The Maelstrom of Violence

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-30-2017, 07:51 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: As I've said before, fascism only really rises when there is a credible threat to capitalism by communism.  That threat isn't arising.  Neo-conservatism (IE Trotskyism masquerading as something right-wing) has been discredited.  Neo-Liberalism is also discredited.  Civic Nationalism is an out growth of bourgeois liberalism itself, so isn't a threat to capitalism.

I see both Marx and Hitler being discredited.  I too don't see their heirs as credible threats.  This doesn't mean all autocratic rule has gone away.  The European forms have crashed but the Middle East hasn't found its way out of the old patterns yet.  Too many are focused on what they think they learned of the European variants of autocratic rule.  The world overall has been doing autocratic tyranny for far longer than Stalin's and Hitler's time.

This doesn't mean there aren't young testosterone filled youngsters wearing Nazi clothes and waving slaver battle flags.  It riles up folk.  It's not a true attempt to revive gas chambers and public lynchings, but it satisfies the need for attention.

We do have an urban / rural cultural divide and a strong division of wealth.  For decades the wealthy and rural have worked enough together to keep the unraveling memes on the see saw.  Bush 43 saw it at a peak.  He had neo conservatives, big oil, and televangelists.  These groups had different memes and values, but at least early on they managed to work together.  Too many may have been discredited since.  The old memes, the old ideas, have often enough crashed and burned. 

Trump pulled away much of the rural, while the Establishment elites ought to be at least a bit nervous.  Brietbart has an oar in the fight, but are sometimes portraying the Republican establishment as joining the left.  This doesn't feel true yet.  How well will Trump, Palin and others of the rural faction do in a collision with an establishment wealthy enough to provide money, but having trouble gathering the votes?  I don't know yet.  The time isn't quite now.  I don't feel it quite my fight other than hoping both factions end up discredited.  To get there, the left needs to feed Trump more rope.  The rural anti establishment folk haven't found a stable champion with gravitas, but the Trump - Palin personas are both eccentric and intuitive.  I don't know that they are looking for stable champions with gravitas.