The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-18-2022, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I have been half wondering what the leftover conservatives would look like as the crisis ends.  I feel the crisis fixes the greatest problem facing the culture.  The conservatives go for no change, no fix to the problem, continue the problem, often profit off the problem.  The progressive come out ahead, forcing a change, fixing the problem…. To me the results of the crisis was more obvious than what would get us here.  Covid would be handled.  The election would be upheld.  Bad cops killing minorities would be no longer acceptable.  Voting rights haven’t quite yet been secured, but you could see it happening if the Senate gets a few more votes and the filibuster is canceled.  What the problem is is so obvious that the crisis continues until there is a consensus that what is wrong has to be fixed.

Crisis Eras typically end with political alignments very different from those going into them. A Crisis is not only a sequence of ominous and traumatic events, but also a transition from 3T ways to 1T. Much that was fashionable in a 3T goes out of mode, and what does survive from the 3T to the 1T is very good. The crap gets consumed in the bonfires of the vanities. Political habits that got society into the economic meltdown that initiated the Crisis Era die in disgrace -- or at least go into hiatus until people who see the easy money but not the ruin find nothing stopping them. The Panic of 1857, the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the financial crisis of 2008 happened in intervals of 71 to 79 years -- enough time for people not even the scared children of the time to remember them to leave economic and political life. 

Let's remember that Edmund Burke, the Founding Father of modern conservatism (as opposed to the premodern conservatism of feudal elites waging a rearguard effort to prevent modernity) , recognized that for conservatism to be viable it needed to defend values worthy of protection -- protocol, precedent, sobriety, integrity, rational thought, national loyalty, fair play, community, rule of law, protection of the vulnerable, sexual modesty, affirmation of learning as a virtue, a market economy, and tradition.  This is not to be confused with the hierarchy, repression, and inequality of feudal times or of rotten systems particularly vulnerable to Jacobin or Marxist revolutions. Burke and his successors insist that we scrap the rot and accept gradual advancements in technology, political reform, technology, and intellectual life. 

Obama may not be the model of a conservative by the standards of the John Birch Society now difficult to distinguish from the Republican Party. Sixty years ago the Birchers were a sick joke to the entrepreneurial part of the American Right. The Birch Society is what it was sixty years ago, and "Eisenhower/Rockefeller  Republicans" despised them. The Republican Party has gone very far to the Right over forty years into the realm of QAnon craziness. The "Eisenhower/Rockefeller Republicans" still exist as a tendency. Most (and I allow for younger voters replacing older ones as one annual calendar replaces another) are now "Obama Democrats". Surely you have seen my map overlaying Obama and Eisenhower elections.

Conservatism circa 2035 will owe much more to Obama than to Trump. Obama may have decided that no particular tradition must thrive at the expense of others. Obama created a viable agenda to protect from radical change. Trump created a nightmare unlikely to achieve much good. It might make some people feel good about themselves; so supposedly does cocaine (I have never touched the stuff, thank you!). Obama may have liberal attitudes on social issues and economic matters, but otherwise he is more a Burkean conservative than a radical of any kind.   

Conservatism has evolved over more than 200 years, and it has in many ways defined itself by what it isn't (feudalism, Jacobinism, Bolshevism, fascism, Ba'athism, and Taliban practice). This said, most of the commandments of the best-known set of moral practices defines what is not moral.  

 

Quote:And then the conservatives do something.  The certainly can’t admit they were wrong,  After the Revolution, they moved to Canada.  After the Civil War they created the KKK.  After the last crisis they stole some of FDR’s best ideas such as regulating the economy and containment.  After Trump?

Fascists (like the Second Ku Klux Klan whence Hitler got many of his ideas) and proto-fascists (like the original KKK) are not conservatives. They are extremists. The Tories weren't bad people; they were simply the last to get the message of the American Revolution. Eighty years after the American Revolution their ideological descendants would found the English-speaking part of the Dominion of Canada. All Klans have been nefarious supporters of a backward and violent attack on anything not white and Christian.

