01-11-2020, 06:42 PM
(01-11-2020, 04:38 PM)Anthony Wrote:(01-11-2020, 11:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: If America could vote for a man with an African Muslim father for President, then think what else it can vote for.
But this country has gotten a thousand times more polarized since 2008 - and barring an absolute economic meltdown in the next ten months. we will be at an economic summer solstice on Election Day, whereas in 2008 we were approaching an economic winter solstice (which actually occurred a year later with the 10.2% unemployment rate of October of 2009).
The economy is great if one is super-rich, but for everyone else... it is awful. We have an extreme disparity of wealth and poverty. What passes as the middle class by occupation (if young) is heavily in debt. Where the economy is booming the people who make money as employees are paying exorbitant rent. In much of America, the local economy is in full-blown depression.
We avoided a full-blown three-year economic meltdown of the style of 1929-1932 by rescuing the banks and in turn Corporate America -- but Corporate America found that it recovered first and could buy the political system. That it did in 2010 and the process culminated in the election of Donald Trump. To be sure, Trump is not a perfect conservative; he has simply pitted the proletariat against the intelligentsia in a conflict that the Master Class alone can win. People are often working two jobs just to survive, which demonstrates how inequitable the economic order is. The Master Class acts precisely as a Marxist stereotypes it for rapaciousness, cruelty, and irresponsibility.
I contrast the last Crisis to the one that we have. If Obama had many characteristics of FDR, he did not get the chance to force pervasive reforms of the American economy. Corporate America might have been unable to knock him out of the Presidency, but it was able to take over most of America and establish a pure plutocracy. In 2016 it got to impose an absolute plutocracy.
Except -- Donald Trump is an atrocious person, a person with none of the virtues necessary for getting a country out of a Crisis Era. He is ruthless, corrupt, and abrasive. If he is building any consensus it is of his inadequacy as a leader.
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.