12-16-2022, 03:45 AM
(12-15-2022, 02:51 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-15-2022, 12:26 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:(12-14-2022, 05:26 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The American political system gives disproportionate power to the super-wealthy who can supply the Dark Money to political aspirants who, like many of the super-wealthy, believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as such serves the power, indulgence, and greed of elites who know no limits for these. Dark Money supports politics of fear and loathing, reflecting to the extent that people can be manipulated, that those who own the gold are the only ones who can competently or rightly rule. This can change. Those super-wealthy are disproportionately white, and those who are most amenable to such an appeal are undereducated white people under economic and cultural stress.
Generation X acquiesced to neoliberal politics and economics in return for promises of opportunity but often hated their jobs and the abysmal pay that came with them. They griped to their Millennial kids who learned their economics as griping about economic inequity and an increasingly-rigid class structure.
It would be nice if we had more right wingers around wanting to do something about this. Whether we like it or not, some sort of wrecking ball is going to smash into the bureaucratic establishment, and a right wing "drain the swamp" agenda is much more favorable to a lefty swing toward something more restrictive or South America-esque.
As to your previous comment about the possibility of young idealists just starting to be born, I don't see that happening yet. One of the most basic turning points that suggest a 4T is just starting to correct course is that people are much more willing to acknowledge the inevitable and face it down on their own terms. We aren't there yet, not even close. Honestly, I'd give us another year before this happens, and another 8-11 years after that before it really gets resolved. As such, my money is on the new idealist births starting around 2027-ish. Of course, we won't really know until the 1T arrives.
I don't see any right-wingers around willing to do anything about "economic inequity and an increasingly-rigid class structure".
Quite to the contrary: they seek to intensify it!
Quote:It is true that Trump alluded to aspects of this, but only offered remedies that make it worse; in fact he doubled down on the neoliberal agenda that so benefits him and his class. I'm afraid that restrictions on big corporate operations and wealthy business interests has to be the central focus of any such correction, since they are the cause of all such economic inequity and the increasingly-rigid class structure. That means higher taxes and regulations on them, and protections and support for the poor and middle class folks who suffer from their behavior and their monopolization of power today in so many ways. And since the government must provide these things, I'm afraid that we need more, not less, "bureaucracy" to handle these matters. And such bureauracy must be clean and not corrupt. Such things as gerrymandering and money-domination of politics, all so favored by the right wing and its supreme court, is the real swamp, and only the Left can or is willing to drain it.
High taxes on large, easy money prevent the accumulation of great fortunes that result from the intensification of economic inequality and administrative brutality associated with those fortunes. High taxes on such money create interstices for small business that can serve niches and do genuine innovation in something other than defeating the democratic safeguards against plutocracy.
(Astrological predictions that I cannot understand. Astrophysics is easier to understand than is astrology).
Quote:As you know, I expect any such course correction will depend on Democrats coming out of the 4T with more power. I don't see any problem with the more-lefty regimes coming into power now in some places South and Latin America; they are not extreme or totalitarian. I don't endorse the Cuba model or Venezuelan kleptocracy, and I abhor the traitor Ortega in Nicaragua, and I don't think the new regimes in Brazil (Lula taking office in January), Chile and Colombia, for example, emulate those models.
Civic generations are conformist even to the extent of preferring similar patterns in consumption possible only with comparative equality of economic opportunity and result. Other generations may tolerate more inequality of result as incentives to work harder and longer to create more prosperity or as some Divine Will.
We have not seen the last of the Hard Right, but the Hard Right is showing itself as simply promoters of selfish indulgence, superstition and pseudoscience, and of a personality cult likely to go from Donald Trump to someone else. It may be ironic, but the weakest leaders in moral standards require the most lavish cults of personality. Obama needed none and neither does Biden; Trump is little else.
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.