07-02-2018, 07:21 PM
(07-02-2018, 03:39 PM)David Horn Wrote: Really? Stalin and Mao are hardly exemplars of the left. Note: the one person who has posted here in the past who actually admired Stalin (Kinser'79) is now a H-U-G-E Trump fan, as he'll be more than happy to tell you. Autocrats, and people who admire them, exist along the entire left-right axis. They worship power, not socialism … or capitalism either. Likewise, libertarians fall along the entire spectrum too. Leftwing libertarians are anarchists, and not to my taste either. So spare us all the examples of "people we admire", when you know perfectly well it's not true.
I can point to nations that have political systems more or less to my liking: the social democracies of Western Europe that Trump is working overtime to destroy. Why do you think that's the case? And while you're at it, explain the Trump fascination with Putin in any terms other than one autocrat loving another.
Yes. Stalin and Mao are discredited. I'm surprised that you-know-who didn't mention Pol Pot in the same breath.
If I have to choose between a right-winger with some moral compass (let us say Churchill or Schuschnigg -- my favorite dictator by default because the only people that he killed were the Nazis who murdered his predecessor) and Fidel Castro -- I will take Churchill or Schschnigg. Churchill ended up with about as absolute power as anyone did without getting the right to kill rivals, bleed his country for gain and indulgence, or rig an election... if it is a choice between survival of old decencies and horrors revolutionary in scale, I'll take the old decencies, thank you.
I see Donald Trump having made some usual left-wing appeals -- an expanded government, abandonment of free trade, disregard for protocol and precedent, and the practical dissolution of NATO and the European Union. Those are among the wrong left-wing appeals to me. Anti-intellectualism (recognize that Vaclav Havel excoriated the anti-intellectualism of the Czechoslovak communist regime) can as easily be left-wing as right-wing. OK -- I an a conservative on drugs (I prefer rationality), law and order (without which civil society cannot exist), and educational content (Rah, rah! Liberal arts -- so that people have some basis for decent and humane choices when religion fails to keep people believing or becomes itself corrupt). Trump's anti-intellectualism goes far behind the capacity to criticize wayward college professors, journalists, or creative people; it is an endorsement of mass ignorance over the only reliable means by which people can advance technology and make life potentially meaningful.
History has shown plenty of examples of people going from the Far Left to the Far Right (Goebbels, Quisling, Laval, Mussolini, Doriot, Pavolini) or from the Far Right to the Far Left. That's the True Believer, the person who like the late Margot Honecker whose formative years were in the Bund Deutscher Maedel and as wife of Commie dictator Erich Honecker proved even more fanatical. Commies may not advance former fascists through the formal political system, but they find them highly useful (after a little brainwashing and the inducement of getting a nice living available no other way) as members of the secret police. If you wonder why there was no Commie massacre of the former Hlinka Guard (Slovakia), Arrow Cross (Hungary), or Iron Guard (Romania) but liberals got executed or consigned to the closest things to human imitations of the Ninth Circle of Hell -- Commies had no use for anyone with any liberal principles. That includes 'squishy' Communists who insisted on some democracy within a Socialist order.
OK, I have discussed Marx' theory... and how capitalists have managed to either thwart or deny the 'Socialist revolution' that Marx thought inevitable. So capitalists like Henry Ford decide that the worker needs a stake in the system so that he will believe in consumerism instead of the appeal "Workers of the world, unite!" Orthodox Marxists might see that as objectionable as fascism which seeks a return to feudal inequality and tyranny... but in view of the failure of 'Socialist' states to bring human happiness, I would say that consumerism with a welfare system is far better than any alternatives. OK. Marx' historical determinism is an oversimplification of history, and markets serve as checks to economic waste.
We seem to be entering a time in which any increases in further production of consumer goods can result only in waste as those goods become incredibly slight in value. How much is a reader device worth? We can all find a use. I use it largely for reading off Project Gutenberg or listening to YouTube videos in waiting rooms. A second one? I have it connected to my stereo as a sound source. A third or fourth? It makes about as much as gorging on a third or fourth hamburger. We will need population growth to justify more output and consumption -- but population growth is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.
Many of our liberal and conservative politicians have little idea of how to deal with the reality of human needs being easily met. Donald Trump has no problem with such because he does not contemplate such. His economics imply using more and payiong more for what we get, a raw idea. Economic reality has a way of refuting crackpot ideas.
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.
