(05-20-2018, 09:51 AM)David Horn Wrote: Let me posit the perfect-storm alternative. Look at the era when all this began. We had turmoil on an international scale. 1968 alone was devastating. Add-in the destruction of trust under Nixon, due to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The Right-to-Work movement began about the same time. Top it off with the first oil embargo in 1973, and most of what passed for institutional stability was under fire from all sides. Into the void stepped the financial elites, who had been waiting in the wings for decades.
The first act: move jobs away from unions, demagogue them so they don't emerge in the their new homes. Since the voices of the powerful economic interests were still given heed, and the use of fear was tried successfully for the first time in decades, people went along. Voices from the public sphere were considered corrupt, and basically ignored. The die was cast.
The real questions:If not, then this is the beginning of oligarchy on, potentially, an international scale. We already have autocrats running several nations. The rich and powerful couldn't be happier … for now, at least.
- Is 45 years of bad getting worse enough to break this paradigm?
- Is Trump enough to finally get the pendulum moving in the opposite direction?
The Religious Right and Corporate America have created think-tanks to attract intellectual sell-outs, have groomed politicians like Scott Walker and Pat Toomey, have cultivated popular figures of talk radio such as Rash Limbaugh to put a plain-folks veneer on standard lines of corporate America, have created (FoX Noise Channel) or taken over ("Stinking Liar Broadcasting") news media to transform them into conduits of propaganda, and have even corrupted some colleges. For that, one Florida university got a huge grant from the Koch foundation in return for letting the right-wing Koch interests decide who the economics faculty would be. Mirror-image Marxists, the sorts of people who see a Marxist critique of capitalism and express the idea that such is so good that they want things even more so.
They created a culture in which a pure buffoon could become President. At first those elites were scared because of the often left-wing promises of that buffoon. No problem -- Donald Trump quickly demonstrated his class interests. What do you expect? He's a real-estate baron. Just cut taxes (cuts to school funding through reduced property taxes mean more profits and make people less able to resist propaganda) and give free rein to raise prices or rents.
The Right offers a simple, stark offer: "All for us (tycoons and executives) except what we deem necessary for your bare survival, or you get nothing". This is all in the direction of fascism, which at its worst turns workers into serfs. (Workers as serfs? It's easy to remember the militarism, repression, and genocidal racism of the Third Reich, but less well known that workers could not change employment except if drafted as cannon fodder or with the consent of employers. Nazi Germany had the lowest industrial wages in Europe except perhaps for the Soviet Union, despite having the richest capital stock and excellent technology).
Maybe we Americans are catching on, but are we catching on too late? Trump may be more like Mussolini than like Hitler, but Mussolini took several years to destroy the last traces of democracy. Eventually Mussolini reshaped Italian politics into one in which economic power became the sole source of economic power. Atwater and Rove showed the way but did not quite get there. But they took steps that neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could fully undo. This is the situation in which Donald Trump operates.
...How long until the political midnight for America, when Big Government and Big Business merge into one brutal, corrupt, repressive entity?
To the demand "Suffer for my holy greed, you peons", we must prepare to respond as Patrick Henry did to the shakier George III...
"Give me liberty or give me death!"
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.