Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(06-08-2021, 09:08 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 08-Jun-2021 World View: Blaming the blacks

Gone Wrote:>   Like blacks who left the south in the 1920s and moved to Detroit,
>   Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Guest Wrote:>   All of which they destroyed.

I totally disagree with this.  The blacks did not destroy any
of these cities.  Blacks are hard working and entrepreneurial,
and when allowed to do so, they are an asset to any city.

In practice, Southern blacks moving north did as internal immigrants what prior immigrants did, taking over the jobs and housing that others had cast off as undesirable. The problems for them were (1) they were all too visible -- unless they 'passed', and (2) they were the last to start over at the rock bottom for a very long time. Like other immigrants they came to their 'new' homes and occupations nearly penniless. Sure, they  had a culture and could occasionally profit from it... but they of course got the cr@ppy jobs.   

Quote:We saw this discussed with respect to the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
The White Supremacist Democrats in the KKK chose Tulsa's
Greenwood district because it was a vibrant, successful business
district known as "Black Wall Street".  It's the White Democrats
who destroyed Tulsa, not the blacks.

Unlike the big cities Up North, Oklahoma was one of the last frontier areas in America, and frontier areas lacked (or were free from) the economic 'structure' that one associates with ethnic hierarchies. Note well that Oklahoma had achieved statehood only in 1907, and the rush of settlers at the foundation of Oklahoma as something other than a  collection of Indian reservations had begun only in 1889. Forty-two years. On a frontier, entrepreneurial opportunities are typically open to practically anyone irrespective of origin. 

What "Black Wall Street" did wrong, in the eyes of many white losers was to succeed, in which case they would not be obliged to defer to the manifold expressions of racism. In 1921, blacks were still largely associated with the Party of Lincoln, the Party that had liberated African-Americans, at least on paper, from subjection by slave-owning planters. Populist resentment toward successful business targets anyone somehow different who is more successful -- and visible. It is commonplace that the worst exploiters do everything possible to cultivate resentment to direct it someone other than themselves.

Most people fail to understand that the typical small business owner rents his share of a building and sells goods on consignment. The gap between wholesale and retail is the living for the business owner and his family.  I wish that more American kids understood commerce as an American institution as they are expected to understand the legislative process. If you want economic, technological, or even political progress, then you will need profits as a reward for effort, imagination, self-denial, resource management, and competent decisions in the operation of the only institutions: businesses.     

Quote:The same is true today of Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia.  It's the
White Democrats who have destroyed and are destroying those cities by
destroying the black family.  As I explained in a previous post, the
White Democrats still have the KKK today in another form, in the form
of black kids without fathers killing other black kids, and black
mothers without husbands being raped with impunity.  This is no
accident.  This is the policy of the Democrat party, just as the
Democrats a century ago were freely raping black girls and lynching
black boys.  This is what the Democrat party is all about.

The KKK is a clique of largely-irrelevant fascist pigs who have no chance of taking over anything except in some fantasy world. The dangerous Second Klan, to be sure, was active in much of America, including Tulsa. It had many of the characteristics of Mussolini's Fascists and what would be Hitler's Nazis. We all know how that works: it starts small as a melding of a bad business and a popular movement. It is safe to assume that the Democratic Party of even the early 1960's is very different from what the Democratic party is today. Start with the obvious: blacks came to recognize FDR as the "Second Lincoln" in those parts of America in which blacks had some right to vote. 

The partisan identification of America is very different from what it was even as late as the 1950's:

 

Quote:When all is said and done, I think that the Obama and Eisenhower Presidencies are going to look like good analogues. Both Presidents are chilly rationalists. Both are practically scandal-free administrations. Both started with a troublesome war that both found their way out of. Neither did much to 'grow' the strength of their Parties in either House of Congress. To compare ISIS to Fidel Castro is completely unfair to Fidel Castro, a gentleman by contrast to ISIS. 

