01-24-2019, 09:01 AM
(01-24-2019, 12:56 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:Quote: (I said)
The Right used to hate the Soviet Union because it was socialist in the sense of the government owning everything and leaving nothing to a privileged class of capitalists. The Right envied the labor discipline and the command system, wishing that it could adopt such in the service of class privilege.
Putin is ex-KGB, but unlike his predecessors as bosses from Dzierzhinksy to Kryuchkov he has never had to sell Marxism-Leninism. He needs not try. He can appeal to the vanity, selfishness, and cruelty, and alienation of capitalists just as his predecessors could appeal to the vanity, selfishness, cruelty, and alienation of people willing to sell at the least some spy secrets to the USSR. Putin can offer a business deal as a Soviet-era Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, or KGB never could. Putin can find more traitors willing to sell out democracy because those who sell out no longer need sell out their class privilege or identity. A traitor like Donald Trump who wants to change the system to fit his vision (he has a vision, and it is a sick one) has more to offer than does a treacherous spy like Aldrich Ames who wants to keep up some Good Life that necessitates the survival of the system whose secrets he sells for 'thirty pieces of silver'.
But Donald Trump has something in common with Commies: a contempt for liberal democracy. The President that we elect in 2020 must reassert the values that really did make America great.
The American Right was opposed to the Soviet Union and its Communist system for obvious reasons. As an older American, you should be able to know and understand those reasons. If not, here's a reason, every American citizen (regardless of their economic status/class and political affiliation (Republican or Democrat) who own property like homes, farms, businesses, land of any kind, cabins and so forth would no longer have a right to own them because the individual freedom and financial means to do so wouldn't exist under the Soviet Union and it's Communist system. Every blue minded poster should be able to read this and hopefully learn why the 99% approach doesn't ever work for them within the US like it could/should be able to within some poor Latin American countries that haven't been torn apart and ravaged by civil was between Communists and Fascist Regimes or dictators.
The American Right is about one thing above all else: class privilege. It has consistently sought to grind the working class into submission until workers are little more than serfs -- people with debt but without property, obliged to suffer for those elites like peons in thrall to feudal lords. For the ideal of those elites, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are solely for the economic masters. It now fits a Marxist stereotype, which is destructive to the domestic tranquility that a well-working capitalist order fosters.
The American Right has readily sacrificed such prosperity as workers have had and is gutting the middle class. It compels sacrifices in a futile effort to satisfy people of insatiable appetites for personal indulgence. It prefers paying people in debt instead of wages. Credit replaces pay. Because people must go heavily into debt or induce parents to sell off the legacy of middle-class assets just to stay in the middle class through college education that might allow one to participate in the 'Good life' as those elites define it. Maybe -- if those elites are so generous as to hire one. They one must pay unprecedented rent, wear expensive clothes, and pay high tolls. It's an 'ownership society' -- those who own the assets rule those who lack those assets.
I am reminded that exploiters often see their victims as beneficiaries of the exactions of the masters. Slave-owners saw themselves as benefactors to slaves and insisted that everyone else recognize such as truth. As late as 1860 they thought that Americans outside the South would come to their senses and recognize such as the truth. Americans who owned no slaves didn't come to their senses as the planters expected; they voted for Abraham Lincoln.
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.