12-02-2016, 01:04 AM
Elections have consequences. If you voted for anyone but Donald Trump, get over it. Prepare yourself for the worst four years of your life if you plan to stay in America, when your life gets reduced to its economic role -- and not what you can enjoy with the rewards. Even I expect things to get worse for myself despite having had some very bad times due to asset-devouring, time-robbing care for parents with slow-moving degenerative diseases -- and I am not sure that I will be able to survive because life for anyone who isn't a workhorse will be precarious in the extreme. The rewards to which you have gotten accustomed will shrink because the ruling elite will cut your pay and ensure that any taxes that they pay will be shifted to you or that the services that you or your loved ones need (like education) will be cut. Donald Trump loves the ignorant fool, the sort of person most likely to vote for him if not super-rich, and if you are non-white but middle class, President Trump will achieve one of his promises -- sticking it to you. His voters wanted that and they will get it -- perhaps ensuring that the schoolteacher who corrects some dullard kid's grammar gets paid like a store clerk.
If I were thirty years younger I would consider emigration even if I had family responsibilities. Maybe especially. I would rather that my kids struggle with a language as difficult as Czech and have a chance to attend college without owing as much as $100K than get away with bad grammar and learn that the Earth is only about 6000 years old because some cleric so calculated and that global warming is a myth because some coal baron so says. So they get to hear Dvorak string quartets instead of hip-hop? Wonderful!
Of course it would be back to America once sanity prevails in the USA -- but if not... well, the kids might have assimilated into a place of sanity.
It will be four years. After things really go bad in America, Americans will surely want someone who promises to reverse the damage other than lost years of economic failure. That failure is nearly certain. Economic strength depends more upon consumption than upon rewards to economic elites. But think of the positive about four years of Donald Trump. Because so few people will want to move to America while Trump is President, real estate will be affordable again -- maybe even in California ... assuming that there hasn't been a nasty war. Elite profits will be sheared in a near-replay of the 1929-1932 meltdown, so economic inequality will not be so severe. As America falls behind the rest of the world in technology because top engineers from China and India will prefer to stay in their own countries than risk going to a country with a racist President who sees education as a menace to his political agenda, America may have to have something like a WPA for teachers and other middle-class professionals. Americans will decide to have vast reforms of the tax system and educational practice. The 46th President will go back to the sanity associated with Barack Obama -- in fact, by 2020 the winning President will likely be the one who seems most like him (except perhaps for the aspect that matters least in the President that tried to make race irrelevant in American life -- melanin).
But should Donald Trump be re-elected... your smart kids will assimilate into some other culture. They will go back to America for cheap holidays, just like their classmates, because skiing in Colorado will be much less expensive than skiing in Austria. Or because tickets to the financially-struggling Chicago Symphony will be cheap. But live there? To be bartenders and cleaners in resorts catering to foreign visitors on cheap holidays so that they might have the bonus of seducing some rich European or Asian and gaining a better life through matrimony? Those jobs would be very attractive even if they pay about the same as farm labor or assembly-line work but require one to wear costly clothes that one must pay for.
If you voted against Donald Trump, you have a good idea of what is coming. You may not know about any Crisis theory of history, but you recognize that things will get very bad very fast.
But if you voted for Donald Trump -- it is quite likely that you have accepted Pascal's wager that suffering in This World is a worthy gamble so long as you have a chance at eternal bliss -- and if there is no eternal bliss, what have you missed? You might think that people debased in their circumstances will recognize that there is nothing more to life than toil and Jesus and become a fundamentalist Christian for lack of alternatives. Maybe you never recovered from the de-industrialization of America and expect the jobs to return. (Really, they won't. Technology makes that impossible unless people revert to the technology of about 1955, something very unlikely).
No, cars will not be built here again:
![[Image: pf-001-02.jpg]](http://sometimes-interesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/pf-001-02.jpg)
Nobody will revive the slogan "Ask the man who owns one", even with sexually-neutered language. Packard made a fine car in its day. That's over. But Donald Trump might set race relations back sixty years (so that landlords will again have the right to Make (their part of ) America Great Again by regaining the right to discriminate on race in housing, and labor-management relations back 90 years to those glorious days when Big Business didn't have to deal with unions, and elderly workers stayed on the job until they died of overwork and exhaustion or had some crippling or fatal industrial accident because there was no Social Security.
