11-30-2016, 02:05 AM
(11-29-2016, 05:34 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-29-2016, 01:49 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I'm not exactly a cake eater. I don't fit their social profile or the uppity red stereotype that's associated with them. Me, I work like everyone else who works in the trades. I don't toot my horn, flaunt my wealth and promote my association with higher wealth in public like play Playdude. I will toot my horn, chime in and inform Playdude that his wealth and political connections and the bulk of social programs associated with them doesn't mean much to me. How large and how much more technologically advanced is the group who are associated with those who earned their independence and gave us the Constitution? Ever think about that? Well, 60 some million for sure and probably millions more once the shooting starts and sides are taken. Had core America showed up in force in this election. Is it a helluva lot bigger than you ever thought it was? Is it much bigger and more powerful than you ever believed or were able to comprehend?
You are still very much mistaken in thinking Red America is America. The country is truly split, and the role and values of both halves or American have contributed and will continue to contribute. We're stuck on a see saw, with two groups of politicians getting power for time, pushing the perspective of one culture or another, ticking off the other culture in doing so, thus guaranteeing the other will take over for a time. If the blue side has a snobbery about it, believing in the superiority of urban culture and the virtue of their values, the red side seems to have a proactive vindictiveness to it.
So far as I can interpret the 2016 election, it was the triumph of what Sarah Palin called the "Real America" -- people stuck in the values of a rural or small-town America, white and proud of it, and disgruntled with the successes of people who do not look like them. It looks like a victory for people who see the educated people as an exploitative and oppressive class, and who want Donald Trump to stick it to them hard. I expect Donald Trump to keep that promise. I also expect him to show his class affiliation and give the super-rich the bounty to be derived by sticking the educated classes of America through tax cuts that will have to be paid for by tax increases elsewhere and the destruction of the welfare state. I can see America becoming a work-or-die society, just like the typical fascist society.
But note well -- I expect President Trump to hurt the American poor hard. He will load people with responsibilities without offering any certainties in return.
Yes, there is a huge difference in culture between the more cosmopolitan, educated people of all ethnic origins and the white poor. America really does have a national culture -- for white people. That culture does not include such un-American material as classical music, Renaissance and Impressionist painting, literature appreciably richer than supermarket tabloids, and BBC dramas. Poor blacks, Hispanics, and Asians take their cultural cues from the middle class of their ethnic groups. The white middle class is split in its cultural affiliation.
Quote:In engineering classes it is called feedback. If pushing things one way results in a force that pushes things back the other way hard enough, things swing back and forth with increasing and vicious intensity. The best known example is the scream produced when a microphone gets too close to a speaker it is driving. While the feedback loop is unstable, no other signal is discernible. The system is unusable. One has to move the microphone further from the speakers or reduce the volume level on the amplifier. I suppose one could also pull the plug or crash a guitar through the speakers...
Good analogy. Remove the microphone or wreck the speaker.
Quote:I for one am in favor of reducing the volume some. If we keep pushing at each other hard whenever we have the chance, the feedback will continue.
The worst situation for any polity is that large groups, however identified by class, race, language, region, or political orientation come to the conclusion that they will be permanently shut out of the political process and will find that the government will tax them without doing appreciable good for them. To be sure, sheer force and fear can people in line -- think of blacks in the American South for a century after the American Civil War, Kurds and Shiites in Ba'athist Iraq, and non-whites in Apartheid-era South Africa.
Ask how things are going in 2020. We will be obliged by then to ask some fundamental questions about the role of the Federal government. Should the Union be dissolved, with the fifty states becoming fifty independent republics? (Some might want to form their own unions and some might seek to join Canada.... Michigan would probably better off as part of Canada, but would Canada want a basket case of a state as a new province? I can also imagine city-states carved out of America, with the rural areas largely in one piece. . Cleveland and Atlanta have far more in common than does Cleveland with some small town in northeastern Ohio. It could be the State structure (and in effect the federal system that we know) that goes. The big divide is between rural and urban populations (where ethnicity does not get in the way of white supremacy), with Suburbia as the swing region.
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.