Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Man, oh, man. As january 20 approaches, I just get sicker and sicker in my stomach. These cabinet appointments…Jesus Christ. And Pence and McConnell and Ryan. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

————–
Well, zooey we were totally screwed either way. As you know.

I dont know if Trump will be worse than Hillary, because i dont know what effect the Trump presidency will have four years from now. I also dont agree with noam that every single policy of Trumps is worse than Hillarys. I mean its conceivable to me that Trumps trade deals will be better than Hillarys. I dunno.

He’s a monster though. No doubt. And his cabinet and supreme court justices and fed judges are gonna be nightmarish.

But maybe it will shock people into some kind of leftist-resistance. I think you agree that is our one ray of hope.

…Speaking of Trump tweets andd trump talk…Someone today told me Trump supporters take him seriously, but dont take him literally. And anti-trumpers take him literally but not seriously.

I dunno if that makes any sense but thats what i heard at the water cooler today.

Oh, he will be worse.

I also disagree with Noam that he will be worse in every measurable way. I tend to prefer de-escalation of tension with Russia, for example, and hope that leads to an end of the Syrian conflict, and a relaxation of our murderous exploits in oil-producing countries.

But he will be worse. Look at his appointments. Hillary would have supported pipelines and fracking, but Trump wants to do away with the EPA entirely. Hillary wouldn’t outright assault public education. Trump will. Hillary wouldn’t roll back civil rights with judicial appointments and an a-hole attorney general like Sessions. You can go right down the list. He is more extreme than status quo corporate, planet-killing. He is for killing it faster.

She would have been bad, no doubt. But Trump is worse.

But isn’t Russia looking more and more iffy? We’re learning more about his personal connections with Putin and likely connections to mob bosses there. He owes Russian banks a fortune and they’ve been bailing him out for years. Can we count on that deescalation under those conditions?

Also, for me, just his call to ban all Muslims from entering this country was more than enough to know he’s worse. Throw in his call to register American Muslims, and just them, and that he would shut down mosques and . . . it’s just not an exaggeration to call that nazi-like. All of this followed his blatant lie that he saw “thousands and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11.”

I don’t see him as even remotely “antiwar,” and he’s calling for a huge increase in military spending, including nukes, which he says we should use on the “terrorists” if needbe.

Yeah, Clinton is bad. But Trump is on another level of bad.

I found this excerpt online from the author. It was on Bill Moyers’ site:
link: “http://billmoyers.com/content/steve-fraser-age-acquiescence/

The following excerpt is from the introduction to Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiescence.

Marx once described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. Several decades have come and gone during which we’ve learned not to mention Marx in polite company. Our vocabulary went through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor” or even something as apparently innocuous as “working class.”

In times past, however, such language and the ideas they conjured up struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as accurate depictions of reality. They used them regularly along with words and phrases like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced. Never before, however, has the Vatican of capitalism captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that recently ran the country for a long generation and ended up running it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville (no Marxist he), confessed as much during the Clinton years, when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Occupy Wall Street, even bereft of strategy, program, and specific demands as many lamented when it was a newborn, nonetheless opened up space again for our political imagination by confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament. It rediscovered something that, beneath thickets of political verbiage about tax this and cut that, about end‑of‑the ­world deficits and ­missionary-​minded “job creators,” had been hiding in plain sight: namely, what our ancestors once called “the street of torments.” It achieved a giant leap backward, so to speak, summoning up a history of opposition that had mysteriously withered away.

steve-fraser-120True turning points in American political history are rare. This might seem counterintuitive once we recognize that for so long society was in a constant uproar. Arguably the country was formed and re‑formed in serial acts of violent expropriation. Like the market it has been (and remains) infinitely fungible, living in the perpetually changing present, panting after the future, the next big thing. The demographics of American society are and have always been in permanent upheaval, its racial and ethnic complexion mutating from one generation to the next. Its economic hierarchies exist in a fluid state of dissolution and recrystallization. Social classes go in and out of existence.

Nonetheless, in the face of this all­sided​ liquefaction, American politics have tended to flow within very narrow banks from one generation to the next. The capacious, sometimes stultifying embrace of the two­-party­ system has absorbed most of the heat generated by this or that hot­-​button­ issue, leaving the fundamentals intact. Only under the most trying circumstances has the political system ruptured or come close. Then the prevailing balance of power and wealth between classes and regions has been called into question; then the political geography and demography of the nation have been reconfigured, sometimes for decades to come; only then have axiomatic beliefs about wealth and work, democracy and elitism, equality and individualism, government and the free market been reformulated or at least opened to serious debate, however briefly.
Why, until the sudden eruption of ­OWS — a​ flare‑up that died down rather quickly­ — was​ the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?

