Denazification and Second American Reconstruction
March 7, 2025 9:32 PM Subscribe
Providing that the USA is able to get out of its slide into authoritarianism -- what might be done to prevent such slides in the future?
- A Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and to give Congress real power to regulate campaign finance.
- A frank and open open discussion about the prevalence of racism across society, one that doesn’t devolve into scolding and lecturing, but rather makes a sincere attempt to heal the nation. The kind of discussion that should have happened in the 1860s, and also should have happened in the 1960s, but never did.
- Frank and open discussions about the prevalence of similar issues such as child abuse, bullying, and sexual assault.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:40 AM on March 8 [9 favorites]
Paul Slade said it very well. And flabdablet, awesome video.
In addition to overturning Citizens United I would add: pass the John Lewis Voting Rights. The difference in voting patterns after the Justice Dept review of redistricting expired to today is breathtaking. People have to feel that their vote matters or they won't vote. I think the Electoral College needs to go. But baring that each state ought to award Electoral Votes on a pro-rata basis. Winner take all is one reason there are only about 6 or 7 "swing states".
Bring back civics in high school. I could not believe it when I heard that was no longer required.
Emphasize critical thinking skills. Making people an "other". Lambasting ideas such as DEI, for all its faults, is the modern day Commie scare.
Bring back some form of "equal time" in the media. It won't get rid of echo chambers but it might help.
The tax code has to be more equitable and that means the wealthy paying more. There needs to be no cap on SS taxes on income. And get rid of "carried interest" loophole in hedge funds. In fact, there has to be some kind of tax on "deferred gains".
After the war Japan and Germany made deep and painful changes to their societies. It can be done.
posted by jtexman1 at 5:08 AM on March 8 [10 favorites]
In addition to overturning Citizens United I would add: pass the John Lewis Voting Rights. The difference in voting patterns after the Justice Dept review of redistricting expired to today is breathtaking. People have to feel that their vote matters or they won't vote. I think the Electoral College needs to go. But baring that each state ought to award Electoral Votes on a pro-rata basis. Winner take all is one reason there are only about 6 or 7 "swing states".
Bring back civics in high school. I could not believe it when I heard that was no longer required.
Emphasize critical thinking skills. Making people an "other". Lambasting ideas such as DEI, for all its faults, is the modern day Commie scare.
Bring back some form of "equal time" in the media. It won't get rid of echo chambers but it might help.
The tax code has to be more equitable and that means the wealthy paying more. There needs to be no cap on SS taxes on income. And get rid of "carried interest" loophole in hedge funds. In fact, there has to be some kind of tax on "deferred gains".
After the war Japan and Germany made deep and painful changes to their societies. It can be done.
posted by jtexman1 at 5:08 AM on March 8 [10 favorites]
Voting rights/ease of voting is huge, as is eliminating the electoral college. There is another huge voting problem that is independent of those, and can be worked on simultaneously:
The best way of "making our votes count" is moving beyond our stupid manner of vote counting. We've known of superior ways to count votes since the French Revolution, and that first-past-the-post method we use in most cases is objectively and mathematically inferior. Arrow proved in 1950 that there is no objectively perfectly fair and democratic voting method in multi-candidate races (for some values of those words), but that's ok because literally anything seriously suggested is a vast improvement, and the differences between the modern (e.g. since ~1780s) methods are mostly small edge cases that are now very well understood. Or things like some of them are better if you have 100 candidates and some of them are better for 3-5. Even the sportsball people have figured this out, and use Borda Count for important things like the Heisman trophy. But we are stuck voting in crowded primaries the worst possible way.
FairVote.org is working on this. Ranked Choice methods probably have the most momentum, I'm also a fan of Range Voting. That site also has a particularly nice and simple anti-gerrymandering procedure, and all states should adopt some similarly simple districting method to end gerrymandering, re-applied every e.g. 5-10 years to track population changes.
TLDR: Voting methods reform. We need to learn the simplest, most basic lessons on how to count votes in a fair and democratic manner. Mathematicians and political scientists have been trying to teach these for a few hundred years, and we need to implement improvements based on these lessons if we want to have our votes count to democratically elect a representative govt.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:43 AM on March 8
The best way of "making our votes count" is moving beyond our stupid manner of vote counting. We've known of superior ways to count votes since the French Revolution, and that first-past-the-post method we use in most cases is objectively and mathematically inferior. Arrow proved in 1950 that there is no objectively perfectly fair and democratic voting method in multi-candidate races (for some values of those words), but that's ok because literally anything seriously suggested is a vast improvement, and the differences between the modern (e.g. since ~1780s) methods are mostly small edge cases that are now very well understood. Or things like some of them are better if you have 100 candidates and some of them are better for 3-5. Even the sportsball people have figured this out, and use Borda Count for important things like the Heisman trophy. But we are stuck voting in crowded primaries the worst possible way.
FairVote.org is working on this. Ranked Choice methods probably have the most momentum, I'm also a fan of Range Voting. That site also has a particularly nice and simple anti-gerrymandering procedure, and all states should adopt some similarly simple districting method to end gerrymandering, re-applied every e.g. 5-10 years to track population changes.
