12-16-2021, 02:12 PM
It is easy to see why a thoroughly-depraved capitalist order would seek to extend a 3T that endorses economic and social depravity. Easy money for a few and hardship for everyone else is great for intensifying the disparity between sybaritic indulgence and gross desperation. When the plutocrats get extremely callous about hunger, exposure, and exhaustion things are extremely and inexcusably bad.
Extreme plutocracies make proletarian revolutions possible when something goes catastrophically wrong -- military defeat and the breakdown of the credibility of the economic system, as when the warring state starves those who make the weapons and grow the food on behalf of the warriors. The warriors know that they will be the next to starve, so they turn against the current leadership.
Lenin's revolution succeeded when his revolutionary government started paying the soldiers and police. The Tsar and the chaotic Provisional Government had started to fail at that.
A 3T is at best a fun time, but it is one of cakes and circuses -- and cocaine and concubines. Crises can be over quickly, and when they are the 1T can begin. I expect America to be much more regimented in 2030 than in 1980.
Extreme plutocracies make proletarian revolutions possible when something goes catastrophically wrong -- military defeat and the breakdown of the credibility of the economic system, as when the warring state starves those who make the weapons and grow the food on behalf of the warriors. The warriors know that they will be the next to starve, so they turn against the current leadership.
Lenin's revolution succeeded when his revolutionary government started paying the soldiers and police. The Tsar and the chaotic Provisional Government had started to fail at that.
A 3T is at best a fun time, but it is one of cakes and circuses -- and cocaine and concubines. Crises can be over quickly, and when they are the 1T can begin. I expect America to be much more regimented in 2030 than in 1980.
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.