The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-19-2020, 01:19 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(02-18-2020, 09:45 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(02-18-2020, 02:40 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: If it takes an oligarch to get America on the right track, then so be it. FDR was an outright patrician, which is far better than being a poltroon like Trump. FDR wanted to save the system from its worst tendencies -- and that is exactly what he did.

In America, representing the new values and switching to the new values puts you in a rather elite club.  Can you picture going into a group that currently consists of Washington, Lincoln and FDR?  It is worth skipping out of one’s oligarch station and making a few enemies among the robber barons to get there.  The allies one would pick up in the process would compensate.

So, what do you think Bob, is blue America on the right track? Do you think Bernie and Bloomberg can muster enough wealth to keep you funded, the UN funded, the illegal immigrant population funded, the legal refugee population funded, the existing welfare population funded, the big city streets paved, the big city police forces adequately sized and supplied, the big city liberal institutions and its infrastructure and all the corruption funded and continue not enforcing laws and continue looking the other way as farmers and workers are getting the shaft by corporations and global conglomerates like its doing today. I'm a hard sell because I'm not a Democratic believer any more than I'm a Catholic believer or a socialist believer these days.

My GI father had a favorite saying, one he uttered to his Boomer son it seems far too often. “The problem is, you feel like the world owes you a living.” He knew better. He grew up in such bad times that he knew the world owed him nothing. He would have to seize it. That thought eventually stuck. Like much of my generation, I put enough into school to get a decent job and saved for retirement. Today I get flack for it.

That seems to me to be the biggest difference between the GIs and their supposed heirs as civics, the Millennials. The Millennials are so used to daddy as an individual and the boomers in general taking care of them that they really do believe the world owes them a living. If they can’t save for retirement, no big deal. The world owes them a living. It must be a nice belief to have, the idea that the cliff they are speeding towards must not exist seems neat.

From the New Deal through Great Society we lived in a progressive era. If there was a problem, they would solve it by big government throwing large amounts of money at it. It sort of worked. A lot of problems were seen and dealt with. The problem was that even the GIs eventually got tired of solving problems, tired of the changes that came with it.

The result was the conservative era. Smaller government. Tax cuts. Surrender in the war on poverty. Voodoo economics periodically crashed the economy. Don’t save for retirement. Division of wealth. Subtle racism. A dominant philosophy by a party which served the elites more than the people. Jobs abroad. Ignoring looming problems by simply pretending they don’t exist.

So if you ask if we can fund it, right now, taking the temperature of the country overall, no. Years of small government favoring the racists and elites has left us in a lousy position to fund our way out of a paper bag.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lurking desire to make America great again. Even the conservatives are feeling the itch. Step one might be spending like America was great again. But people aren’t ready for that. They want it both ways. They ask not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them. That’s no way to be great. The idea that they may have to put in as individuals to get back as a generation is alien to them. They are not the GIs. Not close. That was long ago.

I guess that too is why the T4T forums that have survived are tending to favor progressives. It is the difference between linear and cyclical thinking. When one pattern has gone on for a turning or two, will it continue? Or do you expect the point of diminishing returns for that pattern has long since been passed, that the opposite pattern ought to be tried again? The linear thinkers think that if two turnings have worked, why not three or four? The cyclical thinkers are wondering just when the pendulum will start swinging the other way.

I am one of those waiting for the pendulum to turn.