So...where exactly is our leadership?

[pbrower2a]

(11-13-2022, 02:04 AM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(11-13-2022, 01:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The big change that America needs is one of culture. We are best off with one that is rational  yet adequately permissive, and tolerant of benign and unavoidable differences. Crisis eras redefine the material and intellectual world.

Neoliberal economics were good for stopping inflation (if at great cost to younger workers who needed opportunity and adequate pay if they were to fulfill even the desire for starting families and were denied that). They were pushed to their limit in staleness, effectiveness, and harm.

I look at the Siena poll of historians, and I notice that two Presidents have slipped greatly from once-high perches. Andrew Johnson was a political hero until Americans started judging the removal of First Peoples in part to allow the expansion of chattel slavery. (America would pay a high price for that in the Civil War). Reagan has also slipped some. Jackson has lost standing in recent years, and the assessment of Reagan is theoretically reversible. Taking Reagan's ideology to the logical conclusion leads to Donald Trump.  

Here's one of the paradoxes: Trump is a lousy President for his gross immorality (including cruelty, which is one of the worst expressions of immorality), a paucity of lasting achievements, debasement of political discourse, and his tendencies toward despotism. He demanded unqualified loyalty from Republicans even to the extent of endorsing the Capitol Putsch soon after it was over as a test of loyalty. He tried to rule as a dictator, and the Constitution got in the way. The President may have great powers in the event of a major war, and economic calamity, or a natural disaster to the extent that Congress authorizes such power.  

Had Trump won a smashing electoral victory in 2020, getting re-elected with firm majorities of lackeys in both Houses of Congress, then he might be #1 because dissent would be driven underground and flooded with macabre cynicism. Everyone would be obliged to praise His Undeniable Greatness if they want to keep teaching, preaching, or doing journalism. Maybe Democrats would be old-whale figures in giant cities (think of "Red Budapest" in Horthy's Hungary), but outside of such sanctuaries for liberals, getting along in life would depend on holding the sort of values consistent with the GOP/MAGA/John Birch Society. Kiss up, and always be thankful that no matter how harsh reality is, it at least isn't as bad for one as someone who grumbled or even failed to show a big-enough smile. Even the mass culture would be corrupted, as movies, TV shows, and pop tunes espousing Trump-era values would get advantages over others. Want to attend a public college if one doesn't have a million dollars for attending a private one that still exercises academic freedom*. Then make sure as a high-school student to praise Trump and unbridled plutocracy in high-school essays -- and be sure to join the politicized youth movement, the Trump equivalent of Soviet Pioneers or Mussolini's Balilla (I could name another, the female equivalent being the Bund deutscher Madel), instead of the Catholic Youth League, Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, 4H, Y's, Future Farmers of America, Junior Achievement, Campfire Girls, or Boys' Clubs -- unless those are taken over and corrupted.  

Trump, MAGA, and Q-Anon have failed to win enough to stop the slow erosion of support that is now sure to make the current Hard Right increasingly weak in electoral contests. Young adults are the future in American politics, as Boomers are going to lose their constituencies unless they can make solid appeals outside their generation. Millennial adults will increasingly find themselves in high public office and will be able to reshape the debate into one consistent with Millennial rationality and insistence upon equity. Conspiracy theories are not their style. Other generations have had a difficult time in fending of the garbage appeals of the Hard Right.  

The 1T is nigh, and it seems much closer now than it did even a week ago. Just look at 1T values that form in a 4T and supplant those of a 3T because the hard struggles wring out failed ideas and practices. The late 1940's looked little like the Roaring Twenties even if multitudes of the had participated exuberantly in that giddy time. Bathtub gin or GI Bill? Slum housing or Suburbia? Burlesque halls or sanitized entertainment? Labor unions that give workers a stake in the economic order or being at the mercy of a boss who could always demand unpaid overtime if there were a  large order to complete? A world in which one nearly had to be a WASP to get ahead in life or one in which anyone white had a chance (rights for blacks did improve in the 1T outside the South, but at a glacial pace).  

I can't imagine a huge technological revolution, and I can't imagine huge new rings of suburbs in which blue-collar workers get to live up to middle-class standards. I can't see an equivalent of Interstate Highways or television reshaping  American life this time. I can see MAGA stuff becoming objects of ridicule instead of fearful reverence.

*From what I hear one country offers an outlet: Finland, which welcomes foreigners who can learn one of the most difficult languages in a Latin script. You will effectively become a Finn, which is part of the idea.  Finland has "Russian winters".

So we may be at the point where the 3T values are starting to be rejected more, but I am not confident the new 1T values have been established yet.  What even are the new values?  Unions appear to be finally coming back but we have a long ways to go.