The definitive moderate Republican may have been Dwight Eisenhower, and I have heard plenty of Democrats praise the Eisenhower Presidency. He went along with Supreme Court rulings that outlawed segregationist practices, stayed clear of the McCarthy bandwagon, and let McCarthy implode.


 
gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice
deep blue -- Republican all four elections
light blue -- Republican all but 2012 (I assume that greater Omaha went for Ike twice)
light green -- Eisenhower once, Stevenson once, Obama never
dark green -- Stevenson twice, Obama never
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once 

No state voted Democratic all four times, so no state is in deep red.

The electric eel is loose! What?  Republican Eisenhower and Democrat Obama? They did win much the same states in their elections (Obama not getting the High Plains states or the Intermountain West aside from Colorado and New Mexico). OK, the political culture of America in 2008 and 2012 is far closer to that of the 1950s than partisan identity would indicate -- it is just that the partisan match to the political cultures of the states are mostly opposite in partisan identity. 

So what changed in in American politics between 1952 and 2012? Let's start by saying what did not change. Eisenhower cultivated the Mormon vote for the GOP to get it to start identifying with conservative politics. Trump has some chance of blowing that. Ranch country is as strongly R now as it was in 1952, I do not want to go into the details on how ranch-area and farm-area politics differ; Iowa has voted D in all but two Presidential elections beginning in 1988, and Kansas has voted R in every Presidential election since 1968. Demographic realities have given California, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico large Hispanic minorities, and such now favors Democrats in statewide elections.

But note well: Eisenhower and Obama did very well with well-educated people, winning decisive majorities among both. Stevenson, McCain, and Romney did well with not-so-well-educated people -- and such makes a big difference. People with much trust in formal education as a necessity for the Good Life voted for Ike -- and Obama -- at least as the states suggest. The states with the lowest standards of formal education went for Stevenson (D) but against Obama (D). Ike won three states usually tough for Republicans even in good or great years, winning the states (Massachusetts and Minnesota) that were the sole states that hapless McGovern and Mondale won in 49-state landslides for a Republican, and Rhode Island, the only Northern state other than Massachusetts to vote against Herbert Hoover in 1928. Ike won all three twice, and no Republican has won all three once in any other election since 1924.     

OK, what about the Hispanics? Sure, many are poor, and recent immigrants might be ill-educated people who hold onto cr@ppy jobs. They insist that their kids do well in school so that they don't become a permanent under-class in America. In the 1950's such people would have gone for Ike. Today they hold Trump in contempt for an anti-intellectualism that reaches far beyond the usual wayward professor to the K-12 teacher. Note well that the Catholic Church has no use for the young-earth creationism that so many Protestant fundamentalists endorse. "Believe it or burn!"

.....

The ideal antithesis of Trump is an Eisenhower (if one is a conservative Never-Trumper) or Obama (if one is a moderate liberal) The two are more similar than one might expect. Obama elections are closer to those of Eisenhower than to anyone else -- even other Democrats. The political cultures of the states are essentially as they were in the 1950's, with biggest changes in demographics (the biggest one: the rapid growth of the Hispanic populations as shares of the electorate). Blacks have not gained as a share of the electorate, and Asians are heavily concentrated in states that are 'sure things' in recent years. Technology has changed, but that has more effect upon journalism than upon economic reality aside from the disappearance of many industrial jobs. (But industrial workers of an earlier era are getting warehouse and delivery jobs instead. If they are not involved in pressing records or assembling televisions they are handling them in a warehouse or delivering them to customers.    

The main change between the 1950's and now is that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies. Eisenhower won the college-educated vote -- big -- and so did Obama. The constituencies for "Eisenhower" and "Rockefeller" Republicans, conservatives in style and personal life but progressive on civil liberties and the environment, have gone Democratic. Meanwhile the whites of the Mountain and Deep South have gone largely Republican. Asian-Americans have gone from Republican (concern about Communism) to Democratic (concern about the anti-intellectualism within the Republican Party).

OK, Republicans still have the plutocrats and executives and still have a hold over ranchers and Mormons as did Eisenhower. Democrats still have a strong hold over Jews, Mexican-Americans, and blacks. 

