11-23-2020, 12:27 PM
(11-22-2020, 05:22 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: There seems to be little to no blip in the spiral of violence leading me to believe the red are going to be more violent. Sure, a few bad cops and militias might try, but they are not doing well of late. The military have made it clear they will not get involved. The secret police have withdrawn in the face of local opposition. The Proud Boys and Wolverine watchmen made their moves and were rebuffed. Trump did enough wrong stuff that most understand why he lost, and I doubt they will start a revolution about it. We will have to see who wins the conflict between the Republican factions, the fight for control of the base and the party. That’s not my fight, but I don’t see the victor as winning anything but a remnant. Trump is a loser. No one has risen to take his place, but Trump looks likely to try to block whoever tries. The establishment is discredited. The true conservatives have not yet become competitive.
The Hard Right will try to offer a "new and improved" version of a troubled product, introduce a new marketing scheme, new pitch-people, or even a "new look". It's like the cancerweed industry offering 'innovative' cigarettes, new mystique to cigars, or even vaping. We can all be sure that the next semi-fascist that the current GOP will have very different personality, speech patterns, and mannerisms than Trump. Joni Ernst, just re-elected to the Senate, much younger, more rough-hewn, less headstrong, more learned (which is not tough to achieve against Trump), and less connected to any personal fortune than Trump, could be the one. Republican... hmmm... Lincoln split rails and she castrated hogs... is one that I could think of.
OK... it is time for conservatives to recognize a few things. Conservative pols have often won on more blatant shows of religious devotion, normal family life by the standard of the time, and respect for current (active-duty) and former (veteran) service-people than the liberal Democrat... and this time Joe Biden won that argument. If that is worth 5% of the vote, then that is more than the margin of the Biden victory. Biden had a Reagan-like campaign against Trump. Joe Biden is the devout Christian, he has been married twice but as the result of a tragic death of his first wife, and he makes clear his respect for military service.
I have had familiarity with Donald Trump from his early media-hugging... and I saw someone with whom I had no desire for any dealings. He always struck me as "all hat and no cattle". There was nothing erudite about him -- which is not to say that an oil wildcatter, a traveling salesman, or a successful day-trader must be erudite. For a high-level politician I want someone who knows how the system works and who can derive some relevant lessons from history.
Quote:I don’t anticipate a conservative faction being dominant through a crisis - high - awakening time interval. The crisis is a time of resolving issues and taking decisive action. The high settles the solutions down. The awakening is when a new problem is highlighted by people who want to do something about it. Is there room for conservatives there? The unravelling will come eventually, but I have not yet got a clear picture of what the conflicts will be then.
A reminder: Sir Winston Churchill, one of the most frequent models of a successful leader during a Great Crisis, was as conservative as one gets. Obviously Donald Trump is about as far from being Sir Winston Churchill as is possible except for being similarly ruthless. Churchill of course was brutally ruthless against an enemy that he could cast as Satan Incarnate. Recent political rivals in Labour? He recognized that they had as much stake in defeating Hitler as he did and saw them loyal to a far greater cause than a current majority in Parliament. There was nothing revolutionary about Churchill, and if he was admirable it was for standing up for old decencies well entrenched in the British political heritage. Churchill made clear that when his side there would be no further cause for fighting. Italy, Japan, and the German Federal Republic* haven't invaded any other countries in just over 75 years and seem unlikely to do so. Churchill let the scientists do their job with no impairment other than monitoring them for success, let the British intelligence services operate with minimal interference, and put the consumer economy in hiatus for the duration.
This said, when conservatism becomes a cover for superstition, exploitation, inequity, and corruption it needs a fresh redefinition.
Conservatives might as well put aside their enmity toward Barack Obama. Their next President is likely to act more like Barack Obama than like Donald Trump. All that kept Barack Obama from being a fine conservative President was that he wasn't especially conservative. (That might be like saying that Tchaikovsky's opera Yevgeny Onyegin is a fine Italian opera except for being in Russian). I can't yet see any Eisenhower-like war hero emerging from this Crisis, but I can recognize similarities of demeanor, conduct, and achievement in Eisenhower and Obama. The Obama and now Biden constituencies, except for farmers and ranchers, seem much like those for Eisenhower.
Joe Biden will be more effective at erasing the personal perversity of Donald Trump than at undoing the 'intellectual' direction of conservatism. The shock-jock style of the Boomer Right needs to go, as it is spent. Trump's 'bad Boomer' sexuality is simply sick and unsupportable. Maybe we will be headed into an era in which the nuclear family (with an allowance for same-sex couples that will stick) is a norm and an expectation. The practice of men dumping their wives when they no longer resemble the Playboy Playmate of the Year of the time (that image changes little except for some 'inclusions' of non-white women) in favor of a new model as they exchange a six-year-old car when they tire of it and want something 'sexier'. The inequity that has bloomed into a stinking mess during the neoliberal era will become discredited. Quack science and pseudo-history will have to be recognized for their worthlessness and even harm.