TLDR: Voting methods reform. We need to learn the simplest, most basic lessons on how to count votes in a fair and democratic manner. Mathematicians and political scientists have been trying to teach these for a few hundred years, and we need to implement improvements based on these lessons if we want to have our votes count to democratically elect a representative govt.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:43 AM on March 8
I forgot to add that all of the ideas discussed here would likely take an overwhelming Democrat majority in both Houses and of course the Presidency. The margins would have to be on the order of FDR. And then for the next two years just fire hose the legislative changes, as opposed to EO's.
Then Congress can find a way to get rid of Presidential immunity as the SC just created.
This is a very big lift. But not impossible.
posted by jtexman1 at 5:48 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]
Then Congress can find a way to get rid of Presidential immunity as the SC just created.
This is a very big lift. But not impossible.
posted by jtexman1 at 5:48 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]
all of the ideas discussed here would likely take an overwhelming Democrat majority in both Houses and of course the Presidency.
They'd also require an overwhelming progressive majority within the Democratic Party. This, in turn, would require an overwhelming progressive majority within the general public. Which would in its turn require that far more people become motivated to think about politics more as a respectable field of genuine inquiry than a quasi-religious collection of tribal affiliation markers.
The idea that politics and religion are the two subjects that must be avoided if dinnertime conversation is to remain bearable has to be the most American idea in the world. Neither subject would be anywhere near as fraught if more people were open to the idea that politics should be more about justice than power.
Which way would Jesus vote, and why?
posted by flabdablet at 6:23 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
They'd also require an overwhelming progressive majority within the Democratic Party. This, in turn, would require an overwhelming progressive majority within the general public. Which would in its turn require that far more people become motivated to think about politics more as a respectable field of genuine inquiry than a quasi-religious collection of tribal affiliation markers.
The idea that politics and religion are the two subjects that must be avoided if dinnertime conversation is to remain bearable has to be the most American idea in the world. Neither subject would be anywhere near as fraught if more people were open to the idea that politics should be more about justice than power.
Which way would Jesus vote, and why?
posted by flabdablet at 6:23 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Best answer: Germany answered this question by relying on a good economy and good social programs so that their working age male population would not go into a spiral of frustration where failure leads to frustration, and frustration to radicalization. However, they have not been able to maintain the growing economy that provides a range of good opportunities lately, so they are having problems with growing right wing disaffection.
Radicalization takes a generation. It often comes from seeing your economic prospects dwindle and knowing that you and your peers cannot simply work a little harder to become successful and secure. If a few members of a cohort fail, they can blame bad luck or bad planning. If the majority of a cohort is failing they can see that the society they live in has failed them and it makes them want to go fuck things up and risk it all on change to try to restore it to a theoretical golden age in the past, or a theoretical golden age in the future, when our Destinies are Met under the latest proponent of genocide.
One of the biggest protective factors may be for the men have stable marriages and children. (I base this on among other things, a study of de-radicalizing Palestinian men.) The man who is providing for his family ordinarily dedicates himself to them because he is needed and bonded to them and they give his life meaning. He won't cut and run as long as he feels he is essential and is doing a good job. Being a valued member of a family also builds and helps him maintain his social skills and empathy. Nazis do not make good fathers; to turn a good father into a Nazi you have to remove him from his family and isolate and indoctrinate him amid a group of Nazis.
That said, obviously, and it should go without saying, to subjugate women unwillingly into dependent relationships with men who cannot adequately provide for them is not going to prevent the radicalization of the men, but will increase it. They will know, both that they are resented instead of valued, and that they are not personally providing benefit to their families. Men actually have to be needed and to have been chosen by women whom they also value.
If it were easy, we would already have done it.
The root of radicalization is not propaganda but rage and despair. Men shouting "You will not replace us!" are not confident men, any more than a child shouting, "I am not going to bed!" is a child who is embarking on a winning power strategy. It would be different if they were shouting, "We are going to replace you!" but their chants only inspire people who similarly feel beleaguered and back-to-the-wall.
There is a bad feedback loop going on where men (and voters) are making bad choices because they don't see any better ones. A researcher who once did a study on the lives of young men involved in the drug trade noted that they were doing so because they couldn't find better sources of income and for the vast majority of them, being a drug runner or a foot soldier provided them with so poor an income that they could not afford to move out and were still living with their moms. The researcher was repeatedly asked by multiple gang members if he could maybe, somehow, help them get a cleaning job at the university. If those guys had really had better choices they would have taken them.
Your average radical right wing working class man was a C student, not because he was stupid, but because schools are designed to encourage only a certain class/sort of people to achieve the results that lead to good jobs. (It does this the same way that sports competitions are unfair to people who are not physically gifted.) For the last fifty years the Democrats have been offering the same solution for the problem of people needing better jobs: Education. But half the population of the USA learned by the time they were in Grade Six that they are not academic material and that in any academic or training environment they will inevitably come out in the bottom half.
They have been offered little but Training Programs, or grudging social assistance, which is made demeaning to get and grossly inadequate to live on. Moreover it was designed so that often the best thing a young man could do to support his family was to disappear, because whatever wages he could contribute would be clawed back from his children.
I'm not dissing the Democratic Party for letting people down. I sure as hell can't think of anything better that they could have offered. The US government, no matter which party was in power has never been able to protect their people from the increasing power of the corporations, nor from larger global socio-economic change. (Or maybe they have, in an alternative universe things might be much, much, much worse.) I think when a government has been particularly helpless to change things and protect its people, that is when the voters fantasize that they just need a man who is strong enough, and willing to do the hard things, and lead his people to overcome their challenges. Pol Pot, for example. Maybe Stalin? Musk? Mussolini?