A double mystery then is the subject of this book. Speaking generally, one might ask why people submit for so long to various forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination. And then, equally mysterious, why they ever stop giving in. Why acquiesce? Why resist? Looking backward, the indignities and injustices, the hypocrisies and lies, the corruption and cruelty may seem insupportable. Yet they are tolerated. Looking backward, the dangers to life, limb, and livelihood entailed in rebelling may seem too dire to contemplate. Yet in the teeth of all that, rebellion happens. The world is full of recent and long-ago examples of both.

America’s history is mysterious in just this way. This book is an attempt to explore the enigma of resistance and acquiescence as those experiences unfolded in the late nineteenth and again in the late twentieth century. We have grown accustomed for some years now to referring to America’s two gilded ages. The first one was baptized by Mark Twain in his novel of that same name and has forever after been used to capture the era’s exhibitionist material excess and political corruption. The second, our own, which began sometime during the Reagan era and lasted though the financial meltdown of 2008, like the original, earned a reputation for extravagant self-​indulgence by the rich and famous and for a similar political system of, by, and for the moneyed. So it has been natural to assume that these two gilded ages, however much they have differed in their particulars, were essentially the same. Clearly there is truth in that claim. However, they were fundamentally dissimilar.

We have grown accustomed for some years now to referring to America’s two gilded ages. The first one was baptized by Mark Twain in his novel of that same name and has forever after been used to capture the era’s exhibitionist material excess and political corruption. The second, our own, which began sometime during the Reagan era and lasted though the financial meltdown of 2008, like the original, earned a reputation for extravagant self-​indulgence by the rich and famous and for a similar political system of, by, and for the moneyed. So it has been natural to assume that these two gilded ages, however much they have differed in their particulars, were essentially the same. Clearly there is truth in that claim. However, they were fundamentally dissimilar.

Penthouse helipads, McMansions roomy enough to house a regiment, and private island getaways… Substitute those Fifth Avenue castles, Newport beachfront behemoths, and Boss Tweed’s infamous courthouse of a century before and nothing much had changed.

Mark Twain’s Gilded Age has always fascinated and continues to fascinate. The American vernacular is full of references to that era: the “Gay Nineties,” “robber barons,” “how the other half lives,” “cross of gold,” “acres of diamonds,” “conspicuous consumption,” “the leisure class,” “the sweatshop,” “other people’s money,” “social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest,” “the nouveau riche,” “the trust.” What a remarkable cluster of metaphors, so redolent with the era’s social tensions they have become permanent deposits in the national memory bank.

We think of the last third of the nineteenth century as a time of great accomplishment, especially of stunning economic growth and technological transformation and the amassing of stupendous wealth. This is the age of the steam engine and transcontinental railroads, of the mechanical reaper and the telephone, of cities of more than a million and steel mills larger than any on earth, of America’s full immersion in the Industrial Revolution. A once underdeveloped, infant nation became a power to be reckoned with.

For people living back then, however much they were aware of and took pride in these marvels, the Gilded Age was also a time of profound social unease and chronic confrontations. Citizens were worried about how the nation seemed to be verging on cataclysmic divisions of wealth and power. The trauma of the Civil War, so recently concluded, was fresh in everyone’s mind. The abiding fear, spoken aloud again and again, was that a second civil war loomed. Bloody encounters on railroads, in coal mines and steel mills, in city streets and out on the Great Plains made this premonition palpable. This time the war to the death would be between the haves and ­have-​nots, a war of class against class. American society was becoming dangerously, ominously unequal, fracturing into what many at the time called “two nations.”

Until OWS [Occupy Wall Street] came along, all of this would have seemed utterly strange to those living through America’s second Gilded Age. But why? After all, years before the financial meltdown plenty of observers had noted how unequal American society had become. They compared the skewed distribution of income and wealth at the turn of the twenty-first​ century with the original Gilded Age and found it as stark or even starker than at any time in American history. Stories about penthouse helipads, McMansions roomy enough to house a regiment, and private island getaways kept whole magazines and TV shows buzzing. “Crony capitalism,” which Twain had great fun skewering in his novel, was very much still alive and well in the age of Jack Abramoff. Substitute those Fifth Avenue castles, Newport beachfront behemoths, and Boss Tweed’s infamous courthouse of a century before and nothing much had changed.

