal of anything not fanatically on his side, his substandard communication skills (he got away with those in 2016 but won't this time), and overall failure to win over voters who voted Democratic in 2016.          

Quote:I just don’t see a winning hand there.  Fortunately, I don’t have to.  I am inclined to see the pendulum swinging the other way.  I am enough a fan of cyclical history to expect that the pendulum will eventually swing the other way.  I am hoping this is a spectacular enough failure to start a swing.

I already see Donald Trump as a catastrophic failure as President. The question is whether enough people will so see him in 2020. I recognize well that my opinion is unrepresentative: I would have voted for Nixon in 1972, and I voted for Anderson in 1980. Otherwise I voted for the Democratic nominee for President.  I saw Trump's win as a freak.  I will see any Trump victory in 2020 as an even bigger freak, if not a fraud. 

History shows that we Americans opt for change when things aren't going well or when reality gets stale.  Trump has solved nothing as President.   

Quote: I wonder about the American readiness to use military force to spread our way of life.  That results in our spending a lot of money that other countries just do not spend.  We have essentially got out of the Middle East.  If we are going to give up the World’s Policemen role, can we cut the absurd amount of spending?

We need to clean up our own political mess before we try to impose our way of life or our political style where such is unwelcome.

Quote:I wonder if you can keep the conservative agenda alive if you tie it to racism and division of wealth.  Some of the conservative agenda makes sense.  Not all of it is deplorable.  The demographics are changing.

I am seeing too much elite bootlicking in the liberal side of things.  Can they push the more aggressive radical agenda without running afoul of the recent decades of small government memes.  I am not worried that a more equal and more active government could sustain itself for a few decades.  It worked just fine between the New Deal and Great Society.  It is the small government mind set that has been pushed from Nixon through Trump that is my concern.  It is not whether America could be great again, but whether our voters are willing to risk being great again.

Liberals have much to work out. Nationalizations are out of the question. Selling people on high taxes for more government services will be difficult. Maybe if we see that bigger government spending that guarantees that education be less costly, that government try to de-concentrate the income in America so that people don't have to leave Cleveland do not have to, that people with needs get those addressed... paying 60% in taxes but getting that back as benefits is not so bad after all if the alternative is an economic meltdown. Figure that many physicians have hundreds of thousands of dollars in educational debt before entering the profession, and working on a government payroll might not be so attractive. 

Quote:Anyway, there is a core set of ideas on both sides that are solid and should be looked at.  The two groups should be able to talk to each other.  Thing is, the extremists have pushed their opposites toxic.  They engage between socialists and bigots, not between two group of people with solid ideas and are willing to let go of their more deplorable brethren.  As long as you continue to demonize those not riding the poisoned perspective, you cannot be involved in a real conversation.  Neither can many of the blue extremists that demonize the red.

By 2030 I expect a general consensus that debt will be as vile a word as f**k... something only for dreamers of fools, unlike sex. Pay-as-you-go will be the way to do most things, including big projects.  People will insist upon being paid enough so that they can save, and they will be expected to make large down-payments on auto loans. College education will again be about as expensive as a hobby that one lacks the time for if one is in college. Rationality will be a virtue instead of cultural baggage. 

People who get welfare of any kind will be more regulated. Thus people who get food aid will find that more of what they get will be determined by some bureaucrat (more vegetables and far less candy, and fewer if any pastries, crackers, chips, and sodas -- if those at all).  College education will be more uniform, with the content of the first two years being nearly as uniform as is coursework in junior high school today.     

If one thing will be different in life, it will be that status symbols will be far less relevant. Post-scarcity society will mean that any attempt to distinguish oneself by having a costlier drink, phone, car, or sofa will be less meaningful. Besides -- taxes on conspicuous consumption will be high.