The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-26-2020, 07:35 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-26-2020, 06:44 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I'm not sure if the progressives went too far by throwing money at things. It was something like that, but the old Democrats of the fifties and sixties used to think in terms of wholesale slum clearance and putting up huge housing blocks. They took away community downtown shopping streets according to the idea that people wanted lots of land around the buildings. They built freeways which decimated inner cities. They paved paradise and put up parking lots. They too often thought of themselves as people with power and grand plans. People like Robert Moses and Mayor Daley. They over-did it, but more correctly, they did it without much refinement, sensitivity or humility. It's called hubris.

In another sense, they did not go far enough. The war on poverty was a good war. It started a process of creating a middle class of all races. However, just as it was starting, LBJ decided to make his hubristic power play and tried to impose his will on another country half way around the world and at the same time remake American society wholesale, without even raising taxes. It was spend, but no tax, or whatever you have called it. The war on poverty stalled; riots broke out. People of all races resisted his deadly, unjust, hopeless and unnecessary foreign war, and unrest spread over the land. LBJ bowed out and several Lichtman Keys turned. The progressives never got power again until today. For sure, they lost the South with their policies and achievements toward racial justice and a great society, and that was a positive Lichtman Key, but they also lost the confidence of many young people and many others who weren't racists in swing states but who bought Nixon's pledge to end the war and bring us together in 1968. The election was close, but the tide turned, and it never turned back. It was a redefining election in the sense of which parties represent which policies and which regions. The blueprints for today's red states and blue states were laid out.

Reaganomics in 1980 was never necessary or justified. But it appealed to the mood of the times of distrust of government. Johnson and Nixon had betrayed that trust. The end of the line of this mood is Trump. Many now feel betrayed by him, and it's a chance for the progressives to take another shot. Will they overdo it? Probably. But maybe not in the way their opponents will say. Progress has to be smart. And it has to know what is sustainable, and what is merely based on limitless ambition for power. It needs to keep its eye on the prize, and not be distracted by hopeless projects based on the delusions of the past.

So, what's the prize? I hope its not our homes and business's and all our rights related to them because America will unite and kill every one of you. I'm going to give you a hint, you can win wars on poverty by allowing and enabling a steady stream of poverty. Like I said, are you ready for the flood when America soundly rejects the liberal Democrats and forces them to capitulate and hand over the reigns to a stronger more qualified individual American associated with law enforcement vs some worthless hand picked politician/public official associated with Liberal Democratic politics. Dude, only a Liberal hack would see a difference in value  between a black ghetto slug and a white ghetto slug these days.

The War on poverty became necessary as manufacturing became a smaller share of the American economy n the 1960's. Huge numbers of manufacturing jobs disappeared due to automation, and the ill-educated people who held those jobs and earned middle income were cast to the 1960's version of the 1890's industrial scrapheap. If the War on Poverty had as its original purpose the eradication of traditional poverty it ended up as a stopgap for the new poverty that had nothing to do with any political choice. 

There were new jobs appearing in fast-food places and shopping malls, but those were in the suburbs beyond the reach of cioty buses -- and owners of those businesses or their tenants preferred to hire suburban kids who were perfectly happy to work for the minimum wage because they would 'graduate' from those jobs to office work, skilled trades, or the usual jobs of college graduates. 

If you ever saw Roger And Me , then you might recall that many of the factory workers from the closed GM plants got jobs in fast-food places and could not meet the demands  such as constant smiles and deference to customers. Factory work does not involve such servility. 

I hope that you do not believe that a well-run America is one in which the vast majority suffer severe poverty on behalf of rapacious and demanding elites who take everything possible and leave life precarious and objectively miserable for everyone else. If such is a consequence of high technology, then maybe we need to return to older technology that demands the quantity of semi-skilled workers (as on the assembly line) that the American economy used to demand... and reward.  Maybe we could go so far back as to renew the old Packard line of cars (Ask the man who owns one!)