Providing the economic climate where working age men can get good jobs that benefit society and which steadily increase their resources the longer they work is a daunting prospect. (Understatement.) Why is it so hard? I'll give a quick armchair amateur review of history as I understand it. The decades of increasing economic prosperity that followed the Second World War were largely the result of trade barriers going down and some countries experiencing economic ascendance over others. The USA made eye-watering profits from that war and from post-war reconstruction. Britain continued food rationing into the next decade. East Germany was pillaged by the Russians; American money poured into West Germany to turn it into a complete contrast to West Germany. Developing nations exported resources at amazingly cheap prices in order to finance their own development. In much of the West it was a glorious time of abundance.
But the developing nations that provided oil and bananas and rubber and palm oil and minerals, developed enough to become manufacturing nations, and to start independently financing and managing the extraction of their resources without needing foreign experts. Without the hundreds of millions of poor farmers and cottage industry workers supporting the USA by providing a full days labour for pennies, the basic resources underpinning our prosperity stopped being cheap. Their labour was still significantly cheaper than labour in the USA even after they left the farms and the tractors trundled in, but wages in those countries went up. The children of the farmer who had worked for pennies felt it was a significant trade up to do sweatshop labour for a dollar or two a day instead. What that means is that the manufacturing jobs in the USA went overseas. They had to. The vast majority of companies that didn't outsource labour or import under the table labour went under and no longer exist. A few survived by becoming premium brands that carry social prestige but the vast majority are gone.
How do you turn around a global trend like this? Remember that tariffs were a lot of what led to the pre-war austerity of the depression. Tariffs are not the answer. If the war time manufacturing boom had not occurred in the USA the Greatest Generation would probably have turned into the equivalent of the Nazi Party. Remember the KKK and the Bund and the Eugenics movement in the USA? But Roosevelt was able to turn the economy around. Suddenly there were good jobs for anyone who wanted them, with the New Deal to get it started, then there were millions of jobs in war time manufacturing, and then the USA was even able to reduce her cohort of working age men by shipping them overseas. There were so many jobs available with decent wages that some jobs were even made essential - you couldn't resign from them to go work somewhere else, or no one would have been willing to stay in the suffocating darkness and heat of the coal pit, no matter how high the wages.
If you look at how the radicals of the nineteen-thirties, you'll see that it took a war and post war prosperity to turn things around. Let's hope we escape without the war. But where will the prosperity come from?
A really big issue is that corporations now have massive amounts of power. Who in hell thought it was a good idea to invent the corporation and create entities that were above the law? But corporations are structured so that the owners and creators and people who profit from corporations are not liable for whatever harm the corporations do. As soon as there is anyone above the law, they are more powerful than everyone else, and that will give them the opportunity to slowly and steadily increase that power. They did. The list of World Economies puts Canada ninth - and we are barely holding our position above Walmart, who comes in tenth position. Corporate economies - and their collective power - dwarfs that of nations.
Like every other entity in the country, corporations have worked to get governments to give them what they want, lobbying, making friends with politicians, persuading people to vote in their interests, advertising, drawing up suggested legislation, turning out and showing support when it shores up a friendly politician, and working to appear deserving. And what they want is to contribute the smallest possible share of taxes, benefit from as much financial support as they can get, and have laws drafted and passed to protect them. Just like the rest of us. Except of course that if I deliberately poison my neighbours I can be arrested, and sent to prison, whereas if a corporation deliberately poisons their neighbours, the worst risk they face is that some other corporation will learn from their example and do it more efficiently, and gain greater profits from doing the same thing.
Corporations have a lock on the money. If the 1% didn't have all the money, and if a portion of the money that they do have was available to be earned by a average working man, sufficient to buy a three bedroom house, and sufficient to provide good safe schools in the neighbourhood where he buys it, I feel there is a good chance he would buy that house and exert himself to be very agreeable to the local young women so he can Live the American Dream, of a house in the 'burbs and 2.1 kids.
Now I am not at all sure the local young women would not simply roll up her sleeves and earn the wherewithal to buy that house for herself. There has been a lot of cultural changes that make it likely that she will regard a three bedroom house as the ideal residence for a childless cat lady with hobbies. That working man might instead spend his earnings on the latest high end gaming rig and a host of tech toys instead. We've gone so far that it's very probably neither of them will get satisfaction out of playing Happy Families. And there is a very good argument that we need to make the transition to a contracting population as rapidly as we can, despite the fact that it is already too late to prevent the climate apocalypse, and may have been too late back when the Industrial Revolution started.
At least if he has the choice of six different tolerable jobs with a comfortable income he won't be scared. At least he won't feel that he is a failure. At least he won't be afraid that he isn't getting a fair share. So perhaps he won't feel the need to look for someone who makes him feel safe, someone mean enough to really smash all those other people who seem to be grabbing all the resources and leaving nothing for him.
We live in a "Meritocracy". Just as Democracy is the only system with a built in disadvantage for minorities, competitive societies ensure that there are a LOT of losers. I have a few friends who believe in guaranteed basic income. Only thing is, they have no idea how government budgets work, and have the vague idea that finding the money to finance it is simply a matter of passing a law, and they don't think about things like interest on deficits and inflation.
