01-10-2022, 07:31 PM
(01-10-2022, 01:00 PM)David Horn Wrote:(01-09-2022, 12:50 PM)Victorian Jim Dandy Wrote: ... Also, there should be no nostalgia for Reagan. Voting in the eighties and having nostalgia for Reagan should put you in the Boomer category.
Picking just this one, the most Reaganite cohorts are all classic Gen-X. His libertarian pitch fits their libertarian sensibilities like a glove. Are there Boomers iin that same group? Sure, but certainly not nearly as many.
Reagan was more economic (the pitch to X that then succeeded) than religious. Generation X never fell as much for fundamentalist religiosity (whether evangelicalism or Pentecostal claptrap in Protestantism or the Opus Dei or Operation Rescue currents in the Catholic Church) as did Boomers. Reagan was practically a collectivist and secular version of the Prosperity Cult that owes more to Horatio Alger than to any divine. Make your sacrifices of working cheap, loyally, hard, and you will get your rewards in This World. But Reaganomics would fail at making life better to those consigned to and working cheap. He did succeed at crushing the inflationary trends, but he did so at a great price for young workers who were obliged to create the basis of prosperity without enjoying in the prosperity. The Reagan era was the time of multiple jobs just to meet rent, food, utilities, clothes, and commuting costs. If one was poor it was a miserable time. Of course, poverty is never fun whether one works or is unemployed. If one has the time but not the means one gets boredom or at most the questionable diversions of TV and pop music.
Religious people can, if they have the right (or should I say Right) view, recognize that life is little more than a struggle to avoid damnation by obeying their Divinely-appointed oppressors. In the end as one can do little to hurt others one gets the promise that one will go to Heaven where those who have suffered in This World get their Pie in the Sky. Boomers could more easily believe that than could X. To be a Christian Fundamentalist is of course to hold intellectual curiosity as much a snare in life as the drives for sex, entertainment, gain, or drugs and alcohol.
I am tempted to believe that the X world is one of serious disappointment. If they could not safely gripe on the jobs that they hated, they could certainly do so at home to their Millennial kids who learned that the trickle-down promise was a fraud. But even more, Generation X had good cause to drift left on issues of labor and management because managers trained in the "Simon Legree" School of Management made sure that the people who did the work would live miserable lives,. which effectively negates the promise of prosperity in This World. Prosperity for someone else? I chose "Simon Legree" for a very good reason.
The Horatio Alger story was a myth in the late nineteenth century, and it still is. Ownership of an income-generating asset remains far more an assurance of prosperity than does work. Wielding bureaucratic power to ensure that people remain poor despite their toil is another way in which to be rich. (That was the ultimate failure of the Soviet Union, which differed from America in economic practice largely in having no room for small business including family farms that might do sort-of-OK and serve as an alternative in America; the Soviet nomenklatura was just as rapacious and self-indulgent as America's executive elite).
The era between Reagan and Trump fits the neoliberal (really plutocratic) era of a Skowronek cycle in politics. Two Skowronek cycles, at least for the Presidency (The President enunciating a political culture and either effective as such or failing). Basically, Reagan and the older Bush were opposition to the previous Establishment of New Deal and Great Society politics and got some results, however flawed. Clinton was a recapitulation largely of the New deal and Great Society to a great, if not full extent. Dubya followed the 'new conservative orthodoxy' of "He who has the gold makes the rules" and was only marginally effective. Obama seems like a portent of things to come, arch-conservative in style but supporting what would become indelible and necessary changes. Trump is a disaster even if he takes Reagan-Bush ideology to its logical conclusion and grafts onto that a Personality Cult and a hypocritical support for right-wing religiosity. He has run into diminishing returns for his ideology.
Who were the prior failures as President for sticking with a mainstream philosophy after it lost its effectiveness? If you remember the talks of the Lost, you would recognize Herbert Hoover (the Market, free enterprise, drive, determination, willpower, and hopeful sacrifice will solve everything) believed such as fully as anyone and got instead the worst economic meltdown in the Industrial Age. Short of some incredible Man-Made disaster such as thermonuclear war or unimpeded global warming, or a supervolcano eruption or meteor strike that ravages the world's ecosystems, we are unlikely to see that again. The sesquiannum beginning at the peak of August 2007 and ending in the spring of 2009 was just as severe as the first sesquiannum of the 1929-1932 meltdown... but the political system of 2009 stopped the catastrophe of bank runs beginning in earnest in the summer of 1931 that ensured no easy return to the sleazy prosperity of the middle-to-late 1920's. Jimmy Carter was a smart, moral person, but he attached himself to the New Deal Coalition that was no longer getting the bang for the buck as it had. To be sure, the New Deal coalition (mostly the GI Generation) was eroding and its economic contributions were on the fade, which may explain Carter failure.
Trump fails as neoliberalism cannot provide any semblance of economic justice; it is out of step with any religious heritage in glorifying the basest drives of human nature (I see religion as useful in imparting moral values to children and consoling those who face impending death or other situations of hopelessness; it may offer insight into some Eternal Truth and improve the person); it rejects reason and any humanitarian interest. Trump is objectionable on many other counts, but even without those he is riding a dead horse. It is impossible to derive any new good from the neoliberal model. A "nice guy" version of Donald Trump (well, that is an oxymoron) or at least one with some more personal restraint would be just as ineffective.
Two Skowronek cycles typically fit neatly into one Saeculum, so I love to discuss them.
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.