The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(05-22-2021, 11:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-22-2021, 02:23 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(05-21-2021, 05:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: No, it is Trump supporters who have burned a bridge with Americans who prefer rationality, rule of law, wisdom, and intellectual integrity. Admit it: Donald Trump has huge gaps of character that I would not want in a subordinate. Unless I were in an industry such as entertainment or the arts in which character matters little, I would not hire him. To be a factory worker? Well, maybe that would break his narcissism, but I would rather let someone else do that. Fast food? He wouldn't last a week. Retailing? The question is whether he would insult a customer or boss or have a blow-up. Skilled trade? Do you think that his type willingly gets his hands dirty? Teaching or library work? Aside from having little desirable learning and having himself as the focus of the classroom or library, he'd be a disaster. Accounting? Too creative, and not in the positive sense. Writing, editing, or journalism? Do you see coherent communication? Police officer? He would be the worst sort, a brutal cop with sloppy paper work. 

Most people who do real work have their narcissism broken, or they learn the hard way through vocational failures. In an economy in which most people are subordinate to some boss, Trump is the sort of person who tries to order people about before he has earned the position in which to do so.  Most people chafe in jobs too small for their spirits, as someone said to Studs Terkel in Working.  You might try reading that some day to understand what is demanded of people from domestic servants to pro athletes and elected officials or judges. 

True, Joe Biden was  the most viable candidate of all the Democratic candidates at the time. I mean, he was Obama's ( the greatest or at least the most highly anticipated Democratic president we've seen since John F. Kennedy) right hand man for eight years for God's sake. Now, we've got old Biden acting like he's  Bernie in his stead. I wonder how many racist whites supported Biden/Bernie ( a fellow racist white who had represented the racist whites on the Democratic side for many years) in the last election. Bob says the racist whites switched parties. I think they stayed and continued voting to protect paychecks and benefits and the institutions associated with the Democratic party. Bob forgets that Biden and Bird ( the old clansman) served together and were close friends and political allies.

As far as I can see, the white tribe is still the most dominant of the tribes associated with the DNC today. I have a question. Are you able to adapt and adjust to living in an environment where the black tribe or any minority tribe has the right to do or say whatever they want with you. Personally speaking, I do not like the leadership of the white tribe on the Democratic side and I could care less about what eventually happens to them during the reckoning/resolution that's coming. Acerima is on a collision coarse with America and I don't see Liberal Acerima coming out of it in one piece. So, I suggest that you prepare for major impacts.

As I've told Dave and shown others, I'm very similar to them in their way of thinking and my willing to slide the rule of law and morality to the side for the right cause as well. The only difference is, I'm more principled and I'm on the opposite side as them. Plus,  I'm willing to wait (allow more time for the better people stuck among the tribes to move out of harms way and get out of dodge before its to late) for the white leadership cross the line that it should know better than to cross at this point in their lives.

Your side has an advantage in that you control more land, although we have more people on our side than you do. A century ago, the question became whether money or people was to be the priority. The money folks moved into the Republican Party, and the people folks became Democrats. In the 1920s, the Republicans solidified their hold on the fundamentalist puritans while the Democrats corralled the "wets." Wets and labor became the heart of the Democratic Party, and it started to become more urban.

Classic X'er is on the geographic side of the parts of America that have the food, fuel, and water that other Americans need.  People in Blue America would die of thirst, hunger, cold, or heatstroke if his side cut off much of Blue America from those things. OK, there are exceptions: Detroit has an excellent water supply, and people are unlikely to get into big trouble from climatic extremes on the West Coast. Sieges kill; thi9nk of Leningrad in World War II. On the other hand, the sorts of people who would starve or freeze others on behalf of some ideology are themselves brutes with a narrow view of human character. Maybe we know people who think that human nature reduces to primitive needs and drives, but this well serves exploiters and oppressors. I do not know if Classic X'er understands  Maslow's hierarchy of needs,  but what works in a concentration camp or a plantation succeeds only in domains of great human suffering. 

To be sure, many people enjoy being in more bucolic places in which they can get away with far more. On the other hand, what one can get away with, like letting your dog poop in a ditch beside a cornfield, may also suggest what isn't available. There is no free parking for Carnegie Hall, but there is for a Dollar General out in the sticks. This said, buying some staple foods at a Dollar General is an unmemorable experience, and witnessing Turandot is... well, need I say more?  

Quote:Meanwhile as the Democrats took power and pushed quasi-socialism into being under FDR, the people vs. money dichotomy solidifed and the blacks (then called Negroes) began to migrate to the Democrats. As civil rights got pushed harder in the 1960s, southern Democrats and some other whites moved into the Republican Party, and blacks solidified their presence in the Democratic Party, while other growing ethic and gender groups magnified their presence and power there in the following years. The Great Society of 1964-66 succeeded the New Deal and supported these groups, and aroused further opposition to paying taxes to support the poor and the blacks. The cultural revolution expanded into feminism, the hippies, the gays, gun control advocates aroused by the assassinations, the peaceniks opposed to LBJ's war, ecology proponents, and so on, and became Democrats; and so the opponents to civil rights (the racists) joined with the new religious right, the neo-con superpatriots, the anti-tax/anti-regulation corporate neo-liberals and the gun nuts to solidify their hold on the Republican Party. The Goldwater campaign, powerfully assisted at the last minute by Ronald Reagan, first attained this new "white backlash" cultural identity for the Republicans in 1964 and won five former-Democratic southern states, and it solidified in the years since.

