On the contrary - the US is a peek at the future the Tories want for the UK. We beat them to it, long ago. This is the process by which the UK turns into the US, although the UK’s austerity government is still less austere than the US at its most free-spending. (Because much of what we spend money on isn’t people.) Even if the NHS is suffering, they at least still have it, etc.
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That and ramping up the fear and hate in the UK tabloids (Sun, Mail, Express) so that when you do see them, they are shirkers, leeches, frauds, foreigners, etc.
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It’s more of a give-and-take. The U.S. has a default state of “screw you, I’ve got mine Jack” that the Tories have wanted to emulate by eliminating parts of the existing social safety net. Meanwhile, the UK (mostly the Tories but sometimes Blairite Labour) is constantly introducing individual awful new policies in this regard that conservatives in the States borrow to cut more holes in what remains of our social safety net. Some of the latter policies, designed to make it even more difficult for vulnerable people to collect aid from a system they’ve paid into, are documented in the film “I, Daniel Blake”, which @teknocholer mentioned above.
Rubes are rubes in both countries, and if conservatives are telling them that taxes are tyranny, giving them scare stories about a non-existent “crisis” in state pensions or SSI, and that they can all be millionaires if social programmes are cut and the money is instead given to Wall Street/The City to invest (on generous two-and-twenty terms, no doubt) they’ll go for it.
As in many aspects of the political and economic scene I’m taking a “hope for the best, expect the worst” attitude and planning for the latter. In both countries we’re headed back toward the pre-war class allocations of a tiny ownership class, a rump middle class, and a precariat/unnecessariat class of between 80-90% of the population. Increased automation (benefitting only the ownership class), global warming, the continued assumption of greed as the natural order of things (and the consequent economic and political policies) and the resurgence of right-wing populism are going to make the average person’s life in much of the West more harsh than it has been over the last 60 years.
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What’s that, SSI are bringing out a game in the Crisis series; I thought that Crytek made those? Damn, the skim reading lessons are really paying off!
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Insert your own local examples:
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All good points.
Sigh. I hate to be a downer in these types of discussions but, shesus, winning a couple of elections will be nice but it ain’t gonna solve the problems we have gotten ourselves into. It’s almost impossible, as far as I can tell, to find a lefty running for office who can articulate what it’s going to take to get us back to, oh, where we were just twenty years ago. Long term planning on the left seems largely defunct (minus some completely currently unelectable options). Even the DSA, in their altogether sensible Bread and Roses platform is looking at, oh, getting us back to the beginning of ACA and that’s about it. (Don’t get me wrong, the current DSA platform is great, maybe the best thing going in the US right now.)
One of the problems is that the right, in the US and elsewhere, has the institutional infrastructure to think about the long term big picture. This kind of thing, for example, just doesn’t exist on the left:
Long term kinda lefty (let’s say not evil) planning used to exist, in a fashion, via various state institutions, land grant college think tanks, institutions left over from the progressive era, etc. But, sadly, that’s mostly gone now and there’s basically no long term planning in the Democratic Party. That Christian Nationalism legislation program is making serious in-roads, no one is fighting it, and it’s going to create a range of serious problems in the near and distant future when the left actually does get around to being in power for more than a few years. And the right is going at their long term, big picture goals in a number of ways. It’s not just flood-the-floor legislation, it’s the courts, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and on and on.
Okay, sorry. That’s all kinda depressing . . . yay! Go left! Win some elections! Surely, it will all work out in the end!
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Well said and accurate. Part of what’s holding progressives back, though, is people taking this kind of thing literally:
One of the main problems I have with Corbyn is that he’s trying to take the UK back to the 1960s and 1970s and assuming that the economic and geopolitical context of those times can be reconstructed along with the social programmes that are needed. Until Boomers (or the UK equivalent) finally lose their clout in Western politics we’re going to be stuck with politicians across the “political compass” pining for the past instead of looking toward the future.
