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Ted's avatar

"My concern is why would anyone working class be republican when they despise us?"

Very good question, Bev Jo. Again from the perspective of my admittedly unscientific "survey" results, I'd divide the polity into three broad categories; those who are willing to discuss issues and attitudes on their merits, those who identify individuals as unthinking ciphers, and those who refuse to think at all and simply hurl insults.

The last can be dismissed, because they cannot be reasoned with and refuse to reveal anything about themselves. The second seem rather adrift, appearing incapable of existing apart from a consensus that offers protection from uncomfortable introspection.

The first category contains those that criticize ideas but do not utterly condemn well-intentioned people for holding those ideas.

From my own perspective, President Trump fits within my pattern recognition as a type subject to what I call "executivitis." This malady afflicts business leaders who, rather than actually studying issues and engaging with the minutiae necessary for effective decisionmaking, find "experts" within their organization and set them at each others' throats, making the final decision on the basis of a sort of gladiatorial, Darwinian approach.

I appreciate your indulgence and beg a bit more.

Immediately following the 2016 election, I engaged in a forum discussion with a number of people who were gloating over the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of those whose candidate lost. I made an appeal to their compassion, pointing out that the new president's public persona was inextricably linked to his television catchphrase of "you're fired!"

These were working-class people, and the replies were instructive; they conceded the point and shared their similar concerns, concerns for job stability and the general welfare of friends and family and their small towns that had been hollowed out by job offshoring.

Another episode I find rather illuminating is one resulting from acts of charity. About forty years ago, I hit a rough patch. My friends on the left sent me care packages, let me couch-surf and fed me dinner. My friends on the right "invented" chores for me to do, things that really didn't urgently require doing, but provided an excuse to give me money and feed me lunch while I performed those handyman tasks.

"transactional," one might say, and do so with some degree of accuracy, but what sort of transaction? My friends on the left found value in conviviality and humor.

I think the "conservative" (whatever that may mean on an individual basis) value is something akin to "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime."

I suspect that you already know this about the diffrent approaches to extending a kindness, but my point is that there is no collective without the individual; there is only a mob, subject to the dynamics of mob behavior, the "mass effect," the "madness of crowds."

those of us who have been truly poor live with the reality of Hobbes' description of life as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short." Those who have never experienced life in that way, are invested in their snap judgments over the reasons for poverty amidst plenty. When I regard the latter, I seem to intuit a sort of "whistling past the graveyard" dynamic.

I also find myself in sympathy with the Libertarian principle espoused by Thoreau; "that governs best which governs least," but it''s an ideal. markets are always distorted and by the time the predators and parasites are reined in by market forces, they've destroyed countless lives irreparably.

There's a cohort of working-class Republicans who despise, but there's a silent majority that just want to be left alone to struggle through life as best they can. They're not so different from Democrats in that regard.

Anyway, thank you for your reply and your indulgence in the ramblings of a tired old man.

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Bev Jo's avatar

The sad problem is that the republicans who want to be left alone are voting in a way that brings our country increasingly closer to a nazi state where maniacs like Drumpf want to be Fuehrer. But republicans have been working against our country since Reagan and before. Reagan wanted all our forests cut down, they want to pollute our air and water and earth. Everything they are for is for their profit and against what is good for the rest of us, including nature.

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Ted's avatar

"the republicans who want to be left alone are voting in a way that brings our country increasingly closer to a nazi state where maniacs like Drumpf want to be Fuehrer."

Authoritarianism appears to be endemic. Power begets a desire for more power and I don't disagree with you about the rising fascist state. On the other hand, I've observed that power principle working to corrupt leadership on both sides of the aisle.

As an old school "bleeding heart Liberal," I'm convinced that what allows the seizure of power by authoritarians like Bush, Clinton, Obama and Trump, is the rise of limited liability.

Communism is state-ownership of the means of production. Fascism is state control over privately-owned means of production. Capitalism is Mercantilism without personal liability for the destruction caused by wealth concentration and economic entropy.

None of those arrangements are exempt from the fundamental laws of economics. The question is always a matter of how deeply each system intrudes into the personal lives of citizens.

There is always a cost to be borne. Low-density agrarianism has environmental costs, but they're more localized. I'm no Malthusian, but there's no coherent refutation of his point that population density has limits beyond which the environmental costs lead to bankruptcy.

The reason why we're in an endless loop of economic growth is entropy. It's a treadmill that leads to hunger and death when one steps aside from it. Rather horrible, but an inescapable fact.

Reagan is a great example. I remember the day he made self-defense unlawful in California. I considered the act racist then, and still do.

And then Clinton. Production costs were rising steeply as the environmental contamination controls were imposed. Eventually, goes the theory, it would have all balanced out, but Clinton scored environmental points by the simple expedient of opening the floodgates to products made in countries that lacked those controls and their associated costs. In other words, he offshored pollution and claimed credit for reducing environmental contamination on American soil.

With the pollution went the jobs. What did America gain? It appears that we simply provided the means for a totalitarian nation to become a grave military and economic threat toward the rest of the world. It was predictable, predicted and we see it manifesting itself more clearly now than ever.

I dunno, Bev Jo, it's quite the conundrum. Central planning doesn't work, laissez-faire doesn't work and every attempt to strike a happy medium between the two results in a "seesawing" from one extreme to the other.

I can no longer consider myself an environmentalist, considering the extremists that seize power in every organization at some point. I'll always be a conservationist, though. Poisoning soil and water is just not a prescription for human flourishing.

However much her extremist background colors her judgement, there's no getting around the fact that Lena Khan and her henchwomen are doing something that is long overdue; applying a corrective to the fascistic control enabled by monetary velocity at the peak of the Pareto distribution curve.

Meanwhile, the unholy alliance between corporate power concentration and the state's otherwise-legitimate monopoly over violence, continues its corruption of our democratically representative republic.

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