The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-17-2020, 11:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: 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").

The problem is not the elites.  Oh, I suppose they are evil enough.  I suppose they have diverted too many resources to too few people.  Go ahead, really, and preach against them as much as you like.

The problem in the US at least is that the elites have convinced enough people in the center of the country to buy into their faux reality.  There simply are not enough elite votes to win anything in and of themselves.  They have to ally with or fool some large enough group, often populist, often more than one.  These forces are strong enough that even the elites may be just one of them.  Say, the Tea Party could have already rejected the elites on the surface, but the rest of the issues may be strong enough to have winning impact without obvious elite support.  The faux reality could continue without allowing a regeneracy, an overwhelming take over by the new values.

The old values?  Racism.  Shifting money away from minorities supposedly, from Xers and Millennials by accident.  Voodoo economics.  A habit of collapsing the economy.  Two Republican White House terms of stimulating in good times and bad, followed be two more responsible Democratic terms to recover, rinse and repeat.  Belief that the people who shifted jobs abroad can or will ship them back.  Small government, tax cuts, which translates again to making the Xers and Millennials too poor to save for retirement.  A strong military, which diverts off from domestic spending and tempts one into folly.

The elites are a key.  You cannot solve all of the above without attacking elites and the division of wealth.  The elites have extra extraordinary influence in government which has kept the other issues alive.  I do not see how to seek victory in most of the issues above without going after the elites and division of wealth.  

But you aren’t going to defeat the elites without hitting some of the other issues.  You have to expose the flaws in the Republican policies, to take away the elite’s votes.

It comes back to convincing someone like Classic Xer.  He is just a proxy for his 'Americans'.  He doesn’t think much of the elites.  In fact, he puts them in the liberal camp somehow.  But if you don’t convince people who think like him to let go of the other issues, you get nowhere.