My personal theory on Trump supporters (i.e. 1/2 American voters)

My own view is that it reduces to one thing.

The economy has been re-structured to deepen inequality, and this robs people of the quality of life they were once used to.

But typical of the USA going back decades and decades, when that happens, people can’t see it for what it is…and then the political establishment preys on their fears and endorses their scapegoating. The end result is that the people responsible for the bad economic policies keep getting elected, and do more of the same.

Which isn’t hard to do because it’s both parties. Maybe to somewhat different extents. But at the end of the day…not THAT different.

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I think Corporate-Capitalism just destroys people’s minds and/or hearts and/or character. Mainly because the entire system is built on lies and propaganda. It could not survive withOut massive quantities of lies/propaganda.

Capitalism leads to Inequality, which means an entire Underclass is stressed, ignorant, unhealthy, depressed, angry, mis-informed, and easy prey for the worst-kind of capitalist-propaganda. Fox-News/NY-Post style propaganda.

Capitalism leads to a wealthy-class which is privileged, greedy, indifferent, in-denial, blames-the-poor, and easy prey to propaganda aimed at the wealthy. NYTimes/NPR style lies/propaganda.

Capitalism leads to a 1 Percent, super-elite who are, essentially, for all intents and purposes, smiling sociopaths who are destroying the entire biosphere, while at the same time, giving money to charities, acting as media-darlings, and ‘wise’ policy advisors.

This system has spun out of control, and its going to get very ugly. Maybe not in my lifetime, but its going to get very very ugly.

w
v

wv wrote:

I think Corporate-Capitalism just destroys people’s minds and/or hearts and/or character. Mainly because the entire system is built on lies and propaganda. It could not survive withOut massive quantities of lies/propaganda.

Capitalism leads to Inequality, which means an entire Underclass is stressed, ignorant, unhealthy, depressed, angry, mis-informed, and easy prey for the worst-kind of capitalist-propaganda. Fox-News/NY-Post style propaganda.

Capitalism leads to a wealthy-class which is privileged, greedy, indifferent, in-denial, blames-the-poor, and easy prey to propaganda aimed at the wealthy. NYTimes/NPR style lies/propaganda.

Capitalism leads to a 1 Percent, super-elite who are, essentially, for all intents and purposes, smiling sociopaths who are destroying the entire biosphere, while at the same time, giving money to charities, acting as media-darlings, and ‘wise’ policy advisors.

This system has spun out of control, and its going to get very ugly. Maybe not in my lifetime, but its going to get very very ugly.

w
v

Well said. There is no period of time in the entire reign of capitalism where it ever worked to adequately allocate resources or compensation. Not even during the one and only middle class boom time here (1947-1973), which was roughly the same “golden age” for Europe too. Even then, when capitalism was at its “best,” evah, as far as allocation and distribution of access and comp, we still had mass inequality, and minorities and women didn’t share in that boom much, if any. And the West’s relative “success” was always dependent on virtual slave labor overseas.

IMO, there is no way to make it work for the good of all. Not even close. It’s impossible. Its very foundation is designed to concentrate wealth, which concentrates power and privilege too. So how could it? It’s set up that way. And, as Martin Hagglund points out, even social democratic reforms, while greatly needed, are incompatible with that set up — and the reasons are self-evident to me, as well as being bass-ackward.

They come in after the fact, when it’s too late already to prevent that power concentration, so those in power, obviously, will crush even those social democratic reforms whenever and wherever possible.

It all has to go. There is no way to make it work for more than roughly the richest 20%. At best. There is no history of it ever working to the good of society or the planet.

Quick follow up:

One potential and radically important use of social democratic reforms would be this (IMO):

Make it abundantly clear to all citizens that a greater Commons, a far bigger public, non-profit sector, would be a massive boon for all. But to make it have an obvious, can’t miss impact, it has to go Big. Really big. It can’t be mush. It can’t be meh. It can’t be a bit corporate, a bit non-profit, cuz the former will water down the benefits of the latter.

I think that’s one of the best routes toward true economic democracy. Prove in concrete terms that the for-profit private sector simply can’t compete with the non-profit public sector. And it can’t.

Second point to follow up on: The wealthy and near-wealthy all over the globe are going to need to radically downsize their consumption, footprints, etc. etc. And we’re all going to have to work together to lift up the poor and the working poor across the globe. Again, if we just do the latter, we’re speeding up environmental catastrophe. Without major sacrifice — major de-growth — from the richest 20%, at least, the added flow into mainstream consumer culture of the so-called “developing world” will bring on literal End Times.

Gotta pull waaaay back at the top and the middle, while we lift up the bottom and lower middle, etc.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Make it abundantly clear to all citizens that a greater Commons, a far bigger public, non-profit sector, would be a massive boon for all. But to make it have an obvious, can’t miss impact, it has to go Big. Really big. It can’t be mush. It can’t be meh. It can’t be a bit corporate, a bit non-profit, cuz the former will water down the benefits of the latter.

Well long term goals aside (ie. reform v. revolution aside) we already did this. And it worked, though it was a racist version so didn’t work for everyone. Talking about the FDR New Deal plus the GI Bill (both of which were deliberately tailored to be exclusionary in racial terms). So yeah you can have things like that which as we all know, is basically all that Bernie was trying to do–consolidate, protect, and extend the New Deal.

And it wasn’t dismantled by capitalism per se, it was dismantled by narrowly sectarian political and economic neoliberal policies which favored certain constituencies and pretty much screwed everyone else. Leaving the everyone else to blame people of color, liberals, gub’mint, and so on.

Again, the long term aside….right now, are there New Deal policies that would improve the quality of life, along with Green New Deal policies (which themselves have the potential to create jobs and bolster the economy). We all know what that list would look like, including MFA.

I mean I think we all agree with that.

And we know it ain’t gonna happen under Biden.

We agree about what Sanders was actually pushing — and what Biden won’t do. It’s basic FDR, updated for 2020. Where I think we part is on what actually blocked it. Those sectarian factions blocked it on behalf of capitalism, in my view. Neoliberalism is capitalism. It’s actually the logical progression of capitalism, because capitalism creates the power imbalances that allow it to blow through most political checks and balances, including previous reforms. The FDR era? That was an anomaly (IMO), set up by a once in a century (maybe two or three), combination of back to back wars, depression, a surprisingly strong left (relatively speaking), etc. All of that came together in such a way to enable a one-off change in capitalist arrangements. None of that occurred during the roughly three or four centuries* prior to FDR, or after him.

*As you know, historians of capitalism differ a bit regarding its origin date. The most recent history, for me, basically put its beginnings, roughly, with Columbus and the so-called Age of Discovery.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

by Raj Patel (Author), Jason W. Moore (Author)
October 2017

Billy_T wrote:

But it’s just not going to be enough to stem the tide of environmental destruction

Personally? I’m not convinced of that.