09-16-2021, 09:26 AM
(09-16-2021, 06:48 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I haven’t been pitching in as much here lately. From my perspective the Republican Party has considerable commitment to racism and the elite. During the unraveling, they had a considerable advantage in seeking elite profit, tax cuts for the rich, sending jobs abroad where you don’t lose profits to high wages, benefits and environmental concerns, and attacking labor, benefits and wages in the US. As small government and cutting domestic spending was seen as hurting minorities rather than the working poor, the racists were pleased. As so many problems like infrastructure and the environment were more encountered and obvious in urban areas, the idea that small government didn’t have to solve problems less encountered in rural areas. This came to hurt when Covid became one of the problems.Unraveling ways usually are smacked down in a Crisis Era, usually because they lose elite support for being unproductive, costly, and disruptive. This time the economic elites act as if they prefer that people be divided along every imaginable line of identity, that every man be for himself, and that maximal inequality is a desirable end in itself. COVID-19 may be exactly what repudiates 3T patterns in politics and economics.
The Right abandoned the idea of small government when Small Government no longer served Right ends. Big Government is excellent cover for crony capitalism, wars for profit, union-busting, and the prison-industrial complex. For what it is worth, the libertarian Small Government types are political orphans.
Quote:Now these aren’t Classic’s problems. He is not an elite. He is not a raving racist. He just is tied by habit to the Republicans and extrapolates his own views onto an imaginary Acirema. These views are not what I see as the primary Republican / Red threat. The problem is elites using money to influence government and racism gathering more votes that LBJ gained by pandering towards the blacks. The elite money and racist votes dominated the unravelling. With the twin Covid and Floyd triggers, these factors could be reversed in the ongoing crisis.
At some point, the rural, under-educated part of the white Mountain and deep South will realize that it has been used and that it has gotten nothing from alignment with reactionary interests.
Quote:But Classic has an idea that the Republicans are for the working man. I don’t think so. Oh, they tried to make it so for a while. For a time when the ‘Tea Party’ was towards its peak, there was an attempt at the Republican’s main stream divorcing itself from the elite influence. From my view, this died with Trump. He brought the elite and racist elements back together.
Success of non-white, non-Christian, and non-straight people sticks in the craw. The problem is that whites of the Mountain and deep South are themselves oppressed people. I recognize that it was long ago, but just before he died, Dr. Martin Luther King was planning a trip to Appalachia to address the economic hardships already known in the area. I cannot say that he would have been successful at it, but oppression is oppression. At the least, middle-class Hispanics seem to care about their poorer brethren. Bourgeois blacks seek to improve the lives of poor blacks. What do middle-class and upper-class whites do for poor whites in the Mountain and Deep South? Nothing!
Quote:But at any rate, arguing with Classic doesn’t seem to be much worth it. Attention should stay focused on the real problems, the influence of money on government, and systematic racism.
He often shows beyond any doubt that he does not understand what he is talking about.
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.