08-05-2016, 06:46 AM
(08-03-2016, 05:17 PM)Odin Wrote:(08-02-2016, 02:58 PM)JonLaw Wrote:(05-19-2016, 09:41 AM)Mikebert Wrote: That is, the Republicans would more or less become old-style Democrats, the party of Jackson, Jefferson and FDR. The Democrats would become old-style Republican/Whig/Federalist, the party of Lincoln, Hamilton and T. Roosevelt.
Note I don’t want this to happen, but it seems a lot easier since we are pretty close to that now.
The Republican party is transforming into the party of labor as we speak. You can pretty much watch it in real time as the Establishment Republicans keep talking about how they are leaving the party/voting for Clinton/in denial about economic reality.
It's fun to watch. You might as well enjoy watching it, since you can't unring the bell.
The Republican party is the more democratic party, hence Trump.
The Democratic party is more controlled by the political elites, which means that labor is not going to take it over. The salaried professionals who make up the Democratic party elite think labor is some sort of combination of sad/icky because they are paid by the hour to do non-awesome things.
Fascists pander to the working class right up until they take power, then they stab them in the back, like Hitler did with Ernst Rohm and the Strasserites.
Worth remembering. Fascists (including the KKK) are as much demagogues as Commies. They make wild promises to the most unsophisticated people with the knowledge that once they get power they will not be accountable for their failures to meet those promises. Conservatives and liberals must be careful about what they promise. A conservative might make promises of trickle-down economics as a solution (there will be more prosperity, but to get that one must accept falling real wages, ravaging of the environment, more power to owners and bosses on the job, and the dismantling of the safety net)... but if a society has 20% unemployment, maybe such might be a valid trade-off for a while. Liberals must admit that their paradise implies higher taxes that people can't really get away from. Democracy implies responsibility for achieving promises and for constraining the nastiness of the consequences. Tyranny of any kind (and our American government by lobbyist is so far a mild form of tyranny) shoves responsibility onto the common man.
This Crisis Era will compel people to ask why our political tradition is what it is. Crisis Eras may not be perfectly similar (we are not going to struggle to overthrow the authority of a king who tries to tighten his grip; we won't have slavery to dismantle in a bloody Civil War; we are highly unlikely to end up at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan). Government by lobbyists responsible only to their paymasters must go if we are to have "a new birth of freedom".
We are going to look back to the Founding Fathers and recall what they were right about (everything but slavery and male chauvinism); as did the intellectual heroes of World War II we will likely take formulas that Abraham Lincoln used. Nazi Germany and Thug Japan had slave systems far more odious than the Confederate States of America had.
If a Degeneracy (the depraved economics, corrupt politics, and debased mass culture of a 3T develops slowly, then its repudiation in the Regeneracy appears with amazing speed and entrenches itself swiftly. In retrospect the Regeneracy seems so obvious a solution to all that ailed the overall society that people can't imagine anything else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.