11-11-2016, 11:30 PM
(11-11-2016, 03:43 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I would note that Strauss and Howe date the second turning from the mid sixties to the mid eighties, so it includes the Reagan revolution as much as it does the Vietnam protests.
Before we figure out how the elites are reduced, we need to figure out who the elites are. I think if we identify them as people like Zuckerberg and Cook and Musk, we could easily envision Trump taking governmental action to undercut their empires, for example by creating a national social media infrastructure along the lines of the post office. If they are Goldman Sachs bankers, it's possible that riots could result in their homes being burned down and many being killed, and while it currently seems unlikely, such riots could grow out of BLM protests and the current antidemocracy protests.
Mikebert, who do you think the elites are?
So who are those elites?
As a rule those elite4s are expensive to maintain, and the larger that they are the more economic hardships they impose upon the common man -- and make the social order untenable.
1. Intellectual dominators -- the shamans of hunter-gatherer societies, the priests and scribes of early civilization, corporate lawyers, ad men, political operatives including lobbyists, televangelists in modern times
2. Big landowners. Such people had the power in feudal society, the King being the biggest of all landowners and thus the most powerful. They have become the planters and corporate farmers of modern times... and the owners of large tracts of urban rentals, Donald trump is a prime example of the urban landlord.
3. Industrialists and financiers. Mostly a 19th-century and later phenomenon.
4. Bureaucratic and managerial elites. Marx missed the power of bureaucratic elites in 'socialist' societies -- and the nomenklatura of "socialist" states became no less exploitative than the old aristocrats and capitalists. Executives paid very well to treat subordinates badly form a capitalist version of the Soviet nomenklatura.
5. Organized crime.
...It's hard to predict who would be among the first to be put before the firing squads of 'revolutionary' justice in the wake of an overthrow of economic elites that the masses decide that they can live without. Violent revolutions arise when the masses get the means to cull out the elites that they believe that they no longer need -- typically when the masses find that the exactions of those classes make life itself precarious. That might correspond with crop failures, military collapses, or overpopulation.
The elites rarely step down for the good of Humanity. They get cast out and singled out for extermination.
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.