Quote:
Originally Posted by Lilu7
Herein is where we encounter the problem with 'democracy' as we know it. You're all correct in wanting to assign blame to Republicans a la "feckless" "cowards". Almost each and every one of them knows something is egregiously wrong here and almost each and every one is doing nothing about it. But what is the key word in their title? It's obv 'representative.' If most people in their district are not riotous about the recent turn of events - in fact - if most outright deny the reality of current events, then R pols apathy and denial is not only wholly allowed, it's actually in line with the way democracy is supposed to work.
The fundamental issue here goes back to the Einbert post I quoted, which is that America has become ridiculously polarized to the point where Person A in the South and Person B in the West can't even agree to what 2+2 is equal to. Republicans are living in an alternate reality that threatens every tenet of democracy as we know it
You are largely correct that paradoxically, the GOP is fundamentally respecting a form of democracy by channeling their voters undemocratic desires into action. I've made similar points in the last week or ****, 6 months about this very thing. If ~40% of people simply have no value for norms and these people tend to be more powerful and better able to impact the system
then you have no norms at all. The whole preening about norms and shared values seems like the Great Liberal Blindspot of the early 21st century and how we unwind to this point. Democrats are hyper defensive and respectful of fictions only they believe.
From last week in the Fire Comey thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
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.
I do think the US is in a bad place. I'm not saying it's intractable. But I am arguing that the normal process of political pluralism and compromise and relying on norms may not be effective, those norms are largely eroded, vestiges of the immediate post WWII system and the Cold War menace. Most critically: they are no longer norms. That's maybe the biggest take-away people should take from Trump. He isn't tearing down the norms; his presence at the head of our governing institutions is a clear demonstration the norms are already eroded, gone, discarded.
That like many times in history, the ultimate course correction or leveler may simply be some kind of external factor or calamity. Even cases when these sorts of movements of hyper segregation, alienation, disparity and strife atrophied and wound themselves down peaceably and without revolution (e.g., 1880-1920), there was still actually a lot of violence and trauma and strife. Trump is a buffoon and an oaf but consider that Harding once credibly threatened to
bomb West Virginia coal miners who were on strike. America ain't always been Tip n Ronnie bipartisan consensus common sense shared wisdom Sorkin narratives, it's often been violent and toxic and angry, full of people and factions and parties that wanted to dominate and kill each other before they dare considered compromise and pluralism. Or simply did. It's been highlighted by commentators and authors, mostly black, but I thought that SNL sketch with Chappelle right after Trump was elected maybe captured it best: there's a whole heckuva lot of white privilege underlying deep anxieties about Trump and our institutions, and being threatened with authortarianism and jackbooted injustice has been simply part of life for many Americans forever.
Last edited by DVaut1; 05-17-2017 at 12:52 PM.