They cannot believe that GBI is not the latest variation on Social Assistance, or Poor Relief or Bread and Circuses, because their GBI will actually provide enough money to make everyone comfortably off, the way those other thing things were all intended to do but didn't. The problem with programs like this is that if the poorest of the poor have a million dollars a week to spend the chances are really high that the competitive people at the top of the heap will have earned their first million dollars of the year before they open their eyes on the morning of January First. If you have income inequality it doesn't matter how much the bottom half gets, it will still be inadequate to stay nourished and housed.
I am very much afraid that to get to the point where people are no longer radicalized, we need to reduce our population of working men to the point where everywhere you go you see hopeless eager "Help Wanted" signs, and it goes without saying that training is free, and there are benefits and good working conditions. The idea of such a massive reduction in population makes me sick to my stomach. There is also a high chance that such a massive reduction in population would not lead to good jobs, but more hunger, from the breakdown of the infrastructure. So I'd really, really, really like to try reducing the power of the corporations first, instead of hoping that some climate change disaster, or the next epidemic, or a brutal war reduces the number of men instead.
But I do think that the root cause of radicalization and authoritarianism is struggling as hard as you can to improve your life and your society, and failing. And the most likely way for us to get to a good and safe and friendly society, is for those angry, scared, mean men to turn their sights on the corporations. If we take the power away from the corporations, there is a chance that we will have the funding to finance something like the New Deal, provide hope and meaning and allow those men to find ways to be essential and valuable, and maybe even get us switched over to a sustainable society.
It's a nice idea. I'm not sanguine. I'd be surprised if I am even around to see how it turns out. But it's the only path I can see that gives me any hope. It's going to take radical social and economic change, not just passing a few laws. I think it will take a lot more than four years to get us there, if we do.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:29 AM on March 8 [22 favorites]
Radicalization takes a generation. It often comes from seeing your economic prospects dwindle and knowing that you and your peers cannot simply work a little harder to become successful and secure. If a few members of a cohort fail, they can blame bad luck or bad planning. If the majority of a cohort is failing they can see that the society they live in has failed them and it makes them want to go fuck things up and risk it all on change to try to restore it to a theoretical golden age in the past, or a theoretical golden age in the future, when our Destinies are Met under the latest proponent of genocide.
One of the biggest protective factors may be for the men have stable marriages and children. (I base this on among other things, a study of de-radicalizing Palestinian men.) The man who is providing for his family ordinarily dedicates himself to them because he is needed and bonded to them and they give his life meaning. He won't cut and run as long as he feels he is essential and is doing a good job. Being a valued member of a family also builds and helps him maintain his social skills and empathy. Nazis do not make good fathers; to turn a good father into a Nazi you have to remove him from his family and isolate and indoctrinate him amid a group of Nazis.
That said, obviously, and it should go without saying, to subjugate women unwillingly into dependent relationships with men who cannot adequately provide for them is not going to prevent the radicalization of the men, but will increase it. They will know, both that they are resented instead of valued, and that they are not personally providing benefit to their families. Men actually have to be needed and to have been chosen by women whom they also value.
If it were easy, we would already have done it.
The root of radicalization is not propaganda but rage and despair. Men shouting "You will not replace us!" are not confident men, any more than a child shouting, "I am not going to bed!" is a child who is embarking on a winning power strategy. It would be different if they were shouting, "We are going to replace you!" but their chants only inspire people who similarly feel beleaguered and back-to-the-wall.
There is a bad feedback loop going on where men (and voters) are making bad choices because they don't see any better ones. A researcher who once did a study on the lives of young men involved in the drug trade noted that they were doing so because they couldn't find better sources of income and for the vast majority of them, being a drug runner or a foot soldier provided them with so poor an income that they could not afford to move out and were still living with their moms. The researcher was repeatedly asked by multiple gang members if he could maybe, somehow, help them get a cleaning job at the university. If those guys had really had better choices they would have taken them.
Your average radical right wing working class man was a C student, not because he was stupid, but because schools are designed to encourage only a certain class/sort of people to achieve the results that lead to good jobs. (It does this the same way that sports competitions are unfair to people who are not physically gifted.) For the last fifty years the Democrats have been offering the same solution for the problem of people needing better jobs: Education. But half the population of the USA learned by the time they were in Grade Six that they are not academic material and that in any academic or training environment they will inevitably come out in the bottom half.
They have been offered little but Training Programs, or grudging social assistance, which is made demeaning to get and grossly inadequate to live on. Moreover it was designed so that often the best thing a young man could do to support his family was to disappear, because whatever wages he could contribute would be clawed back from his children.
I'm not dissing the Democratic Party for letting people down. I sure as hell can't think of anything better that they could have offered. The US government, no matter which party was in power has never been able to protect their people from the increasing power of the corporations, nor from larger global socio-economic change. (Or maybe they have, in an alternative universe things might be much, much, much worse.) I think when a government has been particularly helpless to change things and protect its people, that is when the voters fantasize that they just need a man who is strong enough, and willing to do the hard things, and lead his people to overcome their challenges. Pol Pot, for example. Maybe Stalin? Musk? Mussolini?
