10-24-2020, 04:44 AM
(10-23-2020, 02:14 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-23-2020, 04:27 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: America has plenty of equivalents of "Beavis and Butthead", and considering that those types are Generation X and are largely in their forties and fifties, they still vote. They may now have been culled for self-destructive stupidity (think of the Darwin Awards that mock people who make catastrophic errors that kill themselves), but they never learned much. I can imagine "Beavis and Butthead" as Trump supporters because Trump supporters believe in one of the most hare-brained ideologies ever brought forth... (More stuff pretty much true.)
Not so long ago, it became ritual to call all Democrats communist, and all Republicans fascist. There is an element of truth to it, but I would not at all have difficulty telling the difference between Hitler’s or Stalin’s approach to things and what the US is doing. This is not the 1930s and 1940s.
In the last election before Pearl Harbor, the difference between the Democratic and Republican platforms on foreign policy was practically nil. Of course, American politics were already showing one of the usual signs of a society heading into a 1T -- placidity. The KKK was on the fade except as a money-maker for its operators and the German-American Bund was already an object of disgrace. American political sentiment was already becoming hostile to the Axis powers with every act of fascist aggression. An isolationist like Arthur Vandenburg, a Dutch-American, became hostile to the Third Reich about when the land of his ancestors (and many of his constituents in the Grand Rapids area) came under Nazi rule and a brutal occupation. American politics sometimes work that way.
Quote:Looking at it from a different slant, you can see it as dominance of policy by a particular class. With rulers like Atilla, Napoleon and Hitler taking charge, the policy was tribal, aggressive, and territory oriented. The more land one controlled, the more powerful one was. This was very true in the Agricultural Age and became less true as the Industrial Age progressed.
The foundation of Trump's power, such as it is, was real estate. His real estate, unlike that of the feudal lords (the biggest of which in most countries was the all-powerful reigning monarch) is not the lucrative agricultural land on which peasants are helpless, compelled to toil for bare survival and nothing more than the promise of pie-in-the-sky as a reward for suffering without rebellion and facing horrible means of elimination if they ever did challenge their roles... but instead urban real estate. Urban real estate that people must live in after bidding up rents just to have the opportunity to live where the opportunities are may be even more lucrative now than agricultural land ever was. People paying $4000 a month for real estate so that they can live where they make $5000 a month after taxes are anything but wealthy.
The nature of power in America is still real estate as it was with the great landed magnates of medieval times. The power is now with urban real estate.
Quote:With destructive weapons such as the machine gun and the nuke, with defensive alliances and proxy wars becoming better established, it became harder to profit from war. This is not to say people will still try. If you look at Bush 43’s Middle Eastern efforts as colonial imperialism revisited, as a war for oil, no matter how many noble excuses he came to use in public, it is still a thing that is tried. If you do, you are apt to fail. More and more the elites and the leaders are not apt to try. There are more cost effective rackets.
Dubya was not going to nuke Iraqi oil fields. He wanted to turn them over to such an entity as Exxon-Mobil, but that oil would be worthless if it "glowed". Exxon may have had the advertising slogan "Put a tiger in your tank" -- but radioactive gasoline would put something even more dangerous than a tiger (radioactivity) in the passenger compartment.
It may be cynical on my part, but if the real source of economic power behind politics should be urban real estate, then wars of the future might be over who owns the rental properties in places like Seoul, Tokyo, London, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and New York City. Nuking a giant city means that urban real estate becomes worthless. Land would still be valuable in a country like Hungary if Austrian landlords replaced Turkish landlords. The people waxing fat would be Austrian; such would be the change.
Quote:There is a second class struggle where the robber barons attempt to keep wealth at the expense of the people. The most visible indication is an extreme division of wealth. If you are trying to cut benefits, limit the power of unions and ship jobs overseas where it is more profitable, you are taking the robber baron’s side. This is more an Industrial Age problem. The US was making strides against it, but the Republican united the elite’s cash with the racist’s vote. The unraveling was a revisit of giving runaway influence to the elite class with the aid of the racist vote.
One of the biggest pressure groups in America is the National Right-to-Work Committee, which exists for the purpose of eviscerating labor unions so that workers are at the mercy of executives who can exploit the bargaining weaknesses of workers to drive wages down to starvation levels, or at least to the point at which Americans do not see Marxism-Leninism as deliverance from oppression in the wake of some economic meltdown or military debacle. The objective of our economic elites is a plutocracy in which those with the wealth and power compel the responsibility of the common man to serve people devoid of any responsibility except to themselves.
One of the few areas in which I agree with Marxists is their explanation of racism: it is an effort to divide the working class into tribes willing to immiserate each other for the benefit of rapacious plutocrats. It is telling that much of the Civil Rights movement had the support of Big Labor. Do you remember Viola Liuzzo, assassinated by the KKK in Alabama? Her husband was a union official.
Dignity for all of Humanity is rightly an indivisible objective for all people of good will.
Quote:Now this view is different from Democrats are socialists and Republicans fascists. The communists parties were essentially elites, ruling for their position not the people, caring mostly about maintaining power. Major powers are not waging war against other major powers these days. World War II was enough. Bad things happen given modern weapons and the ability to fight proxy wars. As a result those perspectives are badly flawed.
Some Democrats are socialists (if not Marxist-Leninists) and some Republicans are fascists (if not Nazis). Marx had the delusion that ownership was the cause of economic inequality; he did not quite see the harm that bureaucratic power could do. The State might own the property, but whoever administers the property can control who gets what opportunity . The Soviet nomenklatura was all for merit-based authority when they had newly achieved power. Once it was time to establish careers for their children, the retiring Bolsheviks did not want their kids to have to become factory workers or collective farmers.
It is no better here with America's executive elites. They certainly don't want their kids to become factory workers, store clerks, or farm laborers as a system of pure merit would mandate. Power can arise from ownership or position, and those often go together. So it has been since shamans decided the right time to goon the hunt.
Quote:...This crisis seems to be ending the alliance between the elites and the racists, making it no longer dominant. It makes it harder to get involved in abuses either by military acquisition or construction of huge divisions of wealth. There is reason to be optimistic.
The racists have shown how dangerous they are. They are running into America's model minorities who have enough political savvy to appeal to people not in the economic elites. The model minorities have an inordinate level of intellectual prowess, which one needs if one is in competition with the entrenched, largely-white elites.
Ideas are precious. Know well: white people can be just as oppressed as any minorities, especially if they live in the economically-nuked places like a dreary area from Portsmouth, Ohio to Huntington, West Virginia. Thin also of Flint, Michigan and Lima, Ohio.
Quote:But stupidity? The elites and the racists are not stupid. They have goals, even if these objectives are not constructive to the culture as a whole. It is a mistake to allow them to justify themselves by creating an alternate fantasy reality which justifies their dated, misguided and sometimes downright evil aims. But I am less inclined to believe they believe their justifications.
The economic elites may not be stupid in the sense that they act like "Beavis and Butthead", taking a ride in a clothes dryer for the thrill of it (Do not try this at home! It will kill you!), but they can go too far with rapaciousness and economic sadism. They can demand too much in a time when things fall apart; when that happens they will be among the first to end up in front of a wall and facing "revolutionary justice" from a firing squad full of soldiers from the victorious revolutionaries. This said, it is best for all of us that we go nowhere near that possibility.
Quote:The big lesson learned is not to allow a sizable portion of the population indulge in such evil fantasies. Fact checking must become a central part of the culture.
Ideally the elites recognize that evil fantasies are impossible, unsupportable, or ultimately self-destructive. Good laws can prevent such.
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.
