The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-03-2020, 07:28 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-03-2020, 12:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-02-2020, 09:27 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I've never said America was perfect, life was perfect, employers were perfect, people are perfect or that I'm perfect either. I display my comfort with my own imperfections here with the use of my lack luster writing/grammar skills. Like I've said, I don't have a hard time reading or understanding what's being communicated or fail to get the gist of the direction the Left-wing wants America to go either and neither should you since you write so much better and spend your time reading way more books than me. Like I said, when the culture clash between America and the Left-wing begins, you are going to find yourself on the wrong side of American history and the wrong side of the history of the world as well. You better wise up and start using that mind of yours for something other than just the good of yourself.

Your compositional skills are the least of the problem. If you are discussing such types as the old Weather Underground... those are now irrelevant. We are now in a Crisis mode, and extremists of all kinds tend to either take over or get shown the door. 

Nitpick:  It is the progressives in the US that take over, the conservatives that are shown the door.  No, progressives are not defined as the winners, but by such virtues as democracy, human rights and equality.

The current "Right", which is anything but conservative in view of its acceptance of demagoguery, resentments as a unifying factor, a contempt for traditional decencies, support of Big Government (so long as such supports them at the expense of everyone else), and rejection of protocol and precedent. Such tendencies show a significant drift toward fascism, which is not conservative. Add to that a support for a nightmarish hierarchy in which the vast majority of people are obliged to suffer for the power, indulgence, and gain of a tiny minority of people of great and entrenched privilege, and such is either a feudal or bureaucratic nightmare. Whether it is the old aristocrat-and-serf world of the late middle ages or a science-fiction nightmare such as the Great Powers (Oceania, Eurasia, or "Eastasia"), the First Galactic Empire of the Star Wars Saga, the "classless society" of the Soviet Union gone awry (its nomenklatura of a bureaucratic elite becoming nearly hereditary and beginning to act like aristocrats) or the muddled trend that we see in America... the preservation of a rotten order is an ignoble activity that one does only out of fear or opportunism. 

I expect things to go too far in the end. They always do. The question is when, and then some new variant of conservatism emerges. It certainly won't have much in common with Trump.  

(07-03-2020, 12:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: What is Left by your standards has abandoned Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, and Castro. Such has a track record of making losers out of nations.  You have the straw man fallacy in which you define the Other Side on its supposed behalf and then tear it down. It's like saying that gay rights is all about molesting children, that conservatives would restore slavery if they had the chance, that liberals really want central planning, that Christianity is all "holy roller" stuff, that Jews are a conspiracy intent on exploiting and degrading gentiles, that Islam is all about terrorism. 

Nitpick:  The nations that did a Marxist revolution were already losers.  You have to be pretty desperate to trade one set of autocrats for another.  Russia, China and Cuba of their respective revolutionary eras count as desperate.  The trick is having enough checks and balances to force the government to work for the people rather than themselves.  Overthrowing a government that has already proven itself good at the overthrowing government game is difficult.[/quote]

I once told someone lamenting how horrible Communism is and telling me that we need a plutocratic order as its antithesis what Mark Twain said of pre-1789 France: people may find the guillotine shocking for all the aristocrats that it killed, but consider the terror that those aristocrats imposed upon the poor peasants. The legal system excused practically anything that an aristocrat did, but it would punish any desperate deed of a poor person to stay alive by filching a little bread with an often brutal means of execution. Aristocrats, including the clergy (advancement within the Catholic Church was largely a result of being born into the Right Family), had rights... and peasants had duties to deliver those rights, often as private taxes for which no service was rendered except for restraint of punishment.

Indeed it is the pre-revolutionary order that is itself a monstrosity. In France that was the real terror. 

I once saw a list of characteristics of countries vulnerable to Marxist revolutions. Among them:

1. Early stage of industrial development. True peasant societies that have no industry have inequality connected strictly to unequal distribution of land or huge rents due to aristocratic landlords. The solution to such is a land reform that abolishes rents and redistributes land to those who work it. Genuine landed peasantry has often shown itself a cornerstone of democratic conservatism.

Early stages of industrial development are times of bitter disappointment for former rural toilers. Early factories were dangerous places in which people lost limbs or got killed in industrial accidents. The transition from the certainties of rural life to the harsh uncertainties of urban life is always difficult. There is no safety net for industrial workers. Industrial workers end up in fetid fire-traps in which epidemics and violent crime are the norm.

