The center right will likely win the culture war

[pbrower2a]

(10-21-2022, 10:38 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(10-21-2022, 10:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Center Right is exactly what we need for fending off the Hard Right. Britain in the 1930's had active Communist and fascist groups, but it also had a strong Conservative Party and a strong Labour Party. Conservatives made clear that fascists had nothing to offer but bigotry, and Labour recognized that the Soviet Union was not the paradise that it claimed to be. Conservatives showed that the fascists were unconscionable evil (concentration camps, book burning, Jew-baiting, and torture chambers) .

The Center Left (and the bulk of the American Left is Center Left) is the diametric opposite of the Hard Right. The problem is that the Center Left has little to offer the Hard Right except for ridicule that cause people on the bubble to stand with their neighbors co-workers, and  drinking buddies when such people feel excoriation for believing FoX News and spouting conspiracy theories. We lack a Center Right that states clearly that this stuff is bad for business and contrary to traditions that have held the test of time.

Exactly. My biggest contentions with a few right wing groups/ideas are as follows

Quote:1) Almost have the US population is not white. Since we can't deport them even if we wanted to, we need to find some way to at least get along cordially. The business conservatives and midwestern rural and suburban conservatives have been good at this for a long time, but the younger, edgier right wingers need to temper that with a bit more cooperation and patience.

If you are to count the Jews (largely white even if they generally avoid making "whiteness" anything more than coincidence) and LGBT people (who cross all ethnic and sectarian lines) we have a large population of Model Minorities who largely cling to traditions and communal heritage (which I respect). These people are doing well, indeed perhaps too conspicuously well for America's white bigots. 

In general they respect formal learning and business enterprise and create alternatives to Corporate America consisting of bloated, bureaucratized firms often designated as "Too Big to Fail". With "Too Big to Fail" often comes "Too Inflexible to Adapt" or even "Too Corrupt to Survive". Many of those companies deemed "Too Big to Fail" are approaching the end of the business life-cycle



https://site.adizes.com/lifecycle/

Quote:Clearly a business in "Bureaucracy" is on the brink of death. It may be the last surviving firm offering a specific component or raw material. It got there as it lost its ability to adapt and modernize. It may survive because it gets subsidies from a key customer or from a government that does not want the company wound down with the loss of a large number of employees becoming unemployed (and hard to put back in employment due to bad habits necessary for survival in such a business. Creditors may keep it alive because it owns real estate, high-cost machinery, or intellectual property that the creditors recognize worth more than the book value, and that even with losses it might be paying taxes that the creditor would otherwise be on the hook for.  The company will die in a short order, most likely when the firm can no longer eat into fixed costs or when the creditor pulls the plug when someone buys assets worth more than the value of the going concern.   For a dying airline, the formal death may come when the creditors can sell off the jetliners to a competitor. For a film studio or publishing house, one of the competitors buys the copyrights.  Real estate purchased fifty years earlier may be heavily depreciated on the books, but a failing store chain might be 'executed' when the creditor finds someone who seeks to redevelop the property for apartments or medical clinics.   The company may lose its reason to exist if the clients fund in-house solutions to some item for which the company is the last supplier.   

  Problems of Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic organizations accomplish very little of any value. Their focus is frequently on control for the sake of control. With no inclination to change, everyone’s day is filled with systems, forms, procedures, and rules. People know all the rules, but they can’t remember why they exist. If you ask why they do things in a certain way, managers in a Bureaucracy will likely tell you, “Because it’s the policy.” The response to almost any request is, “Write me a memo.”

After the pressures of Recrimination, working in a Bureaucracy is a low-stress environment. There is little pressure to perform, so long as one abides by the rules and regulations. Bureaucratic managers are among the nicest people you’ll ever meet. To make change happen, they now need the cooperation of others, which is a near impossibility in a Bureaucracy. A single executive cannot mobilize people across organizational lines. Rituals must therefore substitute for action. Meetings take place. Minutes are taken. Papers get filed. There is plenty of voting, and debates rage but one sees little, if any, real action.

Bureaucratic companies are internally disintegrated. Each department has responsibility for a particular task, but no one has responsibility for the combined result of the separate tasks. It is usually up to the client to put all the pieces together. Employees don’t know the inner workings of other departments. The customer service department often consists of telephone reps whose job it is to listen, record complaints, and answer them with a standard, routine letter: “We regret any inconvenience, but we will do our best to resolve your problem.” Mostly they respond to customer requests by demanding yet another document. Bureaucracies do not ask in advance for everything they will require. Rather than show its entire hand, a Bureaucratic organization shows only one card at a time.

Like an older person who follows a set routine every day and becomes highly aggravated with any change, Bureaucracies resent outside disruptions and aggressively create obstructions to limit them. Customers are an example of one such disruption. Bureaucracies minimize the possibility for external disruption by connecting to the external world through very narrow channels. Perhaps they allow only one incoming telephone line or they keep their customer service departments open for only a few hours a day. They keep people standing in lines, only to tell them which line they must go stand in next.

In a Bureaucracy, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. One department rejects what another one requests. Customers are puzzled, frustrated, and lost. To get results, a customer must build their own systems to deal with the ineffective organization. Businesses that must work with Bureaucracies usually have dedicated departments, systems and people that are experts on the inner workings of a particular government agency and getting the results they need from that Bureaucracy.

