05-24-2017, 12:06 AM
(05-23-2017, 04:54 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-22-2017, 12:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: As far as that goes, the concept "Make America Great Again" is reactionary in the sense of suggesting that something noble has been lost. All that I see worse about America since the 1920s is that America is more crowded and that real estate is much more expensive in real terms. But go back to the era of 120 years ago -- I don't want elixirs of opiates and liquor sold as alternatives to seeing a physician. I don't want children then seen as trash (then Irish-Americans, largely) being run over by trolleys. I don't want black people being consigned to conditions reminiscent of serfdom. I don't want children drinking booze or toiling in mines and factories. The forty-year lifespan and seventy-hour workweek for workingmen as a norm is something to avoid -- not to recover.
I miss the optimism and energy of the GI generation. They grew up in the last ugly remnants of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression being a final reprise of the economic ugliness of what came before. From the New Deal through the Great Society I think we did pretty good. Getting back that spirit and energy wouldn't be a bad thing.
Regaining that spirit and energy would be the optimal solution. As a candidate, Donald Trump exploited mass resentments of people who use their education to allegedly exploit and oppress people with lousy jobs. The convenience store clerk who witnesses someone putting over $100 in motor fuels into the tanks of his pick-up and his motorboat isn't being exploited in that transaction. That clerk's problem may be in working in a job far too small for his talents and incapable of allowing anything more than bare survival in a social order that seems to value only material indulgence.
When America relied more heavily upon factories for employment, factory work was usually a reliable escape from grinding poverty. Work in fast food, retail, and farm labor was typically a stopgap or placeholder job -- something that one did while waiting for something that pays reasonably well before getting the first 'good' job, seeking a husband, or while laid off. Now such jobs have often become permanent even if the worker intended it as a stopgap.
People who feel that they have no stake in the economic order are vulnerable to demagogues, Left and Right. Be not fooled. Some Trump voters would have voted for a Commie who promised to expropriate great wealth and put it into new factories that would employ multitudes (but with Communism that implies denying the market and thus making huge amounts of stuff that nobody really wants -- obsolete stuff and objects with a saturated market).
Quote:The Great Depression and World War II were not fun. The Gilded Age was just bad. Thinking those times the peak of America doesn't feel right at all save in the context of a Churchill misquote. If the nation lasts a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour." But in terms of when was our time of broad sunlit uplands, that would be the heyday of tax and spend liberalism.
The Gilded Age was necessary -- the time in which America made basic investments in basic industry and sorted out what sorts of business work and what sorts don't. It is easy to despise the brutal management, the dishonest business practices, the environmental degradation, the corruption in municipal and state government, and the gross neglect of children. We would not put up with that again. It was a time of economic growth, however uneven, unjust, and erratic with bubbles and busts. Nobody wants a return to the booms and busts. The Great Depression was the result of an attempt to return to the Gilded Age, and most of the Great Depression was the necessary measures to get out of a horrid meltdown. World War II was the consequence of fascists trying to achieve a new feudalism in which the industrial worker or small farmer became a serf worked to his physical limits and punished severely if he balked at that.
It is hard to imagine another war like the Second World War in which the war is an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil, with Good generally prevailing (but only after multitudes of people who did nothing wrong, like Jews, Gypsies, and the Polish intelligentsia. were largely exterminated). But this time, dystopia is practically at hand and many Americans know such to be so.
We will need to remake our cultural and economic norms. We are entering a new economic reality in which scarcity is no longer a necessary spur to toil. The bright side is that we can live with much more ease without lack. The dark side for many is that there may be no shortages to exploit (except perhaps for urban real estate, Donald Trump's source of wealth) for easy income above the norm.
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.