The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(12-30-2020, 09:08 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-30-2020, 08:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-30-2020, 08:01 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-26-2020, 10:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Good point. The economic elites want no real change in American economic life. The tycoons want most of Humanity dependent upon them to the extent of accepting abject misery as a blessing instead of a curse. America's executive nomenklatura -- and that is just about what it is -- act increasingly like its old Soviet equivalent as administrators and enforcers. These people claim to stand for Free Enterprise, but even this term can lend itself to Orwellian Newspeak: it is not so much the possibility of people competing with the elites as it is that Enterprise be free to do what it must to squelch competition.

The neoliberal era has been an attempt to restore the Gilded Age, but unlike the Gilded Age it is without elite competition. It is the worst of plutocracy and barracks socialism melding themselves into a nightmare. When its intellectual pretense proves lacking, it turns to the most anti-intellectual pol in American history, Donald Trump, as a savior.

Gridlock thwarts change, and it usually dies as the 3T gives way to the 4T.

You didn't want change either. You wanted things to go back to the way things were before Trump entered office. Do you remember the picture of the cake of a government that you made the mistake of showing me and associating with me and what I want for a government? Well, you are part of the cake and the poor working class fools who voted for Biden are the only ones who are going to be left holding it up as we depart and watch as it collapses. You're in on the take like every other worthless Democratic voter. The gridlock is to strong to die at this point which is why I see the country splitting and going separate ways. America as we know it will no longer exist and you'll need a passport to visit the America that comes out of this 4T. Oh, and if you happen to be stuck in a blue state that's too blue to change, you'll get to experience first what it's like to live in a poor third world country like Venezuela or most of Mexico or a lawless third world state like Somalia.

Ha ha, before Trump entered office? The ultimate reactionary? Don't you know when a reactionary conservative is in power, change is thwarted? When he is removed, that is change. It is the red states that support Trump that are more like third world countries. The blue states are where the money is. That's because smart people move there. Dumb people stay in areas like yours, and do the same old things and think in the same old ways.

It's pretty clear that you've never seen a real reactionary conservative in power yet. Trump more or less represents the last of the mean old conservative Democrats that you rebelled against and fought with back in the day. The blue states seems to be where the bulk of the action is right now. You keep saying that as I keep showing you where you're wrong about that and telling you what to expect as time goes on and the natural sorting out process that your seeing and experiencing now continues. The redder suburban areas are where the bulk of the real money (hard currency) is at these days. The Blue States (blue cities) are more or less living off a combination of cheap debt and federal programs.

But overseas: I'm old enough to remember Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, and the Greek colonels' regime, let alone Augusto Pinochet in Chile and military juntas in Argentina and Brazil. By the time the Soviet Union became politically stale, it too was reactionary in many aspects of politics and culture. (It is telling that most of the people who sold out to the Soviet Union in its last years in America through espionage and other treachery were right-wingers... not leftists).

We obviously have never had a fully reactionary, repressive, dehumanizing regime such as those of Franco in Spain, the Greek colonels' dictatorship (oddly it kissed up often to the Soviet Union), or Pinochet's Commie-style repression in Chile. Such would require a mass culling of Americans who have an idea that freedom doesn't simply mean the right of asset-owners and their executive retainers to rape everyone else economically and obliterate anyone who gets in the way. Although the Hard Right, as mirror-image Marxists on the economy, can get their economic way to a large extent with the aid of the Tea Party (which has largely morphed into the Trump cult), it cannot yet suppress thought that holds that people exist for reasons other than their power, indulgence, and gain (P. I. G. -- the initials are intended, and I might remind you of the pigs in Orwell's modern fable about  Stalinist communism, Animal Farm). Trump may be too rakish for the tastes of the elites (who may do much the same, but more secretively), and his lapses of logic and unconventional word choices and grammar grate on the minds of most educated people. 

A fully reactionary, repressive, dehumanizing regime would have torture chambers, labor camps, and plenty of disappearances. If you are a clergyman and preach that injustice is un-Christian, then the government will pressure some religious body to terminate your ordination... and if you go 'non-denominational' and still preach something contrary to the official line you might be silenced in much the same way as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in Nazi Germany or Jerzy Popielusko was in Communist Poland -- formally executed or assassinated. Pop music star who exudes conscience instead of official propaganda that denies conscience in favor of slavish obedience? May I remind you of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara? 

Quote:    Early in his recording career, Jara showed a knack for antagonizing conservative Chileans, releasing a traditional comic song called "La beata" that depicted a religious woman with a crush on the priest to whom she goes for confession. The song was banned on radio stations and removed from record shops, but the controversy only added to Jara's reputation among young and progressive Chileans.[12] More serious in the eyes of the Chilean right wing was Jara's growing identification with the socialist movement led by Salvador Allende. After visits to Cuba and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Jara had joined the Communist Party. The personal met the political in his songs about the poverty he had experienced firsthand.[12]

