The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(08-20-2022, 08:06 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-19-2022, 01:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: ... Why do a few Republicans get it, and most don't? And I think there is a tendency among some to really think that Trump represents them against the elites. They are simply deceived, and there's just not much more to it than that, as far as I can tell. And their supposed anti-elitism really translates into support for policies that uphold the elites and their destruction even of the common people themselves, and that is another indication of their extreme level of ignorance and foolishness. I encounter it often online.

We all see through our own lens, and the GOP lens centers on class validation: some are just more worthy than others, and stubborn continuity.  In a way this is the issue that is fracturing the party and may, in the long run, finally overcome the negatives.  The problem: what consitutes the long run?

We T4Ters have a unique lens, based on the idea that history operates over saecula consisting of turnings.  What we lack is any ability to see into the future with a high degree of precision -- so we speculate.  The GOP just assumes that their continuity model is a fact, not a theory (and a weak one at that).  The real problem is pace and timing.  When and how quickly can this be resolved are now the burning questions.  Soon we all hope.

Men make history and history shapes their children through economic and political consequences. Then their children make history in accordance with their psychological make-up, their environment, the educational system, and the culture. They may rebel against strictures that make no sense to them or offend moral sensibilities, but Howe-Strauss theory explains how, when, and why such happens. What people tolerated in the name of social peace despite its amorality is most likely to incite rebellion. Jim Crow practice was the most brittle of targets in America, and it imploded more precipitously than anything else.  

Were Trumpism to be entrenched in a 1T, then we would have the stormiest Awakening Era ever around 2040 or so. It is too morally empty, too mindless, too exploitative, too personally repressive, and too culturally insipid to  avoid collapse once cultural and political challenges are possible after a 1T is over. I can't say that Trumpism or something like it won't be entrenched, but the likeliness of such has dropped from nearly even to a long-shot. 

Time is environment just as much as geography, ethnicity, sect and social class.   Time dictates whether social class is disparities between lavish excess and lethal poverty or between "high culture" and "low culture" (let us say a sailboat or a motorcycle, as the two are similarly expensive the two are similarly expensive, or  spending free time in art galleries or pumping coins into slot machines. It is far better that the class divide be the latter than that we have starvation in plain sight (or at all). 

The 1T will redefine many of the buzzwords of political discourse. Figure that whoever prevails in this 4T and defines the Zeitgeist of the forthcoming 1T may even redefine what conservatism is. Consider:

1. respect for tradition as a fallback against the avant-garde when the latter fails
2. continuity of the value of old wisdom because human nature changes less over the centuries than one might expect. 
3. honoring precedent and protocol as alternatives to destructive chaos
4. support of rational thought (aside from aesthetics, as we cannot live on pure reason)
5. insistence upon the rule of law and of law and order.
6. recognition of the inherent hierarchy of competence and the need to support it over demagogic leveling or class privilege
7. promotion of old, well-entrenched decencies that underpin civility and prosperity
8. understanding the necessity of family, community, and nation
9. attempting to harmonize necessary change with extant reality instead of starting anew in a revolution

Does this sound like conservatism to you? That describes Barack Obama well, even if he did not fit certain parts of the idea of conservatism that one associates with the Reagan-to-Trump GOP that puts emphases upon bigotry, superstition, pseudoscience, economic hierarchy whose basis is class privilege requiring great suffering below. When Barack Obama is the model of how to be President and much else in political life, then this will define conservatism circa 2030. Obama is the Mature Reactive, the typical style-setter for political life in a 1T. (If you want to know what an "immature reactive is", then look at most Axis leaders and Stalinist stooges. Yuck!) Obama may have been liberal on economic relationships and social values, including LGBT rights and feminism, but Obama showed his adeptness at harmonizing needful change with existing reality. 

I look at the list above and I see Obama as the conservative and Trump as the dangerous radical. Trump is a reactionary in believing that he who has the gold makes the rules, which satisfies few people outside of those who own the gold. Look at the above list and see how Trump fails to match it. 

1. He can't recognize his own failure, and he faults anyone for seeing him as a failure at anything.
2. He has no idea of what the old wisdom is. 
3. He scrapped stare decisis, a principle without which legal process becomes anarchy.
4. He seems terribly irrational. 
5. The Bolshevik-style coup on January 6, 2021.
6. He is hostile to formal learning. 
7. Very bad manners such as mocking the handicapped and military vets who have faced some hardships in service to their country.
8. His family life resembles something more like that of the Borgia or the Gotti families. 
9. See 5 again.