11-18-2017, 09:58 AM
(11-17-2017, 09:13 PM)gabrielle Wrote:(11-17-2017, 10:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: So what does "Make America Great Again" mean? I will concede that Trump's ideal America will be wonderful for any one who does not have to do real work just to survive. That's how things were in the Russia that President Trump admires. Don't fool yourself: Vladimir Putin shows the relics not of Communism but instead of tsarist Russia. It is easy to see why tsarist Russia so appeals to modern reactionaries like Donald Trump (if with an obvious qualification for his daughter and son-in-law).
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Hey -- admit it! Imperial Russia was a wonderful place so long as you weren't a toiler in a farm, weren't Jewish or gay, and had no conscience. Conspicuous consumption was much in vogue. Profits were high, so it was a great place to invest until World War I .
(OK, the cultural life and scientific community were very good, but those don't depend upon the rottenness of the social order).
Aristocratic orders are not at all democratic, even if everyone but the workers are well represented in the political system. Just modernize the styles and the technology, and you have the Trump dream.
Sad that after a century of fighting and, presumably, defeating fascism and communism, we are back at the same issues from 100 years ago, gross inequality and class warfare.
I had great trouble with the slogan "Make America Great Again". America in older times might have done some things better (such as undergraduate education, and perhaps better manners on some things), but I can't see when it was better without qualifications. Some things might have made life easier, such as lower real real estate prices -- but that implies a much smaller population. More people are competing for lesser square footage in the few places that still have opportunities. Returning to the economic security of the 1950s, when people with less than a high-school education could still earn a middle-class income on an assembly line, would require a return to consumer habits and to high prices for the technology of the time. How many people want to give up consumer goodies like cell phones, personal computers, the Internet, stereophonic sound, and recorded video? Ask yourself whether you would like one television in the household, that one costing the equivalent of a used car today if black and white or a new car if color -- and then with only a small screen? I just saw a 32" flat-screen, cable-ready color TV for $135 at "Wally World"... and unlike the TVs of the 1950s, they don't break down often enough that you get to be on a first-name basis with a TV repairman.
Starting a new life on the open frontier, with knowledge that such could lead to great prosperity for oneself and one's progeny as people might now know wasn't as safe a proposition in those days. Child mortality was high, and people were helpless against household fires. It's easy also to remember the railroad barons who got spectacularly wealthy, but also to forget how many people went from happy in success to destitute in one of the many financial panics. Let's remember how nasty, short, and brutish life was for industrial workers,,, seventy-hour workweeks and forty-year lifespans, with their children often having to leave school to work in the same factories that wore their parents down by age 35. Quack medicine as the norm, and especially dubious panaceas with undisclosed liquor and opiates that simply masked pain while curing nothing? No thanks! Oh, so they didn't have auto accidents. Sure. Horses kicked, dragged, and trampled people to their deaths. The trolley cars of big cities used to run over large numbers of small children.
It's still advantageous to be straight, white, and male... but not as much so as it used to be in the past. I think that American political life became more civilized after black people got the vote. Anyone who thinks Jim Crow practice an aspect of greatness of the American life in the past to be recovered has either a moral or mental gap. Let's not forget the infamous Blood Alley roads. There's much nostalgia about old Route 66, but before the Interstates it carried about a tenth of the highway traffic of Arizona and had a fourth of the highway fatalities. I've taken plenty of drives along an Interstate highway that supplanted one of those Blood Alleys... and I would not take such trips so frequently if I had to use the old Blood Alley complete with intercity trucks.
If life is not great now, it wasn't better in the recent past (unless you could somehow get your youth, looks, and health back). We should be seeking to make America better than ever.
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.