Donald Trump: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

(01-22-2021, 02:12 PM)mamabug Wrote:

(01-22-2021, 05:15 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: It's true, mamabug and classic. The nub of the problem is really people not disowning Republican ideas. 

So, basically, the problem of the crisis is 'wrong think'.  Or, to borrow from an earlier era, "The Crisis will not end until those evil papists turn from their sin and embrace the King as the head of the Church!"

A Crisis exists because of catastrophic failures, many of which come from 'new' ideas that are superficially attractive to people who didn't learn their consequences in the last Crisis. In a memorable cartoon from Mad Magazine in the 1960's, one of the elderly pair of geezers (probably Lost) says to the other "It's not the new morality; it's the old immorality!" People who know what the blunders are from their experience don't find them so seductive the next time that they appear. Blunders must first seduce. 

Let's look at the most obvious blunder: the lure of easy money, money not gained so much through toil, investment, innovation, the honing of skill, and enterprise. There is going to be a new era that makes all the old fashioned ways of personal sacrifice irrelevant. The speculative bubble is attractive for many reasons -- until one runs out of suckers to buy in. At that point there are only sellers, and if the speculative investment  doesn't generate much of an income, then it rapidly loses its value. 

While people are buying into the speculative bubble they are not investing in plant and equipment that create jobs for industrial workers (among others); as they read about how well their investments are doing they aren't honing their skills. It is far easier than starting a shoe-string business unless one dedicated to selling status symbols to those who think themselves getting rich. 

Then it is back to the old-fashioned ways of eking out a bare living because living the high life is no longer available.      

Quote:I think I've read enough of your views to understand I have little hope in convincing you of why I see this as an incredibly dangerous mentality to take hold in those who control the levers of power, you seem fully immersed in the stereotypical Boomer 'Black vs. White' thinking.  I'm sure if, in the coming months, a few eggs need to be broken to form the coming utopia I will be able to read your justifications of it.

We have developed a perverse sort of utopia in the last four decades, one that depends upon the assumption that nothing matters except the power, indulgence, and gain of those already super-rich, with others obliged to work for a mockery of a living in jobs far too small for their spirits and talents. In the 1980's there was huge growth in merchandising and food service as manufacturing jobs vanished. No single adult generation was at fault for all; all but except X (to the extent that they were not yet adult) and the Lost (off the scene) were partly culpable. GI's got the reassurance that they would keep getting pensions and Social Security; many drove around in RV's with bumper stickers that read "We're spending our grandchildren's inheritance". That was an understatement. The RV was guzzling motor fuel and belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and grandparents weren't putting money into college funds. The Silent could keep their soft jobs as long as they wanted. Boomers were looking for meaning in life instead of hard labor or numbing tasks -- and ended up working in a shopping mall or a fast-food place despite a college degree while talented people avoided factory work and construction. 

We are still paying a high price for that. American businesses went from being manufacturers to being importers. The acquisitive drive remains, and when the easiest way to make a buck is to spend money on the right paper investment, then that prevails.    

Quote:I'm just going to repeat my earlier assertion that a Crisis Era does not arise because there is an actual, real problem that needs drastic action to solve.  The 'problem' is just a manifestation of underlying splits in society - you could subtitle this hypothesis 'King George was Right.'  The Crisis Era arises when generations align in a structure that fosters a social belief that not only does a given, selected 'problem' need to be solved, but it is so important they become willing to solve it via force and are able to morally justify marginalizing, impoverishing, imprisoning and/or outright killing their neighbor.

Some societies that go through a Crisis Era force history through conquest, genocide, and enslavement, as did the Axis Powers in the last Crisis Era.  Some solve their core problems more gently. The most effective way to get through a Crisis is to discover what has failed and do some combination of old ways that work with major reforms. So a society commits to technologies that can make life easier and more enriching and rediscovers doing things that pay off only in the long term, offer no quick-buck easy money, require deferral (or even denial) of gratification, and have low yields -- and require hard work and the development of customer loyalty (which is easy to lose and hard to develop).

So the monopolized, bureaucratic, unimaginative behemoths vanish. People who lose their jobs must start anew and focus on economic survival instead of control of a system.    

