First Turning "purge"

[JasonBlack]

(03-12-2022, 05:26 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Don't get me wrong: any totalitarian regime in America would be the greatest nightmare in human history. American blacks dwarf the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the Jewish population of the USA is about the same as the death toll of the Holocaust. Add to this a totalitarian regime in America would have copious atom bombs to use either in diplomatic bullying if not death-tolls of a million or so in some direct attacks. It is up to us Americans to avoid letting our Empire of Liberty become the most powerful evil entity in human existence.

Above all else we must preserve responsible, representative government just to prevent the worse -- at the cost of near-serfdom (the trend of neoliberalism in which most people are heavily in debt and obliged to toil long and hard on behalf of exploitative classes of big rural landowners, Gilded-style plutocrats and financiers, and rapacious landlords and executives, Do I trust such people with my welfare or civil liberties? Not in the least. It's just that democracy does not guarantee desirable results, especially when ruthless and well-heeled elites have learned how to game the system in the service of their greed. This country has a heritage of chattel slavery, and it remains part of American political culture. In practice government at times reflects wealth and (private) bureaucratic power at the expense of all else with the elites trying to maintain some image of decency. So those elites sacrifice a Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Madoff, or the "Enrob" gang -- what does that prove?

America has not gone pervasive reforms on the scale of the New Deal since the 1930's aside from the Civil Rights struggle (the latter did not challenge capitalism). Since then we had some tough times due to the energy crunch of the 1970's and the rise of a neoliberal ideology that has solved one problem (price stability) at the expense of workers' rights, economic inequality, declining real pay, the disappearance of economic security for anyone not already filthy-rich, huge private debt for working and middle classes as a substitute for adequate pay, despotic management, great concentration of economic power, the ravaging of huge parts of America that once prospered, the rise of anti-rational culture and religion, and the celebration of elite vice. The ethos of those elites is that the rest of us suffer while displaying the "Happy to serve you smile" that one sees on dumb schmucks in many retail places (stupidity is a virtue in American mass culture).

It will likely take some ecological, military, economic, or political disaster to force us to reach bottom and rebuild a more humane, equitable, and sustainable order. We have faced little of the type. Maybe we really needed a full-blown meltdown analogous to the Great Depression to smite the power of monopolists and the executive elite (itself becoming muc like the Soviet nomenklatura) instead of a cheap recovery so that neocon interests could not buy the system.

While we probably disagree about just how right vs left they are, I do think we're at least talking about mostly the same people. Capitalism doesn't work when people can pull up the latter behind them and buy up the game. To me, that's the main issue here. In fact, The Constitution accounted for this with strict limits on the terms of corporations, which were only allowed as a means of facilitating temporary projects for the public good before being dissolved. One political test I took separated out scales for public vs private ownership from scales for low vs high levels of regulation, which I thought was a useful distinction, because you can support private ownership, but also be skeptical that a deregulated market can properly account for externalities (I scored high on private ownership, but only medium low on regulation).