New York Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez marches with Occupy Wall Street protestors before an attempted re-occupation of a vacant lot beside Duarte Park in New York. December 2011. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Or so it might seem. But in fact times had changed profoundly. Gone missing were the insurrections and all those utopian longings for a world put together differently so as to escape the ravages of industrial capitalism. It was this social chemistry of apocalyptic doom mixed with visionary expectation that had lent the first Gilded Age its distinctive frisson. The absence of all that during the second Gilded Age, despite the obvious similarities it shares with the original, is a reminder that the past is indeed, at least in some respects, a foreign country. Why, until the sudden eruption of ­OWS — a​ flare‑up that died down rather quickly­ — was​ the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?

If the first Gilded Age was full of sound and fury, the second seemed to take place in a padded cell. Might that striking contrast originate in the fact that the capitalist society of the Gay Nineties was nothing like the capitalism of our own time? Or to put it another way: Did the utter strangeness of capitalism when it was first taking shape in ­America —​  ­beginning decades before the Gay ­Nineties — so​ deeply disturb traditional ways of life that for several generations it seemed intolerable to many of those violently uprooted by its onrush? Did that shattering experience elicit responses, radical yet proportionate to the life‑or‑death threat to earlier, cherished ways of life and customary beliefs?

And on the contrary, did a society like our own long ago grow accustomed to all the fundamentals of capitalism, not merely as a way of con-ducting economic affairs, but as a way of being in the world? Did we come to treat those fundamentals as part of the natural order of things, beyond real challenge, like the weather? What were the mechanisms at work in our own distinctive political economy, in the quotidian experiences of work and family life, in the interior of our imaginations, that produced a sensibility of irony and even cynical disengagement rather than a morally charged universe of utopian yearnings and dystopian forebodings?

Gilded ages are, by definition, hiding something; what sparkles like gold is not. But what they’re hiding may differ, fundamentally. Industrial capitalism constituted the understructure of the first Gilded Age. The second rested on finance capitalism. Late-​nineteenth-​century American capitalism gave birth to the “trust” and other forms of corporate consolidation at the expense of smaller businesses. ­Late-twentieth​-​ century­ capitalism, notwithstanding its mania for mergers and acquisitions, is known for its “flexibility,” meaning its penchant for off­-loading​ corporate functions to a world of freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and numberless petty enterprises. The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion.

Excerpted from The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser. Copyright (c) 2015 by Steve Fraser. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.

wv wrote:

So what does the writer say is the reason for the lack of resistance?

w
v

I need to reread it to do that justice — his historical work preceding the present kinda makes the case by itself. The reader, in other words, can deduce it really before his summary . . . .

But, in short, it’s a combination of a long history of suppression of dissent, unions, relative affluence, the promise of capitalist shiny stuff, leading to a kind of nation-wide docility. But the reason the historical stuff is so important is that America wasn’t a capitalist country until after the Civil War. So when the first Gilded Age hit, most Americans still had a memory of how things were before capitalism dominated. They still remembered being their own boss, being an artisan, a small producer, a small farmer, etc. etc. But with the spread of capitalism, Americans got further and further away from knowing what any of that was like. So it got harder and harder for people to believe they could resist how things were. They felt trapped or just assumed there was nothing that can be done about it.

The genius of capitalism is that it basically destroys its competition, unifies previously independent and autonomous markets under one single roof, and then creates the conditions for “no exit.”

Kinda like those Sci-Fi films that have the heroes struggling to break free of their world, only to find themselves reaching the “border,” punching a whole through it, and seeing nothing but empty, dark space out there. They just discovered they’ve been inside a traveling starship all this time.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

What’s your take on that, WV? On what they mean by “the system” and what they want to replace it with.

————
Oh, i just think most of em are prisoners of mainstream rightwing memes, and propaganda. The usual blame the poor stuff.

Corporate-capitalist Propaganda works.

w
v

Agreed.

How do you typically respond to his supporters in real life?

I think we’re in a serious Catch22 with all of this, and it makes honest dialogue close to impossible. And I’m often finding myself forgetting my own advice about that. Talking to people honestly about the reasons for their views tends to just get folks to dig in deeper. It rarely seems to work.

Case in point: After Brexit passed, I wrote a little blog piece on a pro-Sanders, heavily anti-Clinton site, and I assumed it would be well received. Can’t remember the title, but it was basically that Brexit was a victory for the far right and the forces of racism, xenophobia and islamphobia, etc. etc. Nothing within light years of a condemnation of anyone there. I didn’t know anyone there at the time, even in the sense that we can “know” anonymous posters on a bulletin board. I just assumed I was “speaking truth to power,” albeit from a distance, hoping to spark further dialogue.