Jara's songs spread outside Chile and were performed by American folk artists.[13] His popularity was due not only to his songwriting skills but also to his exceptional power as a performer. He took a decisive turn toward political confrontation with his 1969 song "Preguntas por Puerto Montt" ("Questions About Puerto Montt"), which took direct aim at a government official who had ordered police to attack squatters in the town of Puerto Montt. The Chilean political situation deteriorated after the official was assassinated, and right-wing thugs beat up Jara on one occasion.[13]
In 1970, Jara supported Allende, the Popular Unity coalition candidate for president, volunteering for political work and playing free concerts.[14] He composed "Venceremos" ("We Will Triumph"), the theme song of Allende's Popular Unity movement, and welcomed Allende's election to the Chilean presidency in 1970. After the election, Jara continued to speak in support of Allende and played an important role in the new administration's efforts to reorient Chilean culture.[15]

He and his wife, Joan Jara, were key participants in a cultural renaissance that swept Chile, organizing cultural events that supported the country's new socialist government. He set poems by Pablo Neruda to music and performed at a ceremony honoring him after Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. Throughout rumblings of a right-wing coup, Jara held on to his teaching job at Chile's Technical University. His popular success during this time, as both a musician and a Communist, earned him a concert in Moscow. So successful was he that the Soviet Union tried to latch onto his popularity, claiming in their media that his vocal prowess was the result of surgery he had undergone while in Moscow.[16]

Backed by the United States, which opposed Allende's socialist politics, the Chilean military staged a coup d'état on September 11, 1973,[17] resulting in the death of Allende and the installation of Augusto Pinochet as dictator. At the moment of the coup, Jara was on his way to the Technical University (today the Universidad de Santiago). That night, he slept at the university along with other teachers and students, and sang to raise morale.

After the coup, Pinochet's soldiers rounded up Chileans who were believed to be involved with leftist groups, including Allende's Popular Unity party. On the morning of 12 September 1973, Jara was taken prisoner, along with thousands of others, and imprisoned inside Chile Stadium.[18][19] The guards there tortured him, smashing his hands and fingers, and then mocked him by asking him to play the guitar. Jara instead sung the Chilean protest song Venceremos. Soon after, he was killed with a gunshot to the head, and his body was riddled with more than 40 bullets.[20]

According to the BBC.com[21] "There are many conflicting accounts of Jara’s last days but the 2019 Netflix documentary Massacre at the Stadium pieces together a convincing narrative. As a famous musician and prominent supporter of Allende, Jara was swiftly recognised on his way into the stadium. An army officer threw a lit cigarette on the ground, made Jara crawl for it, then stamped on his wrists. Jara was first separated from the other detainees, then beaten and tortured in the bowels of the stadium. At one point, he defiantly sang Venceremos (We Will Win), Allende’s 1970 election anthem, through split lips. On the morning of the 16th, according to a fellow detainee, Jara asked for a pen and notebook and scribbled the lyrics to Estadio Chile, which were later smuggled out of the stadium: “How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror/ Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.” Two hours later, he was shot dead, then his body was riddled with machine-gun bullets and dumped in the street. He was 40."

After his murder, Jara's body was displayed at the entrance of Chile Stadium for other prisoners to see. It was later discarded outside the stadium along with the bodies of other civilian prisoners who had been killed by the Chilean Army.[22] His body was found by civil servants and brought to a morgue, where one of them was able to identify him and contact his wife, Joan. She took his body and gave him a quick and clandestine burial in the general cemetery before she fled the country into exile.

That is what it would take, Classic X'er. Fascism is Bolshevik terror and repression in the name of a reactionary or even feudal agenda of economic elites. Jara was one of those people who naively believed in the ideals of Marxism in a country with severe economic problems from which Chilean elites profited greatly, but also gravely dehumanizing to the many poor.  Mussolini, the first Fascist dictator, learned much from Lenin on how to establish state brutality and gave his secret police the name "Ceca", which is the Italian transliteration of the Russian Cheka, Lenin's secret police.   

Yes, I want some things to go back to how they were when Barack Obama was President -- when the President recognized the appropriateness of precedent and protocol, when checks and balances were beyond challenge because consequences for their short-circuiting were far worse than failing to get one's way, when people got respect and dignity in public expressions despite hardships instead of mockery, and when people accepted ethnic and religious diversity as acceptable instead of as something to mock. 

I thoroughly despise the person that Donald Trump is. He is low in emotional intelligence, as is shown in his mockery of people on the autistic spectrum. If you have ever seen Rain Man -- I am not far from being that character. Oh, sure, everyone on the autistic spectrum is different... but I am 'bad' enough that I must practically do stage acting to seem normal. I have embarrassing lapses, so that messes up my human relationships and my work record. 

America has people capable of believing any absurdity that some right-wing official offers -- even medical quackery! -- that Donald Trump has offered on COVID-19. Over a third of a million people have died in America of the Plague of Donald Trump, roughly one-thousandth of the US population. To be sure, this is negligent homicide more than outright murder, which prevents me from calling it genocide.    

...but what I most want is a return to a shared acceptance among Americans as a whole that norms vital to democracy be accepted even if -- indeed, especially if -- those norms be inconvenient. I would like to see conspiracy theories get the recognition for their absurdity; if anything, people who believe in conspiracy theories are the ones most likely to accept a conspiratorial plot that serves their agenda. I'd like to see the political  polarization  between Left and Right, much of which is cultural, disappear.