This said, every country seems to go through this phase of economic reality. Some go through it more gracefully than do others. 

2. Rural distress. Obviously, the more desperate things are in the countryside, the easier it is to exploit and abuse factory workers escaping the extreme poverty of rural life. 

3. Emphasis on producer goods, war weapons, exports, or the extraction of raw materials as opposed to consumer goods.  Industrial workers can relate more to making things that can make life better for them or to people that they knew in the village. Shoes for peasants who have been going barefoot?  Tableware? Foodstuffs? Such production leads easily to the satisfaction of people's needs. Farm implements make food easier to produce and less expensive.

So figure that the earliest examples of industrialization in the West occurred in such places as Tuscany, Flanders, and Britain.. and in each case the emphasis was on what could be sold... textiles, pottery, foodstuffs, farm implements. Countries that developed later typically had a bigger emphasis on the production of steel, coal, and chemicals -- or of luxury exports. The early industrial age was often an age of horrific wars, so the most warlike regimes commissioned huge numbers of warships, artillery weapons, rifles, armored  vehicles, and the like that were more likely to turn peasants and factory workers into cannon fodder than to improve their lives. Note well that economies that depend heavily upon exporting oil, minerals, and plantation crops can work people to death ion mines and plantations and that little of the proceeds of the oil goes to the people. 

4. Irresponsible, undemocratic government.  The pre-revolutionary regimes may be of disparate styles from absolute monarchies to colonial rule to military juntas, but all have one thing in common: a lack of accountability to the People. Where democracy develops, the principle of one-man and one vote may result in political parties seeking the votes of working people. Liberal democracy gives writers the means of expressing the faults of the social order . Reformers can flourish. In undemocratic societies, entrenched elites use government to suppress dissent and of course labor unions. Those in power are able to use the state apparatus to enrich themselves and immiserate the workers.  But even within undemocratic orders there is a huge difference between the British Raj in India and the aristocracy of Russia -- or the French in Indochina.     

Where government is repressive, irresponsible, and undemocratic, dissent goes underground and concentrates itself in small cliques of violent  conspirators who become increasingly  ruthless, devious, and radicalized. A socialist party that operates in the open and seeks votes to force reforms cannot get away with plots of assassination and sabotage, but secretive cliques of extremists have violent plots as their normal operations. When some calamity befalls the incompetent leadership whose wars for profit  rend society instead of unifying it , when some natural disaster ravages the people and well-connected people profiteer from such, then those who can effect change are those secretive, violent, ruthless cliques because other alternatives are no longer available. Wilhelmine Germany at the least had an active Social Democratic Party; imperial Russia had the Bolsheviki.

5. Excessive centralization of industry.  Cottage industries may not be your model of efficiency, but they allow a smoother transition from rural to industrial life. Farming is a highly seasonal activity, so labor in cottage industries does not require uprooting the rural poor. Markets are local, and the goods produced fit local needs.  In contrast some countries seem to concentrate manufacturing in a few cities . There one finds great numbers of poor people that the capitalist order treats badly, people barely literate (if that) so that they are amenable to revolutionary propaganda when the system breaks down -- people with little to lose. Or as Karl Marx put it  "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" So did Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro. 

This may account for proletarian revolutions that succeeded (Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Vietnam, Cuba,  Cambodia, perhaps some revolutions that had Marxist influences (Zimbabwe, Nicaragua)  -- and those that failed because the conditions were not quite right (Germany and Hungary just after the end of World War I). It does not account for conquests by Marxist regimes; the only reason for there not being a socialist republic in the Netherlands after WWII was that the Soviet Army never got that far west. 

So let us suppose that you have free and competitive elections to determine what sort of government you will have, the right to organize a union, an apartment with a flush toilet and running water, electricity that generates power for cooking food and running entertainment devices, a car, adequate heat and air conditioning (especially in a fire-and-ice climate in a place like Indianapolis), and union representation in collective bargaining. You may be bereft of chains unless you involve yourself in some disgusting form of sex... so you have much to lose if the capitalist system goes. Contrast what life is like if the incompetent, clueless leadership gives mystical explanations of why it is important to work to exhaustion yet live close to starvation and prefers that you be illiterate so that you be unable to respond to revolutionary handbills. 

Such makes all the difference in the world.