More and more people reject 3T values. Some of it is that young adults never got to imbibe in the heady hedonism of a 3T and recognize that such, from what they see, brought far too much pain for the pleasure. As have said people from Aristotle on, happiness is the test of the validity of one's choices in life (if one actually makes such choices). Freud's trichtomy of id, ego, and superego has the id as the survival instinct and the pleasure principle. Without the id one can enjoy nothing and is continually in depression, and without a survival instinct one has a high likelihood of early death from reckless or suicidal behavior. The id likes its delights to have swift achievement attached, and most of those (sweets, fats, drug highs, an alcoholic buzz, the "rush" from gambling or impulse shopping, sex, or excitement from daredevil actions) are also ephemeral and costly. Rotting teeth, obesity, arrests, fights, unwelcome pregnancies, and ending up broke result. The superego puts a lid on some of it as the "Thou shalt not" part of moral law. The ego tells people how they can stretch out a delight at the expense of its intensity by connecting it to anticipation, planning, budgeting, and scheduling. The happiest people on their vacations, I have seen, are those who plan their delights with managerial skills of planning, scheduling, budgeting, and recording what they do. So, should I visit a city that I have never visited (somehow Minneapolis and Atlanta are the closest giant cities to me outside of my experience that extends to Madison, Wisconsin and Knoxville, Tennessee) I intend to know where I am going, what I will do and experience when I get there, and not waste money. I am likely to keep at the least a photographic journal, and I will seek out what is unique to those places. Art galleries, architectural wonders, historical sites, and museums of various types are obvious.  Strip clubs? No. Too unimaginative annot special enoughd. I expect to avoid troublesome areas; even I know what few places are worth a visit in Detroit, most of which is to be avoided at all costs. 

The rationalists may not have the most intense fun, but they get the longest and most lasting delight. The stupid and unimaginative end up with obesity, rotten teeth, arrests, fights resulting in broken bones, bad livers, smoking-related diseases, and trouble with creditors.   

The 3T was not only cultural ephemera; it was also economic policy.  Check Maslow's hierarchy of needs against your life and see how far you can go:




At the bottom (physiological survival in doubt)

  are people in danger of death or crippling, or in hopeless situations (the extreme is a Gulag or a KZ-lager. If one lives long enough to get congestive heart failure or terminal cancer one will experience such. I have seen people with emphysema and cirrhosis, so I choose to drink rarely and little and to avoid tobacco completely. The social orders that do the worst to people as a rule offer the least freedom. If you don't believe me on that than I can refer you to the late Richard Rummel, who connects the culpability for the greatest human suffering to some of the most tyrannical regimes that see people exclusively as tools for exploitation or as vermin to be exterminated. Examples include Leopold II (of Belgium) for his hypocritically-named Congo Free State (Heart of Darkness), the Ottoman Empire in the first quarter of the 20th century, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Un ion, Nazi Germany and its satellites, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Uganda under Idi Amin, Iraq under Saddam Hussein. If you disobey you die, and if you obey you will hate your life. 

Go one step above that (safety concerns), and you might be a serf or slave, or at least a prisoner (even if "only" of starvation). You might be in a miserable life of helpless dependency upon an abusive spouse. you might be an alcoholic or addict. or -- you hate your job and see no obvious escape except to more of the same. You might try to bond with sympathetic people in much the same plight, but they can rarely help you. You may endure official oppression as under Jim Crow or Apartheid. You may have gotten yourself in that position and you may have to pull yourself out if you want any dignity as a person.  

Many people struggle (I included due to Asperger's) with love and belonging. I can be friendly, but I usually fail to seal the deal. I am a misfit in the isolated rural area in which I live. Many of those who live in it could never be truly happy anywhere else even if the community is obviously limited in its offerings of fun and enlightenment. Even with great wealth and talent one can be here; Maslow uses Richard Wagner and Vincent van Gogh as failures in personal life despite their artistic successes. (Need I add Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Ted "Unabom" Kaczynski, and John Belushi?) I may go out on a limb and suggest that we have migrant farm workers far happier than Donald Trump because they are not insufferable @$$holes. 

Then comes esteem. So how good does one feel about oneself, and as importantly, can one support such a self-image? If you are doing bad stuff to people, your feigned self-esteem can evaporate very fast. Having legitimate cause to feel good about oneself and the society in which one lives requires some high-powered learning or development of legitimate skill or talent and the moral conduct necessary for staying there. Conspicuous consumption proves nothing; a low-level drug trafficker can do that until he is caught. 

Self-Actualization? As I am stranded between #2 and #3, I obviously cannot fully understand it.