Providing the economic climate where working age men can get good jobs that benefit society and which steadily increase their resources the longer they work is a daunting prospect. (Understatement.) Why is it so hard? I'll give a quick armchair amateur review of history as I understand it. The decades of increasing economic prosperity that followed the Second World War were largely the result of trade barriers going down and some countries experiencing economic ascendance over others. The USA made eye-watering profits from that war and from post-war reconstruction. Britain continued food rationing into the next decade. East Germany was pillaged by the Russians; American money poured into West Germany to turn it into a complete contrast to West Germany. Developing nations exported resources at amazingly cheap prices in order to finance their own development. In much of the West it was a glorious time of abundance.
But the developing nations that provided oil and bananas and rubber and palm oil and minerals, developed enough to become manufacturing nations, and to start independently financing and managing the extraction of their resources without needing foreign experts. Without the hundreds of millions of poor farmers and cottage industry workers supporting the USA by providing a full days labour for pennies, the basic resources underpinning our prosperity stopped being cheap. Their labour was still significantly cheaper than labour in the USA even after they left the farms and the tractors trundled in, but wages in those countries went up. The children of the farmer who had worked for pennies felt it was a significant trade up to do sweatshop labour for a dollar or two a day instead. What that means is that the manufacturing jobs in the USA went overseas. They had to. The vast majority of companies that didn't outsource labour or import under the table labour went under and no longer exist. A few survived by becoming premium brands that carry social prestige but the vast majority are gone.
How do you turn around a global trend like this? Remember that tariffs were a lot of what led to the pre-war austerity of the depression. Tariffs are not the answer. If the war time manufacturing boom had not occurred in the USA the Greatest Generation would probably have turned into the equivalent of the Nazi Party. Remember the KKK and the Bund and the Eugenics movement in the USA? But Roosevelt was able to turn the economy around. Suddenly there were good jobs for anyone who wanted them, with the New Deal to get it started, then there were millions of jobs in war time manufacturing, and then the USA was even able to reduce her cohort of working age men by shipping them overseas. There were so many jobs available with decent wages that some jobs were even made essential - you couldn't resign from them to go work somewhere else, or no one would have been willing to stay in the suffocating darkness and heat of the coal pit, no matter how high the wages.
If you look at how the radicals of the nineteen-thirties, you'll see that it took a war and post war prosperity to turn things around. Let's hope we escape without the war. But where will the prosperity come from?
A really big issue is that corporations now have massive amounts of power. Who in hell thought it was a good idea to invent the corporation and create entities that were above the law? But corporations are structured so that the owners and creators and people who profit from corporations are not liable for whatever harm the corporations do. As soon as there is anyone above the law, they are more powerful than everyone else, and that will give them the opportunity to slowly and steadily increase that power. They did. The list of World Economies puts Canada ninth - and we are barely holding our position above Walmart, who comes in tenth position. Corporate economies - and their collective power - dwarfs that of nations.
Like every other entity in the country, corporations have worked to get governments to give them what they want, lobbying, making friends with politicians, persuading people to vote in their interests, advertising, drawing up suggested legislation, turning out and showing support when it shores up a friendly politician, and working to appear deserving. And what they want is to contribute the smallest possible share of taxes, benefit from as much financial support as they can get, and have laws drafted and passed to protect them. Just like the rest of us. Except of course that if I deliberately poison my neighbours I can be arrested, and sent to prison, whereas if a corporation deliberately poisons their neighbours, the worst risk they face is that some other corporation will learn from their example and do it more efficiently, and gain greater profits from doing the same thing.
Corporations have a lock on the money. If the 1% didn't have all the money, and if a portion of the money that they do have was available to be earned by a average working man, sufficient to buy a three bedroom house, and sufficient to provide good safe schools in the neighbourhood where he buys it, I feel there is a good chance he would buy that house and exert himself to be very agreeable to the local young women so he can Live the American Dream, of a house in the 'burbs and 2.1 kids.
Now I am not at all sure the local young women would not simply roll up her sleeves and earn the wherewithal to buy that house for herself. There has been a lot of cultural changes that make it likely that she will regard a three bedroom house as the ideal residence for a childless cat lady with hobbies. That working man might instead spend his earnings on the latest high end gaming rig and a host of tech toys instead. We've gone so far that it's very probably neither of them will get satisfaction out of playing Happy Families. And there is a very good argument that we need to make the transition to a contracting population as rapidly as we can, despite the fact that it is already too late to prevent the climate apocalypse, and may have been too late back when the Industrial Revolution started.
At least if he has the choice of six different tolerable jobs with a comfortable income he won't be scared. At least he won't feel that he is a failure. At least he won't be afraid that he isn't getting a fair share. So perhaps he won't feel the need to look for someone who makes him feel safe, someone mean enough to really smash all those other people who seem to be grabbing all the resources and leaving nothing for him.
We live in a "Meritocracy". Just as Democracy is the only system with a built in disadvantage for minorities, competitive societies ensure that there are a LOT of losers. I have a few friends who believe in guaranteed basic income. Only thing is, they have no idea how government budgets work, and have the vague idea that finding the money to finance it is simply a matter of passing a law, and they don't think about things like interest on deficits and inflation.
They cannot believe that GBI is not the latest variation on Social Assistance, or Poor Relief or Bread and Circuses, because their GBI will actually provide enough money to make everyone comfortably off, the way those other thing things were all intended to do but didn't. The problem with programs like this is that if the poorest of the poor have a million dollars a week to spend the chances are really high that the competitive people at the top of the heap will have earned their first million dollars of the year before they open their eyes on the morning of January First. If you have income inequality it doesn't matter how much the bottom half gets, it will still be inadequate to stay nourished and housed.