Quote:In the last turning, we directed most of that willingness outward.  The two turnings before that we directed it inward (North vs. South, loyalists vs. freedom fighters).  Both were very bloody.   Of course, in the modern era, we could have a kinder, gentler suppression where we simply 'unperson' people by depriving them of their jobs, access to federal services, the ability to access the public square, and equal protection under the law.

 
No two Crises are quite alike. There will be different sets of villains and victims, victors and vanquished. Just imagine how life would now be for many of us had the insurrection of January 6 succeeded. People who acted much like those who stormed the Winter Palace would decide what political figures would be relevant and which ones would not. Donald Trump would have been declared President (if necessary at gunpoint), and the revolutionaries would redefine American politics. The personality cult around Donald Trump would prevail. People would learn quickly that enthusiastic support matters more in such activities as teaching, librarianship, and clergy than does competence and intellectual flexibility. There would be plenty of opportunity for hacks to rewrite school textbooks to extol the person and agenda of Donald Trump. People would know that the US flag by tradition is at the top followed by something extolling the personality cult (as opposed to the US flag). We would be expected to emulate the banality of that wondrous person. We go back to environment-ruining practices because they are profitable... and if we have to import coal, then we do that to sate the greed of coal barons who no longer need miners. Global warming becomes a myth. Anyone who gets in the way is ruined or treated even worse. 

The demise of the Trump agenda and personality implies also the demise of the core values (ahem!) behind them. Rationality emerges as a source of solutions and replaces bureaucratic power and shady command-and-control systems. People (at this the Millennial generation will be the support while Millennials deputize some X, Boomers, and even Silent to be formal leaders) will insist upon sharing the sacrifices and rewards more equitably. It will be less attractive to have even regional divides (and these have often become more flagrant than ethnic divides) of 'winners' and 'losers' by region. Americans have been discovering the hard way that poverty is more an impediment than a spur to work.

Even as we have seen a trend to plutocracy in the neoliberal cycle of politics (beginning with the Reagan "Revolution" and failing with Trump, many of us have lived through an economic transformation without noticing it. In the First World we are at the end of the line for the era in which making and selling more stuff allows greater happiness. High technology of the computer and the Internet allows us to read this:

       https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701




without having to possess a physical copy. The copyright has been expired for perhaps a century.

If you are interested in reading the only novel by Ayn Rand that won't destroy your soul like sulfuric acid destroys flesh, this one work managed to slip out of copyright:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1250

  


That is only literature. You can get full video of concerts. Because of YouTube I have discovered a masterful conductor well-suited to Anton Bruckner, Sergiu Celibidache. Celibidache didn't like to record; he far preferred loive concerts to the exclusion of recording, unlike his contemporary Herbert von Karajan. Karajan is one of my favorite overall conductors of Bruckner (who wrote long works as symphonies). 

Not all is free to the customer, but obviously one can dispense with all the newsprint if one has an e-subscription to a newspaper of high journalistic standards. Best Buy allows one to get a large, super-high-definition TV which doubles as a picture frame which allows one (on a subscription basis) to use your TV to display a renowned work of art. So maybe one won't need to travel so much and will not need to buy newspapers to cast off as trash after one day. 
  

Quote: 
If you disagree that the democrats could or would do this, please explain to me how you would resolve the Crisis of 'people holding Republican ideas' if almost exactly 1/2 of the country hold one or more ideas that could be considered 'Republican.'

Republicans involved in the insurrection will be ruined politically soon enough. Nobody has any justification for making possible a security breach that puts fellow members of Congress at risk of violence. Nobody has a right to organize a riot. Political tastes may be changing rapidly, and the old sort of conservative will have to rebrand Reagan-Tea Party-Trump conservatism into something benign and practical. Core values that existed with little question in the 3T may be proved very wrong. 

Humanistic liberals have an edge: they do not need any hierarchy except of talent and achievement (I'd say that that is a small-r republican virtue, wouldn't you?). The technology that we have mandates as much sophistication in its use (lest it become numbing or exploitative) as in its creation and manufacture. The opportunities for editing, marketing, criticizing, and archiving will themselves create excellent opportunities for careers. 

Creating value with less material is technological advancement at its purest. Technology is not so much the opposite of lack as it is of brute-force ways of doing things. We are going to have more and better options for a good life, and we will not need as much toil to do what we need to do.