Who are you voting for in 2016 pt. II

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-04-2016, 12:26 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: As much as I'm loath to agree with CH here (mostly because I think he is possibly psychologically unstable and have no evidence he's started on some meds or something--I have noticed he hasn't posted about his nebulous "restorationism" lately though) the fact is that whatever is the status quo at the end of the 3T (Neo-Liberal economics, Neo-Con foreign policy, globalism, multiculturalism, and open borders) becomes the "Establishment" of the 4T.

As such to solve the 4T whatever that establishment is must be completely smashed before the 4T is resolved.  This is true whether the 4T ends well or ends badly.

Now before someone accuses me of siding with the only person who is likely to be a fascist on this board, the fact is that this comes straight out of S&H's very own theories.  No matter what happens in the 1T, no matter how the 1T feels, or is like it is fundamentally different from what was before the 4T.  That happens, and can only happen with whatever the establishment was being completely destroyed.

First, I always read S&H as very conservative for a pair of folk who came up with a theory of how transforming change occurs.  They always insisted that their theory is non-partisan, that it didn’t favor or justify the theories or principles of either party.  I disagree with that.  I always thought a 4T would address the gravest problems of any given era, and in most crises in the Anglo-American series, this meant that the establishment elites lost power, wealth and influence to progressives who wished to force change.

To that extent, yes, a crisis generally gives the Establishment a black eye.

The problem is in correctly identifying the gravest problems, seeing who is trying to solve them, and who represents the Establishment that wants to continue to hold power and profit by leaving the problem unsolved.

As an heir of sort to the Whigs, I have a shortcut arrow of progress that helps me distinguish between Establishment and Progressive.  The arrow points towards human rights, equality and democracy.  In this particular crisis, we’ve got income inequality and an biased legal system that leans hard on certain minorities.  In just about any crisis, the wealthy have too much influence over the politicians, and this one is no different.

I see the chain of crises as incremental.  From the start of the transformation from the Agricultural Age pattern to the Industrial Age pattern, the conservative elite that held too much power over the people were the hereditary land owning militaristic nobility.  As I see it, they did not go away in one crisis.  It took many many crises before they were no longer the primary problem, the bad guys whose power had to be slowly whittled away.  The US Civil War might be viewed as the last US internal crisis between agricultural elites and industrial democracy.  Even that was not a total clean wipe-your-hands victory.  The slave owners just turned to sharecropping and Jim Crow intimidation.  A grave problem was ‘solved’, and one of the more hateful mechanisms for an elite class to dominate the working people was removed.  Nothing to snicker at.  Still, the elites did not vanish in one crisis.  Martin Luther King had and the modern Black Lives Matter movement has more work yet to do.

After the Civil War, agricultural elites were no longer the gravest elite threat to the life style of the People.  That position went to the Robber Barons, the very rich owners of the means of production that Marx so disliked.  While Marx proposed one can make an elite class go away in one fell swoop in a decisive revolution, S&H look at history in more detail.  They suggest cultures transform through a long series of crises.  There are more crises in S&H’s tale of cultural evolution than Marx had revolutions.  This is because groups of elites don’t go away in one crisis.  You can only whittle them down some.  Often one can whittle quite significantly, but the job is always partial.

FDR’s New Deal aspect of his double crises might be the first S&H crisis aimed at diminishing the power of the Robber Barons rather than agricultural elites.  It didn’t get the whole job done any more than the English Civil War made the American Revolution unnecessary, or the American Revolution made the American Civil War unnecessary.  Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings suggested that the shadow will always take another shape and grow again.  No victory, no matter how magnificent, is final.  One should expect a different threat to form.  In the real world, there will always be elites trying and to some extent succeeding at monopolizing wealth and political power.

Thus, from my perspective, income inequality is the gravest problem, and Robber Barons are the elite whose power and wealth must be diminished.  Your father is the living embodiment, the walking talking platonic ideal manifestation, of the idea of Robber Baron.  He has spent his life amassing great personal wealth with no regard to the common man.  I see no reason to expect him to change.  His economic plan features tax breaks for the Robber Barons.  His solution is to increase the economic inequality.

Hillary, meanwhile, had not been a politician until after her husband left the White House.  She had been a lobbyist and activist on the behalf of women, children, minorities and the ill.  She has spent her life pushing for equality, trying to benefit the People who have been trodden on worst.  

The two people have spent their lives pushing very different causes.  For one whose arrow of progress points at equality, human rights and democracy, my choice is absurdly clear.

Then there is Trump’s endorsement of leaders like Putin and Saddam Hussain who tried and are trying to make the Agricultural Age style of intimidating tyrant continue to work in the modern age.  Trump is sort of correct that Saddam did maintain peace by terror, did prevent the Middle East from going unstable.  Saddam was not insane.  He was just a student of tyranny.  He knew how to keep a people oppressed and in line.  I will give Saddam that much.  However, I can’t admire the man, and I’ll not back a modern politician seeking office in America who suggests that autocratic tyranny is an admirable way of doing business.

While I’ve often suggested that Cynic Hero’s desire to restore autocratic strong man Agricultural Age values is pretty much unique to him, very un-American, Trump in some ways does match Cynic’s ideal of going back to the old way of doing things.  Trump isn’t often explicit in saying such, for good reason, but he gives hints of it from time to time.

Issues aside, your father does not play well with others.  If he is frustrated in any way, he will throw a tantrum, demonize the other person, and throw about insults.  It doesn’t matter who he is dealing with…  women, minorities, the disabled, reporters, fire marshals, gold star mothers, Republican authorities, even Democrats on occasion, get given the same sort of treatment.  I have no reason to expect this will change should he get elected and have to work with foreign leaders, who are already quite alarmed at having to deal with him.  Issues and philosophy aside, he just doesn’t have the temperament to work with human beings he can’t just fire should they disagree with him.  His personality alone would disqualify him as a candidate in my eyes, even if he did have a history of working for the benefit of others.

Anyway, my primary thrust is that too much power and wealth is often placed in the hands of an elite class.  In any given crisis, the abusive behavior of the elite class must be reduced.  In recent history, this elite class is the Robber Barons.  No single crisis will totally end the power of elitism, or even destroy a specific elite class.  Some issues will be resolved, but the answers are never complete.  The battles of one crisis are never fully over.