The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(02-17-2020, 09:17 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-17-2020, 01:08 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(02-11-2020, 09:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-10-2020, 03:03 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-10-2020, 11:43 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: I'd be wary of making Constitutional changes through a Constitutional convention while the hard Right still has great power. The Hard Right would love to commit us to a Christian and Corporate state that represents economic and bureaucratic power at the expense of all else, and uses a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian ethics as a mechanism of enforcing a plutocratic order.

That would merely be a replay of the Gilded Age, when the company clerics spoon-fed religiosity to the working class to benefit the owners.  It worked then and may again.

Such would be a nightmarish world, basically a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. It would require a populace barely literate as was so in America during the Gilded Age. Say what you want about the intellectual mediocrities that flock to Trump -- many other Americans do not. 

I would expect the economic elites to be as evil as ever, making hypocritical displays of fraudulent simulations of piety only to return to their indulgence and cruelty. So how does the Establishment cut the norm of education to the elementary level? One would have to replace PBS with pro wrestling on TV... there are limits to dumbing-down of public life.

And yet I have wondered if it is perspective.  It is not evil to try to get one’s best for one’s company.  To do something once is not special.  It becomes evil when as a group or a class one seeks dominion over another, for the robber barons to leave the people with no left over choice.

And yet these are the same thing.  You have to ban the acts of individual companies in such a way to limit the acts of all corporations or classes.

I think this has a good deal with how the red and blue groups perceive things.

It’s okay to believe in Santa Claus, unless you assume he’ll be there to keep you afloat. After all, there is a limit to irrationality.  I’m afraid half the country has equated irrational and correct. That makes a lot of things existential that shouldn’t be.  DJT has played on that theme since The Apprentice. So far, it’s working for him.  Nothing has fallen apart so far. He’s hoping it lasts until late in his second term, at least.  So he bows-out a winner, and we get to clean up aisle 4. 

Worse: Don Jr. is waiting in the wings — worse than dad, I suspect.

Some perspectives really are evil. People have been able to rationalize anything from child molestation to organized crime to slavery. Some perspectives indulge a minority while depending upon the abuse or exploitation of others. Anything that depends upon a huge proletariat of helpless people who exist solely for the indulgence and gain of others must die as an ethos if Humanity is to survive. 

Such is Crisis talk, and it is the sort that reverberated as slave-owning planters tried to convince  small businessmen and yeoman farmers Up North that slavery was a good thing while the intellectual leaders of the North saw slavery as contrary to humane values that those people saw mandatory consequences of Christianity or Judaism. (Such Jews as there were were on the abolitionist side; they saw chattel slavery as an abomination). 

The last Crisis Era started as a struggle between Gilded-like elites who saw profit as the only measure of economic success and workers as mere tools for the achievement of that success. The economic reality of the 1929-1932 meltdown required that the little man get some modicum of economic certainty (deposit insurance, right to organize unions and get collective bargaining, and old-age pensions) followed by a struggle against extreme manifestations of the worst demons in western civilization (if Japan wasn't quite Western it had adopted many of the worst features of the West in the 1930's). The Crisis before that  was between freedom and slavery. The one before that was between civic institutions already in place and a  King reasserting through his madness manifestations of Divine Right; even if it was called the American Revolution it was not against the Massachusetts General Court (now the oldest, continuing elected legislative body in the world) or the Virginia House of Burgesses. 

Two sets of ideas on how to organize society conflict, and when compromise fails as happens when one side gets unduly arrogant and intolerant, one must die or at least lose its relevance. The current ethos that the only people who matter are the asset-owners and a bureaucratic elite attached to those asset-owners either falls or entrenches itself in an order of extreme authoritarianism -- Gilded plutocracy with a Soviet-style nomenklatura. Most of us have no stake in that. The elites have sought to transform Americans other than themselves into a helpless proletariat who must submit to all demands of that elite if they are to get the privilege of survival. Those elites have an ideology close to mirror-image Marxism -- that the common man is simply a conduit of of money between elites and that that common man is to earn that status with his toil in the name of survival. 

One must admit that the economic elites have a coherent philosophy, one that elevates elite indulgence as the highest of virtues. The worker is to overpay for rent where the economic opportunity is and buy (or even rent) consumer schlock of rapidly-declining value. When exhausted from working two jobs simply to earn bare sustenance and the vicarious delight of seeing elites wallow in opulent splendor (through the Idiot Screen and pulp reading) -- he goes onto the post-industrial scrap heap. 

What passes as the Left has largely been shut out. We see the dehumanizing individualism that Reagan introduced with steady erosion of the New Deal consensus has become a monstrosity in Donald Trump, a refutation even of rationality. (Another ideology refutes rationality in practice: fascism). To be sure, nobody can live on pure reason; with pure reason alone we would never love, we would never appreciate nature, and we would never appreciate the arts. I might be as rational as anyone, but even I know the need for theater, music, art, and natural beauty... and were I writing a song lyric to fit a commonplace need, then it would boil down to "I need TO love").