If you voted for Donald Trump you are going to see strikes, demonstrations, and protests as you never saw since the 1960s, and you will not expect those as part of the bargain. But this will not be Awakening-era self-discovery. This will be Crisis-Era concern for freedom, community, and economic survival. Maybe even peace in a time in which several countries hostile to the USA will have nukes. We liberals who start demonstrating in late January are not your enemies. The people who got you to vote for your own economic ruin in return for some Schadenfreude have already cheated you. They will keep cheating you for four hard years.
If I were thirty years younger I would consider emigration even if I had family responsibilities. Maybe especially. I would rather that my kids struggle with a language as difficult as Czech and have a chance to attend college without owing as much as $100K than get away with bad grammar and learn that the Earth is only about 6000 years old because some cleric so calculated and that global warming is a myth because some coal baron so says. So they get to hear Dvorak string quartets instead of hip-hop? Wonderful!
Of course it would be back to America once sanity prevails in the USA -- but if not... well, the kids might have assimilated into a place of sanity.
It will be four years. After things really go bad in America, Americans will surely want someone who promises to reverse the damage other than lost years of economic failure. That failure is nearly certain. Economic strength depends more upon consumption than upon rewards to economic elites. But think of the positive about four years of Donald Trump. Because so few people will want to move to America while Trump is President, real estate will be affordable again -- maybe even in California ... assuming that there hasn't been a nasty war. Elite profits will be sheared in a near-replay of the 1929-1932 meltdown, so economic inequality will not be so severe. As America falls behind the rest of the world in technology because top engineers from China and India will prefer to stay in their own countries than risk going to a country with a racist President who sees education as a menace to his political agenda, America may have to have something like a WPA for teachers and other middle-class professionals. Americans will decide to have vast reforms of the tax system and educational practice. The 46th President will go back to the sanity associated with Barack Obama -- in fact, by 2020 the winning President will likely be the one who seems most like him (except perhaps for the aspect that matters least in the President that tried to make race irrelevant in American life -- melanin).
But should Donald Trump be re-elected... your smart kids will assimilate into some other culture. They will go back to America for cheap holidays, just like their classmates, because skiing in Colorado will be much less expensive than skiing in Austria. Or because tickets to the financially-struggling Chicago Symphony will be cheap. But live there? To be bartenders and cleaners in resorts catering to foreign visitors on cheap holidays so that they might have the bonus of seducing some rich European or Asian and gaining a better life through matrimony? Those jobs would be very attractive even if they pay about the same as farm labor or assembly-line work but require one to wear costly clothes that one must pay for.
If you voted against Donald Trump, you have a good idea of what is coming. You may not know about any Crisis theory of history, but you recognize that things will get very bad very fast.
But if you voted for Donald Trump -- it is quite likely that you have accepted Pascal's wager that suffering in This World is a worthy gamble so long as you have a chance at eternal bliss -- and if there is no eternal bliss, what have you missed? You might think that people debased in their circumstances will recognize that there is nothing more to life than toil and Jesus and become a fundamentalist Christian for lack of alternatives. Maybe you never recovered from the de-industrialization of America and expect the jobs to return. (Really, they won't. Technology makes that impossible unless people revert to the technology of about 1955, something very unlikely).
No, cars will not be built here again:
Nobody will revive the slogan "Ask the man who owns one", even with sexually-neutered language. Packard made a fine car in its day. That's over. But Donald Trump might set race relations back sixty years (so that landlords will again have the right to Make (their part of ) America Great Again by regaining the right to discriminate on race in housing, and labor-management relations back 90 years to those glorious days when Big Business didn't have to deal with unions, and elderly workers stayed on the job until they died of overwork and exhaustion or had some crippling or fatal industrial accident because there was no Social Security.
If you voted for Donald Trump you are going to see strikes, demonstrations, and protests as you never saw since the 1960s, and you will not expect those as part of the bargain. But this will not be Awakening-era self-discovery. This will be Crisis-Era concern for freedom, community, and economic survival. Maybe even peace in a time in which several countries hostile to the USA will have nukes. We liberals who start demonstrating in late January are not your enemies. The people who got you to vote for your own economic ruin in return for some Schadenfreude have already cheated you. They will keep cheating you for four hard years.
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.