Right now, the entire so-called civilized world seems to be going through some sort of gastric pains, with lots of bloating, gas, irritability, gorging and purging, to use a rather disgusting metaphor. And it seems to be something for which there’s no ready cure, even if we could get everyone to open up and swallow it.
The only positive I can find is that, from what I’ve learned looking into the past via lots of books, after a period like this comes an Age of Reason.
Look, that’s what keeps me going sometimes, okay? I might not be around for it, but so what? At least things’ll be better for my son and everyone else who outlives me.
Yeah, that’s true. The 20s and 30s and the depression gave us serious economic reforms that leveled out the economy for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century, and the second world war helped to create serious reforms with regards to many of our isms as well.
So the revolution will be put down, but little more than twenty years and a few wars later those in power will give us a twisted version of what we wanted on their own terms.
I don’t want you to do anything(!) - I just want to say that while we may have divergences of opinion (and OK your are more likely to be right than I am) I hope we are basically on the same side.
You really do not accept the concept of the difference between the rulers and the ruled. Until you take it on in a less hand-wavey way, your “advice” isn’t useful at all.
of a sort. at least on the face of things trump said he was anti-wall st, and anti-globalization.
my read is: oil, gas, coal, steel - all the rallying cries - are blue collar, manufacturing type jobs. that’s different (for his voters) than the faceless forces of globalization.
where the left is on surer footing is in recognizing that all capitalist endevours can be harmful and therefore, at times, will need regulation.
the right seems to believe as long as the companies are in the trusted social network then the companies are by definition good and decent. once you’re in that zone, anything goes. buyer beware.
so, for his voters companies, by and large, are okay: so long as they put american, and especially white, christian, american interests first.
another way of saying it is: wall street is where republicans and democrats overlap, and manufacturing is where the tea party and progressives overlap.
The engineer in me always laughs grimly at the idea that any of those fields are blue collar, especially since now I basically work in the wider oil & gas industry. Half of our “blue collar” guys all have BS degrees, and the industries are notoriously the worst run industries in the world that simply have been around so long and/or make so much money it doesn’t matter.
I’ve been repeatedly ranting on that subject ever since the primary.
The working class is the only economic group that voted majority Democratic. The core of Trump’s support is very solidly in the white middle class. Not impoverished rural yokels; financially comfortable suburban bigots.
It is understandable why upper- and middle-class America wants to blame the poor for Trump. But it’s factually incorrect, hugely destructive and completely fucking infuriating.
It would appear that Don Sr signed off on the bogus statement that Don Jr went to talk to somebody Russian about adoptions, which, if true, is Don Sr committing obstruction of justice, one of the charges from Nixon’s articles of impeachment:
If (big if) Don Sr is impeached, he’s effectively out of the pardoning business, and any previously issued pardon likely will be seen as attempted obstruction of justice. Pence is probably not going to come through this smelling like a rose, either. The press already released the Ryan tape. [/quote]
You already have slam-dunk evidence of obstruction of justice from the Comey sacking. And the emoluments clause provided clear justification for impeachment since the day Trump was sworn in.
None of that matters while the GOP holds the House. Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one.
Nixon had a Democratic legislature and unanimous opposition from the USSC. Trump has McConnell, Ryan and Gorsuch.
The midterms are not going to substantially affect the House, because the red states are no longer under democratic governance.
If America waits to see how the midterms pan out, we’re all dead.
If I didn’t know we lived in different countries, I’d say we were in the same neighbourhood.
It’s always jarring to me to hear someone gush on about crystals or kale or whatever and then jump into right-wing politics without missing a beat. Then I realise they have more in common with 18c aristocrats than actual save-the-earth types. They’re granola-crunchers the way Marie Antoinette and her friends used to play at being farmers.
During WW2 a lot of debates took place in the UK and the Soviet Union about how life should be organised after the war. The result was the election of a left wing (ish) government in the UK in 1945. The iron boot of Stalinism delayed the process in the USSR for a long time but the collapse was catastrophic when it came.
The US never really faced a threat to the US mainland, and the percentage of Americans who died in WW2 was much smaller than in the UK or the USSR. The result was, I think, that the US emerged a very much stronger and more confident society due to the increase in economic activity, but it didn’t really challenge its preconceptions as to how society should be organised (despite Eisenhower’s very percipient warning). Even Vietnam wasn’t actually a very big deal in world historic terms.
I suspect Trump is the nadir of this process. But the US may be strong enough to weather Trumpismus without serious change. Perhaps it will just get a bit patched.
