04-03-2021, 10:14 AM
(03-29-2021, 11:09 AM)David Horn Wrote: After nearly 50 years of neoliberalism, we're finally in the opening round of 'the next thing'. It's looking a lot more progressive, but it's still too early to say.
Political change never happens overnight, unless its a response to an attack or something equally immediate and devastating. Try not kvetching about the baby steps needed to start the journey in earnest.
As someone whose almost-entire adult life has been during the neoliberal era according to the Skowronek cycle I am accustomed to seeing short-lived terms of moderation from the rigors of neoliberal economics only for the politics to revert to the neoliberal norm, I almost expect another equivalent of Newt Gingrich's Contract for America or the Tea Party Movement after which the rigors come back anew as the reforms die and e4ventually get overturned. Life as social progress is one step forward and three steps back, and go back enough in political institutions and we might have Jim Crow again in race relations and a reversion to the economic norms of the "New Gilded Age" of the 1920's... or something that resembles the Planet Mongo on Flash Gordon serials. You know how that went: government served only entrenched elites and the only people who mattered were those elites.
I do not kvetch about the baby steps. It's the three steps back that I almost expect based upon my experiences that I have seen before. America's economic elites are often no better than any economic elites that have ever existed from pharaohs to medieval nobility to slave-owning planters to the Soviet-era nomenklatura. Such people would not remain elites on their own merit except for denying entry to others except as replenishment through birth and ensuring that others get no opportunity other than to be overworked and underpaid while getting vague promises of a better world (quite often pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die) in return for misery with no promise of an expiration date. Economic elites have often failed to recognize any limits on their appetites that they can partially sate only at the cost of mass misery that includes the denial of opportunity to improve one's lot.
The generational cycle suggests that we are in a genuine crisis (COVID-19, which has killed on the scale of a shooting war) and that we will come out of it with either very new institutions or a major rededication of those that already exist. It is too early to predict how, but it will all seem obvious and inevitable after the fact. There -- the gangster Axis regimes were doomed from their first aggression due to the brutality inherent in their "New Orders". There. The Confederacy was doomed from the start because people can't eat cotton... and if the slaves flee the plantations, then food shortages start to starve the Confederate Army. There -- King George III couldn't micromanage "the Colonies" that had largely been left to their own devices due to distance and the competence of the politicians and businesspeople therein.
The end of scarcity is the economic reality underpinning what follows what we now have. Two solutions exist. One is to ensure that most people are obliged to accept whatever terms the economic elites offer, which means that one has no chance of survival except by convincing those elites that one deserves to live in severe poverty in their equivalent of sweatshops, and that those who get nominally-high pay are obliged to pay monopoly prices for everything. This is not a free-market paradise in which people have meaningful chances to start mom-and-pop businesses, for monopoly and vertical integration will prevail, with the economic elites squeezing out what remains of any middle class of home-owners, small-scale farmers, and small businesspeople. Economic inequality will become about as severe as that in countries in which the royal family and close relatives command the proceeds from the extraction of oil or minerals. This would be a feudal order with a high technology of propaganda, surveillance, repression, and numbing mass low culture. If those elites want you to listen to country music and not to classical music, then you will listen to country music and express love for it -- or else. People might still get the vote, but they would vote as their employers direct -- which is fascism. Run afoul of this system, and die after being reminded that you will burn forever in Hell.
The alternative is something in which people achieve their economic needs easily and end up with much spare time because they will need to work much less than a 40-hour workweek. Such will be the same whether one lives in New York City or some little town in Mississippi. Social differences will largely reduce to the difference of vocational competence. Physicians will earn far more than will convenience-store clerks, but consider the difference in training and preparation for one as opposed to the other. Status symbols will be meaningless because most of them will be disposable. I can easily imagine a social-market economy appearing in America as a rational response to the distress that so many endure as the result of the neoliberal era which has played out.
It boils down to freedom or fascism. Note well that the Right has learned to use Big Government to its advantage.
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.