(10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness
Divisiveness isn't caused by the president. It's caused by
the generational era.
Some eras are inherently divisive, and some aren't. It is obvious that American life is least divided just after a Crisis war is over (young men are more likely to be accustomed to taking orders and enduring privation and are unwilling to let anything get in the way of peace, prosperity, and normality) and most divided as America starts to go from an Awakening Era to an Unraveling because the Idealist generation has stretched things as far as it can while the Reactive generation is more likely to put individual gain and comfort above a Voyage to the Interior that it can never understand.
This said, some Presidents are more likely to enhance the divisiveness of a time and some are more likely to mollify the divisiveness of a time. Those who push a one-sided agenda and are unwilling to back down to get what they want piecemeal are more likely to divide America than are those who can make pragmatic compromise to get most of what they want more gradually. Thus I contrast Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and find Trump severely lacking.
Quote:FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for
implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated. FDR
seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the
Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again. Like
Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people
hated him.
He was blamed wrongly, and only by a tiny minority that has not gained respect over time. The Great Depression reached its low point in stock-market valuations in the autumn of 1932 (stock-market valuations are a coincident indicator in economics), and the perception of danger ended after the Bank Holiday that FDR established, after which major reforms of banking made any further erosion of the economy from the low point . After the Bank Holiday, America started on a recovery that, within six years, would have most Americans living better than they did around the time of the Great Stock Market Crash.
According to the arch-conservative economist Friederich Hayek, it is the speculative boom leading into the financial panic (as in 1857, 1929, and 2008) it is the speculative that does the real damage by devouring capital that might otherwise go into the gritty investment in plant and equipment that creates jobs and genuine investment. People perceive easy money from speculation in paper instead of investing in small businesses that create real prosperity for owner-operators and do far better at spreading economic opportunity through capital formation than does a welfare system, let alone a speculative bubble certain to burst.
It is possible that the growth from the nadir of the Great Depression was mostly the result of people out of work starting small businesses such as one-location supermarkets. One may have a reality close to that which Doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide) would offer: that the aftermath of an economic meltdown is the best time in which to start a small business. Opportunities to get jobs in bureaucratic organizations are few, so starting a small business in which one must work 70-80 hours a week building a business is better than anything else that anyone can do. Because so many people are out of work, labor is cheap for its overall competence and diligence. Inventories, and real estate and equipment that got devalued greatly are available cheaply. Employees recognize the need to seek out customers who make their jobs possible, so everyone who has a job is hustling to get a revenue stream if he cares about his private-sector job. The economy goes in short order from people looking for easy income from short-term, lavish returns from highly-liquid assets to the unpleasant default in survival through long-term, low yield means that require much effort that one cannot reasonably abandon. The 1930's were arguably the best time ever in which to start a small business.
So what is the difference between the 1930's and the 2010's? The economic meltdowns from 2007 and 1929 were similarly severe after a year and a half. From the middle of 1931, bank runs and a deflationary policy in the money supply made things far worse. By 2009 the federal government was backing the banks, so businesses and investors did not find that their bank accounts were gone when payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes came due. By 1931, businesses that had done nothing wrong started going under, and things got steadily worse. Governments had to retrench because their tax revenues vanished. Early in 2009 the effects of the government backing the financial industry ensured that things would not get as bad as they did in the 1930's. The bank runs did not happen. Businesses could meet payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes. Governments did not need to shrink just to meet the fall in revenues; they could borrow.
But note well: the economic elites got rescued, and they had the means for spending lavishly on politics. They backed exactly the sorts of people who shared the agenda of tycoons, rural magnates, and executives: the idea that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as the Master Class gets whatever it wants -- which is its own indulgence while the rest of Humanity is reduced to peonage with survival as a dubious privilege easily lost. 95% of the people are to suffer for 1-2%, maybe 3% would do well in any economic system (like physicians, engineers, accountants, and senior military officers), and 1-2% would get to live like sultans in oil-rich kingdoms with small populations. What those elites wanted was ultra-cheap labor in a society in which the proles had responsibilities to the rich and the rich had none to the proles. You can blame the economic elites from the Boom Generation, many of them educated in MBA schools in which they learned finance but not human values -- and, impoverished in learning the liberal arts, gravitated to the more primitive drives of sex, drugs (OK, it became fine whiskey instead of cocaine fashionable for a short time), bureaucratic power, material gain and comfort, and mass culture. Donald Trump exemplifies such, and he shows how putrid such a philosophy can get.
