09-01-2022, 02:23 AM
(08-31-2022, 01:34 PM)Anthony Wrote: The precise road to a return to humdrum politics would be the implementation of a neo-Malthusian economic agenda that would be welcomed by a huge slice of the right because immigration would be essentially cut off, and would be welcomed by a huge slice of the left because the resulting perpetual tightness of the labor market would cause wages to soar, with unions regaining the immense power they had in the last 1T.
There will be immigration even for mating. Some white men can get an erection only in the presence of Asian women. So go to Manila and get a wife who will at least be part of Western civilization and be exotic only in appearance if women 'like that' are rare where that is. Some people will be alienated with their culture alone and emigrate.
Quote:Japan is living proof of how awesomely this combination works: It gives that country both a high degree of cultural homogeneity and a high degree of economic equality - and the latter without any kvetching about "socialism."
So is Denmark. So is Finland, although Finland has a fiendishly-difficult language.
Quote:This would be the greatest gift that Gen Xers can bestow upon America.
So far the greatest gift that Generation X has bestowed upon America is a President who has shown a largely-conservative view of how to live and how to harmonize human desires with reality without sharing the plutocracy, superstition, hierarchy, and pessimism associated with much of contemporary conservatism. I do not know what books Obama has read, but it is far more likely that Barack Obama is more familiar with Edmund Burke than is Donald Trump. If I were to connect any philosopher to Donald Trump it would be the odious mystic Aleister Crowley, whose aphorism
"Do what thou wilt"
better describes Donald Trump's conduct and lack of sustainable values than any other philosophy.
The Mature Reactive recognizes that ideals can create more problems than they solve. After All, Man is more capable of creating Hell on Earth than some utopian paradise. Some realities never change, and such is the inherent conservatism in the Mature Reactive. Who better exemplifies a conservative lifestyle than Barack Obama? Obama seems to be the sort of person that I would not want to encounter as a judge, prosecutor, or chief of police if I were a mobster, fraudster, spouse-beater, drug trafficker, or garden-variety crook. Obama went another political direction, but he seems like a "do the crime and do the time" sort. His family life is exactly what one would expect from a 1950's sitcom except for being black. That exception says more about how American life has changed for the better for blacks who were generally not yet recognized as part of the cultural and political mainstream.
If the overall community misses out on the Grey Champion, the Mature Reactive is the second-best. Obama support is closer to the demographics of Eisenhower voters than to those of any Democratic President before him. He did not get the farm-and-ranch vote or the Mormon vote as did Ike, but he did very well with well-educated people. Relative to the time, merely having a high-school diploma was above average when Eisenhower was President and any college education was truly elite. Ike did better with high-school graduates than did Stevenson, and wiped out Stevenson with the college-educated. Having a high-school diploma and nothing else is now below average, and Obama held his own with people with any college education and wiped out McCain and Romney with the college-educated.
Trump may have said that he loves low-information (which corresponds in generally to the ill-educated), but if I have my choice, I am going with the well informed who are less likely to change their vote on some trifle. Send someone to me with a MAGA hat in an effort to turn me and I am more likely to turn that person than that person is to turn me.
Obama recognizes tradition as a fallback when the avant-garde fails (which it usually does). What differs with Obama from the old sort of conservative is that he does not define as "his" tradition only. He recognizes law and order and the rule of law as essential to even the most basic of civil liberties. His sexual behavior is arch-conservative in contrast to what Trump does. He recognizes loyalty to nation as something to be assumed. He recognizes the need for a hierarchy of competence and achievement. He supports rational thought and rejects angry, demagogic populism. He knows well that core reality does not change even if knowledge of it can be discovered or more refined. He considers sobriety and modesty honorable and necessary. he is in no way utopian
Most of what Obama seems to believe is boilerplate conservatism, if with a needful tweak here or there, as most of us recognize it. I was able to get conservatives of the 'devout' and 'pro-business' types to accept my militant support for LGBT rights by convincing them that homophobic violence is neither 'pro-family' nor good for business. I was not going to convince someone who wanted to do serious bodily harm to me for real or imagined homosexuality with such a trite ditty as "gay is OK, but it isn't my way". I simply ran from the scene. Was I a coward? Apparently the Armed Forces tell soldiers to run away from personal violence and not fight back, so maybe self-preservation is not so cowardly as it seems. (Today if I were at the scene of homophobic violence I would call 911 on a cell phone, just as I do if I see a drunk driver).
Generational history runs in cycles, and time is running out for the Boom Generation to have a Grey Champion of the likes of Beaconsfield, Lincoln, Juarez, Churchill, Blum, FDR, Mannerheim, or Adenauer. Maybe the danger of a Trump-like figure is fading. The Grey Champion needs the Mature Reactive at the least as administrators and enforcers.
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.