I am very much afraid that to get to the point where people are no longer radicalized, we need to reduce our population of working men to the point where everywhere you go you see hopeless eager "Help Wanted" signs, and it goes without saying that training is free, and there are benefits and good working conditions. The idea of such a massive reduction in population makes me sick to my stomach. There is also a high chance that such a massive reduction in population would not lead to good jobs, but more hunger, from the breakdown of the infrastructure. So I'd really, really, really like to try reducing the power of the corporations first, instead of hoping that some climate change disaster, or the next epidemic, or a brutal war reduces the number of men instead.
But I do think that the root cause of radicalization and authoritarianism is struggling as hard as you can to improve your life and your society, and failing. And the most likely way for us to get to a good and safe and friendly society, is for those angry, scared, mean men to turn their sights on the corporations. If we take the power away from the corporations, there is a chance that we will have the funding to finance something like the New Deal, provide hope and meaning and allow those men to find ways to be essential and valuable, and maybe even get us switched over to a sustainable society.
It's a nice idea. I'm not sanguine. I'd be surprised if I am even around to see how it turns out. But it's the only path I can see that gives me any hope. It's going to take radical social and economic change, not just passing a few laws. I think it will take a lot more than four years to get us there, if we do.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:29 AM on March 8 [22 favorites]
With respect, "not take away tons of local jobs" is a symptom of billionaires
Where do jobs go? Why do nations stop planning for the welfare of all but the wealthiest? This is what happens when you allow wealth to be concentrated in a tiny fraction of your population. They capture the laws and legislators to ensure:
- economic activity continues to benefit shareholders, often to the cost of workers (deterrents to organizing, reduction to protections and conditions) and outsourcing of entire sectors of production to be more 'competitive'
- decline in spending on programs that might benefit wider swaths of the population, including education, healthcare, food security
- etc.
It is the billionaire that needs to go. Everything else follows, imo.
posted by ginger.beef at 6:43 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Where do jobs go? Why do nations stop planning for the welfare of all but the wealthiest? This is what happens when you allow wealth to be concentrated in a tiny fraction of your population. They capture the laws and legislators to ensure:
- economic activity continues to benefit shareholders, often to the cost of workers (deterrents to organizing, reduction to protections and conditions) and outsourcing of entire sectors of production to be more 'competitive'
- decline in spending on programs that might benefit wider swaths of the population, including education, healthcare, food security
- etc.
It is the billionaire that needs to go. Everything else follows, imo.
posted by ginger.beef at 6:43 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Best answer: It is the billionaire that needs to go.
More precisely, it is the specific rules of the economic game that inevitably give rise to billionaires that need to go. Just getting rid of today's billionaires, French Revolution style, will do nothing but switch the bums on the seats unless we stop playing Musical Chairs.
As the game stands at present, the only immutable rule is that the public protects private property. There is a general consensus that private property is desirable and therefore needs public protection, which from the point of view of the ordinary person is true: if you have organized your own life, security or even merely convenience around exclusive control over a certain amount of stuff, then having somebody else just waltz in and take it off you is going to fuck you over. You want to be able to call 911 and get your stuff back and have some severe disincentives applied to the perpetrator.
Unfortunately, though, as happens to so many simple rules, this one has been elevated to the status of some kind of sacred truth. The idea of private property has been granted so much assumed respectability, especially in the United States, that putting any kind of difficulty in the way of acquiring unlimited amounts of it is just anathema.
That underlying assumption turns up all the time in the opinions of folks who lean libertarian. What's mine is mine, and you can pry my stuff from my cold dead hands! To this way of thinking, the only way anybody would give up some of their private property except in the context of some specific trade freely entered into by both parties is if they were coerced to.
But here's the thing: The proper function of government is equitable management of the commons. The social protection of private property is itself a commons. And the logical consequence of persistently claiming more use of any commons, including that one, than anybody else has is to diminish it until ultimately there's nothing left of it.
If the rules of the economic game allow private property to accumulate unchecked in fewer and fewer hands, then there comes a point where, from the point of view of ordinary people, it doesn't matter whether the guy waltzing in to take all their stuff off them is a burglar or their landlord or the companies that made the appliances that stop working without the monthly subscriptions.
If the rules of the game are designed such that wealth grows essentially exponentially - in other words, if anybody can reasonably expect some more-or-less reliable average rate of return on assets owned, like say 5% annually regardless of portfolio size - then socially destructive concentrations of wealth will arise. They have to. It's inherent in the rules.
So we need better rules. We need rules that mean that wealth, along with everything else that we would like to see grow, does so sigmoidally rather than exponentially. There needs to exist a certain level of wealth beyond which the same body of law that protects private property makes accumulating more of it impossible.
Assets need to be taxed yearly on their assessed value, not on gains realized when they change hands; the rate at which any entity's assets are taxed needs to increase progressively with the total quantity of assets owned by that entity, in much the same way as the rates of tax currently levied on incomes depend on total income. Importantly, the rates levied on such portions of an entity's assets as exceed the sigmoid's upper asymptote need to exceed the expected returns achievable from owning those assets, thereby switching the economic feedback inherent in such ownership from positive to negative.
