Compare/contrast American Presidential elections

[pbrower2a]

(01-22-2019, 12:24 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-21-2019, 03:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Blue states are usually better than red states at everything, except the cost of doing business. That's because they have the right idea about things in general, and are willing to be well-informed. However, I notice that the northwestern mountain and plain red states do OK on some of the indexes, while the southeast is invariably the worst. These southeast ones are, after all, mostly the states that defended to the death their right to own and abuse slaves. It's been a long climb out of that hole, and they are nowhere near finished climbing out.

True enough, but not so much for that reason.  The problem with the Old South is a love and admiration of a rigid class structure.  The class structure is well maintained by people on the bottom who feel they belong there, as much as those on top who believe it too.  Worse, folks near the bottom find it fully appropriate that "their betters" should pay them poorly and treat them as less, yet they also embrace their position as somehow superior.  It's a bit weird to me, and I've been here for decades.  No one's prouder than a redneck, and redneck culture permeates the entire region.

For all that, it seems to work in an odd way, but it's far from ideal.

A rigid class structure is one consequence of neoliberal economics -- promotion of bloated, vertically-integrated monopolies and near-monopolies with bureaucratic elites that establish low, rigid ceilings for advancement. The seeming rationale for such low glass ceilings is that anyone who has endured genuine hardship at any time will have loyalty to something other than pure plutocracy. The tax structure is designed to favor extant elites over small business that, however politically conservative, is more likely to create opportunities for people not born to advantage and beyond judgment for incompetence.

We have largely been conditioned to believe that elite power, indulgence, and indulgence are the sole measures of economic success because those elites have defined themselves as the measures of social virtue. Those elites have survived the worst economic meltdown since 1929-1932 only to get a firmer hold on the political process (and I say this on the tenth anniversary of the Citizens United decision that has essentially established that buying the political process is the definitive exercise of free expression. Meanwhile Corporate America insists that people pretend that their agony is delight and that their frustration is wish-fulfillment. In such a climate a political phenomenon as odious as Donald Trump now seems an inevitability. 

Those on the Right can ask themselves whether someone acting much like Trump with a left-wing agenda would be ominous for reasons other than the agenda. We Americans can live with the usual partisan swings inevitable in our system; we cannot long endure pervasive corruption and official deceit, let alone the debasement of the traditions of rule of law and separation of powers.    

To spoof the state motto of Michigan Si quaeris amoenam peninsulam circumspice  (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around) -- Si quaeris foedem plutocratiam circumspice ... if you seek an ugly plutocracy, look around).

Politics are ugly. Language is debased. Intellectual curiosity makes one a pariah. Twenty years from now about all that anyone will want to remember from this time is some of the entertainment, mostly in cinema (heavily Pixar and Marvel). Should things go really haywire, then people might see the current time as the last sort-of-OK time in their lives -- only to have ignored what the historian Barbara Tuchman said of the years before World War I, that truly good times do not implode in calamity. People may have waxed nostalgic about such a time after the disasters of WWI, especially if those people had been physically or economically ruined -- but that time was known by all to have its faults at the time.