11-14-2022, 12:15 AM
(11-13-2022, 03:53 PM)galaxy Wrote:(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Crisis Era comes to an end with a sharp change in the political culture. For example, extremist behavior is no longer tolerated or trivialized.
Well, this year's election results look pretty interesting in light of that. I find it hard to imagine we're more than six years from the end of the turning now.
Bill Clinton was known for his "it's the economy, stupid."
For Republicans in 2022, perhaps the best advice would be "it's the crazy, stupid."
Thank you for ratifying my intuition as I could not do credibly myself. I no longer trust mine as evidence of any reality beyond myself. I have been terribly wrong so many times that I need to get the opinion of others to evaluate what I feel as an impression of basic reality on anything not a simple judgment of aesthetics for which any coherent statement is equally valid.
The last week was an agony for anyone alert to politics, but it was a week that seems like a year. Much happens quickly in the near-conclusion of a short time-frame. Much happens in a short time, and it is normal human behavior to feel that life goes on in slow motion at such times. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel said that the day on which the British and Americans would be the literal Longest Day in history because it would determine not only a swift Allied victory. Within ten months the Soviets would take Vienna, Americans would enter the second-largest pre-WWII German city (Munich) as if they were liberating it from a foreign occupation, Mussolini would be executed with his cadaver desecrated and his puppet "Social Republic of Italy" liquidated with little formality, Adolf Hitler would blow his brains out in a bunker, and the largest non-German city under Nazi rule (Prague) would be in open rebellion against the Nazis. The defeat of Nazi Germany was inevitable after D-Day, if not the final determination of spheres of control that were close to the line of contact between the Soviet Union and the western Allies.
One week ago there was much talk of a Republican wave in which the GOP would effectively turn the Democratic Party into strictly local politics in a few places in which nobody could ever expect GOP majorities. Republicans were going to win Senate seats in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado, Nevada, and even Washington state. Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have a decisive majority in the House of Representatives. America could be in the inevitable path to becoming a theocratic-plutocratic Republic in name only (a Christian version of Iran), and everyone would be expected to click his heels and say the praises of government of the moneyed elite, by the moneyed elite, and for the moneyed elite that would never perish in America because any opposition would be rendered impotent and irrelevant even if it were not to be killed outright. Non-white people would know their subordinate places with those few who had achieved anything being relegated to roles as tokens. FoX News would be the definitive source for news acceptable as some new and perverse mainstream.
The Democrats did not win a decisive and utter defeat of the GOP, but they have made the future one in which the GOP as now constituted face demographic trends that will slowly gut their national power. The GOP now has little appeal to people now under 45. That segment of the America will simply get older and will start to run for high offices and win surprising victories in unlikely places. People rarely change their core beliefs, but the political leadership can adapt. One may argue that people on the whole become more conservative with time, but parts of the Demoicratic Party can redefine conservatism to mean what used to be characteristic of the Republican Party:
- recognition of tradition as a fallback when the avant-garde fails to get desirable results
- treating law and order as an essential civil right at the expense of the criminal element ("Do the crime and do the time!")
- acceptance of the validity of protocol and precedent as guides to personal and collective behavior
- insistence upon a sustainable world
- demanding integrity in all aspects of human life, including expectations of non-violence, political integrity, and sexual decency as norms
- support of rational thought with the promotion of education to that end
- limited government with government subordinate to the People
- a general desire to improve Humanity
What used to be conservative in one time (a quest for cultural uniformity, support of institutional hierarchies, the rich oppressing the poor, and promotion of superstition as the basis of obedience) may not be so effective now as it used to be. The world changes. Because the vast majority of Americans are not LGBT, and that LGBT rights expanded at the same time that America that America intensified a crackdown on sexually-related deeds that have nothing to do with LGBT issues (child molestation, kiddie porn, spouse abuse, and date rape), most Americans find a climate of greater, and not lesser, repression on sexual matters. Don't let me get into the topics of abortion and contraception, both of which have potential to become illegal nationwide should the Hard Right get its way. (I draw the line there. I want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare because few people will need it if men recognize a woman's right to say NO -- as in "HELL NO", "not with you", "not now", "not without protection", "not your way", or "not until we get married". Rape (including statutory rape) is a valid excuse because most women lack the means of taking care of a child who carries sociopathic tendencies from the genetic material of the rapist. Committers of incest are usually crazy, and it is likely that the child of an incestuous relationship has "crazy" genes. Life or health of the mother? If not, then the claims of anti-abortion advocates can be "pro-death" instead of "pro-life". If I have a daughter or granddaughter with an ectopic pregnancy, she is getting an abortion of the misplaced mass of cells that has a chance only of killing her. If someone wants an abortion for a trivial reason (such as "I don't want a black baby", "I don't want to get fat", "I want to know what an abortion is like", or "It might force me to give up my job") then I might try to prevent an abortion for such reasons. Abortion is a tragedy, but so is amputation and so are certain cancer treatments.
If one goes back to Edmund Burke, a conservative favorite to this day, one recognizes that the preservation of social rottenness is the cause of dangerous revolutions including the worst aspects of the French Revolution. One can fault the vileness of Imperial Russia for the Bolshevik Revolution.
On the other side it is easy to see what is not conservatism in the Hard Right:
- demagoguery that plays upon mass resentments
- rejection of reason as a means of finding solutions -- have faith instead, and fault people for lacking faith
- disdain for intellectual activity, including the arts
- economic hierarchy that simply preserves existing elites in their roles while denying opportunity for others
- superstition and bigotry, and the overall rejection of human kindness
- alignment with world figures hostile to democracy here and elsewhere for political advantage or self-gratification
- recklessness in foreign policy
- bigotry that divides and humiliates
- corruption and cronyism
- dirty tricks as a political norm
- gross dishonesty (FoX News) or flagrant promotion of cruelty in news media (Alex Jones' InfoWars)
- rejection of electoral results that fail to go the way that one wants them to go (January 6. 2021)
Get it?
The Left-Right divide is not simply the divide between those who support capitalism and those who seek to destroy or constrain it. People can oppose bankers, manufacturers, and merchants as challenges to their semi-feudal agenda or because the successful capitalists are largely members of minority groups such as Jews in much of the West (think of Hitler in Germany) or south or east Asians (think of Idi Amin in Uganda). Although I expect workers to insist upon getting more than what capitalists deem fit to offer as wages, I also recognize the need for enterprise. I look at Reconstruction of the post-Civil War South with the prospect that Freedmen were going to establish their own world of commerce and industry, and I see a viable solution to everything but the racist bugaboo of keeping the races separate and of securing cheap labor on behalf of the land-rich former slave-owners.
..........................
In close races in which demographics decides all, the difference between R and D wins could be that some people whom one would have expected to vote one way did not vote. This may in part reflect the pattern of deaths by COVID-19. In 2020 the death tolls from COVID-19 were still relatively even in partisan victimhood. Protecting oneself from COVID-19 was certainly wise even when the means of self-preservation were to avoid pointless gatherings and wearing masks. Liberals were usually rushing inoculation sites as early as possible to get the first shot and then the booster. Over 65 and having an auto-immune disorder (even if it was "only" psoriasis) I got both at the first opportunity. I was delighted to see soldiers delivering the shots, indicating that the Biden Administration recognized that COVID-19 was a clear and present danger meriting such a response. I volunteered at a couple of mass inoculations. When I went to the store and saw fellow shoppers wearing masks as I did I said "Thank you for wearing a mask".
By 2022 the death tolls from COVID-19 may have reduced the potential GOP vote to a greater extent than that it reduced the D vote.
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.