The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-20-2022, 07:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Thanks for your input. I hope you are doing OK after not being here for a while.

Your timing being off may account for being off on some of this analysis.

For sure, we are just past the half way point of a 4T that started in 2008. The crisis is not solved. As you say, voting rights are not handled; they are still on the ballot. Bad cops can still kill ethnicities without apparent cost. No legislation on either problem has been passed. No significant change has been made on gun ownership either, so mass shootings will continue and get worse. The MAGA crowd is armed with these guns, and plans to resist and overthrow democracy as Trump (their dear leader) is trying to do.

In practice, 4T's are comparatively short. Once resolved they are over. The World War II Crisis that began with the Great Stock Market Crash and ended on V-J Day lasted sixteen years (and 14 if you count only the bank runs that did the real, lasting damage). We are fourteen years into an economic crisis. When COVID-19 dissipates as a perceived menace and the Russians seek a graceful exit from a nasty war, then this Crisis is over. 

The cultural climate is changing. MAGA is largely a rearguard defense of obsolete ways  steadily losing a constituency solely due to demographic change, and I hope (soon, like November 8) political viability.  I can see them holding onto some regional power, but that is it. 

Quote:We can't talk about what the conservatives are doing yet in a 1T, beyond what they are continuing to do now until they are defeated to end this 4T: resisting what needs to be done to heal the crisis, and instead making the crisis worse.

Are the economic reactionaries really so sympathetic with the superstition, the homophobia, the racism, the misogyny, and the religious bigotry? It looks bad for business.  

Quote:The nub of the Crisis has not been fixed and is getting worse. It is obvious to those who look, but that doesn't mean people have looked. It doesn't mean you have looked.

We have seen more and more bad stuff, and none of it undoes the perception of the bad stuff no longer so. Americans are going to remember the disaster that is Donald Trump for a very long time even after he has lost all relevance to contemporary politics.  Someone like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who did far less damage while offending too may sensibilities in the end, was remembered for at least fifty years after his antics were over. The right-wing dream of 95% of the people suffering  for 2%, as in Imperial Russia, never quite goes, but only rarely can it be achieved in modern times. 

Global warming is real, but its worst effects will not be obvious for at least fifty years -- and by sixty years it could easily be the basis of the next Crisis Era complete with mass death on the scale of either the Mongol invasions or the Black Death. (Those caused real declines in the human population!)  

Quote:It is a twin malady, as I see it. First, the cold civil war. The division of the country is still deep and getting deeper. Neither side trusts the other, and neither side trusts our institutions. The division seems mostly powered by ethnic (aka mis-titled "race") fears. One side wants to keep America white, the other is either not white or wants to accept diversity instead of prejudice. Deep demographic divisions exist in this divide: rural vs urban, college educated versus not, male versus female, ethnic divisions, old versus young, etc. The cold civil war could get hot, as it did on Jan.6, 2021.
Again, refer to this article:

http://generational-theory.com/forum/thr...l#pid82663

The Hard Right wants America to become a pure plutocracy in which white, straight, male, fundamentalist Protestants have dominion and tests of faith in the need for repression, hierarchy, and inequality offer proofs of reliability of people. He who shows greatest acceptance of personal suffering gets fed first. I can imagine it using global warming and energy shortages as pretexts to make life grossly impoverished for the vast majority. I do not see them achieving this through free elections. If they did get what they seek, then they would be the obvious 'first people before the firing squad' in the event of a revolution. 

Remember: capitalism saved itself by turning workers into consumers. Such allowed the blooming of such high technology of the time such as electricity, automobiles, radios, and phonographs... all the way to the miracles of our times. If the plutocrats simply have people working to exhaustion for bare sustenance as was the norm in Nazi Germany, then they will have lost all credibility once the system collapses in the wake of some catastrophic war. Vile, inhuman regimes start wars that they lose; they lose wars in which they seem to have every advantage of population size, pre-war build-up, and raw materials.  

Quote:Part and parcel of the division is also the neoliberal ideology (aka Reaganomics, free-market ideology, trickle-down economics), which took power in this country at the end of the 2T. It has only very recently even begun to be challenged, when a 15% minimum tax on corporations was passed by reconciliation. In addition, since 2020 there have been bipartisan spending bills on a scale that had not been passed since before the neoliberal era began about 41 years ago. But as long as the wealthy get away without paying much in taxes, and are allowed to keep wages/salaries/overtime low, then inequality and middle class decline will continue. Neoliberalism by definition renders government incapable of dealing with any problems or concerns. This ideological malady has not been seriously dealt with, and unless it is, democracy itself will continue to be in serious danger along with economic and social/health viability.

http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html

The financial difference between the current Crisis and the previous completed Crisis is that the economic meltdowns that started similarly ended at different times. 

