(09-16-2016, 01:00 AM)Dan Wrote: (twitter messages)
1. Maybe the economic elites care only about themselves and their indulgence. The world must have looked very good to the Bourbons at the Palais de Versailles or from the Imperial Court at St. Petersburg while the masses hated their lives and saw fundamental change as a necessity for having any satisfaction in life. Maybe they just don't care that the world sucks so badly for people managed largely by fear.
So if the bounty of a rich society goes largely to people who are guaranteed easy, large profits and everyone else must struggle ferociously for the scraps, we have a sick society at least in formation. Measures of GNP per capita will not matter if people live on the brink of starvation at worst and in thrall of loan-sharks at best.
2. The elites would rather that the People have no meaningful vote, but racist votes and votes manipulates by religious bigotry really are 'dumb' votes. But ensuring that mass education is awful might be a good way to ensure that people vote 'dumb' or vote 'scared'.
3. Few people want to be known exclusively for their economic function. People who are nothing more than their economic function might be highly-successful business-people and professionals, but I can assure you that nobody wants to be known only as a salesclerk, farm laborer, or warehouse worker. Those jobs are often far too small for the human spirit of many who do them. People often identify themselves as "Yankee fans", "Baptists", "someone who bowled a 300 game", alumni of Southern Michigan University, or the maker of the best lasagna in Springfield.
Is there any question of whether people find their economic role so inadequate when they hate their jobs? Slaves were identified exclusively by their economic role.
Is there any surprise?
4. The system undeniably works for the elites, if for nobody else. That is nothing praiseworthy. That's how things were in France before 1789, Russia before 1917, or Romania before 1989. All hierarchical orders except the Catholic Church end up having a hereditary method of passing down power and its perquisites. Even in the alleged "workers' states", the Commie bosses made sure that their kids didn't have to become farm laborers on a kolkhoz or 'mere' factory workers. I see much the same a near certainty with America's executive elite which operates little differently from the old Soviet nomenklatura. It will go similarly badly.
5. The kids in the middle rows know that their chances are under threat. Those in the back never thought that they had a chance, which explains why they can get along unless they show something that remotely resembles a gun upon a cop, commits an armed robbery, or deals in the drugs that the elites hold in disdain. Maybe there is some welfare so that one does not see people dying of starvation in unglamorous part of town. Those in the back row know that they will survive. Those in the middle row do not know the terms of their survival and have legitimate fear. Attending an overpriced college with the prospect of being in debt while having to work at a fast food counter isn't so great as attending a heavily-subsidized college with the prospect of at least having a low-level profession.
6. The Trump voters are extremely angry. Sanders? Don't be so sure. Sanders' supporters don't beat people up.
7. Middle-class blacks , Asians, and Hispanics still have some faith in liberalism. When liberalism fails, the non-white component of the middle class disintegrates. When the white middle class gets the same message before the disintegration of the middle class is well under way, then the game is up for the elites. Something like Henry George's single tax (a tax upon economic rents) could solve many problems, one of which is economic inequality. Easy money deserves to be taxed more heavily than hard-earned money. Exploiting a contrived scarcity of property, as Donald Trump does, is easy money. Doing oil changes or putting up sheet rock is not easy money.
8. It is easy to see what people would go first in large numbers to the equivalent of the guillotine -- people who have gotten fantastically rich by treating others badly. What will be necessary is creating a frontier-like free-for-all that really does reward talent, probity, and competence instead of being well connected by birth or marriage.
9 and 10. The economic, bureaucratic, and political elites overthrown in revolutions typically have no clue that things are going badly for those other than themselves, and that those elites are the cause of rightful dissent that explodes as a revolution. Those elites see nothing more natural than that their noble selves should wallow in selfish indulgence and be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit. The masses hate such people and have no use for them. Louis XVI and Nicolae Ceausescu had much the same flippant view of the initial unrest that eventually toppled them. Our economic elites could be much the same.
Donald Trump has much more in common with Louis XVI than with Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- that is beyond any doubt. Donald Trump loves the fools of America -- but not smart people who can see through him.
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.