Presidential election, 2016

[pbrower2a]

(11-21-2016, 02:28 PM)MillennialJim Wrote: (Hi - former T4T forum user, occasional poster under handles similar to this one), no one of any consequence though - going back to 2003 or so.  Glad someone set this up!)

Thought regarding the 2016 election:

One could think of the New Deal as a deal in part with southern whites.  That is, the tacit price of new deal legislation was arguably no movement or little movement on civil rights and the perpetuation of Jim Crow etc into the 60's.  Until LBJ, many new deal type democrats were in fact white southerners.  

Go back to the 4T of the founders.  A key compromise in the federalist system was the issue of slaves.  


I understand that Trump is equally likely to be a robber baron in power as he is to be what he campaigned on.  But, if for example he starts pushing through trillion dollar infrastructure bills, and essentially courts the white working class voters on both the left and the right (who may overlap on key issues.  Trump met with Bernie Sanders supporter Gabby Giffords today, in fact), could Trump be a product of this type of tacit political compromise?

In a 4T, in other words, is our political system set up in such a way that we can only make these big conceptual changes for the white majority, waiting for a young prophet generation in a 2T to open up opportunities for excluded groups?

I have strong opinions on this but wanted to ask the question rather than answer it myself.

I expect Donald Trump to betray American workers. Once elected he may never need their votes again or may never have any doubt about them voting 'right', because 2016 could be the last Presidential election for a  very long time that has any semblance of freeness and fairness. The Republican Party is all about power of the Master Class to exact as much toil from working people for as little as possible and to cut corners on workplace safety and the environment as necessary to maximize profits. Expect American cities to have as polluted air as Krakow, Poland in the Commie era -- it was worse than Greater Los Angeles at the time, and not because it had a huge number of automobiles. The Commies wasted energy from coal, treating energy costs and environmental damage as practically trivial costs in the desire to create a large industrial base around a university town that never had been a manufacturing center. The Republicans will almost certainly do what they can to entrench themselves permanently in an absolute plutocracy that has the inequity characteristic of Imperial Russia in the first decade of the 20th century, if not the plantation order of the antebellum South.

Expect the big projects to be full of graft, with mobsters (especially Boris Putin's buddies in the Russian Mafia) taking huge cuts, effectively gutting much of the benefit of the big projects. If you wonder why the two are such good buddies -- the Russian Mob has huge hooks into both.

Despite turning the calendar back eighty-to-ninety years in labor-management relations, race relations, and treatment of the elderly (get rid of Social Security and let the elderly work until they drop dead or get killed in industrial accidents because their reflexes are too slow), things could be a net positive for white working-class people... so long as Donald Trump should largely imitate an Apartheid system. Things were freakishly good for white people of modest skill and talent in Apartheid-era South Africa.  For lack of opportunities to maintain middle-class American ways of life, non-white, non-Anglo, and non-Christian minorities might sell out their homes and business properties cheaply to white Anglo Christians. Even California (which has lots of Mexican-Americans owning expensive houses because the owners' families bought them in the 1960s or earlier when California housing was still affordable) could become affordable again. But at the same time "Silicon Valley" might have to relocate to some place without the American Apartheid. Mexico seems obvious enough.

It's still a raw deal, all in all, for working people because they will die in more industrial accidents and work harder and longer for less while they get to pay higher taxes that the super-rich get excused from paying. The truly dangerous part will come from the sowing of seeds of ethnic and religious discord in a perverse effort to divide and conquer -- in which case the USA could be the next Yugoslavia. I can imagine the USA fracturing along cultural lines that bear little resemblance to any modern, official map of the United States -- note even on state lines. For example, I can imagine a new republic centered on the southern shore of Lake Michigan that includes Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Hammond, South Bend, Kalamazoo, and Battle Creek, containing parts of four states yet united to nothing, perhaps separated by hostile territory from Detroit-Flint-Saginaw-Toledo. On one side of the line a Confederate flag in your possession might be cause for summary execution. On the other side a picture of Barack Obama might be cause for summary execution. That is how 'racial' wars go when they have an ideology behind them.

We may be stuck on such a course because enough Americans fell for a malicious demagogue. I have seen plenty of instances in history in which ruthless demagogues stir up ethnic and sectarian strife for short-lived political advantage; I know of no instance when such   fails to create monumental suffering, if not mass death.

I apologize for seeing this all from the bleakest possible view. I expect any good to come from a Trump Administration (more investment and more-- if far-lower-paying jobs) to have a much bigger offset in harm.