1929 peak 2007
1930 the real crash  2008
1931 breakdown of the financial system 2009 the forestalling of such 
1932 the real depression 2010 no such thing.

You will notice that FDR was elected President in 1932 when America was in full-blown depression. The economic elites might not have liked him, but they lacked the means with which to buy the political system. Obama was elected in 2008, and he pressed for the rescue of the financial system before it could start devouring savings accounts, payrolls, and collections of payables. Big Business could recover, and part of its recovery was the ability of Big Business to unleash the Dark Propaganda of ideological reaction. In the 1930's America elected economic liberals (even if some of them were virulent racists) . In the 2010's America increasingly elected people who believe that those who own the assets have ownership of the hopes of those who are the subjects of those assets -- and that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of the power, indulgence, and gain of the economic elites. Note that those elites were often Boomers full of themselves who had never faced any challenge to their bloated self-images and thus saw themselves the rightful masters of everything that they could influence. 

The economic elites going into the Great Stock Market Crash were humbled. All that they could hope for is survival within a capitalist system, and they could not waste precious assets buying the political process. 

Character is destiny, and those with bad character bring ruin until they themselves are ruined. Donald Trump exemplifies this. But we need ask ourselves whether our economic prowess, our sophisticated technology, and our formal education are nothing more than pearls before swine. If we the common people cannot act with charity and overall decency then we can expect rulers and manipulators like Donald Trump. We need to recognize learning as a virtue worthy of itself as an inculcator of virtue.  

Quote:Hovering over all of this is the most dangerous crisis of our time: the climate crisis. Again you did not mention it. It gets noticed more and more all the time as the resulting disasters get worse and worse. Scientists scream that unless fossil fuel use and other changes are made in the next 10-20 years, tipping points will be reached that will make hothouse earth inevitable and irreversible. Civilization will not survive this condition, and it will last for thousands of years. The decision of whether to transform our energy sources in particular (and also start to deal with reforestation and changes in agriculture) MUST be made in this 4T, which means the 2020s. If that is not a crisis, I don't know what is. Only a start has been made to deal with this crisis. The fourth turning is described by the authors as archetypally symbolized by the season of winter. This is when bad weather happens. This time the symbol is quite literal.
http://philosopherswheel.com/globalwarming.html

The world needs zero population growth and the end of the era of conspicuous consumption, the latter often compensation for empty, frustrated lives. We may not have the mass destruction of elderly assets such as housing of a war that forces us to do differently what we did before. The car culture must go. People must make it do or do without. We can do 'virtual' travel, enjoy 'virtual' music, and engineer foods that do not have animal flesh as their basis. Except for the poor who often endure extreme crowding we will need to have less space per capita. Maybe a single person can live in space roughly the size of a motel room. We will need changes in land use. All of that is generational change.    

Quote:But unless the cold civil war and its basis in prejudice and market ideology is resolved by a blue victory over the red, climate change will not be dealt with. Because every proposal to make the needed change in policy is lumped in together with the cold civil war division. This issue and every other issue is now part of the division between the blue and red tribes. Every issue is politicized and partisan now. The 4T is on the ballot

The Blue side has a more sustainable ideology. That matters greatly. Much of the Blue ideology is virtues once associated with conservatism. It may be multicultural, but the sort of multiculturalism that recognizes equal validity of ethnic and religious traditions. People who have some valid tradition are far more capable of adapting to needful change that blends with their tradition. Liberty and political competition are essential for good lives.  Law and order and the rule of law recognize the necessity of honest dealings and the rejection of personal violence. Personal responsibility and rational thought are both essential for prosperity. Precedent and protocol make predictable and reliable what must be predictable and reliable. Education is essential to the creation of the complete person, but it must inculcate virtues and knowledge that have always been true. Vice and corruption need be sacked. Above all, there must be something worth preserving -- and a combination of severe hierarchy, repression, and inequality all contribute to military defeats, economic stagnation, and violent revolution. That all (except for the multiculturalism that is reasonable and necessary in an Empire of Freedom) is the old conservatism. This is far closer to Obama than to the destructive Trump/MAGA cult.