(10-27-2016, 01:39 PM)playwrite Wrote: I think the divide is much more cosmopolitan/vulgarian, with the vulgarian tribe divided further between the philistine with xenophobic tendencies (disguised as nationalism) and the money-grubbers. To the extent that the money-grubbers can manipulate the philistines will determine how much the combined vulgarian group can remain an active political force.
Many of the vulgarians are proud of Hillary Clinton's label "deplorable", even wearing the word as a badge of pride. Such people would never think of deciding why Hillary Clinton labels them 'deplorable'. Thus I see paraphernalia that read "Deplorables for Trump", apparently for people who read little and fail to contemplate what insults really mean. To them, "homophobia", "xenophobia", and "Islamophobia" that she considers horrible are harmless and even admirable.
The money-grubbers may not be particularly bigoted; they simply have their gain above all else -- some times even their own indulgence. So why shouldn't working people make great sacrifices for the creation of elite wealth, the only virtue in America? To such an end the common man needs to pay more of the cost of enforcing capitalist 'needs' through taxes? Why should plutocrats need to show any conscience? So it is back to the Gilded Age with its 70-hour work-weeks and 40-year lifespans for industrial workers and extreme distress for all but a few big land-owners in rural America because such creates wealth.
(Really, the great plantations were not so good at creating wealth as they were at concentrating income; the progress of the Gilded Age was innovation in technology and business practices. Some fellow named Karl Marx showed that the concentration of income would eventually create human suffering and social instability that would manifest itself in revolution in which the workers would rise against their cruel and perverse masters and overthrow them in a new era of social equity.
The wiser capitalists, or at least those who saw their innovations needed mass consumption to justify high levels of productivity, sought to make the proletariat into a market and give workers a stake in the system.
Quote:Some of the philistines sub-group will smartin up and reject the xenophobic siren calls of the money-grubbers sub-group. However, most will not change but instead fall further and further behind economically and healthwise and simply die out.
Support for Donald Trump is largely low-end, among people whose civic ignorance is 'deplorable'. I notice a lack of reflection -- how can people believe something else? These people get answers that they never asked for from Donald Trump, answers that one would not accept if one faces the same economic hardships but has a different ethnic or religious origin or level of intellectual achievement. Donald Trump plays the white populist card well, but he does little to assuage fears of people not clearly white or who can think things through.
I hate to use the political f-word, but as with fascists of the past, Trump appeals to people of superficial learning. Such people buy and read tabloids... and when they read those tabloids they see nothing missing. They identify with 'celebrities', many of them vulgar and intellectually vacuous parvenus who act as if they won the Super-Duper Megabucks Lottery, or at least pretending to be such. The only way in which those people in the 'deplorable basket' will ever get rich is by winning the Super Duper Megabucks Lottery or its equivalent in a casino. So don't bother with book-learning that might teach some of the underlying realities of life, some workable philosophy of existence, or the idea that there is more to life than (I have said it often enough).
Their kids need to put down the video games on occasion or turn away from such on the Internet often enough to learn some stuff that gives them more opportunities on the job and more meaning in life once they get past the nothing-but-survival mode of existence. One is more than one's economic role, or one's life is miserable. Ask any slave who has ever lived.
Quote:On occasion, the money-grubbers will come to fear what they have wrought with their seething philistine sheeple and back off - like the ones currently backing away from Trumpism. The money-grubbers subgroup, however, cannot be made to fully come to heel until enough of their philistine sheeple either smartin up or die off to sufficiently undermine the political power of the combined vulgarians group.
But few of the money-grubbers are pure misers who insist upon misery for everyone else so that the misers can simply accumulate capital without reward other than in owning capital or watching it accumulate in others' hands. Most recognize that workers need some stake in the system so that they have something more to lose than their chains.
Quote:It's going to take a while, but we're on the road to it. First by winning national level elections and increasingly statewide elections that through making the SCOTUS and state judiciary increasingly progressive will undermine gerrymandering, corporate electioneering, voter suppression and other desperate rearguard effort. But just as important, these losses will help split the vulgarians into their two subgroups, despising each other as much as the cosmopolitans and thereby hasten their eventual departure as a political force.
Maybe it's hard to be a vulgarian if one sees the economic elites as exploiters and abusers. Remember -- if one is not white, straight, Christian, and Anglo one has good cause to distrust Donald Trump. The votes of all those groups, however subdivided, would give Hillary Clinton 538 electoral votes. This is true even of groups doing better than average, like most Asian ethnic groups. Middle-class blacks and Hispanics vote like poor blacks or Hispanics against Trump.
Donald Trump is a nightmare to many Americans. Maybe if poor white people would contemplate why blacks in the same economic plight see Donald Trump as a political anathema they might vote on conscience instead of for some junk politics. But who needs a conscience when one's life is debased to sex, booze, mass low culture, and the implicit acceptance of superiority for being white, Anglo, straight, and Christian?
Some people are more concerned about their rights as expressed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; some are more concerned about the 2nd Amendment. Go figure. I have heard some people express themselves as "10th-Amendment Americans". Somehow they neglect the 13th, 14th, and 15th.
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.