Neil Howe: 'Civil War Is More Likely Than People Think'

[pbrower2a]

(02-18-2019, 11:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: These differences existed, but are they relevant today politically? The Deep South white and the Mountain South whites both vote heavily Republican and have the same racist tendencies.

Mass politics in America depend heavily upon regional coalitions. Poor Southern blacks may have little in common with middle-class Chinese-Americans, but they seem to vote much alike. This said, blacks seem to matter not at all in any former Confederate states except in Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Such is a consequence of winner-take-all at the state level. Usually that evens out.

Before 2016 I had suggested that agrarian interests in some Northern  states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin usually got overpowered in Presidential elections, but they probably made the difference in America being a shining example of democracy and a snake-pit in 2016.

President Trump's economic policies seem to have a basis in an assumption that the common man has the duty to suffer as much as possible for the economic elites just to earn the privilege of survival. which is exactly how feudal lords, planters, German and Japanese plutocrats of the 1930s, and operators of the Soviet Gulag system or the infamous Tucker Prison Farm of Arkansas see things. People who act upon such beliefs, whether out of traditional cruelty or extreme 'post-modern' narcissism, get horrid results for everyone else.

We are more likely to have a 1929-style implosion of the economy than a civil war. We have had a foretaste of a 1929-style implosion; just look at what happened for a year and a half beginning in the autumn of 2007 and compare it to the year and a half beginning in the autumn of 1929:




I don't have the detail for 2019 yet, but 192% to 158% (my guess of magnitudes from eyeballing the graph) is a 17.8% drop. I see one nasty leading indicator in people being behind in meeting their debts -- the number of people and the volume indicate that people are in trouble and that consumer purchases on debt should slow down.

The Great Depression at the least undid the severe inequality of the 1920s, the Last Hurrah of the Gilded Age, anhd humbled the rich and powerful by forcing them to focus on economic survival instead of on trying to control the political system. The Little Depression of 2007-2009 solved neither such problem, and both problems threaten to implode the American economy. The economic elites recovered quickly an, much unlike the case in the 1930s, funded the destruction of such influence as organized labor has and promoted monopolistic consolidation of the economy, supposedly to promote growth. They got growth, all right -- in economic inequality and the economic distress that it generates.

If I am to take my choice it would be a 1929-1932 meltdown. Such humanized the American economy and created opportunities for mom-and-pop enterprises to fill the gaps that the business failures left behind. It may be ironic, but the 1930s (once the danger of bank runs was over) was one of the best times ever to start a business. Market realities compelled good habits such as caring about customers -- and business loyalty among customers. There was no easy money, so people were obliged to think of the long term (which people seemed to not care about in the 1920s). People who had industrial jobs found that they could not work as many hours. which is when the 40-hour workweek replaced the 60-hour workweek that had been normal in the 1920s.  Perhaps as significantly as anything else, business profits could not easily be funneled into reactionary politics analogous to the Tea Party  and such Hard Right advocacy groups as Club for Growth, Freedom Works!, and Americans for Prosperity.

In the 1930s there was no possibility of a return to the 3T economics that culminated in the Great Depression. In the 2010s we have felt a reversion of capitalism at its most inexcusable harshness since the time of the slave-owning planters. At the least the Gilded Age was a time of great innovation in technology and business methods that changed li9fe for the better.