If you think that such is essential to capitalism, then think again. I know of one clearly-capitalist community in which men do not ditch a wife when they no longer looks like a Playmate of the Monty ™, who have no tendency to drugs stronger than alcohol, whose community has few white-collar jobs, in which the material standard of technological indulgence is about one hundred years in the past, and for that has largely been immune to the degrading effects of an amoral mass culture.
Such people are the Old Order Amish... you might not want to live as they do, but their way of life is far more sustainable than the one that Trump stands for. Individual prosperity depends upon the size of the farm that an Amish farmer can operate (with his children's labor, of course), and the only way in which to get rich in their world is to be a capitalist.
I could make the case that the health of a capitalist society is the extent to which this is true: that almost the only people who can get rich are the capitalists. The fault with Soviet communism was that the people who got rich were the bureaucratic administrators better at feathering their nests and ensuring that their own kids could succeed them than in creating prosperity through entrepreneurial innovation. Guess what is happening in America? Our bureaucratic elites are beginning to look much like a nomenklatura in "socialist" states.
Quote:In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive. They
hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President,
that portrayed the assassination of Bush. Obama's presidency was
supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he
could to stoke racial hatred. The left constantly threatened the Tea
Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa
frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence.
Wrong. The Hard Right has been fostering division along ethnic and class lines since the 1980's. It has sought to exploit the class line between educated and under-educated people, between regions in states and between states, and between ethnic groups. Its efforts have degenerated into tribalism. The Tea Party exists as an effort to give populist support to a reactionary agenda that holds that multitudes must suffer for economic elites. The Hard Right believes that capitalism is essentially and incorrigibly corrupt, inequitable, cruel, hierarchical, and repressive -- just as doctrinaire Marxist say that capitalism is. The difference between the American Hard Right and doctrinaire Marxists is that the American Hard Right endorses what Marxists consider the horrible vices of capitalism. Capitalism saved itself by making avid consumers out of the proletariat, and contemporary plutocracy seeks to create an economy that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism.
Some people have caught on. Blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have caught on. Maybe well-off blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have long recognized that the poor of their groups deserve attention from the well-off. Thus the black bourgeoisie sees responsibility toward blacks left behind. "Asians" is of course a category which includes peoples as diverse as Koreans and Pakistanis... but all of the Asian groups that I have met have shown respect for formal learning essential to smooth functioning in American life. The only Hispanics that I have known in large numbers are Mexican-Americans, and they seem to insist that their kids pay attention in school so that they do not become a permanent underclass in intractable poverty. The people not catching on are most white people.
So what is wrong with White America? The white upper class and middle class generally has little contact with poor whites and really cares little for them. You do not see white people from Suburbia serving as mentors to poor whites in Appalachia. Therein lies much of the division in White America. Well-off blacks, Asians, and Hispanics vote like the poor people in their own groups.
(As for the movie Death of a President, it is largely forgotten. It may not have been as awful as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Howard the Duck, Gigli, Inchon!, Showgirls, Jaws 4, or Superman 4, movies that leave impressions in people who had the misfortune to watch them, which might be a backhanded compliment. So what is the relevance! Why bring it up?)
We liberals do not see assassination as a way to deal with Donald Trump. We believe in lawful, constitutional means. I'd be more wary of the Armed Services, the intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement -- entities usually on the Right but who find Trump far more objectionable than Obama ever was. The current President has done something no prior president has done -- making a coup possible. This country is about as polarized as Chile was in 1973, with the President showing undue solidarity with totalitarian leaders at the expense of his country's usual allies. Sure, Allende was as far Left as Trump is far Right.
Quote:The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment
Trump took office. They've spent three years humiliating themselves
trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony
charge after another.
If you want an analogy, consider Richard Nixon. About everyone recognizes that Richard Nixon ran a largely-clean campaign and had no connections to gangland creeps before being elected. To be sure, Nixon had some spiders in his soul, but not enough to overpower his rationality until he got full of himself when the power of the Presidency went to his head. Nixon did not have a legacy of sleazy dealings in business. He had a keen legal mind.
