11-19-2016, 01:16 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-19-2016, 01:17 AM by Eric the Green.)
(11-18-2016, 06:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: But identity politics is nearly a surrogate for ideology in a country so polarized between center-left and Hard Right. It's who gets the goodies and who gets the shaft. For the next four years, the well-connected Right will get the rewards and everyone else will get taxed to support those rewards..
At the worst, consider (if without the serial mass murders of Saddam Hussein) Iraq under Saddam Hussein. If one was in the right side of the regime one could live up to standards characteristic of at least southern Europe. If not one was living under standards characteristic of India (except with great fear). Government worked for one or made life miserable in what proved an Apartheid system (Christians and non-Kurdish Sunni Muslims OK, Shiites and Kurds not OK).
It's patronage or punishment. It looks as if Donald Trump will be a big-government Republican, using the Treasury to reward those to whom he made the biggest promises but cutting off government services that he can get away with cutting off aid to everyone else. That happened on a smaller scale with the younger Bush.
Exactly. The more I see of the new presidency, the more this is clear. We have these 3 choices: resist, surrender and suffer, or leave.
Resistance can take many forms. It's not just what I think should be done, or what I might do or say. But it's up to the people who would like someday for the 21st century to begin, to find a way, to speak up and take action so that someday it can happen.