12-21-2018, 09:43 AM
(12-20-2018, 07:31 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Well, I'm not sure what a purple center means to you as far as good or bad but that seems to be where the center is at right now. I think you're seeing a regeneracy that you aren't used to seeing because the bulk of protesting took place during the Bush/Obama years. I accept that they're more likely to vote Republicans and I accept they're more likely to live in red areas. However, I will not accept responsibility for their actions and I will not accept being directly associated or supportive of their views. You are aware that the KKK and the Neo Nazi's don't see eye to eye or share the same goals. I would also not be surprised to see them become more active on the Democratic side and eventually form a white caucus on the Democratic side of congress.
It is difficult to say what a Regeneracy will look like. Should it be right-wing, then it will be a recognition of the need for unbridled plutocracy as the means of getting such economic growth as America needs. It would be mass acquiescence in an economic view that the Common Man has responsibilities to entrenched elites who can act out of generosity by the standards of those elites. (Basically, you choose to work for us, and if we like your work we will keep you from starving). With that comes an economic order with no safety net but instead a piked pit for anyone who fails to perform as the elites wish. If someone falters there might be a labor camp in which one quickly comes to learn that poverty in return for being overworked by rapacious elites is not the worst thing possible in life.
That would be Nazi Germany, the definitive worker's Hell, without the racism, genocide, and wars for conquest. Maybe the Jim Crow South, except that far more people are treated as ni--ers, as in the sense that some white fellow in Roots complains that white people are being treated like ni--gers. Alex Haley's father tells the white fellow that it is wrong to treat any9one like a ni--er.
If it is on the Left, it is a recognition that the American economy cannot operate as it used to -- but needs a more generous and more encompassing welfare state. Maybe we end up with a social-market economy that fosters capitalism but without exploitation. Markets are good, their absence demonstrating the folly of either feudal societies or Marxist-Leninist regimes. The social-market economy depends upon a strong capitalist system but not upon people being overworked and underpaid. The welfare system itself fosters a secondary economy that creates opportunity even for capitalists.
As for the KKK and neo-Nazis... there is a group that calls itself the "Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan", which suggests some melding between the KKK and Nazism which shared much the same objects of hatred, including Jews and blacks. We will never know what a Klan-dominated America looks like (unless I am to write the novel about a Klan-dominated America). I have no cause to believe that a Klan-dominated America would be any nicer than Nazi Germany. The Klan has done as much violence as it can get away with. Where it disagreed with Nazis was that at one time the Klan had many WWII veterans who hated Germany and as a corollary Nazis. Now that the WWII vets are off the scene, leaders of Klan groups (there are many competing, and not one, Klan groups) often affect nazi symbols and rhetoric. Holocaust denial is commonplace among Klansmen such as David Duke, one of the pioneers of the KKK-Nazi synthesis.
Most white people recognize the folly of any identity of themselves as 'white', which now means not so much what one is than what one isn't. I was amazed back in the 1970s that I, a kid from rural Michigan, found myself having more in common with Japanese-Americans than with many of the 'Okies' in California. If someone wants to be proud of his Finnish, Irish, Russian, or Greek heritage that is fine because the countries of his ethnic origin have distinctive culture.
There is no such thing as 'white culture' other than soulless racism.
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.