I was strongly condemned by a few, with a variety of “How dare you call me a racist!!” or “How dare you call ALL supporters of Brexit racist!!” or some variety of that.

(splitting this post in two to make it easier to deal with)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

I dont know if Trump will be worse than Hillary

Supreme court, social security, planned parenthood, medicaire, roe v. wade, EPA, climate science, public education, immigration, taxes and income inequality, and so on.

Of course Trump is worse.

In my mind it’s not even debatable.

And name any time in american history where the mainstream public as a whole was shocked into leftist resistance.

It hasn’t happened since the 1930s. This book talks about how that kind of revolt was much more common in our past, and why. An excellent read. Trails off a bit near the end, as he tries to talk about the present and the future. But the legwork getting to that point is fascinating. As is the contrast between the first and second Gilded Ages, and our reactions to both.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/steve-fraser/the-age-of-acquiescence/9780316185431/

The Age of Acquiescence
The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power
by Steve Fraser

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?

THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser’s account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today’s delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE will be one of the most provocative and talked-about books of the year.

wv wrote:

Not really responding to that article, but just an off-tangent response — I was talking to a cop today at the court-house. He’s a trump supporter. And i asked him point blank about all this ‘russian hacking stuff’ and he said, and i quote: “Its all bullshit”

I think he speaks for a lot of trumpies. They…dont…care. The MSM and the CIA could come up with videos, photos, audios, and a thousand witnesses — and the trumpies..would…not…care. Cause they hate the ‘system’ more than they care about the details about Trump. They ‘know’ he’s shady. They think the system is ‘worse’.

w
v

What’s your take on that, WV? On what they mean by “the system” and what they want to replace it with.

Me? I don’t think they hate “the system” at all. I think they hate that fragments of it occasionally help people Trump supporters believe don’t deserve any help. Mostly people of color, immigrants, the undocumented, government workers, etc. etc. From my point of view, from what I’ve seen, they actually want the government to step in, a lot, be proactive in their lives, fix this, prevent that, make things work better — for THEM. They just hate even thinking that the folks they’ve decided are “unworthy” get any help at all, and the surveys we have about their attitudes back that up.

As in, they honestly seem to believe the government spends most of its time showering largesse on the folks those Trumpies can’t stand, and no time on them. The facts don’t support their conclusions. But that doesn’t stop them from believing that the system is out to get them, while it works overtime to help the “undeserving” to live like kings and queens.

Zooey wrote:

zn wrote:

“[They] are sinking into hopelessness, despair and anger — not directed so much against the institutions that are the agents of the dissolution of their lives and world, but against those who are even more harshly victimized,” he said. “Signs are familiar, and here it does evoke some memories of the rise of European fascism.”

.

This is the key difference between Sanders supporters and Trump supporters. In many ways, they were talking about the same disease: wealth disparity, opportunity disparity, and all that comes with that. But Sanders supporters generally identified our institutions as responsible for that disparity, while Trump supporters blame blacks, latinos, muslims, women, PC libruls who give away their “rights” as handouts to others.

Man, oh, man. As january 20 approaches, I just get sicker and sicker in my stomach. These cabinet appointments…Jesus Christ. And Pence and McConnell and Ryan. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

I think all of that’s true. But I also think Sanders and his supporters take their critique beyond out institutions. They focus on corporate malfeasance as well as governments which allow it. It’s incredibly rare to hear Trump or his supporters ever talk about business culpability. And this is standard right-wing ideology, as you know. It’s never the fault of business, in their minds. It’s only the fault of the government for getting in its way — or in its role as picker of “winners and losers.”

I think the critique needs to be pushed beyond just business or our institutions. We need to finally have a real discussion about capitalism itself. Because, for far too long, that has been suppressed, and “liberals” have been complicit in that too. Anderson Cooper’s shock and disbelief at the mere thought that Sanders might be questioning capitalism was indicative of this, in my view . . . .

wv wrote:

I assume the way the Repugnants will play is something like this — they will scream and yell and diss ObamaCare to their Core/Base voters. And they will talk about fighting the good fight for freedom from big-government, etc. And they will allow the Dems to derail their ‘effort’ to Repeal ObamaCare.

That way they can pretend to fight for something ‘better’ and they can blame the Democrats for blocking their efforts.

Simple.

They are not stupid.

w
v

Yeah. The Republicans are like the big talker at the bar, confronted with another drinker mad enough to actually fight him. And that big talker has friends there, and just as it looks like the two will exchange punches, he positions himself behind his friends, who hold him back, as he fakes his desire to really have that fight.