MY OPINION:

I see Donald Trump as a political failure at the least, unable to add fresh support to the votes from  the constituencies that he needed for a bare election. Generational change in the electorate as younger votes who are much more Democratic than Republican supplant older voters who are slightly more Republican than Democratic die off. President Trump will need new support to win re-election in 2020 just to offset an electorate becoming more Democratic. Most people already recognize that Trump's economic agenda demands great suffering on behalf of existing elites of ownership and management. The Trump economy is a raw deal -- prosperity only for a few for which we are all expected to be grateful. 

It's hard to measure political failure at this stage, as we have never had a President with such pervasive corruption as this one. Americans have shown tolerance of political corruption only in local machine politics, but not at the state level and not even at the level of the congressional district. Scandal is political ruin, but it is hard to measure it against an economic collapse that Trump has not yet inflicted upon us (and might not). [/quote]

Yes, as different as their curriculae vitae may be, Obama and Eisenhower were similar in temperament and in attitudes toward legal formalities, diplomatic precedent, and the rule of law. Someone has to be more like Obama than anyone else, and they even fit the pattern of "mature Reactive" types more likely to promote incremental change than pervasive or violent revolution.  By speaking of a "mature reactive", what do I mean by an "immature Reactive"?



Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Arabic: أَبُو مُصْعَبٍ ٱلزَّرْقَاوِيُّ‎, [i]’Abū Muṣ‘ab az-Zarqāwī[/i], Abu Musab from Zarqa; English pronunciation (help·info); October 30, 1966[1][2] – June 7, 2006), born Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (أَحْمَدُ فَضِيلِ ٱلنَّزَالِ ٱلْخَلَايْلَةَ, [i]’Aḥmad Faḍīl an-Nazāl al-Ḫalāyla[/i]), was a Jordanian jihadist who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings, and attacks during the Iraq War, reportedly "turning an insurgency against US troops" in Iraq "into a Shia–Sunni civil war".[3] He was sometimes known by his supporters as the "Sheikh of the slaughterers".[4]



Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Arabic: أَبُو بَكْرٍ ٱلْبَغْدَادِيُّ‎, romanized: ʾAbū Bakr al-Baḡdādī), born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai (Arabic: إِبْرَاهِيمُ عَوَّادِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ عَليِّ مُحَمَّدِ ٱلْبَدْريِّ ٱلسَّامَرَّائِيِّ‎, romanized: ʾIbrāhīm ʿAwwād ʾIbrāhīm ʿAlī Muḥammad al-Badrī as-Sāmarrāʾī; 28 July 1971[1] – 27 October 2019), was an Iraqi terrorist and the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from 2014 until his death in 2019.

Baghdadi would become directly involved in ISIL's atrocities and human rights violations. These include the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq, extensive sexual slavery, organized rape, floggings, and systematic executions. He directed terrorist activities and massacres. He embraced brutality as part of the organization's propaganda efforts, producing videos displaying sexual slavery and executions via hacking, stoning, and burning.[13][14] Baghdadi himself was a rapist who kept several personal sex slaves, .[15][16]




Alphonse Gabriel Capone (/kəˈpoʊn/;[1] January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American gangster and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as a crime boss ended when he went to prison at the age of 33.



Ferenc Szálasi (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈfɛrɛnt͡s ˈsaːlɒʃi]; 6 January 1897 – 12 March 1946) was the leader of the Arrow Cross Party – Hungarist Movement, the "Leader of the Nation" (Nemzetvezető), being both Head of State and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary's "Government of National Unity" (Nemzeti Összefogás Kormánya) for the final six months of Hungary's participation in World War II, after Germany occupied Hungary and removed Miklós Horthy by force. During his brief rule, Szálasi's men murdered 10,000–15,000 Jews.[1] After the war, he was tried and executed by the Hungarian court for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during World War II.




Mátyás Rákosi ([ˈmaːcaːʃ ˈraːkoʃi]; born Mátyás Rosenfeld; 9 March 1892[1][2] – 5 February 1971[3]) was a Hungarian communist politician who was the de facto leader of Hungary from 1947 to 1956. [4][5] He served first as General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party (1945–48) and later holding the same post with the Hungarian Working People's Party (1948–56).