Donald Trump is no conservative. He stands for nothing that could ever stand the test of time. The coup on his behalf resembled of all things the Bolshevik Revolution, an anathema to any genuine conservative. His rhetoric is demagoguery. 

Quote:Maybe after the hatred and violence of the recent past one can start to guess.  Drive though a peaceful protest of police abuse.  Take an assault rifle to a bar full of minorities.  Drive from rural to urban areas to give the resident minorities a problem.  Implement a violent insurrection.  Gerrymandering.  Deny lost elections.  Impose their culture on all as they did repealing choice.  Attack doctors, teachers, poll workers, the DOJ, the FBI.

In the first case you will see the police and the protesters on the same side. I can imagine a DA using a violent attack on minorities as a pretext for a display that the courts of law in his bailiwick are color-blind with respect to overt, murderous crime. What do Black Lives Matters protesters do when they see someone torch a police car? They let the cops do their job. We are about to see the sentencing of people who plotted to kidnap and lynch the Governor of a State, and as more serious offenses go on trial involving the Capitol Putsch, the sentences get increasingly severe. Attacking and professions institutions that most people see desirable and necessary is not a good way to win friends and influence people. 

The Trump agenda has little appeal to youth. It is much more likely to engender protests than to set lasting norms. The base between Trump's one electoral win is shrinking, as shown in the attendance of his rallies. Trump's support is among voters over 50, and new voters supplant the voters at a rate of roughly 1.6% a year. Even without a formal collapse of Trump ideology, voting patterns (new voters are about 20% more Democratic than Republican, and voters over 50 are about 5% more Republican than Democratic), then that alone suggests that with nothing else changing, Democrats can expect to gain 1.6% every four years at election time.  That is the difference between 2016 and 2020, and that is enough to explain how Trump lost the Presidential election in 2020. At the start of 2020 I predicted that Trump would lose 2020 election by losing (by diminishing margins) Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida with a simple application of that rule. I got three states wrong, but I came within one electoral vote because Arizona, Georgia, and NE-02 combine for one fewer electoral vote than Florida. That was still possible with a shift of 1.6% of the popular vote from 2016. 

Trump did nothing to reverse that trend. He did not expand his coalition; he kept his coalition intact, but if the demographics are not in one's favor following a bare win, then one loses. What is so amazing about 2020 was that it was as close as it was despite one of the worst Presidents in American history running for re-election. Polarized as American politics have become, demographics is practically everything.       

Quote:I can see a rough remnant of MAGA becoming professional bad neighbors.  Not most of MAGA.  The Big Lie and Trump’s criminality is becoming very obvious, if at a slow pace by people who limit themselves to MAGA loyal media.  But there will be a small fraction of those who hate because they have always hated, who make other people miserable because that is what they do.

Well, the John Birch Society never went away. Neither did the Black Panthers. g0dh@tesf@gs.com is still around. $cientology still does its stuff. Porn has yet to disappear from the Web. 

Quote:That is what has to be crushed in the high.  It is said that the values of the high support the solutions to the preceding crisis.  This hate reflects the methods and attitudes of MAGA.  The culture of the high has to reflect that this hate is not acceptable moving forward.

In time, MAGA and QAnon will be objects of ridicule, much like 1930's British fascists such as Oswald Moseley in Monty Python's Flying Circus.  Note well that a new Adaptive generation is just beginning to reach adulthood, and I predict that it will do comedy and do it well, much like its Silent predecessors. The best analysis is comedy, as much that is gross failure gets its harshest criticism through ridicule of its stupidity, emptiness, and vileness. 

MAGA, QAnon, and other totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian movements have little use for comedy. Everything important is deadly-serious, never to be challenged or mocked. But MAGA and QAnon must be mocked for their hideous qualities.