12-05-2017, 10:45 AM
(12-04-2017, 07:48 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I remember wasting my first Presidential vote on Anderson. Fortunately, the right candidate won anyway.
I voted for Anderson, and I did not consider my vote wasted. Then as now I was not a populist. I still considered capitalism a benign engine of technological progress and economic growth. Nearly forty years later I recognize our bureaucratic-capitalist order competent only at enriching and pampering elites and excluding people not connected to those elites except from the cast-offs of a supposedly-prosperous society. I see our order taking the worst parts of the American heritage (Southern agrarianism if without the racism, and the Gilded ethos distilled through the mock-Christian Gospel of Greed of Ayn Rand) combined with one of the most objectionable features of the Soviet Union and other Marxist states, to wit a bureaucratic elite that becomes as rapacious and exclusive as a class of exploiters as a land-holding aristocracy. For all that we have going right for us as a nation (a high level of productivity, a heritage of rule of law, mass education well beyond the level of bare literacy, no legal status for official bigotry, civilian control of the Armed Forces, a heritage of competitive elections, and adequate materialism for giving people incentives to improve their lot) we end up with the worst government that we could possibly have. We fell for the idea that the plutocrats could better manage wealth than we can, and then we fell for a demagogue who acts like a televangelist with the usual sociopathy, anti-intellectualism, and indulgence of televangelists at which educated people snicker without the veneer of Christianity. To describe the Trump agenda as a new feudalism fitting a 21st century technology may be hysterical -- but anything other than hysteria about the degradation of democracy as we have a President who acts like a demagogue and a cadre-like Party that uses its bare majority to ensure that anyone not in it gets the shaft is naive.
We will never know what sort of Presidency John Anderson would have offered. He was a GI, and his politics fit a collegial GI culture that no longer exists in American politics. With Boomers the practice is "get what you can while you can, and tough luck for anything else". GI politics was give and take; Boom politics is take everything and let the rest compete for the cast-offs. If Millennial adults fit the Civic pattern , then any GI-like President will appear even under the most freakish circumstances when the first Millennial adults are in their mid-forties, which would be about 2030. Face it -- we got our first Generation-X President from the earliest birth-year of Generation X (1961) when he was 46. We elected our first GI President when the oldest members of the GI generation were turning 59.
GI pols had their virtues, if not also faults. Kennedy had a sex life that nobody could excuse today. LBJ was crude. Nixon was paranoid. Ford had inadequate preparation for the electoral process. Carter had his ideas of how things could be done and had no Plan B. Reagan was intellectually hollow. The elder Bush was politically stale. But as a rule they all believed that the blessings of capitalist productivity were for all to enjoy, and even the welfare state was intended to help children of the laziest and most incompetent parents to get a little. We will never fully understand what Anderson would have done as President, as his personality and agenda never made the limelight. If there should ever be a "John B. Anderson Memorial Library" it will be an undistinguished public library in Rockford, Illinois.
Intense, and exclusive partisanship is the way of American politics. Millennials are no less intense in partisanship than any other generation -- yet. But we are in a Crisis Era, and I expect the intense partisanship to be shattered in the Crisis. Through the 1T Americans will want pragmatism over ideology, quite possibly because intense ideology brought about the greatest dangers of the Crisis. We could even have two very different Parties from what we now have. Maybe the contemporary Hard Right will be discredited in an economic meltdown or a bungled war... and will be rejected forever.That could leave America with a Big Tent party that itself rifts into factions. If the two Parties resemble the CDU and SPD in Germany we will do well enough. Or perhaps we go to a parliamentary system and end up with as many as 30 parties that have some chance to win elections, and coalitions can be made with one of the two bigger parties and figures from several of the small parties.
But so far I have been speaking of things that have not happened yet. Anderson was a conservative who became a moderate, and we see little of that today. We are missing something important, and what we are missing could give us a nasty Crisis Era.
I suggest that if you want to discuss most of what is in this post, please take it elsewhere.
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.