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I have many republican friends. Some are wayyyyyy to the right whom I don’t care for. Others are moderate. But to a person they ALL say they would vote for Trump again notwithstanding their distaste to the man himself.Their reasons? His policies.
Notwithstanding the polls-I think this is a real problem. We are born with “self interest” and he preaches to that. We want what WE want-not what others need. The capitalistic system teaches us that our happiness is dependent on what we “gather” not what we can give. Trump’s claimer is “hey I may be an Ass hole but I can give you (not others in need ) more toys you can enjoy.
So what can be done?
While I have been an optimist for soooooo many years I no longer am. Not because of Trump but because of my “friends” who I talk to. Where in the world did they learn its all about “them”. Is there anything that can practically be done?
Here’s what I think we should do: Stop trying to understand, court, pamper, coddle or work with right-wingers when it comes to making public policy. Instead, we on the left should do everything we can to defeat them and keep them from power. Just utterly defeat them, keep them from power, and once we’re in power, make the best public policy we can for everyone — which necessarily means ignoring right-wingers.
The reason I say the above: It goes to your discussion via “self-interest.” That view is itself “self-serving,” because it’s not at all supported by science, common sense, history or logic. As in, we never would have survived as a species if not for literally hundreds of thousands of years of communal organization, sharing everything, cooperating with each other, helping each other out. I think the vast majority of people prefer that way of life to the dog eat dog world promoted by capitalist propaganda, and I know it’s the better way to view things when making public policy.
(To keep the post relatively short, I’ll add to this later)
Anybody remember a time when you read a book and it had a big effect on you. A transformation. A significant change.
Back in 1988, i was on the ninth floor of WVU’s old Library, and it was late at night, and i was all alone on the ninth floor. I think it was a Friday night. And i remember coming across “The Culture of Terrorism” – an old Chomsky book.
And i read it for a coupla hours, and it kinda cracked up or cracked open my mind. It was like when you dial in the numbers on a combination lock and that last number lines up and there’s a “click”. My brain went “click”. Things were never the same after that. Newsweek and Time never seemed the same after that. I was no longer a mainstreamer politically. I didnt know much but I knew somethin had changed and i couldnt go back to Time/Newsweek/Face-The-Nation world.
James Joyce would have called that an “epiphany.”
I think I’ve probably had too many of those moments for my own good.
May have the dates wrong for this one, but reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, followed by Robert Graves’ Greek Myths — those were the first profound reading experiences I can recall. I think I was 9 or 10. Weird, but it wasn’t that far removed from becoming a Rams’ fan.
I could never look at Christianity, god, gods, religion the same again. It shattered all those things for me. The biggest, brightest light came on . . . that if there were thousands of different gods and goddesses, and thousands of varieties of belief through the millennia, all across the world . . . how could there be any thing like “the one true god”?
Fast forward to a much later epiphany: Reading William Barrett’s Irrational Man. Perhaps the best single intro to Existentialism ever written. Nothing was the same after that, either. I think that was 1983.
A lot of mini-epiphanies since that time, with some launching many others.
Most recently reread a book that did that, but in an odd sort of way: George Scialabba’s awesome What Are Intellectuals Good For? It’s odd because it’s a collection of essays and reviews (primarily) about intellectuals who caused some of those mini-epiphanies in the past, or would have caused them if I had know about them before. Rereading the book made me want to chase them down all over again, or for the first time. A great collection for leftists, especially.
Ask average west virginians on the street what ‘neoliberalism’ is and they will either not know or they will say it means liberal or democrat.
I actually think this ‘naming’ thing is important. I know it is. And neoliberalism is the wrong term to be using unless the audience is academics.
You can have corporate capitalism without neoliberal economic policies. They’re not the same thing.
And the reason most people don’t know about it is because mainstream news does not address the issues. In fact it does not identity neoliberal economics as a “thing.” It has nothing to do with the name. Give it another name and it will still be a mystery to most news outlets and most citizens.
We had “corporate capitalism” under the Keynesian consensus, too. It’s actually, in a sense, a redundant term, cuz incorporation is one of the chief markers for capitalism itself . . . separating it from previous economic forms.
As in, prior to capitalism, the norm was home production, without incorporation. Home production, family production, small family farms, artisans, craftsmen, who never even thought of incorporating what they did. They didn’t need to. They made their products themselves, with use-value in mind, with a local market in mind — an independent local market, one outside any unifying force.
Capitalism changed all of that, killing that home production, killing those family farms and local producers, artisans of use value, etc. etc. . . . forcing people to give up their autonomy and flock to the new factories to work for OTHERS, to make THEM rich instead. Those factories were incorporated, and incorporation became the norm instead of the rare outlier. Corporations then started the process of banding together to lobby for better and better environments for their businesses, all the while workers lost more and more of their independence, status, say in their own destiny, etc. etc.
“Neoliberalism” is basically an attempt to undo the one serious, extended regime of reforms in capitalist history (Keynesianism). It’s the Revenge of the Death Star and the Empire Strikes Back, etc. . . . and seeks a return to minimal regulations on capital, workplaces, benefits, and so on. It wants the lowest possible taxes on corporations and rich people in general, and the privatization of as much of the Commons as is possible . . . almost none of which would have been necessary if not for the brief period of reform already mentioned — which, again, still fell waaay short.
The media won’t talk in those terms because it won’t allow actual criticism of the capitalist system — at all. That’s verboten, as are discussions regarding the homogenization of culture, the commodification of pretty much everything in the life-sphere, and the dumbing down of our politics to make sure no meaningful critiques take place.