He can talk about how he “almost came to blows” in the bar that night, and that the other guy was toast if his friends hadn’t held him back.

The GOP really needs the Dems, holding them back all the time, just a little, to keep them from actually following through on their promises.

The Dems do the GOP a great favor, week after week, year after year, and this seems to help the GOP and hurt the Dems.

It must be a part of the plan. “Good cop, bad cop,” etc.

Our two-party system kinda makes it so “the people” will always have a false sense of private versus public.

I have no idea, really, if this is planned, or if planned, how much, or for how long . . . My guts says, yeah. It was set up to do this from the getgo. It’s baked in. And it doesn’t even need ongoing “conspiracies” to make it happen. It’s been naturalized and normalized enough, etc. But my “be reasonable” side says, maybe. We don’t really know . . . .

Anyway . . , it’s like this:

The Dems typically act as a speed bump for “conservative” policies. They have managed, for the last forty years or so, to slow down or even prevent a lot of the worst aspects of right-wing agenda/goals, etc. But I wonder. What would happen if the Dems just stepped back and let the GOP do what it claims it wants to do, regarding the private sector? What would happen if the right actually got to create its beloved udopia without any government interference on business?

I think this may finally wake people up. But I would ask for something in return. I would say, hey, we’re going to let you let business do as it pleases. No regulations. No restrictions. Not on treatment of workers, or quality of goods, or pollution controls, or safety controls. The government will get totally out of your way. But in return for this, you get totally out of the government’s way, too, and let us craft 100% all-non-profit, all-public, all-in-house goods and services . . . and we don’t have to even think for a second how any of this might impact private business interests. Our sole concern will be to improve quality of life for all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay, and there will be zero private-sector input.

And may the best goods and services win!

bnw wrote:

Your post is irrelevant. Trump’s support among republicans is the issue. The Rasmussen poll specifically addresses his support amongst republicans.

But Trump can’t win on Republican support alone, and he faced a very strong “Never Trump” movement that’s still there. He needed independents to win and for disaffected Dems to stay home or vote for Stein.

Without Clinton, with Sanders or someone like him, that doesn’t happen. There is no rallying cry for the Trump campaign, and no three decades of going after the Clintons to help galvanize opposition.

Sanders, for instance, hasn’t faced any real opposition from the GOP over the years. They’ve basically ignored him. Which means, instead of having thirty years of Oppo on the Dem candidate, they’d have to start fresh the summer of 2016.

Sorry, no way Trump would have won. He barely eked out a win against Clinton. And even his own campaign thought he was going to lose, right up into that evening.

He would have been toast if Sanders had run or pretty much any other Dem. Clinton was pretty much the only Dem he had a chance against.

Thanks, WV.

Pretty great talk.

He’s funny, too. “Octopuses have read their Gramsci.”

;>)

Also love that he brought in Rimbaud (one of my favorite poets, all-time), Lautreamont (Les Chants de Maldoror) and the Surrealists who followed them. Have read Walter Benjamin (Illuminations), but had never heard of Christopher Cauldwell and will definitely look him up now. I love the idea of “Gothic Marxism,” and that’s a new term for me too.

Mieville is on my reading list now as well.

Also, Goya, whom I studied in school on my way to a minor in Art History:

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. 1799

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

That’s one poll, bnw. And Rasmussen is well-known for its Republican bias.

Best to look at the polls in the aggregate.

This is a pretty good source for that:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorableunfavorable-5493.html

____

Trump has the lowest approval rate of any incoming president in decades.

Trump’s approval rating is the lowest of any incoming president in nearly 25 years Sonam Sheth Dec. 21, 2016, 1:33 PM

excerpt:

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition approval rating is lower than that of his predecessors over almost the past 25 years, according to a new Gallup poll.

Trump’s approval rating hovers around 48%, which is at least 17 percentage points lower than the lowest approval rating that any of the past three presidents had during his transition.

George W. Bush had a 65% approval rating when he first took office, Bill Clinton took office with a 67% rating, and Barack Obama entered with a 75% rating.

Trump’s disapproval rating of 48% during his transition is also the highest of any president in the past quarter-century. The Gallup study notes that a potential factor driving down the president-elect’s approval rating is that members of the opposing party are much more critical of Trump than they were of previous opponents.

Obama and Clinton had approval ratings of nearly 50% from members of the Republican Party, while Bush’s was almost 50% from Democrats.

According to the poll, Trump’s support among members of his own party, 86%, also lags behind Bush’s Republican support (93%). He also does significantly worse among independents than his predecessors did.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.