05-02-2022, 01:02 PM
(05-01-2022, 11:04 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Some younger people more often commit crimes or other violent actions than people over 30, no doubt. They have the vitality and lack of perspective needed. Certainly sometimes people in their 20s or late teens can be narrow-minded fanatics. To an extent, I was, and many boomers were. Some people might say I (and other boomers) still am, though. These days, indeed, the only sensible thing is to be partisan. The Republican Party today is dominated by crazy conspiracy theories and an anti-democratic, xenophobic cult of personality on the one hand, and by an equally crazy but considered a more normal but real conspiracy called neoliberalism (lower taxes, less regulation, anti-welfare, prosperity trickles down from job creaters, etc.). Usually the two go together, especially because most of the adherents of the latter, older conspiracy are bowing to the cult power of the former, conspiracy theory peddler, who embodies both kinds of destructive foolishness.
The Millennial Generation has lived all of its formative years in the neoliberal phase of the Skowronek cycle. It has heard the promises and seen little of it achieved. It has been condemned to make sacrifices in the furtherance of neoliberal ideology but achieved nothing. Millennial kids heard promises of super-prosperity that would redeem the severe inequality, economic uncertainty, and harsh management that go with neoliberalism. If neoliberalism has achieved any greater prosperity it has all gone to economic elites -- and then some. I can't see how life for a young adult is any more promising now than it was in 1975. Oh, so we have wonderful technologies such as cell phones (overrated), personal computers, and two hundred channels on cable TV (overrated -- you can watch at most two channels at a time as my Dad used to do when watching one TV with a Detroit Tigers game on the bedroom TV and a Chicago Cubs game on the living room TV through the opened bedroom door, or vice-versa) -- much that used to be free now has a huge price-tag attached if you are more than 40 miles away from the transmitter tower. And then come the property rents -- oh, do they hit hard! Urban landlords are kings in the American economy.
That neoliberalism has failed shows in many of its figures going toward crazy ideas that would have been too reactionary for the political mainstream in the 1970's. Neoliberalism would scrap democracy on behalf of economic elites responsible to none but themselves. It now stands for crony capitalism and hyper-reactionary social values that more suggest Iran than America.
Quote:And it's important to point out who supports this dangerous Republican nonsense. It is mostly older people, not those in their twenties. Most of the 20-somethings oppose it, but are nevertheless victims of it; because the neoliberals have successfully destroyed the sense of civic responsibility and trust among the young people with the destruction of democracy they have so-far carried out, along with their destruction of education, which the conspiracy-theory xenophobes are seeking to destroy even more now with book banning and other laws supporting bigotry in schools and in medicine.
We would be better off reading books than grazing on Facebook and Twitter -- let alone the dreadful Parler. Some ideas really are precious because they enrich our souls and give us insight into the questions that Humanity needs answered every generation. Wise people still read Plato. Except for some highly-refined science, drama, music, architecture, and visual images little really is new under the Sun. Human nature changes so little that the Iliad and the Odyssey are still readable.
Quote:Those on the center-left and many on the left, on the other hand, though they support progressive policies, do not peddle division and seek instead to find support among every demographic, as President Obama does. There are crazies on the left, though, who only support the most thoroughly and perfectly leftist candidates, and think they don't win only because of rigging. This and other conspiracy theories also exist or are supported by some people on the left, and by some from throughout the political spectrum as well; just not as thoroughly, nor are they able to put their theorists in power as the right-wing is able to do. But is it mainly young people on the left who support these crazy theories and fanatics on the left? I'm not so sure.
Extremist militancy has rarely achieved anything in power except the sorts of horror that their ideological opposites have achieved. If an ideology causes starvation, builds concentration camps, performs mass executions, rigs elections, or suppresses benign thought, then we have the "fool-me-once, shame on you, fool-me-twice, shame on me" meme in operation should we accept the murderous folly.
Part of the problem is that many of us believe that because we can't understand how anyone else could support (Barack Obama/Donald Trump -- pick one) that we can't imagine either winning. Well they did even if nearly half the electorate thought them horrible. OK, Trump really is horrible by practically any standard outside his cult, and conservatism that adopts Obama's virtues while being more sympathetic to unfettered markets and the profit motive will likely arise after the neoliberal ideology crashes and burns.
The antithesis of Marxism-Leninism isn't the endorsement of a cruel plutocracy. The economic sadist who endorses a New Serfdom on behalf of owners and executives does exactly what a Marxist-Leninist says that capitalists do, and differs from Marxism-Leninism only in endorsing what the commies recognize as pure horror. The antithesis of Marxism-Leninism is a capitalist system with humanistic values and opportunities for people not capitalists. Not everyone can be a capitalist, and if capitalism is to succeed it must work for people not in the economic elite.
If we cannot scrap capitalism (even workers' cooperatives must follow such capitalist rules as those of honest accounting and the payment of bills) then we must have capitalism with a human face.
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.