Most people will be satisfied after the Crisis is over with following the basic rules (do your job, eschew crime, avoid overt bigotry) in return for a modestly-comfortable and secure life for themselves and their loved ones. Rogues will be out in the cold. Taxes will be higher on the elites; executive competition will not be so lavish. I expect tax laws that favor small business over bureaucratic behemoths that have been more adept at shedding jobs than creating them. Scrupulous behavior will be the expectation in commerce. The bad behavior that accumulates in a 2T (Donald Trump's sex life and shady business dealings) and a 3T (reckless and harmful -- or even irrelevant fads) will go into the 'dustbin of history', much as happened with much of the cultural detritus of the Roaring Twenties going into the last Crisis Era. (OK... we still listen to George Gershwin and find the better silent movies still watchable, but we don't do wing-walking or flagpole-sitting).
We are going to see more standardization of undergraduate education because it will be expanded as a norm. K-12 is inadequate preparation for the complexity of the content of the World Wide Web and the moral challenges of an often-depraved mass low culture, let alone for the scammers and shysters in politics and commerce. We need more learning in the liberal arts so that we can know how to live in the world without scarcity that is nigh.
Quote:The Marxists are not active in this crisis. They are not one of the people who participated in the grand debate through the preceding unravelling. They did not participate in a spiral of violence. I do not anticipate a Marxist revolution.
Marxism is obsolete. Capitalism does not need the extreme inequality and suffering that Marx attributes to capitalism to make it serve capitalists at the expense of everyone else. Marxists fail to recognize the validity of markets not so much in producing goods and services but also in refusing to produce goods and services that people do not want but that devour huge amounts of natural resources and leave much environmental damage behind. Capitalists do not have a death wish, and are more likely to give workers a stake in the system than to risk being the sorts of people who fit the Marxist stereotype of capitalists whom none could like except each other (and I am not sure even of that).
The really-bad guys in capitalist societies are mirror-image Marxists, the sorts of people who make life miserable for working people for their own opulent splendor and sybaritic indulgence. Such people do far more to foster the rise of Communism than do alienated intellectuals who get an introduction to Marxist literature and become firebrands.
Quote:China and Russia are major powers. The major power have not become involved in crisis wars recently. I am not certain about China. Their culture underwent severe stress from the opium wars through Mao’s time. They are very reluctant to return to a time of instability. Yes, that time is fading from living memory, but it was long and it hurt. Yet, their autocracy is clinging to power, and does not look to let go of that power easily. A revolution may be necessary. I see them reluctant to start it. They are also reluctant to kill the golden goose. They have established the upper hand in Hong Kong, but seem reluctant to launch the crushing final blow.
Russia did have trends toward democracy before Putin and could return. China has had practically no experience with democracy. I see the Chinese people reasonably trustworthy with democracy if they ever experience it. Will they? This is about like saying that the Detroit Lions will win the Superbowl some year.
Quote:I am not thus too worried about protecting my anonymity. Speaking loudly the progressive agenda and supporting the resolution of the crisis problems seems the thing to do. Anticipating that the conservative values will fade again seems right.
We are far safer now that Joe Biden is about to become President than when we still had legitimate fear of a second term of Donald Trump. We are in a Crisis, and America needs significant reforms to recover what was legitimately great in America. Most of what is great is the result of Enlightenment and Humanist reforms. Golden Ages in history are myths. After being threatened with a gay-bashing incident, I have no desire to return to bans on same-sex marriage. Women have shown that they are as capable of high-level contributions to true greatness as men, and I would not throw those away to have some dubious security that comes with male dominance. I would not like to have been black in "Kukluxistan". All that may have been better in the past is being young again, opportunities that one cast off for no good reason or that real estate was incredibly cheap Way Back When. But that often comes with some problems. The longshoreman who worked long hours and could have an apartment with a view of the water, a view now precious, didn't have the time in which to appreciate it... and was likely dead by age 50, worn out or crippled by his work.
The world in which I live has suddenly become quieter and even more civilized now that those silly red MAGA hats have disappeared. COVID-19 is still killing in large numbers. America is 'quieter' by 260,000 people due to that disease, and that is the wrong sort of quiet.
* Commie East Germany did participate in the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which counts little because the DDR was a puppet state. The German Federal Republic disapproved of that invasion.
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.