04-12-2017, 01:53 AM
People can read into Howe and Strauss whatever they want. Howe and Strauss try to evade partisan politics, a reasonable thing to do in history. Who knows how the Parties will align? Selfish, cruel, corrupt, and rapacious people in extant elites are unlikely to read the canon with the expectation of seeing their demise -- even though such people are the first people to be put in front of the firing squad or be led to the guillotine in the wake of a Crisis that overthrows them. Such people might see a Crisis as the perfect time for intensifying the inequity within the society with greater brutality and repression.
Obviously we do not live in the dying days of the Ancien Régime or the dying days of the Romanov dynasty. Even so there are people who dream of a return to the Gilded Age, a time in which a primitive industrialism by modern standards was forcing rapid economic growth and technological innovation because of the harsh discipline in the sweatshops of the time and because higher profits allowed greater investment in plant and equipment. Of course the assumptions of such a time cannot be met in reality.
But if the brutal conditions of early industrialism can't be restored, then perhaps racism and religious bigotry can be. Thus Wilder, LePen, and... Trump, whose "Make America Great Again" suggests that the way to make things good for people who have been enduring some distress as they see people unlike them shoot past them in economic reality is to cut down those that those in distress resent. Back to the stereotyped lives of poverty, people with such sentiments have, so that the noble white people can prevail even if they are ignoramuses with horrid habits.
In most times the solution is incremental improvements. People get more formal education, have unions looking out for their economic interests, and insist upon some steady improvements in infrastructure.
Donald Trump does not have a consensus on his side. He is unlikely to form one. He is an unconvincing speaker; it's not that he says the wrong things for my sensibilities -- unlike Ronald Reagan he says them awkwardly. He has abysmal ratings of his approval. He has only one way to tell people who didn't vote for him to participate in decision-making: give up your old beliefs and join him.
Obviously we do not live in the dying days of the Ancien Régime or the dying days of the Romanov dynasty. Even so there are people who dream of a return to the Gilded Age, a time in which a primitive industrialism by modern standards was forcing rapid economic growth and technological innovation because of the harsh discipline in the sweatshops of the time and because higher profits allowed greater investment in plant and equipment. Of course the assumptions of such a time cannot be met in reality.
But if the brutal conditions of early industrialism can't be restored, then perhaps racism and religious bigotry can be. Thus Wilder, LePen, and... Trump, whose "Make America Great Again" suggests that the way to make things good for people who have been enduring some distress as they see people unlike them shoot past them in economic reality is to cut down those that those in distress resent. Back to the stereotyped lives of poverty, people with such sentiments have, so that the noble white people can prevail even if they are ignoramuses with horrid habits.
In most times the solution is incremental improvements. People get more formal education, have unions looking out for their economic interests, and insist upon some steady improvements in infrastructure.
Donald Trump does not have a consensus on his side. He is unlikely to form one. He is an unconvincing speaker; it's not that he says the wrong things for my sensibilities -- unlike Ronald Reagan he says them awkwardly. He has abysmal ratings of his approval. He has only one way to tell people who didn't vote for him to participate in decision-making: give up your old beliefs and join him.
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.