The activist community

[pbrower2a]

(03-19-2021, 04:45 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-16-2021, 02:59 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-16-2021, 06:10 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: ... During the 1T everybody who tries to debate cultural or moral issues will be seen as a laggard who has yet to recognize the truth of Inclusivism and wants to bring back the culture wars.

That may be a bit optimistic, since is hasn't happened to any great extent in the past.  Yes, the 1T will be more communal, but 'more' is about it.

Isn't cultural conformity another hallmark of a 1T?

But you're right that "more" is guaranteed. In the 2030s we'll make it to Mars and start the colonization process. We will also probably a proof of primitive life on the Red Planet, and of more complex lifeforms in another solar systems. This is what will make people excited when politics calms down.

Very much. This time I see more certainty that Americans will be unable to avoid the cultural influence of America's model minorities -- people not straight, white, and Christian. In all likelihood the "lewd and lascivious" will be taken out with the other detritus. Things recently shady will be obliged to clean up their acts if they do not want oblivion as examples of how not to do things. There will be traces of regional differences and ethnicity in mass culture but anything 'ethnic' will likely be sanitized for mass consumption -- like much of the "Latin" or "Hawaiian" music once in vogue in the last 1T. 


Community values this time will not include anything like "Jim Crow" ... unless directed at dopers, drunks, deadbeats, and sexual deviants* that most of us will treat as unacceptable influences or presences in mainstream life. I expect pornography to be reduced severely in availability, as "swinger" lifestyles are shown to be harmful to children. Even political extremism might go on the fade. Even the Communist Party on the Left has sought to go mainstream.

There will still be religion, including fundamentalist Christianity, but all of it will have to go through a difficult lens of judgment. If it is crazy, cruel, or callous it will be suspect. Donald Trump's antics as President will be a bad memory to be left as a warning for the next few generations. Conservatism will need to redefine itself as something other than the defense of elite Power, Indulgence, and Gain (get it? P.I.G!). Educational opportunity will expand, and it will not have the cost of gigantic debt as a burden that puts off child-raising and home ownership. It will be more rigidly defined in its objectives of improving the expectations of moral standards and making people less vulnerable to hucksters in commerce and politics. It will be at least two years of liberal arts education, and I expect it to include the well-known Freshman Composition (one learns that volume of writing is not a substitute for structure and content), comparative political systems (yes, fascism, Communism, Ku Kluxism, Baathism, and theocracy suck!), philosophy (where one learns the rules of logic and that there really isn't much new thought and that one's 'discovery' already exists), economics (there is no free lunch), psychology (to know the hustles when they are made), comparative religion (so that one knows the differences and common features... and doesn't get stuck with the idea that  and a foreign language (example: learn a Slavic language -- any Slavic language -- and your world will widen).   

One thing that will be more conformist will be economic results. Americans will be less tolerant of economic disparities, as poverty will be seen as a harm to children. The neoliberal era is over, and the idea that economic elites can be trusted to use severe poverty as a cudgel to get people to create the means of creating capital but instead turned into the means of promoting sybaritic indulgence among the Master Class will be repudiated in high taxes on "easy money". Availability and access to what are now overpriced events will become more important than profit. 

 *LGBT rights will not be impaired. Messing with children, though, will be even more horrifying. The advocates of LGBT rights made clear to straight people that we had to accept that men unable to love women but men instead, and women incapable of loving men but capable of loving women might as well get to live in marital relationships equal in recognition with those of straight adult couples.