If the American Dream - that anybody has a fair shot at making it in that country - is to remain alive, then it must to some extent reflect reality. And if a hundred families own everything and everybody else owns nothing, it never will.
posted by flabdablet at 7:51 AM on March 8 [7 favorites]
More precisely, it is the specific rules of the economic game that inevitably give rise to billionaires that need to go. Just getting rid of today's billionaires, French Revolution style, will do nothing but switch the bums on the seats unless we stop playing Musical Chairs.
As the game stands at present, the only immutable rule is that the public protects private property. There is a general consensus that private property is desirable and therefore needs public protection, which from the point of view of the ordinary person is true: if you have organized your own life, security or even merely convenience around exclusive control over a certain amount of stuff, then having somebody else just waltz in and take it off you is going to fuck you over. You want to be able to call 911 and get your stuff back and have some severe disincentives applied to the perpetrator.
Unfortunately, though, as happens to so many simple rules, this one has been elevated to the status of some kind of sacred truth. The idea of private property has been granted so much assumed respectability, especially in the United States, that putting any kind of difficulty in the way of acquiring unlimited amounts of it is just anathema.
That underlying assumption turns up all the time in the opinions of folks who lean libertarian. What's mine is mine, and you can pry my stuff from my cold dead hands! To this way of thinking, the only way anybody would give up some of their private property except in the context of some specific trade freely entered into by both parties is if they were coerced to.
But here's the thing: The proper function of government is equitable management of the commons. The social protection of private property is itself a commons. And the logical consequence of persistently claiming more use of any commons, including that one, than anybody else has is to diminish it until ultimately there's nothing left of it.
If the rules of the economic game allow private property to accumulate unchecked in fewer and fewer hands, then there comes a point where, from the point of view of ordinary people, it doesn't matter whether the guy waltzing in to take all their stuff off them is a burglar or their landlord or the companies that made the appliances that stop working without the monthly subscriptions.
If the rules of the game are designed such that wealth grows essentially exponentially - in other words, if anybody can reasonably expect some more-or-less reliable average rate of return on assets owned, like say 5% annually regardless of portfolio size - then socially destructive concentrations of wealth will arise. They have to. It's inherent in the rules.
So we need better rules. We need rules that mean that wealth, along with everything else that we would like to see grow, does so sigmoidally rather than exponentially. There needs to exist a certain level of wealth beyond which the same body of law that protects private property makes accumulating more of it impossible.
Assets need to be taxed yearly on their assessed value, not on gains realized when they change hands; the rate at which any entity's assets are taxed needs to increase progressively with the total quantity of assets owned by that entity, in much the same way as the rates of tax currently levied on incomes depend on total income. Importantly, the rates levied on such portions of an entity's assets as exceed the sigmoid's upper asymptote need to exceed the expected returns achievable from owning those assets, thereby switching the economic feedback inherent in such ownership from positive to negative.
If the American Dream - that anybody has a fair shot at making it in that country - is to remain alive, then it must to some extent reflect reality. And if a hundred families own everything and everybody else owns nothing, it never will.
posted by flabdablet at 7:51 AM on March 8 [7 favorites]
In all honesty? Have the left stop throwing up their hands and saying "these people are idiots who Just Don't Get It."
By all standard measurements of intelligence, red states and blue states are almost identical. Smart people are making different decisions based on their own lives, and as we see again and again at a local level they are completely able to find compromises they can accept.
But at the national level, the left continually dismisses 77,000,000 people as ignorant yokels or worse ("deplorables"). They are being continually denigrated and their voices ignored.
Basic respect is not a panacea. There will always be conflict. But treating 77,000,000 people as a single, deplorable voting bloc has got to end.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:42 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]
By all standard measurements of intelligence, red states and blue states are almost identical. Smart people are making different decisions based on their own lives, and as we see again and again at a local level they are completely able to find compromises they can accept.
But at the national level, the left continually dismisses 77,000,000 people as ignorant yokels or worse ("deplorables"). They are being continually denigrated and their voices ignored.
Basic respect is not a panacea. There will always be conflict. But treating 77,000,000 people as a single, deplorable voting bloc has got to end.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:42 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]
the left continually dismisses 77,000,000 people as ignorant yokels or worse ("deplorables")
That's certainly what the overwhelmingly right-wing, billionaire-owned press in the US has said that "the left" did.
In fact the "basket of deplorables" phrase that put that word into the public discourse came from Hillary Clinton, indisputably a dyed-in-the-wool DNC-style centrist rather than a leftist by any reasonable standard. Further, the phrase occurred within the context of a speech in which she went on at some length on the exact point that those seventy-some million do not all belong in that basket and do have legitimate reasons for wanting change:
That said, anybody who looks at the present tumour of scumbags forming TFG's current administration and doesn't see wall-to-wall deplorables is just fooling themselves. I have no problem describing those people that way, not because I am a leftist but because I have eyes and ears. Nobody involved in the creation or implementation of Project 2025 deserves basic respect; every one of the fuckers is a grifter, a zealot, a fool or some combination thereof.
Basic respect for their marks is another matter. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be attempting to spread clear explanations of how and why they were conned and by whom and what for, or the kinds of policies they need to be demanding of their elected representatives going forward.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you." Fool me - you can't get fooled again.
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]
That's certainly what the overwhelmingly right-wing, billionaire-owned press in the US has said that "the left" did.
