08-23-2016, 09:34 AM
(08-22-2016, 03:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(08-19-2016, 02:44 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: ... there have been successful big government programs, and unsuccessful ones. There have been times when the people have needed a lot of help, and times they do OK with less help. There have been times and places where the government can become ingrown and corrupt, and times when they are less so. Depending on what times and places one focuses on in US history, one can learn very different ideas on how America works, what is wrong with it, what is right, and what could be better.
Mikebert brought up a point a while back that certain values can shift easier than others. People get different ideas on how the world works, different focuses on what goals ought to be pushed for to improve life. He has a point that beliefs that can be blatantly disproven by example can be superseded rather quickly. I'd also think values that are religious or emotional might have more staying power than objective ideas that can more clearly be shown to be false.
But you can't doubt that many of the key divides in the current Red / Blue divide are extremely stubborn. I can find merit and historical cause for both sets of ideas, perhaps because my own values hold that world views that succeed became strong because they worked or seemed to have worked in their time. I lived through the 60s and remember the notion that big problems ought to be confronted and solved, and this often involved throwing lots of money at problems. I also saw the National Malaise, with the string of failed US policies and projects that disillusioned many about the effectiveness of the government.
There are two sets of lessons learned. I think we would be better off if everyone tried to learn both sets of lessons.
But that's sure not what is happening. Partisans like you and Eric will cling to the lessons and policies of one time and with intense prejudice find ways to reject the lessons and policies of other times. This is going to the point of demonization, where anyone who holds the other set of values must be stupid, deluded, brainwashed, evil or a clone of Hitler. Folks from either extreme aren't considering where the other side might be coming from. They would rather assume that the other side is totally flying mammal excrement out of their minds.
I don't see either side as being more or less evil, deluded, stupid or etc... I do see a pendulum that ought to be swinging with the cycles. At the moment we have a large division of wealth and entrepreneurs are having no difficulty raising funds. There is no current need for supply side stimulus, to take from the poor to give to the rich. There is a real lack of jobs paying living wages. This makes it a good time for demand side stimulus. Money has to be inserted onto Main Street, where it will allow folk to buy and sell stuff, to get goods and services moving freely again. If we can improve infrastructure, education and health care in the process, it's worth doing.
It's not a matter of one ideology or the other always being better. It is a matter of honestly looking at what the nation needs and adjusting policy to match the current needs, not what the needs were when last a given party sized power. Right now, Main Street has a lot more genuine needs than the Robber Barons. The Robber Barons are riding as high as they ever have.
Now, I might wish Mikebert could be proven right. It would be nice if people could just look at the world, see policies that didn't work, that aren't working, and just let go of old ideas that might no longer be effective. This doesn't seem to be happening, though. (Classic Xer) and Eric are representative in being able to see only one side of the picture. Both of you have lots of company, clinging to the extremes. It seems that modern society is complex enough that many people cannot see things well enough to shift positions.
I don't think it ought to be all that difficult to open one's eyes, to see all of America and its history rather than focusing on selective bits that reinforce what one wants to believe. Still, the partisan divide continues.
If you see all of history, you can see that there's only been one other time besides our own when the supposed "other party" besides the more-progressive one was in-fact too stubborn, deluded, brainwashed, almost Hitler like. That was the 1850s and 1860s. We are in that time again.
"There have been times when the people have needed a lot of help, and times they do OK with less help. There have been times and places where the government can become ingrown and corrupt, and times when they are less so." While I might agree with this, that does not mean that the Reagan-Bush-Tea Party era qualifies as a time when people did OK with less help, or when the government had been ingrown and corrupt before they came along. No, people needed MORE help from government in Reagan's time, and MORE corruption occurred as a result of his election. Corruption in government is a progressives' issue anyway, not a conservative issue. Conservatives don't cure it; progressives cure it. It's not about how big government is, it's about what it does.
As a Goldwater Republican said on a PBS doc, Goldwater in 1964 would not have approved of the Tea Party's ideas today. Just because pendulums swing and cycles occur, does not mean that any ol swing is the right ol thing. It would not do either if the USA swung in a too-radical direction toward communism, isolationism, or violent leftist activities. Or a Green Party candidate who adopts and spreads Republican lies. We don't need to agree with swings that swing too far. That's what has happened in the Reagan-Bush-Tea Party era. The partisan divide will continue until this right-wing swing is defeated.
As mikebert said, values don't come unlocked in 4Ts; one set of locked values defeats the other. Only then will you see more consensus.
