01-04-2020, 05:01 PM
(01-04-2020, 09:08 AM)David Horn Wrote:(01-04-2020, 03:07 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-04-2020, 12:59 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: It just got worse... and worse... and worse.
And trending. To keep making the case more solid, all the Democrats need to do is wait. The problem with that is Trups's attempt to distract by being an ever worse president. How long will the Republicans trash the Republicans by letting him stay in power?
I can't see the Republicans walking away from Trump, until he becomes toxic in his own party. He can have a zero percent support level outside the GOP, but inside is all they see.
They are going to stick with him until he loses, even in a narrow loss of the Presidency. The Republican party is to a large extent the TEA Party that still wants a Christian and Corporate State and still will want it after Trump is off the scene.
The current GOP is a semi-fascist, authoritarian Party, and nothing will change that until it finds itself on the brink of irrelevance. It has sought to maintain a 3T agenda of extreme inequality and as a rear-guard for anti-rational opposition to rational science. Such is inconsistent with the usual values of a Civic generation gaining power as rational, egalitarian, progress-oriented people. They want a better world for their children, and they are not going to let poverty and superstition get in the way. Of increasing importance in American life will be the model minorities who will be more influential in shaping American culture.
The upcoming 1T will be have elements of endorsement of and grudging acceptance for the results of the 4T in reshaping the world...and largely a repudiation of 3T values. Should there be endorsement of the 3T, then it will be of the good stuff... like the music of George Gershwin. People will not be doing the crazy stuff, and they will utterly repudiate the bad business, bad politics, and bad mass culture of the 3T. Business will be conducted to improve the lot of the many instead of get-rich-quick (and get-ruined-faster) speculation of the sort that made the Crashes of 1929 and 2008 near-certainties. If you are thinking of housing, someone like the fictional George Babbitt who built and sold houses that people couldn't really afford in the 1920's and the Double-Zero Decade (the eighty-year rule strikes again; Babbitt was coherent in the 1920's and the Double-Zero Decade -- but people just did not do things that way from the 1930's to the 1990's). People will tolerate economic activity best described as long-term, low-yield, and predictable again. Sports will be more civic ritual than narcissistic excess. To be sure, I expect Boomers to follow the GI and Silent in staying physically and intellectually active into their 80's and 90's, unlike the Missionaries who rarely lived so long -- which might mitigate the trend toward the lack of controversy in public life. I expect the youth music of the 1T to parallel what it was in the 1950's: more whimsical than angry, cerebral, or cynical.
"Mister Sandman... bring me a dream"
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.