Donald Trump was a sleazy, hollow character before he became President -- and he saw his status as a celebrity as a rationale for his excesses as a leader. Corrupt dealings were already in place before Trump started his campaign for the Presidency. Trump has seen his business connections as things to enrich him and his progeny while President with the aid of his power as President. Three years into his Presidency, Nixon started his dirty-tricks campaign against opponents and dissidents; that was the start of his downfall. Sure, Nixon could win in a landslide while the full nastiness was only a rumor to most Americans, and when "Tricky Dick" was simply an echo of his start as a California politician. It took about two years from the start of the dirty-tricks campaign for the Nixon Presidency to unravel. It has taken a little more time with Trump -- with far-bigger offenses.
So what is the difference? Trump has more people enabling him for partisan ends. His supporters are largely those politicians that the Tea Party elected or tolerated. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the anti-human agenda of the backers of the Tea Party. Remember well that the financial backers of Tea Party pols wanted to divide America on class lines between a Master Class and its victims.
Quote:Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star
Chamber. The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil
War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means
possible.
Which is exactly what gangsters and large-scale cheats say of the process that takes them down. This is exactly what I expect from drug traffickers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and large-scale financial cheats. For such people I shed no tears.
Quote:Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised
that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the
lowest unemployment rate in history. But actually, if you look at
history, it makes a lot of sense. Democrats in the Civil War wanted
blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks
for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks
getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is
where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years. It's pretty
sickening.
Uhhh -- blacks have been getting better formal education and starting small businesses, two of the surest means of escaping poverty. No single politician deserves credit for that, unless it is Obama for economic stewardship that allowed one of the longest periods of economic growth in history. Check an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections, and you will notice that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies over about sixty years. The exceptions are in the High Plains and Mormon Country, and those could be at risk to Trump and the GOP in 2020. Donald Trump is an arrogant, obnoxious @$$hole irrespective of his political values.
Quote:So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not
particularly divisive. It's the Democrats who would say that even the
most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering
unemployment rate for blacks.
Trump may not have intended to intensify divisions that already exist, but he has certainly aggravated them through his incompetence and personal nastiness. This is a man who mocks the handicapped -- something that I learned not do do when I was a small child. I learned early -- "See that disabled veteran? You might have to make that sacrifice for your country! See that blind person? There but for the Grace of God go you!" I am on the autistic spectrum, and my life is a mess for that. To be sure, I would rather have Asperger Syndrome than anything else in the DMS-IV classification (including the extreme narcissism or even sociopathy of Donald Trump)... I would rather be black than have Asperger syndrome, and I recognize that white privilege still persists. (I would not give up some points of IQ because my intellect is all that I am).
Incompetence and malign intent have much the same effect in bringing about tragedy... and good organizations root them out of positions of responsibility so that incompetence or malign intent puts one in positions in which one can hurt only oneself. With Donald Trump I cannot make a ready distinction, but all in all it would have been better had he been brought up without privilege and had to make a living selling used cars. In view of his character I might expect odometer fraud from him.
Quote:But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes
well beyond America. In this generational crisis era, xenophobia,
nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world,
particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing. There are
bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and
Hungary in Europe. There are conflicts today in many places,
including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria,
Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine. There are riots in Hong Kong,
Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere. The Brexit debate is
particularly hilarious.
Happy people do not rebel. Maybe if times were not so bad...
Quote:So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness. It's the generational
Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism,
and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness. This is all part
of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without
Trump.
So what happens if Trump manages to avoid removal by Congress, but the Republican majority in the Senate also goes down with him in the 2020 general election as Trump goes down in a defeat?
The world has a general problem. Much of it is prosperous enough that most people cannot improve their lives just by buying more stuff. So what happens to the proletariat who, as Marx put it, has nothing to sell but its labor, when making more stuff is no longer a means of creating more prosperity? I suggest Piketty, who is only a start but is as far as anyone goes.
So how does a post-scarcity society solve the issue of workers becoming superfluous? Rejection of technology so that people must work harder for the basics again? I will pass on the mass culture that the Old Order Amish reject with their rejection of the technologies of mass media, but do not ask me to give up J S Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- or the cinematic wonders of about eighty years ago.
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.
