(10-05-2017, 05:21 AM)Galen Wrote:(09-15-2017, 03:43 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The degradation of American democracy has happened in stages, and the election of Donald Trump could be the start of the last stage. Could be. My most optimistic hope is that America reverts to its old pattern of a liberal-conservative divide in which quality matters more in politics than does ideology.
The problem the US empire faces is the changing logic violence where projecting power is becoming harder relative to defense. As James Dale Davidson have said, "The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence." This is what is shaping the demise of the nation-state and the US empire. Trump is an effect not a cause.
I concur that Donald Trump is an effect even more than a cause. I see part of the cause in the degradation of university education, at least at the undergraduate level, from an institution with the objective of improving the student to either an advanced vocational school or a jump-start into a graduate school as a watered-down grad school. The great universities were intended to impart knowledge that leaders needed and that the proles did not need. To put it crudely, the proles could get away with being the 'great unwashed masses" because they were never going to lead anything.
I would revert to the Great Books to impart the needful knowledge that people needed before setting foot in the seminary, medical school, law school, grad school, engineering school, teaching program, or business school. If you speak of the business school, then consider that every accountant learns how to lie, cheat, and steal; the accountant must be inoculated from the idea that lying, cheating, and stealing are out of the question for himself. The Great Books give an insight into the complexity of human behavior as no dry social study can show. (One would get one's knowledge of psychology largely from Freud, who clearly wrote some of the Great Books on the subject).
Teaching? In view of the snares of mass culture, the K-12 teacher needs to know that there is better music than the fad of the day; the latest hit can never surpass Bach's Art of Fugue, Mozart's Divertimento for String Trio K.563, Carmen, or the Rondo-Finale of Mahler's fifth symphony; that the late 1930s and early 1940s are known as the Golden Age of American Cinema even without the expensive and stunning special effects that we largely take for granted except for a sort of arms war between directors and film studios in creating those effects; that there is literature worth knowing even for children; and the importance of choosing right over wrong even when such is inconvenient. That goes beyond pedagogy, and I could make the case that someone with a solid liberal arts education could learn the fundamentals of pedagogy in a 90-day wonder course.
Notice that I took two of the most common occupations (accountancy and public-school teaching) as examples. But what of the rest of us? Donald Trump had a strong appeal to people with less than a college education unless those people had some reason (ethnicity or religion) to distrust him. People who recognized him as an anti-intellectual demagogue could laugh at him. They are now sickened as he shows the folly of electing demagogues.
Quote:The petrodollar is what has been keeping the US empire going since 1973 and the middle east wars of the last sixteen years are part of an effort to keep it going. Once the petrodollar goes down, which looks like it will happen in the next five to ten years, then the US empire goes down with it. I suggest you read the following two articles which describe the current state fo the empire as well as anything I have seen recently.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...in-us.html
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...-gold.html
While the next quote from James Dale Davidson will annoy most of you hear it contains much truth and you would do well to contemplate it. The cultural equivalence that the SJW crowd believes in is completely absurd.
To deal with the rise of oil as a commodity and the shift of the USA from an exporter of petroleum to an importer, Nixon made his deal: oil would be sold in dollars, in return for the oil-exporting states to buy their imports in dollars. Dollars would represent the wealth that oil-producing states took in and spent on everything from luxury imports to insurance to defensive weapons (the latter subsidized if the country, like the Iran of Shah Reza Pahlavi -- whoops! -- would remain friendly to American economic and political interests). Oil-rich states would buy Mercedes-Benz cars, Sony electronics, or Unilever household goods with US dollars and not Deutschmarks, yen, or pounds sterling. Even the international drug traffickers use US dollars.
China now seems to be doing much the same with exports of consumer products as Saudi Arabia did with oil. But drop the dollar as a world currency, and we Americans get a severe inflation along with whatever other distress is then happening.
Quote:"Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings."
-James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.
Even if one uses the flawed stages of history of Marx (Marx oversimplifies it, especially in ignoring technological change), the transition to the Information Age from the Manufacturing Age will not be easy. Jobs will disappear before new jobs replace them, and transforming coal miners into software engineers while attracting software development companies from Silicon Valley to eastern Kentucky will be tricky. The high-earners of any age need to be where the resources are or, when resources matter little, where the attractions are.
This said, I understand that western classical music is extremely well received in Japan and South Korea... and I, who have no connection to Japan, love the visual esthetic of Japanese fine art. Is American mass low culture an adaptation to the debased politics and education in America? Maybe.
As for Trump -- to ensure that someone like him never becomes our horrid leader, we need inoculate ourselves against the demagogue. The solution to a racist, bigoted, insensitive right-wing demagogue is not a left-wing demagogue. A nation that can elect a Donald Judas Trump can also elect a Hugo Chavez.
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.