Can we just weed out the voters that vote Authoritarian?
Yeah, that would kinda require authoritarian actions so we are fucked.
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Because during that era (1) the rest of the worldâs industrial capacity was WW2âd all to hell and gone and (2) robotics had made essentially no impact on semi-skilled jobs and (3) energy prices were consistently stable (and low) and (4) interest rates allowed stable savings and investment and (5) the United States had not opened the door to sizable numbers of unskilled immigrants.
(1) and (2) are never coming back, (3) might be, given the right technological choices and (4) and (5) require more political will than we have at the moment.
Both left and right have their panaceas of choice which are touted as the ways to bring back the golden post war days of American working class prosperity. None of these panaceas will work any more.
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Your posts are way better than tea and sympathy. Thanks for that. Wherever my knowledge stops, thatâs where I think I tend to make internal attributions. Itâs a horrible habit of mind and the fastest track to misanthropy and cynicism that I can think of, which I why I often plead for insight from someone else on these sort of topics.
Not to mention â would it do any good?
My take on U.S. fascism is that we drifted into a form of it decades ago. The two party system has frozen into two like-minded parties, the democrats on the center-right, and the republicans on the wing-nut-far-to-the-right. Through legislative (in)action, government cares more about coddling corporations and serving the wealthy than helping ordinary citizens. Individual protest is allowed (because it seems to do no good), but organized protest is restrained (e.g., Occupy Wall Street, demonstrations near the president and party conventions), or simply ignored. Unrestrained police action centers on the poor and minorities. Terrorism is used as an excuse to crack down. Surveillance is widespread. I view things like Obamacare as anomalies which show that U.S. fascism has some minor cracks, but no real sign of falling apart.
In the grocery store, we have 22 different varieties of Colgate toothpaste (I counted), but essentially we have only one choice in government â corporate favoritism, or corporations-are-people-so-let-them-rule-the-world. Sanders (and to some degree Trump) show that perhaps the cracks in this hidden fascism can be used to split it apart. But Iâm not holding my breath.
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Speaking about the 1950âs:
Entire neighborhoods and suburbs here in the Chicago area, as an example, conducted everyday business in languages other than English, there being so few native speakers.
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So what cultural cynicism exists to combat AnarchoCapitalism?
That particular magical solution seems to be coasting along just fine while exerting its cynicism over all other forms of ideology.
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Youâre link doesnât really support that it had the largest immigrant population ever. But it does show a post war spike in immigration. Certainly one can see where the big spikes are from certain nationalities coincide with backlashes against certain immigrants.
There are many factors that contributed to the post war boom. Some have already been listed. A few others things I think that had a big effect: Unions were still strong for manual labor, white collar jobs continued to climb, and I think of the biggest things - credit became more common and available.
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What it shows by implication is that the cumulative effect of the influx of immigrants is particularly huge in the 1950s because it was within the lifespan of virtually all of the biggest waves from the turn of the century on.
For example, I grew up with people who came over before the 1950s, but died in the 1960s having never spoken English (except for a few words learned at work in the factory) because everyone in their town spoke the same language they did (Czech). Their children did not speak English either until they started school, and then only spoke it to each other if the adults werenât around. The U.S. was filled with these families in the 1950s.
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Was it Texas?
Both of my grand parents are children of Czech immigrants. My grandpa learned english early on and had no accent, but my grandma sounded like she was from Europe, though she was born in Texas. My grandpas side came over in the late 1800s, not sure when my grandmas side came over.
Nope, in the Chicago area. They came over at the beginning of WWI. Iâm not Czech at all, but I spent a lot of time there as a child, so itâs a language in which I still have some rudimentary knowledge.
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Well that is more than me. My uncle is fluent. He has a PHD in music.
If you get lost in middle of Texas, follow the polka music and clack of dominoes for some beer.
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Iâm not sure we generally have more trust and reverence toward our political leaders than we did in days past. Figures like Washington and Franklin achieved near-godlike status within their lifetimes. We didnât even have the rule about âno living figures on US currencyâ until 1873. (Can you imagine the uproar if the treasury department tried to put GW Bush or Obama on a banknote during their Presidencies?)
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I think the best path to an engaged electorate is via the complete destruction of gerrymandering, particularly US congressional districts. A tightly-drawn compact district has the effect of keeping the politicians in close contact with their constituents. What we have now, where 85% of all US congressional districts are gerrymandered to be safe for the incumbent party, is the direct cause of a government that is no longer responsive to the governed.
The incumbent party can ignore voters of their own party because those voters have nowhere else to go. The incumbent ignores the opposition anyway, so an incumbent is completely free to ârepresentâ only the powers that fund their re-election. With truly competitive districts, we would hear a lot more about policy and far less about hot-button issues that are only trotted out during the election cycle. At that point, the intelligence and education of a politician will start to become a factor in their electability because they will have to be able to articulate what it is that they want to do to help their constituents.
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Itâs hard to imagine it returning in any real way. I suspect that even with a decentralized, limited government, weâd still have corporations, lobbyists, friendly legislators, and trade groups working together to get what they want. The limited government would be even less able to exert any kind of control.
Basically I see corporate states overwhelming the power of nation states, not in overt ways but in many, hidden interlocking ways that will eventually imprison the rest of us (metaphorically for most people, literally for others). In some ways itâs already happening.
Phooey.
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I like this idea, but how do you actually do it?
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Well, there most likely is a time factor involved, and as someone pointed out the click bait gets the clicks to be promoted. I guess I am just a bit jaded as I work with click tracking and ad analytics as a front end developer, so it doesnât seem all that sophisticated or even curated to me.
It would take a perfect storm of convergence:
First, a really bad scandal that exposes a blatant example;
Then a politician who sees an opportunity to move up by making it an issue;
Then a news media that decides to ride it for a story;
Then a critical mass of people who become outraged, leading to more awareness;
Then more hopefuls decide to become politicians and start a snowball effect.
At some point either the political will evolves, or the courts start reversing themselves and finally declare gerrymandering to be anti-representative and unconstitutional.
It could happen.
But thatâs âgoodâ, because corporations are less corruptible than Big Gubbmint because of reasons, we should remove this lobbyist-run society by firing the lobbyists, destroying regulators, and letting corporations self-regulate.
Of course, this is totally not itself a magically convenient solution to promote the AnCap/Libertarian ideology, nosirree. Itâs those other pie-in-the sky ones that arenât being realistic and are being way too trusting and gullible.
I, person with an opposing ideology, certainly have no ideological bent to cause me to claim knowledge over what is best.
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Wouldnât it have to happen in a lot of the states? If itâs a low probability event, then the probability of having it happen in enough states to make a difference would be even lower.
I dunno. Maybe thereâs hope.
I have no clue as to what can be done, or what would work.
Yikes!
