Fair enough. We agree on the importance of the humanities. (History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.)
We also agree on the facts of the more complex distribution of labor, near-universal literacy, and at least the aspiration to universal suffrage. Our society is indeed more democratic than virtually all of its predecessors. Then again, most of its predecessors would have considered ‘democracy’ to be a pejorative, nearly synonymous with what we today would call ‘mob rule.’
You see the complexity of our society - the division of labor, the networks of communications, the distribution of power, as a source of robustness. In the mood I’m in at the moment, I’m seeing all of these as rather a source of embrittlement. Cutting even a few strands of the web, to my eyes, could make the whole fold up and blow away in the slightest breeze, while mighty gales of dissension and polarization try to tear it apart.
We have near-universal literacy, but we do not have anything resembling widespread understanding of even basic civics. A quarter of my countrymen profess a geocentric cosmology. A third cannot name even one of the three branches of government. Nearly half deny the fundamentals of biology, and a similar number vote at every election for a party whose stated aspiration is to destroy our institutions - what else is ‘government small enough to drown in a bathtub’ but anarchism?
You see a robust enough society to cast off the excesses of our time; I see one at great risk of self-immolation in their embrace. We both agree that we’ve all got to work together to ensure that your vision, and not mine come to pass. Are we agreed on that much?
I don’t think I said anything about not needing to keep improve things. I’m saying that to move forward, we need an analysis grounded in reality as it stands right now. Just calling our current situation updated feudalism doesn’t get us there.
I agree that things need a ways to go before they are improved, yes. I don’t agree with the words you’ve put in my mouth about the way things are today. I’m arguing that an analysis of our current problems need to be grounded in an analysis of our current situation, not in a comparison to a previous mode of production.
It’s ironic that the mythical scary boogeyman leading up to the 2016 election was ISIS coming to your town and stealing you away or killing your Starbucks barista mid-pour and now it’s trump making all those same kinds of fears actually fucking come true.
Why nobody has dealt with the business end of clear and present danger I’ll never understand.
“And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks.”
If this means what everyone and their dog already assumes about this presidency, this is going to be terrible. This president and his entourage have already done so much which I would not have thought possible.
Dumbasses. The Southern Strategy, voter disenfranchisement and suppression is how it started. The moment the GOP stopped trying to gain support from the majority of eligible voters and depend instead on electoral dirty tricks is the same moment they got on the greased slip’n’slide to fascism.
on the plus side, the man has no follow through. he puts everything far enough out in the future that by the time the future rolls around he’s moved onto something else.
since we’re already in a constitutional crisis due to covfefe’s actions, i wonder what legal justifications congress - or, heck… the oregon department of justice - could use to arrest the president.
