01-23-2022, 11:19 AM
(01-22-2022, 08:05 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-22-2022, 05:13 PM)David Horn Wrote: I don't see the young moving toward the Trumpists. I don't see them fleeing in horror either. They seem more disgusted than angry, and resigned to their fate.
I agree that the 4T may fizzle. I don't see it as a left-right thing though. The youth, both Millennial and Z, are less idiomatic in that sense. Stress has led them to view the world in the starkest of terms, and that degree of realism doesn't promote the kind of cohesion needed to create movements. What might break through and trigger another wave of political engagement is something only a Millennial (or Z) might be capable of producing. The one missing and necessary element: a real leader they can rally around and follow. Biden's not it.
I disagree about the end of the saeculum, though. The so-called ACW anomaly may have merely be the FOAK for transformational 4Ts. How it plays this time is TBD, but assuredly not like the last 4T.
Agree that Biden hasn't been the cheerleader for the young. Thing is, he has identified the right positions on the right issues. I'm still hopeful that the steady obstruction of the Republicans will cost them in the mid terms. If you are going to solve the problems we are facing, it is clear you have to give the Democrats a few more seats in the Senate. If he gets that, Biden looks very different.
President Biden has not inculcated any semblance of a personality cult. He believes that he can govern without one, which has been true for nearly the whole of American history. The rest of American history involves the Trump Presidency and (one hopes not) its political aftermath. We are still in the aftermath of the Trump Presidency. A dark shadow remains upon our Republic, and Trump has not been alone in casting it. The erosion of liberal democracy began when ruthless people found the seams in our Constitutional republic and started ripping those on behalf of corporate power of executives, large-scale urban landlords, Junker-like rural estates, and principal shareholders. Plutocracy entails the evisceration of democracy until the well-being of a few is the expression of politics and personal survival of anyone else becomes a privilege that economic elites can deny at will. Worse, as the economy increasingly becomes one of bureaucracy and retail presentation, the elites can demand that the rest must smile no matter how much they suffer.
The Michigan plot (a partial analogy is to Mussolini's Blackshirt thugs kidnapping and murdering Giacomo Matteoti in 1924), the Capitol Putsch, and efforts to reshape electoral practice all portend the twisting of our political system into a sick travesty of democracy. We are in a Constitutional crisis due to a combination of mass ignorance and the sadistic greed of 'our' economic elites.
Quote:Yes, in prior crisis nobody had trouble about getting behind change. Democracy, not being on the wrong side of colonial imperialism, slavery, enabling the industrial revolution over a government controlled by agriculturalists, letting the government regulate the economy and containing expansionists powers all attracted the youth of the time. This time, the need seems less pressing to a rural population who doesn't see the difficulties as clearly. At the time Covid was politicized, it was more an urban problem. Prejudice is desired in the rural areas. Attempts to overthrow democracy weren't as obvious. The environment still seems wild and exploitable enough. Trump's criminality was not as obvious. It is still not clear that the rural folk will see the problems, but two votes in the Senate might be possible?
'Our' economic elites seek to impose pervasive change -- a monopolized economy with a command system with political leaders responsible exclusively to that elite. They will create an economic crisis or manufacture some military disaster that mandates coalescence around their agenda through a puppet resembling Berzelius Windrip in Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. Just as the political leaders will be responsible to those elites, so will we. We will work as they dictate and spend as they dictate, all in the name of prosperity. We will appear happy because we will be punished for any complaint. We will experience only what those elites tolerate.
Some change mandates resistance. If we must choose between an economic depression and tyranny, then we must accept the depression. If we all share much the same plight then such will itself be cause for solidarity that underpins a civil society. All forms of tyranny eventually become "every man for himself" or derive from such.
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.