"Anti-Nationalist Civics"....What?

[pbrower2a]

(07-14-2022, 09:24 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:I am satisfied that it will be one or the other, with anyone still connected to the 'wrong' model being damned to poverty, harassment, shame, and even imprisonment. You all know where I stand on that one, with Obama-like behavior solving more problems than it creates and Trumpism as a means to ruin of America in multiple ways.

In a nutshell, this is why I hate millennials more than boomers. The aggressive censorship we're seeing is hardly a first for a generation heavy on peer pressure, ruthless ostracism and enforcing conformity. Boomers probably haven't noticed this until recently, because, during the 80s, 90s and early 2000s we were just kiddos, and this behavior went overlooked because it had little real impact on the adult world of economics and politics. Keep in mind millennials are nowhere close to the height of their power, and the last hero generation is what brought us McCarthyism, and that paranoid, anti-individualistic culture that led to the Boom Awakening.

America is extremely polarized in culture and politics. One side will use force to establish its ways upon others who will be obliged to suffer for people who believe pre-modern ideas.  You'd be surprised what ideas one can enforce if one has the tools of torture and murder or the economic power to make one hungry or homeless. The side that has those pre-modern ideas will see the world and its opportunities take off without them. One side seems willing to use brutality to impose its vision. The other will let reality not of their making set the rulse. One adapts to reality if one has the choice, or one has a miserable life.   

Your real beef may be with the leaders. I concede as a Boomer that our economic and religious leaders have often been horrible. The economic leaders have been more practitioners of vulture capitalism or the administrative style of the old Soviet nomenklatura  (a bureaucratic elite that imposes a command-and-control system over workers and customers with little meaningful choice) while the most prominent divines have either pushed the heretical Gospel of Wealth or even been involved in clerical diddling with children. Is this to say that most Boomers are like this? Of course not! Most never got the chance to do this sort of thing, and most never wanted it. I would rather revert to the GI pattern for executives in which the typical executive has been with his company since young-adulthood starting with work in the mailroom and one successful advance at a time until one is in his fifties. This fellow knows how things really work, knows something about how to deal with customers or how the product or service is made best. By the time that this person is an executive his mortgage is mostly paid off, he has a wife of similar age, and he is too old to know what to do with a sports car. Institutional and personal loyalty are big things to him, so he is not on his third wife because he has tired of her after she no longer looks as if she could be Playmate of the Month. 

That was a different, and in many respects (aside from denial of opportunities for women and persons of color) more civilized and humane. The executives were paid something more like ten times what the person on the assembly line makes instead of a thousand. 

Economic inequality within America is becoming typical of a military dictatorship or of a fascist or feudal society, and that is unhealthy for us all.   

Quote:Put simply...millennials don't like freedom. They are attracted to concepts like LGBT culture because they value acceptance and chafe at the prospect of being judged by their peers, when in practice, they're more prudish and never really cared all that much about the individualism, self-expression or genuine sexuality that the sexual revolution was supposed to represent (you can tell it by the way they dress. It's basically been en vogue to dress deliberately ugly for about 10 years now).

As with the Gilded in middle age (when they assumed the Civic/Hero role) and GI's. Millennial adults are comparatively prudish. Such is Civic expression. Flamboyant expression of sexuality (as with Liberace) is at best a joke, and few people do that. Of course I am a Boomer, so I can't say what the Millennial attitude is toward LGBT... but having been harassed for homosexuality I have decided to support LGBT rights militantly because whatever makes life safer for LGBT people makes life safer for me. I would guess that Millennial adults can abhor both homophobia and child sexual abuse  without contradiction. One need not attach to LGBT culture (most LGBT people act normally in public and don't call attention to homosexuality unless in a clearly LGBT setting. 

If you want to know what kills individualism -- it is an economic order that demands deference to existing elites in the economic order. Figure that most college grads end up as glorified clerks and find setting up a mom-and-pop business out of the question. They have brutal student loans to pay off, which is very different from the norm  up to about 1980. I remember when the cost of a college education was roughly that of a time-consuming hobby like tooling around with modified cars. That is over. The Religious Right is about as conformist a grouping as you can imagine. People live in fear of their employer because they have gigantic rent (perhaps 70% of their income) to pay. 

For America to become a truly livable place, the inequality and the ideological craziness must go. I see no positive contribution to American politics from the MAGA crowd.