01-10-2020, 03:31 PM
(01-10-2020, 01:18 PM)Skabungus Wrote:(01-07-2020, 11:55 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Because we live in a Crisis and find it frustrating and viscerally offensive. There is no obvious flow.
If one is a liberal, one almost feels as if America has succumbed to something that offends every sensibility that mandates a resistance that we are not yet sure will prevail.
Damn. You hit that on the head. Hard.
So Pbrower2a, do you think 2020-2024 with be the culmination? Would be nice.
Dump Trump, 2020, and especially any receptiveness to demagoguery. Demagogues always offer contradictory programs and promises; logical contradictions invariably implode.
Start recognizing that brute-force solutions to problems either do not work or are too costly to get satisfying results.
Use technology to create opportunity in 'forgotten places'. Just think of the Tennessee Valley Authority; it brought unprecedented prosperity to a chunk of America that was living under Third World standards. Develop the equivalent of the GI Bill or the Marshall Plan (or some synthesis) for America's poor.
Ideally we get an FDR-like administration following Trump. Maybe we get to carry out Obama's dreams as the Hard Right implodes politically. (I expect Mitch McConnell to quash the impeachment of Donald Trump through some disgraceful subterfuge, but such will look unconscionable in November). Is disgrace as effective as a Great Depression in discrediting a political tendency?
The last part of a Crisis often moves with amazing speed.
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.