02-20-2018, 08:48 PM
(02-20-2018, 05:17 PM)David Horn Wrote: After the little trick McConnell played to get yet another conservative on the court, don't be surprised to see the same in reverse. More to the point, Merrick Garland would have tilted the court to the left for the first time in decades. That won't be forgotten. With the electorate trending left (especially now that the Millies are finally acting rather than just talking), I suspect several reversals ... Citizens United being one and Heller being another.
The Millies have been on the receiving end of conservative policies for their entire lives. They're tired of shootings, over-priced schooling and crappy jobs. They are a huge generation, so they'll make policy for a long time. To be honest, I'm surprised that they finally woke up. They've been sleepwalking through life up to this point.
The Millennial Generation shows most characteristics of a Civic generation, but even it has limits on what can be done to it, especially should the purpose be suspect. It has gotten the shaft from older adults in power -- the sorts of adults who tell people "Give us everything we want, don't complain, and wonderful things will happen." Well, the wonderful things have happened for people of unrestrained selfishness and lust for indulgence. Everyone else? No. We now have the severest inequality in American economic life in nearly a century (and that may be an understatement).
Millennial values are for greater equity than is now offered. I expect them to be highly active in politics once they get a start. Pols who believe that profit and what it buys (power and privilege) will be voted out at the first opportunity. I expect Millennial adults to look at the institutions that we have and cast off the accretions of class privilege and the sleazy arrangements.
These young adults are nearly irreligious; they will put an emphasis on good works as the acid test of faith. They are also rational enough to see any superstition as baroque excess.
I can see them at their potential worst much like the revolutionaries of 1789 in France... and there is much to cast off. Government by lobbyist must die. The danger is that these young adults will fall in love with the 2020-era "Madame Guillotine" as did the Jacobin revolutionaries; they might prefer to 'retire' people in the way in the sense that troublesome androids get 'retired' in Blade Runner. That means killed. The method will probably be nitrogen asphyxiation, as such will be 'scientifically' painless.
(Yes, you know me for my tendency toward apocalypse. But this is a Crisis Era, and things get decided definitively in such a time near the end. As in "there will be no British presence in the former colonies", "slavery shall be permanently outlawed without compensation to slave owners", or "Nazism shall be blasted from the world." Count on talk of extirpation of intolerable evil and injustice as the main theme of the later stages of the Crisis.
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.