(12-18-2018, 08:51 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-18-2018, 08:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump has hijacked American conservatism, attempting to attach it to his personal narcissism, to superstition, to bigotry, to cruelty, to economic elitism, and even to linguistic fraud out of Nineteen Eighty.Four.
They chose an outsider. They selected someone who wasn't one of the Washington DC elites, with an agenda that backed the elites. This I have no trouble with. They just chose the wrong outsider. The reds seem to select people like Trump or Palin, trying for a Reagan like agenda. If only they could get rid of the elite corruption, they would like to see that agenda succeed. I don't think that it can. It is too much of the past. But I don't blame them for disliking the corrupting and elite influence of the Republican establishment. They also disliked Hillary as she was painted for years as a member of the Democratic establishment. The Democrats would do well selecting someone far away from that.
American politics has shown an alternation between conservatism and liberalism, with extremism and incompetence faring badly in re-election bids and never entrenching power. Outsiders can shake things up, which may be necessary at times. The problem is that the outsiders often shake up the wrong things.
Millions of Americans have been hurting in part because an increasingly-diverse America has little use for them (white people in the Mountain and Deep South). Republicans have won them over and will likely keep them indefinitely. Trump knows how to appeal to ignorance and bigotry, and those are available for exploitation because ignorance and bigotry numb people to the poor results. Add to this, the reduction of the share of manufacturing has caused a decline in opportunity for people of all backgrounds of limited skill and learning. 'Red' America needs more manufacturing jobs, but Big Business is either turning to high-technology production or has turned to importing to get stuff to sell in box stores.
Quote:(12-18-2018, 08:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: "The wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on earth, good will toward men" -- Longfellow.
Not this crisis / awakening. (I am still inclined to see the next decisive wave played out in the voting booth and congress rather than with violence. The spiral of violence is going nowhere thus far.) Not with representative democracy. The representatives will cozy up to the elites. There will likely be at least one more go aground.
I might be surprised. When the culture remakes itself, it usually goes much farther than anyone expected during the prior awakening. But I don't really see a sign of that much of a makeover.
People expect a return to the status quo ante after a Crisis but are surprised (usually to the better) when such does not happen. The solutions that a Crisis Era imposes require the abandonment of bad practices and bad culture, and the reform of existing institutions or the formation of new ones, just to get through. America in the late 1940s looked and behaved very differently from the America of the mid-1920s, and practically nobody looked fondly upon the mid-1920s except for recovering some lost youth. I have never known of many people, even those born in the 1880s and 1890s when they were plentiful, to look fondly upon the 1920s. I've seen nostalgia for the 1930s despite the economic hardships. I've seen people who never knew the time enjoy 1930s' mass culture in movies and music. 1920s? No.
We just don't see the makeover yet. This said, evil causes tend to implode. The "Thousand Year Reich" died in twelve years. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that was to extend from Alaska to Australia and cross the Pacific to encompass San Francisco as well as Shanghai got whittled away to Japan itself. The slave order of the Confederacy had to die.
But let us consider the American Revolution. Simply overthrowing George III was not enough to settle things. All of the colonies sought to expand with settlement in the West. They had conflicting ideas on how to divide the territories between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in what had been weakly-held British territory that the British Crown found impossible to control and develop. Consider that the claim of Virginia to anything north of a line from its southern border to a diagonal headed northwestward from the point on the Ohio River at what was then and now the western border of Pennsylvania... and claims by New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. There would have been some nasty disputes. Statehood allowed the former colonies to get reasonable western boundaries while the federal government would guarantee rights for those states. Just imagine the squabbling that could have happened between powerhouse Virginia and weaker states had it not been for a compromise that said that the Northwest Territory would not achieve statehood until such was ready. A national government also allowed states to separate from states, such as Vermont from New York, with new states (Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio) forming as equals to the other states. Nobody could have foreseen such while the war was going on between Britain and the Colonies even if it all seems obvious now.
I have no idea what the workable compromises will be this time.
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.