The side that used to have dominance that is losing credibility tends to become resolute in its stubborn support for an increasingly-discreditable cause. In the 1850s the slave-owning planters kept asserting that slavery was the best thing that ever happened to slaves (since by 1860 the lawful slave trade had so long ended that there were practically no slaves who had been 'imported', so most slaves knew nothing other than slavery, having been born into it), that slave-owning plantations were the only way to develop an agrarian America, and the only real wealth was agricultural commodities as agriculture was the foundation of industry, and that the Bible condoned chattel slavery (it's a good thing for the slave-owning interests that the large Jewish immigration from central and eastern Europe had yet to arrive, as they would have disabused people of the meaning of the word 'servant' in the Old Testament)*
Comparison of the Confederacy to Nazis is inapt. The slave-owners had the slaves in close proximity, and they did not have extermination camps for blacks. Bad as conditions were for slaves in the Plantation South, slavery in Nazi Germany was infinitely worse. A plantation slave typically had value, a reality that slaves used to save their lives. But people in the South really believed that Southern traditions had made America and would prevail over 'mere' industrial power. The fanaticism is real due to the social isolation of many of the "Red" areas. Figure that if one is a poor kid in Appalachia or the Ozarks and hears about all the depravity in places like Pittsburgh, Columbus (Ohio), Cincinnati, Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta, St. Louis, Memphis, or Dallas... all relatively-liberal places. Lots of people don't look like us, don't pray like us, don't listen to the same music... and that's before you even discuss all the homosexuality and abortion!
Appalachia and the Ozarks have scenic beauty and nice places for fly fishing... but you will not be going there for seeing any of the glorious old buildings of London, Paris, or Florence.
I have yet to see any polls of the High Plains states except Kansas and Texas... Texas straddles regions, so it is an electoral story in itself when it is competitive, which it really isn't. Kansas is not part of the Ozarks or Appalachians; the people are mobile. I am guessing that the Republican Party will be weakening some in the High Plains. If you live in one of those states you need some mobility.
The Tea Party supporters were sold a bill of goods. They got promises that so long as the economic elites got what they want, America would return to social norms that cultural conservatives found comfortable. What the Tea party pols didn't tell their supporters was that America in the 1950s was conservative because America was comfortable. That was when factory workers were buying houses instead of being shoe-horned into tiny apartments, when people with modest jobs saved for appliances and cars, and when the smart kids from factory families could attend heavily-subsidized public colleges and universities if they wanted lives based upon work other than machine-paced work. The bill-of-goods was 'race', 'fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity', 'abortion (against)', 'homosexuality (against)', 'evolution' 'opposition to educated elites', and 'the lyin' African in the White House'.
The linear view of history suggests that the way back to the idyllic times of the 1950s (for people of slight talent working on an assembly line for fair wages) is to turn back the calendar sixty to seventy years, when this place
was making these cars:
But Packard automobiles (Ask the man who owns one!) are not coming back. A pity, I understand, as they were by their reputation good cars. The cyclical history suggests that the way back to a time analogous to the 1950s, in which a person of modest talent can make a modest living doing honest labor is to get through the Crisis Era and solve most of the problems that we have neglected in the name of elite indulgence. I can easily imagine a few little changes in history in which Packard survives as a marque, ends up creating a line of civilized small cars in the 1970s and ends up merging Chrysler into it. But such of course is no longer possible.
The cycle takes eighty (minimum) to one hundred (maximum) years, depending on the length of the Crisis. But even with a protracted Crisis we are closer to the 1950s analogue than we are to the 1950s. We simply know what the 1950s were like. We can reasonably expect that the people who know what the 1950s were like from first-hand experience will not be around in large numbers when the time analogous to the 1950s comes to be.
Just don't expect Packard automobiles to be built again. Today it would be silly to "ask the man who owns one"... if Packard were around today it might now have women, minorities, and same-sex couples to ask, too ... but it is not around, and it won't be back unless a company like Honda or Toyota chooses to revive the nameplate.
...The Tea Party types will be irrelevant in the next temporal analogue to the 1950s. They or their families will have some nice costumes for high-school plays of 1776, though.
*Here's what I saw: the servant was typically a landless young man in a rural society who wanted the daughter of a landowner for marriage. He would contract for a term of service in which he would be a practical apprentice, learning the ways of animal husbandry, planting and reaping so that if he got a little plot of land he would know what to do with it. He was going to get the girl as a wife and the land as a source of sustenance. If he did not learn how to work the land he might be tempted to sell it and waste the proceeds on debauchery, leaving the landowner's daughter and the landowner's grandchildren destitute. In a land with no cash economy such was like an indenture. But think of what the indentured servant was going to get: a plot of land and the landowner's daughter. The landowner wanted the best for his daughter. This was a good arrangement for protecting a daughter.
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.