An ardent Stalinist, his government was very loyal to the Soviet Union, and Rákosi even set up a personality cult of his own modeled on that of Stalin. He presided over the mass imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian people and the deaths of thousands.[6][7] He orchestrated show trials modeled on those of the USSR, among the most prominent victims of which was his former lieutenant László Rajk. His policies of collectivization and mass repression devastated the country's economy and political life, causing massive discontent. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Rákosi was partially demoted at Moscow's behest and the reformist Communist Imre Nagy became the new Prime Minister. However, Rákosi was able to use his continuing influence as First Secretary to thwart all of Nagy's attempts at reform and ultimately force the latter out of office in 1955.

.....

Not the sorts of people whom you like if you could imagine wearing something like this:

  or this 

In view of the map overlay between Presidential elections involving Ike and Obama both had to win big chunks of similar parts of electorates in the various states. That does not happen so blatantly over fifty years with Presidents from supposedly-opposite Parties. To be sure, few people voted in both 1952 and 2016... but if you have ever read David Hackett-Fischer's Albion's Seed, then you will find that even if the partisan identification of ethnic, religious, and vocational communities change, their political values rarely do.    

Quote:We've got to stop letting Democrats off the hook.  They pretend to be
so nice and caring, but they're bitter and angry because they lost the
Civil War and the Republicans freed the slaves, and they're trying to
destroy the country by destroying black families, flooding the country
with illegal immigrants, freeing all the violent criminals in jail,
defunding the policy, and destroying the economy.  Apparently they
believe that if they can start a new Civil War, then they might win
the next one, and then the Democrats can re-enslave the blacks, like
the Chinese Communists are enslaving the Uighurs.

Please put the blame where it belongs, and stop blaming innocent
hard-working blacks for the intentional destruction wrought by the
Democrats.

Well, just look at West Virginia, which has gone from the sort of state that reliably votes D in all but R blowouts like 1928, 1956, 1972, and 1984 to one of the states that most reliably votes R -- perhaps even in the next election in which Democrats get over 400 electoral votes (there has been no such election since 1964). This has nothing to do with race, but instead with a Democratic machine that relied upon the United Mine Workers' Union getting out the vote for Democrats who simply sponsor pro-union legislation while underinvesting in education, highways, and public health. Who needs public health when most people have good health coverage from the UMWU? That worked well until the coal seams started to play out and coal miners started losing lots of jobs. West Virginians after about the mid-1990's started to be more likely workers in Wal*Mart or MacDonald's than in coal mines. One need not be much of a high-information voter if you work in a coal mine -- but one needs practically no information to work for Wally World, Chez Mac, or some convenience store. Trump does well among such workers so long as they are white. 

Republicans started making elections closer in West Virginia and then picking off one election after another until the state has only one high-level official who remains a Democrat. Senator Joe Manchin will either retire or lose his next re-election bid, at which time the Democratic Party will look as if it might as well shut down like some coal mine with no remaining coal seam. The question is whether the Republicans will make things any better than the Democrats did... I doubt it. If they can win elections by keeping people cowed or by having so fcuked-up an economy that anyone with any ability or ambition will leave for better in America, the GOP machine will be able to rely upon ill-educated, immobile (the roads are still among the worst in America) people in poor health to not vote for any threat of change. Just don't take away welfare, lest things start to look like Romania in 1989. 

Democrats should have been putting some money into schools, roads, and hospitals when they had the chance and attracting new employment when they had the chance. Byrd at least got much of the federal bureaucracy to relocate to West Virginia, but that was far from enough.      

... Note well that the damage that happened to African-American communities in the 1960's relates to the demise of manufacturing jobs. White boomers with any talent at all rejected the factory as a place of employment unless to supplement their funds for a college education and then preferred more 'relevant' work even if a mere clerk. It became more attractive to off-shore manufacturing as American quality got shoddier (yes, even the mind-numbing drudgery that is assembly-line work is best done if some people in the factory actually have some skill and talent). The jobs that educated white people rejected vanished, and so did the manufacturing jobs that ill-educated black men performed also disappeared because there just weren't enough people to do those jobs.

Know well: the most reliable way to get people out of poverty in large numbers has typically been the factory, whether the garment factories of New York, the auto plants of Michigan, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the giant breweries of Milwaukee and St. Louis, or the tire plants of Dayton.