Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
At this point I'm really starting to feel like this is all an academic exercise. Nothing is going to stop the vicious descent into authoritarianism. People aren't going to suddenly vote in a blue wave in 2018. Our democracy is just going to slowly die over the next few years.
Since we're getting deep and introspective here I think it's important to grasp, as you probably do, that this is a moment decades in the making. I've made the point before here that you find the root causes of our growing social isolation and economic disparities in policies that extend back 40 or 50 years, or in some cases all the way back to the Civil War.
But while I'm sure this explanation will be considered still somewhat distant, I find the *proximate* big-factor cause to ultimately be migration and specificaly the Great Migration of blacks out of the south and into the North and urban areas, starting around the 1920s but continuing past WWII.
From that point forward, and mixed in with huge levels of migration from Central and South America, American politcal leadership largely did not deal with or meaningfully address integration even if some critical statutory civil rights gains were made. From that point forward, with both the mass migration of racial minorities PLUS the lack of politcal will to meaningfully deal with integration -- the groundwork for all of this was building. We're living in world with growing social and economic stratification, and the persecution mentality and oppositional cutlure seen throughout the right-wing (see its paranoia, its anger, its devotion to Fox News and personality cults like Trump) are all artifacts of these large-scale conditions. The reflexively angry, reactive nature of the old white who only knows the world via Fox News is the result of living largely only surrounded by other whites and a failure of civic institutions to meaningfully integrate or address changing social and economic realities such that these people feel largely dispossesed and foreign to the modern world and economy for reasons they can't even articulate but are channeled through Fox News type punditry.
Predicting the future is hard. I am not hopeless. But I am confident this precise problem has to be solved.
On the good news front, I think we can point to historical parallels to this moment (and I have in the past) that got sorted out without revolution or staggering amounts of violence. The 1880s-1910s in the United States (and Europe too, actually) come to mind. Although I think popular history discounts how much street violence and social unrest there was during the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era.
On the bad news front,
this book is very apt here and I just finished it. It's by Stanford historian Walt Scheidel. And his basic argument is that the greatest leveler of growing inequality throughout most of human history is actually violence and calamity and society's ability to peacefully extricate itself from these sorts of feedback loops is very hard.
Last edited by DVaut1; 05-10-2017 at 02:01 PM.