06-27-2022, 07:39 PM
No two Crises are quite alike. The contests for who prevails and who fails is never the same. Obviously we are not in a shooting war with Germany, Italy, and Japan this time,. we do not have a struggle to establish whether chattel slavery. would survive or die, or a struggle for independence from a despotic king.
The mass death this time so far comes from an infectious disease of the type that advanced industrial countries either do not get any more or automatically handle quickly and efficiently. Except that Donald J. Trump, hardly a model of prompt, effective, and competent responses to a crisis, fumbled his role worse than a running back enduring certain illegal tackles. We also have a Constitutional Crisis whose full measure of deceit and danger looks all the worse after some Congressional hearings. Some people believe in the Rule of Law and some don't. It is best when practically everyone in high office respects the rule of law. Democracy depends to no small extent upon participants in the electoral process recognizing their clear losses.
For all its flaws, liberal democracy that we Americans have known under both Democrats and Republicans has far better solved more of the problems that government can solve than any other sort of government. I wouldn't vote for any politician who claims that he can win a war, create new prosperity, or create a more wholesome culture if only we leave everything (including civil liberties that we abandon) at the expense of essential liberties. All grand projects can go terribly wrong, as the most optimistic such program ever (Marxism-Leninism) became a grave nightmare.
If we must choose between losing some colonies or near-colonies or keeping or gaining our freedom, then we must choose freedom and divest ourselves of the bad habit of lording it over people who would rather govern themselves. If we must abandon some ethnic, sectarian, or class privileges to save our liberties, then we must free ourselves of privileges unworthy of the cost. A "secret plan for economic growth" usually implies making things great for an elite while making everyone else miserable.
Maybe the difference between the Crash of 1930 (the real crash was in 1930, as 1929 was only a heady peak) and the Crash of 2008 is that we Americans got out of the Crash of 2008 too cheaply -- with too few political reforms to strengthen democracy and too few political reforms to prevent a similar economic collapse. I predict that if we get an economic meltdown in the next two years the result will be a right-wing Presidency that, even if not as hollow and perverse as that of Trump, will load great suffering onto anyone not still rich and institutionalize such with political "reforms" that entrench a New Peonage indefinitely -- one possibly enforced with torture chambers, labor camps, and sites of mass killings of dissidents or pariahs. That is, until some environmental disaster or a political debacle. Corporate America wants to be through with health and safety regulations, bans on scams, progressive taxes, labor unions, and college professors offering any political values other than absolute plutocracy.
The Marxists are right in that the class struggle is real. Maybe in better times a political system mitigates it through social reforms and means of contesting the will of the Master Class... but in times in which the Master Class gets unconstrained power... and its morality is harsh judgment with neither charity, caution, nor conscience, things can go very bad and stay so.
Extremists of both the Right and the Left seek to make things very bad very fast so that they can either take everything possible (economic elitists on the Right) or make thins so horrible that a proletarian revolution is inevitable. So things went in Russia during the political calamity of World War I and the inevitable civil war between Reds and Whites. Bad as Lenin's Commies were, I have no cause to believe that the Whites would have been any better -- if my reading of Doctor Zhivago. suggests the reality of both sides.
The mass death this time so far comes from an infectious disease of the type that advanced industrial countries either do not get any more or automatically handle quickly and efficiently. Except that Donald J. Trump, hardly a model of prompt, effective, and competent responses to a crisis, fumbled his role worse than a running back enduring certain illegal tackles. We also have a Constitutional Crisis whose full measure of deceit and danger looks all the worse after some Congressional hearings. Some people believe in the Rule of Law and some don't. It is best when practically everyone in high office respects the rule of law. Democracy depends to no small extent upon participants in the electoral process recognizing their clear losses.
For all its flaws, liberal democracy that we Americans have known under both Democrats and Republicans has far better solved more of the problems that government can solve than any other sort of government. I wouldn't vote for any politician who claims that he can win a war, create new prosperity, or create a more wholesome culture if only we leave everything (including civil liberties that we abandon) at the expense of essential liberties. All grand projects can go terribly wrong, as the most optimistic such program ever (Marxism-Leninism) became a grave nightmare.
If we must choose between losing some colonies or near-colonies or keeping or gaining our freedom, then we must choose freedom and divest ourselves of the bad habit of lording it over people who would rather govern themselves. If we must abandon some ethnic, sectarian, or class privileges to save our liberties, then we must free ourselves of privileges unworthy of the cost. A "secret plan for economic growth" usually implies making things great for an elite while making everyone else miserable.
Maybe the difference between the Crash of 1930 (the real crash was in 1930, as 1929 was only a heady peak) and the Crash of 2008 is that we Americans got out of the Crash of 2008 too cheaply -- with too few political reforms to strengthen democracy and too few political reforms to prevent a similar economic collapse. I predict that if we get an economic meltdown in the next two years the result will be a right-wing Presidency that, even if not as hollow and perverse as that of Trump, will load great suffering onto anyone not still rich and institutionalize such with political "reforms" that entrench a New Peonage indefinitely -- one possibly enforced with torture chambers, labor camps, and sites of mass killings of dissidents or pariahs. That is, until some environmental disaster or a political debacle. Corporate America wants to be through with health and safety regulations, bans on scams, progressive taxes, labor unions, and college professors offering any political values other than absolute plutocracy.
The Marxists are right in that the class struggle is real. Maybe in better times a political system mitigates it through social reforms and means of contesting the will of the Master Class... but in times in which the Master Class gets unconstrained power... and its morality is harsh judgment with neither charity, caution, nor conscience, things can go very bad and stay so.
Extremists of both the Right and the Left seek to make things very bad very fast so that they can either take everything possible (economic elitists on the Right) or make thins so horrible that a proletarian revolution is inevitable. So things went in Russia during the political calamity of World War I and the inevitable civil war between Reds and Whites. Bad as Lenin's Commies were, I have no cause to believe that the Whites would have been any better -- if my reading of Doctor Zhivago. suggests the reality of both sides.
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.