 
The Great Depression laid bare the failure of the last gasp of Gilded-era economics in the 1920's. All societies that have a choice do what is necessary for survival, and in a free society a democratically-elected system has the opportunity to change its assumptions. The 1920's really were a slum of a decade for which I have never known anyone who waxed nostalgic about it. To be sure, the early 1930's were a time of hardships of a sort that Americans are unlikely to experience for a very long time (aftermath of global thermonuclear war or the eruption of a supervolcano). I have known people who lived through the 1920's, and the only thing that such people miss about that time was their youth. For the vast majority of Americans, the late 1930's, still considered part of the Great Depression, were an improvement over the late 1920's. I have known people nostalgic for the late 1930's --- when labor started to attain more dignity, when far more people attended high school, when people had refrigerators, radios, and phonographs for the first time, and when people replaced coal as a heating fuel with something less obnoxious.

So what assumptions changed? Most obviously, that prosperity depended upon super-cheap labor that employers could treat badly. In return for being overworked and underpaid, workers would at least have reliable employment that would allow a family to eat three meals a day. When the American economic order failed even at keeping its cheap labor reliably employed and from needing relief, that assumption shattered.    

Quote:Trump only trumpeted it more loudly, and brought back the "America First" ideology from the opponents of US entry into world war two circa 1940, and also the older Republican policy of high tariffs. He also expanded the racist white-identity appeal and brought it out of the closet, especially with his hate campaign against Hispanics and Muslims, and accelerated anti-tax/anti-regulation neo-liberalism and environmental/climate destruction.

Trump's use of the name of an organization best understood as Hitler's "useful idiots" appalled me. Tariffs are bad taxes and restraint of trade, and they lead to terrible inefficiencies. Tariffs thwart exports even more than they protect against imports.   Get a BA in economics and you will never support tariffs unless you somehow sell out to some questionable interests who "need" tariffs for survival.

The difference between the winning and losing sides in World War II was that the winning side convinced itself that everyone had a role to play and needed the means for playing that role, and that the losing side could deem people expendable. As I once suggested in the (supposedly) great debate on World War II,  the Americans, British, and Soviets had the good Jewish scientists, and the Nazis either caused them to flee or shipped them off to the murder camps.  As for the Japanese -- their colonial dream left no dignity to conquered peoples. 

Quote:If Biden has a good deal of success, and he seems off to a good start, some of the furor on the right could dissipate and the left would thus win the coming battle in our cold civil war. Our side will have the majority, accelerated by millennials and Gen Z and the feared immigrants. But the constitution has given the right-wing a growing, built-in advantage in the supreme court, the senate, the electoral college and the 2nd Amendment, and being without principle and now also dedicated to false conspiracy theories, the right will carry out attempts to suppress anyone who is not rich and white from voting. Rural portions could secede from blue states and add a little bit more to their electoral vote and some extra congressional seats, although this would probably not be approved unless the Republicans have already won back Congress. Greater Idaho (aka the State of Jefferson) is already talked about. It may be harder for blue cities to secede from red states. So although the left can fight back if they win the senate in 2022 by giving representation to DC and Puerto Rico, the right-wing side does have some advantages, even though history and the people are not on their side.

Like Trump, Biden repudiates what he sees as a failed predecessor. The difference is that Obama was an above-average President who got most things right, and Trump is horrid. Trump started America down the road to despotism and has been repudiated in practice. Much of the solution has no connection to partisan politics except as reflections of the values of the Millennial Generation. Civic/hero generations typically know much more material (if not emotional as is all too often the case with Reactive/Nomad children) hardship early in life, and they reject the irrational nonsense that gets in the way of some more equitable commonwealth. So, farewell trickle-down economics! Farewell, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories!

We are going to see major changes in the tax structure and an expansion of the safety net. Millennial adults are on the brink of becoming the administrators of a post-Crisis America in education, commerce, media, and overall government. I expect them to undo the inequities that I associate with a corporate nomenklatura that denies opportunities for people not born into the bureaucratic elites    
 

Quote:Total secession and splitting the country may be the only solution if the left cannot attain a clear victory. I would say, we will not have the usual kind of Prophet Generation if it does not. What kind of generation they would be is open to question. But Prophets are supposed to be victory children, and victory has always meant that the progressive side won.

Urban and suburban life are merging in politics and economics. Some suburbs (Harvey and Cicero, Illinois; Wayne, Michigan; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; Hammond, Indiana; East St. Louis, Illinois; and many suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City -- the latter suburbs especially in New Jersey) are thoroughly-nasty places. Maintenance costs rise as tax revenues stagnate or fall, and middle-class people move out only for poorer people to move in. America has huge issues to solve in the 1T, and one of those is mass poverty. Disparities between rich and poor trear at any concept of a national community. We can live in a nation full of traditionally-minded people who have very different traditions, as such is cause for intellectual and cultural richness. Grinding poverty and obnoxious privilege do not create any sense of community but instead put people in hostile camps.

Some countries neatly divide themselves between rural and urban areas in what are the sub-national divisions. To do so in America would require splitting states into their rural and urban areas. Yes, I can imagine people in rural areas to want to distance themselves from the giant cities through some sort of secession... but I can imagine cities in some "Red" states seceding, too. Example: Nashville is much more liberal and sophisticated than the rest of Tennessee.