08-11-2019, 10:36 AM
It could be worse. Add to the rapacious plutocracy of the Gilded Age the peonage (debt bondage) that made sharecroppers helpless against the agrarian elite of the American South. Such a condition once existed for farm and industrial workers, and even white-collar workers alike. Attempting to change employment without the consent of a current employer was illegal in Nazi Germany, as was any strike or work stoppage. This is in addition to the genocide, war crimes, and gratuitous invasions by Nazi Germany that far overshadow the brutal working conditions for Germans (let alone enslaved peoples brought in as forced labor) in Nazi Germany.
The Hard Right already shows signs of losing. It is becoming more violent as it sees itself on the wrong side of history due to demographic change and the obsolescence of its appeal.
The Millennial Generation is clearly left-of-center in its politics, and as it rises in the political process (it will supplant the Silent, Boomers, and some late-wave X already in office) it will change American politics. Recent sleazy compromises such as dual wage scales will collapse. Like other Civic generations it will have the capacity to make sacrifices, but it will make those sacrifices more readily for something that improves the world. It will not make sacrifices on behalf of the power, indulgence, or gain of extant elites who show no restraint in their greed and sybaritic ways.
It will protect its children from every menace -- including poverty and ignorance! If you think Generation X got things psychologically rough, the Millennial Generation may have had things economically worse. The only progress that the Millennial Generation could count on was the progress of their toil to the gain of the Master Class in an economic order that saw nothing wrong with the economy that tax cuts, evisceration of unions, and regulatory regulation could not solve. This generation knows that it is getting a raw deal, and when it has influence enough to make the difference it will make the difference.
The Hard Right already shows signs of losing. It is becoming more violent as it sees itself on the wrong side of history due to demographic change and the obsolescence of its appeal.
The Millennial Generation is clearly left-of-center in its politics, and as it rises in the political process (it will supplant the Silent, Boomers, and some late-wave X already in office) it will change American politics. Recent sleazy compromises such as dual wage scales will collapse. Like other Civic generations it will have the capacity to make sacrifices, but it will make those sacrifices more readily for something that improves the world. It will not make sacrifices on behalf of the power, indulgence, or gain of extant elites who show no restraint in their greed and sybaritic ways.
It will protect its children from every menace -- including poverty and ignorance! If you think Generation X got things psychologically rough, the Millennial Generation may have had things economically worse. The only progress that the Millennial Generation could count on was the progress of their toil to the gain of the Master Class in an economic order that saw nothing wrong with the economy that tax cuts, evisceration of unions, and regulatory regulation could not solve. This generation knows that it is getting a raw deal, and when it has influence enough to make the difference it will make the difference.
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.