12-14-2022, 05:16 PM
(12-14-2022, 12:40 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: One thing that is sure to go: the divide over whether to have more vs less involvement overseas is a generation one, not a left/right one. Silents and boomers want more "spreading democracy", nation building, being the world police, etc. Millennials and zoomers want us to leave the rest of the world alone and focus on ourselves. One of my biggest gripes with Idealist generations is their tendency to want to project universalist ideologies as far as possible, and they expect other generations to foot the bill and make the sacrifices necessary for this to happen. The Civil War is probably the most extreme example, but this trait is still definitely present in boomers.
Human nature and bureaucratic behavior as they are, one can expect people and especially politicians and administrators to find new demons. I looked at Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign and I saw a very bad character on the world scene with the potential to make the Cold War irrelevant.
The ideal that all human life is precious, a core value of the major religions of our time is internationalist in character. Abolition of slavery became a pretext of European colonization in Africa. British and French declarations of war against Nazi Germany, and UN measures against a similarly-vile regime upon invading Kuwait were pretexts for war.
The demons remain much the same. The inability to judge evil for what it is is itself evil, whether chattel slavery or murderous genocide. Until the final defeat of Evil we can expect a continuing struggle between Good and Evil, both taking different forms and rationales.
Quote:In the event that they are opposing rather than complimentary priorities, the question is what is best for America, not what is best for the rest of the world. Many boomers (and likely a few in here) will object to this, but frankly...most of y'all gon' be dead by the 1T, and the younger generations simply don't care about that. We care about rebuilding, not making sacrifices for causes primarily aimed at benefitting foreign parties.
Perhaps being born now are the first wave of New Idealists. Maybe the vast majority will be unable to wallow in the indulgence, certainty, and privacy that made possible the narcissism of middle-class (let alone upper-class) Boomers. Some political systems (typically Communist) have compelled their youth to do farm labor instead of enjoying "bourgeois" indulgence. A plutocratic order of the sort that Trump tried to create and that others may still succeed in establishing could ensure that the managerial and professional elites emerge entirely from entrenched elites as everyone else is priced out of any training not suitable for menial services, low-grade technical work (repair and maintenance, largely), or raw labor. Such work as nursing, teaching, religion, police work, and all creative activity will be so ill-paid that those who do it will be obliged to rely upon rich relatives for much of their sustenance that cannot pay for student loans. Economic elites can be cruel not only in failing to share the wealth that others create on their behalf but also in brutal treatment of anyone who demands anything better in life than bare sustenance for long hours of ill-paid toil. This is yet to be decided; if Trump fails to get elected in 2024 then there will be others willing to impose such on behalf of their perverse dreams of power. Such nasty orders remain until overthrown in revolutions or calamitous wars. On the other side, we may have a saner new paradigm of neo-liberalism.
After World War II the general consensus in America was that people who had endured hardscrabble childhood were trustworthy if they could show competence on the job, and they could form a large middle class. Bureaucratic assumptions in recent years have been that anyone who has endured any hardship is untrustworthy because such a person will show sympathy for people enduring hardships. It is best that we have a political and economic order that is not simultaneously hierarchical, inequitable, and repressive as was Imperial Russia, don't you think?
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.