Because Bureaucracies rely on laws that provide them with a monopoly on services and allocation of funds generated by taxation, heads of bureaucracies spend most of their time in halls of government and with politicians safeguarding the source of their funds. What annoys politicians most is negative press. So, heads of Bureaucracies are careful to ensure that there is no negative press about their agencies. Ask people in a bureaucratic organization, “Who is your client?” The answers generally include a long list of state or federal agencies that either supervises its performance or its budget, other Bureaucracies that it works with, unions, newspapers and other media. Lost at the end of this long list of stakeholders, are the customers whom the Bureaucracy is really supposed to be serving.

The health of a full-fledged Bureaucracy is very delicate. Although it appears to be a robust monster, it may be relatively easy to destroy it. Many are rotten to the core, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Since many of them get their financial resources from politicians, they survive only as long as they are political assets. When they become political liabilities and the funds are withdrawn, they can collapse promptly. Others are vulnerable to changes in laws, privatization, loss of corporate support.

Any sudden change could ruin them. Bureaucracies forced to confront these sudden changes, quickly, often don’t survive the effort without considerable external support. This is particularly true for government-owned monopolies that are privatized. Many of these organizations have nothing in place that resembles marketing, sales or business development and so they quickly flounder in a competitive environment.
Managing Corporate Life Cycles, 2nd Edition by Dr. Ichak Adizes.Published by the Adizes Institute. © 2004, Ichak Adizes.

https://site.adizes.com/lifecycle/bureaucracy/ 
   

...Sears and K-Mart were in this position recently, and Montgomery-Ward preceded those decrepit two sometime earlier. Banks and insurance companies are bureaucracies by nature, but they can get very bad very fast, as shown in the financial crash of 2008. Plenty of large manufacturers (the automakers are prime examples of companies that skirted liquidation in 2008) survived once but might be going down to ruin in the next Big Crash. We have learned the wrong answer to corporate failure: a huge infusion of cash through subsidies. 

The government needs the auto industry for producing military vehicles; should we have a major war in which China is the Enemy and it is in occupation of South Korea and Japan and Russia has puppet regimes hostile to the USA all the way to Portugal and Ireland, then we might have big trouble producing tanks, armored personnel carriers, and the like. See also the aircraft industry. 

Often these companies dominate an obsolete activity. Today the American coal industry is in deep trouble as its coal seams are worked out. A few decades, as electric vehicles supplant gas buggies, Big Oil might find an inadequate base of customers. $50 a gallon for gasoline as a market price  in the equivalent of current prices might not turn a profit if practically nobody is buying gasoline. However glamorous "tech" is, the path from exciting start-up to worn-out companies can be surprisingly short.      

Quote:2) I hate modern feminism with a passion, but...I still have a mother, aunts, female cousins, etc. Straight men also will need to get along with a wife, and have a 50% of having female offspring. Just because feminism needs to be punished doesn't negate the fact that everyone needs to interact with women regularly in order to function either individually or societally. Yes, be willing to rebuke those who are disrespectful, but you also have to be kind during normal interaction and, especially, when they are doing something you want to encourage.
3) As I've mentioned in a few other posts, conservatives need to focus on....actually conserving something. The late millennial and early Gen Z boys are kicking ass with all the memes and being willing to stand up to all their peers and media outlets, but they are just that...boys. We need more of the men to step up and bring back some good ol' common sense, stability and responsible risk management.

In short, some form of multi-ethnic civic nationalism is the only way we can go. The question is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.

We all adapt to change lest our lives be miserable. Feminism seems here to stay in part because toxic masculinity is consummately dangerous in a time of nuclear weapons. I look at the gangs in our slums and I see the sorts of people who kill for little cause. This sort of behavior often spills out into the mainstream. I look at some of the mass shooters and I often see the combination of anorexia and testosterone. Obviously we do not want people like that in charge of nuclear arsenals or other weapons of mass destruction!  

Quote:“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

[url=https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2796883][/url]
Cassius was among those who would assassinate Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, and in turn Plutarch, were onto something. 

Technology changes, and we can take advantage of it or be left behind. To be sure, there are some advantages to being a "late adapter" as one gets stuff at a much lower price... but in the end the stuff is worthless. Economic reality changes, and if America ever becomes the sort of place in which those who own the assets have everyone else in thrall, we accept such misery and pretend to love it -- or die, whether by suicide of by revolt against overwhelming force. 

So do social relationships. Many people found it unsettling that black people were no longer subjects in their world and had achieved meaningful citizenship. Their precious white daughter attending the same school or in the same classroom with some black male of such age? Oh, the horror (of miscegenation, arguably even worse than "common-ism"), thought many Southern white people. 

If you want a woman who has something of interest to say, then accept that that woman is most likely a feminist.  The couples who cannot speak to each other are the ones who get divorces. Feminism and formal education seem to correlate, so it is getting harder to find a wife perfectly willing to live to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Many couples (the wife as much as the husband) want that; they hire a maid.  If you want your daughter to do well in life, then accept that she will need a solid education wherein she comes to adopt feminist ways.  If you want your son to be something other than a frustrated young man who morphs into a frustrated and lonely young man, then you will need to teach him to adopt to the feminist majority of women.  

Life is never as easy as it looks.