07-01-2016, 10:01 AM
(07-01-2016, 07:01 AM)Anthony Wrote:Quote:Capitalists recognized at a certain point that they were better off getting smaller margins of profit on larger volumes of sales than gigantic margins on small numbers of sales. That required that capitalists transform workers into consumers. If one lives in barracks-like accommodations, sees one's children die of hunger and disease to which the economic elites seem exempt, and lives in crowding and filth so that elites of any kind can live in opulent splendor, then one might see almost any radical change in the political order as a cure to one's distress. But workers who have cars, furniture, and electronic entertainments and who see their kids attending school might have something to lose in the event of a revolution in the name of the proletariat.
But in recent decades the conservatives have gotten so greedy as to try and recreate these conditions. Which is why the "hardhats" recruited into the Republican Party during the Great Backlash against the Consciousness Revolution (and their Baby Buster and Post-Buster children) were no longer willing to play second fiddle to the Overclass, and overthrew them and took over the party for themselves. This is how Donald Trump was "created" - not by anything Barack Obama has done, as per the Overclass' preferred narrative.
The "Hardhats" who found themselves with Richard Nixon simply turned against George McGovern, who seemed to pose the threat of new high taxes (skilled workers generally make above-average incomes and pay above-average taxes) while being linked to the Counterculture that "Hardhat" types could never like. They rally are swing voters, and I can easily see them voting for Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. "Hardhats" love big spending on infrastructure, which is their favored source of income.
Nobody is running on an agenda out of the Blue Awakening, unless it is the MBA culture of Donald Trump. Besides, the core support of Donald Trump is under-educated white working people generally in places where most of the white working people are semiskilled or unskilled labor. Skilled laborers may not largely have college degrees, but they are generally much smarter than unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Also, the kids of skilled workers are far more likely to get college degrees than are the kids of unskilled or semi-skilled workers.
The educational issue isn't the degree; it is intelligence that allows people to see through demagoguery and recognize its danger. If one can recognize that a promise to coal companies to promote more burning of coal and that a promise to environmentalists that less coal will be burned cannot both be achieved, then one might reject a politician who makes such a contradiction that indicates either a dangerous fool or an unscrupulous liar.
The undereducated, semi-skilled or unskilled white worker were offered a deal by the Republican Establishment that in return for cutting wages (to be offset with more economic opportunity and lower taxes) the GOP Establishment would outlaw abortion and clamp down on homosexuality, promote creationism, and bring back school prayer. The GOP Establishment has done everything possible to suppress or even reduce wages, but it has been either ineffective at or unwilling to bring about the 'cultural' agenda. Democrats cannot offer that cultural agenda. Donald Trump plays up racism against people that unskilled and semi-skilled white workers see as possible competitors for jobs, which does play well in rural white America, the "Real America" as Sarah Palin called it. That's the America without so many ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, college students who have no desire to return to the farm, and in general liberal and moderates.
In 2008, Barack Obama got 365i electoral votes from the not-so-real America, and got elected President. (The letter i following 365 is a mathematical joke, if you get it. i is the imaginary square root of -1, a non-real number that proves very useful in some forms of mathematics).
Maybe Hillary Clinton will get anywhere from 332i to 450i electoral votes, largely from the not-so-real America in the states that she wins in 2016.
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.