06-06-2022, 04:33 PM
This Crisis Era can end without a shooting war. It can end with some radically-new arrangement that is likely to be either center-left or Hard Right. Whoever wins, there will be rearguard violence. This one will de3cide among other things whether property determines power or one-man, one-vote does. One side has reason and science on its side, but is unable so far to enforce its vision; it expects the culture to drive the reality. The other has a firm set of values that it has determined is the ultimate reality., and that brute force in the service of those values will establish what is right.
If the Hard Right prevails, then we will have a hierarchical, anti-egalitarian, and repressive society in which any individual thought, let alone any show of dissent, becomes a grave peril. That sort of America will have a brain drain much as have many societies similarly hierarchical, anti-egalitarian, and repressive. It could also have torture chambers and shooting pits. There might be small rewards for compliance -- maybe occasional trips to an amusement park or a cruise on a riverboat casino -- in the equivalent of the Nazi Kraft durch Freude. Religion will play a role in offering a wondrous Afterlife in return for acquiescence with the hell that America will have become.
If the Hard Right prevails, then we will have a hierarchical, anti-egalitarian, and repressive society in which any individual thought, let alone any show of dissent, becomes a grave peril. That sort of America will have a brain drain much as have many societies similarly hierarchical, anti-egalitarian, and repressive. It could also have torture chambers and shooting pits. There might be small rewards for compliance -- maybe occasional trips to an amusement park or a cruise on a riverboat casino -- in the equivalent of the Nazi Kraft durch Freude. Religion will play a role in offering a wondrous Afterlife in return for acquiescence with the hell that America will have become.
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.