The good news is that in the U.S. we’re currently at a demographic crossover point, with Millenials who are understandably concerned about the future supplanting their parents as the majority of the electorate. The bad news is that the outcome could go either way. As Malcolm Harris puts it in his book "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials":
If […] America is quickly headed for full-fledged dystopia, it will have gone through us Millenials first, and we will have become the first generation of true American fascists. On the other hand, were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap, and we will have become the first generation of successful American revolutionaries. The stakes really are that high: In the coming decades, more Americans will be forced to adapt in larger, stranger ways to an increasingly hostile environment.
I’m sure this is also applicable in the UK and most Western OECD countries.
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Yes, you are right about looking/going backwards. That’s not going to work. The situation has changed and what was once, is no longer. However, I guess by “where we were” I largely mean “where we were in terms of economic and judicial equality, in terms of hope of the future, in terms of being able to robustly deal with natural and human disasters, and generally feel that we, as a whole, are at least trying to be more decent than our parents” . . . something like that. Yes, it’s distressing that any number of successful lefty politicians take “going back twenty years (or fifty years or whatever)” quite literally. So, you hear “We’ll bring back manufacturing!” and “Research and development will lead to new solutions!” and so on. When, in fact, we should be articulating a sustainable future, a future that deals with extreme changes to our circumstances, etc. and at least acknowledge the facts on the ground while suggesting solutions.
A Dane! Interesting. Yes, the UK might be your future. Sadly, somewhere between Alabama and Russia is probably all our futures, assume we survive to the future.
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You are being way too optimistic. It’s taken the UK 40 years of full-on neoliberal, thatcherite policy to get the country into this pickle. It could take at least the same to shift the Overton window back to where it should be, some form of northern European social democracy akin to the Scandinavian model.
To make matters worse, a struggling. unbalanced, low wage, low productivity, high personal debt, import reliant economy are structural issues that will need decades of social and economic investment to even begin to turn around.
And then there’s Brexit. Say what you like about austerity Dude, at least it was an ethos.
Brexit will cover government in Carbonite. All of Jeremy’s hopes and dreams for a fairer country, any hopes of a transformative economic and social agenda undermined by the existential economic dragnet of Brexit. A Labour led government in charge of a capitalist economy going tits up, you’d never hear the end of it. A sniping, predominantly right wing press will have a field day, There will be no honeymoon period for a Corbyn government, the press attacks will be relentless from day one.
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But the obscenely wealthy got wealthier as a result of the austerity. Nothing’s more important than that, right?
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I completely agree with you.
My question is… Why not? Why doesn’t the left organize this way, why doesn’t the left have the same funding and organization, why are they not willing to do what it takes to win?
Why is the US left so @$#& ineffective?
“When they go low we go high” = Donald Trump in the white house.
There are days I think that hijacking the Republican party back to the ideals of the nation might be easier than getting the Dems to win. It isn’t like Republican voters actually care what the party stands for, they just want to win.
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Either the picture is exagerated or you are not able to see the problem. There is no way to know. As bobtato wrote:
If you belong to a demographic with a lot of Tory voters, you simply won’t see the effects of austerity, and that is very much by design. It’s targeted at places you don’t go to, and people you don’t mix with.
It would really be essential to kown how much the difference between the article and your observations is accountable to that effect and how much to simple exagerration. But there is no way for us to know.
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If you think this is a dystopian future for the US I would like to invite you to join me for a tour of Cleveland. This is our present and our future looks even more bleak if some serious changes aren’t made.
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I have no doubts about that. Like I said in a previous response, I was being deliberately unclear in my wording.
I live in Denmark, Scandinavia, where the devastation is not as advanced but clearly approaching.
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Relevantly, I just saw Adam Curtis’ old documentary about the rise of New Public Management and the very bleak Cold War theories, based on the built-in distrust of Jon Nash’s mathematical models and R.D. Laing’s negative conception of relations between human beings, on which it is built:
Sorry for the assumption.
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