10-06-2017, 11:24 AM
(10-05-2017, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-05-2017, 05:21 AM)Galen Wrote: ... 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.
"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.
This is true but incomplete. It describes the establishment of a culture but ignores its decline into something else. For example, the culture of Appalachia was built on resentment of the British upper class, and continues with resentment of the American upper class as they see it. It was viable at one time in the not too distant past. It's dying now. What replaces it, if anything, is still TBD.
The same scenario is playing-out in the Rust Belt. Though the initial state was different, the dynamics are much the same. DJT tapped that to get elected, but that is far from a solution to their problems ... one of which is the rapid departure of their children and arrival of new immigrants. A new culture may emerge or the present culture may succeed in driving the new arrivals away and decaying into insignificance.
A cycle of demagoguery and disappointment suggests the potential for wild swings in political affiliation among masses of voters. A hollow left-wing demagogue could be just as horrible as Donald Trump. and that is exactly what Donald Trump could be setting up. I need not offer a name. Anyone who suggested in 2012 that Donald Trump could be President in 2017 would have heard such a question as "What drugs are you taking?"
Wild swings of ideology more likely lead to political harshness of one kind (isn't it great to see all those liberal elitists gnashing their teeth?) to its antithesis (isn't it great to see all those right-wingers gnashing their teeth?) than to efficacy in solving the problems that people have -- like job losses, inflation, and declining wages.
Your observation of Appalachia (and the Ozarks, which are hard to distinguish from Appalachia not only by similar topography) has its elucidation in Albion's Seed. People settled in Appalachia because they could get away not only from the British ruling class but also other settlers who had their own habits brought over from Britain. They were definitely not Puritans who expected people to respect the intellect. They disliked the Quakers who sought to deliver dissimilar people disembarking in Philadelphia to Quaker standards of piety. They disliked the hierarchy of the Tidewater Cavaliers who would have tried to tame the Scots-Irish through exploitative toil. Getting past the first line of mountains got them beyond the authority of people who would repress or regulate them and enforce an unwelcome assimilation. But this is built into an old culture.
It is ironic, but Appalachia became pro-Union during the Civil War. Armies generally avoid mountainous areas unless they find the people hospitable, but this explains why there were so many battles in eastern Tennessee. Eastern Tennessee (basically Appalachia) opposed the politics of Tennessee in which the planters of western Tennessee sought to use the Mountain folk as cannon fodder for defending slavery. It's not that the Mountain Folk had any high principles against slavery; they hated the slaves. They hated the slave-owners even more.
The Rust Belt and its industries attracted people from Appalachia. The auto, steel, rubber (tires, largely), and glass industries of Detroit, Flint, Toledo, and Dayton offered good steady pay to people who may have been poor and proud -- but undeniably material. So people in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky got some easy-to-follow advice: take US 21, 23, 25, or 27 north until you see lots of smokestacks. That's where the pay is. Good pay. But they seem to have kept their culture and their political ways intact. Trump told the descendants of Mountain Folk who moved to Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania exactly what they wanted to hear. He might realize their hatreds, but he cannot solve their economic distress.
At this stage of the Crisis we are finding the rifts where earthquakes strike (but we cannot see which rift will break) and the magma chambers over-ripe for eruption. We will have earthquakes and perhaps even a volcanic eruption.
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.