(01-15-2022, 07:00 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: This is a crisis. The conflict is devisive. The leader will be too. The question of the moment is whether to punish someone who attempted to overthrow democracy. Underneath are the problems of Covid, saving the environment, racism and more or less infrastructure. You have to decide whether you wish to solve these problems or not. In all prior American crisis, the problems have been addressed. Granted, these problems are more visible and problematic in the densely populated areas. There is a big enough difference of the severity of the problem to create a divide. Still, the problems in the past have been addressed.
It is intellectually easy, but fiscally tricky. Some people see government spending as a pure drain upon the other. Some like me see it as the creation of fresh opportunities to do well for oneself by solving real problems. We are not through the Crisis Era, and we don't seem close to its end. We don't have an apocalyptic war with a turning point after which everything is recognized as destiny for all that follows, as at Midway, El Alamein, or Stalingrad. The Devils' Reich and Thug Japan were still capable of occasional reverses of the Inevitable and were still able to enforce much blood-letting to buy time for the survival of leadership that ultimately showed contempt even for the lives of their own people. It is easy to interpret historical facts (aside from culpability for World War I) after the fact. In the meantime the discussion includes the demonization of the Other Side.
Maybe we will come out of this Crisis better than we went in. We are going to recognize that science learned inquiry do more good than does superstition, that community is preferable to social atomization, and that democratic institutions are preferable to such alternatives as despotism. Democracy depends upon people recognizing that electoral losses are a necessary part of the game -- if the game is to be honest. Any dishonest version of democracy either gets rectified by the People or descends into tyranny; this rule is becoming obvious in America.
Quote:My proposition is that in the Information Age cultures can be altered through protest and legislation, as the suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated. That seems to be holding true. The January sixth insurrection seems to be the peak of the violence. Violence and protest faded since. The Democrats have been making little progress since then. The stay the same faction has enough power left to gum up the works. Still, they have had to oppose progress and the will of the people to do so. Of late, the party holding the presidency has lost ground in congress in the mid term elections. The question is whether the lack of progress will be blamed on the Republicans voting as a block against progress and reversing the trend.
I hope that you are right about January 6, 2021 as the peak of danger for American institutions. That Trump had to be defeated electorally if America were to remain consistent with the necessary visions of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and FDR and not go into a slide into despotism. I would have found Donald Trump insufferable even if he had expressed economic and cultural values similar to mine. I see him as a right-wing version of Hugo Chavez, who steadily eroded democracy in Venezuela in the name of "socialism".
I see some good trends, Generational politics do not favor the Hard Right. The Hard Right that we now know is aging into political weakness and ultimate irrelevance. To be sure, many of the changes vital to the refinement of democracy (Suffragettes and the Civil Rights struggle) can happen outside of a Crisis Era. Abolition of slavery came during the Civil War crisis, and workers got rights of effective organization during the Crisis of 1940. The American idea of a peaceful world was to offer basically the New Deal as the Marshall Plan.
Crisis eras end well when the honest, moral, and rational people prevail. As the definitive Christmas Carol from a Crisis Era puts it, "The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, and Peace on Earth, good will toward men".
Quote:Right now the problem is that while the Democrats have the nominal majority in Congress, there are a few conservative Democrats that have blocked most progress. The Democrats need a few more votes to overcome this lack.
As troubling is that there are so few dissident Republicans capable of determining that principle must overtake power when power serves perverse ends.
Quote: (Classic X'er's) personal obsession with violence and disregard for what is actually happening has put (himself) way out in left field.
If he is a left-fielder he jumped into the stands and thinks that he took away what the batter thought was a home run. The ball that he threw back for a triple play instead of a grand slam reads "Little League Baseball". The umpiring crew will quickly rule the home run valid and the triple play void.
Violence of the sort that Classic X'er supports is no viable solution to anything other than his strange vision that denies "One Big Us".
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.