In fact the "basket of deplorables" phrase that put that word into the public discourse came from Hillary Clinton, indisputably a dyed-in-the-wool DNC-style centrist rather than a leftist by any reasonable standard. Further, the phrase occurred within the context of a speech in which she went on at some length on the exact point that those seventy-some million do not all belong in that basket and do have legitimate reasons for wanting change:
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.And yeah, she did say half of them do belong in it, which is most likely an overestimate and certainly a weird slip for somebody so media savvy. But the way it was reported made it sound like she'd labelled every Republican supporter a deplorable, which is not what she said, and ever since then I've only ever seen the word "deplorable" used in ways designed to reinforce that deliberately distorted reportage.
That said, anybody who looks at the present tumour of scumbags forming TFG's current administration and doesn't see wall-to-wall deplorables is just fooling themselves. I have no problem describing those people that way, not because I am a leftist but because I have eyes and ears. Nobody involved in the creation or implementation of Project 2025 deserves basic respect; every one of the fuckers is a grifter, a zealot, a fool or some combination thereof.
Basic respect for their marks is another matter. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be attempting to spread clear explanations of how and why they were conned and by whom and what for, or the kinds of policies they need to be demanding of their elected representatives going forward.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you." Fool me - you can't get fooled again.
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]
I think we are losing elections because of complacency. Dems think things will generally be okay; the Left/ Progressives think splitting hairs is useful and not damaging. There's good research that says most Americans are basically pretty liberal, but they suck at identifying candidates who will vote for their interested.
I believe the Extreme Right has a well organized and well funded cabal that is highly effective at propaganda. They have shifted public opinion in beliefs - criminal undocumented immigrants are terrorizing the streets, illegal voting is an issue, post-birth abortion, and so on. They have successfully indoctrinated Fundamentalist Christians. The wealthy go along because it's profitable. They have swayed opinion against higher education, and are now working against public education, and certainly much more.
Truth has been degraded; an astonishing number of people believe Fox News and its ilk, and believe the mainstream media lies. I'm so grossed out by how much the NYTimes has sold out, but they do state facts, issue corrections and use other journalistic principles. They just neglect facts like trump's lies, mental deterioration, authoritarianism, aka sanewashing. As the media is bought up by the wealthy, reliable sources of factual news are harder to find.
The US votes quite far Right at this point, enabling the wealthy to get wealthier. We need a meaningfully progressive tax, the more you make the greater percentage you pay. End preferential taxes on passive income, i.e., the capital gains tax. Increase the threshold for Social Security Taxes. Raise the Minimum Wage, and index it a meaningful standard - Cost of Living, Inflation, whatever.
Make it illegal to lie for profit. Change the Constitution so corporations aren't poeple and have no inherent right to free speech, i.e. Citizen's United.
You, reading this. Get active. Call your representative at the local, state and federal level. Write htem letters. Write letters to the editor. Protest. Be well-informed. Engage other voters. Stop the Right from suppressing voting and allowing a fascist and his gang to wreck everything.
posted by theora55 at 10:50 AM on March 8
I believe the Extreme Right has a well organized and well funded cabal that is highly effective at propaganda. They have shifted public opinion in beliefs - criminal undocumented immigrants are terrorizing the streets, illegal voting is an issue, post-birth abortion, and so on. They have successfully indoctrinated Fundamentalist Christians. The wealthy go along because it's profitable. They have swayed opinion against higher education, and are now working against public education, and certainly much more.
Truth has been degraded; an astonishing number of people believe Fox News and its ilk, and believe the mainstream media lies. I'm so grossed out by how much the NYTimes has sold out, but they do state facts, issue corrections and use other journalistic principles. They just neglect facts like trump's lies, mental deterioration, authoritarianism, aka sanewashing. As the media is bought up by the wealthy, reliable sources of factual news are harder to find.
The US votes quite far Right at this point, enabling the wealthy to get wealthier. We need a meaningfully progressive tax, the more you make the greater percentage you pay. End preferential taxes on passive income, i.e., the capital gains tax. Increase the threshold for Social Security Taxes. Raise the Minimum Wage, and index it a meaningful standard - Cost of Living, Inflation, whatever.
Make it illegal to lie for profit. Change the Constitution so corporations aren't poeple and have no inherent right to free speech, i.e. Citizen's United.
You, reading this. Get active. Call your representative at the local, state and federal level. Write htem letters. Write letters to the editor. Protest. Be well-informed. Engage other voters. Stop the Right from suppressing voting and allowing a fascist and his gang to wreck everything.
posted by theora55 at 10:50 AM on March 8
We need a meaningfully progressive tax, the more you make the greater percentage you pay.
Stevenson repeatedly makes the point that the principle at work here really needs to be that the more you have, the greater percentage you pay.
The effect that the tax system needs to create stronger disincentives against is not high taxable incomes but extreme concentrations of wealth; they're not even close to being the same thing because so much wealth increase manifests as unrealized increases in asset values.
The more widespread becomes the understanding of this distinction, the faster the Overton window will shift toward making appropriate tax policy responses thinkable rather than cause for reflexive derision from the Sensible Center.
posted by flabdablet at 11:26 AM on March 8
Stevenson repeatedly makes the point that the principle at work here really needs to be that the more you have, the greater percentage you pay.
The effect that the tax system needs to create stronger disincentives against is not high taxable incomes but extreme concentrations of wealth; they're not even close to being the same thing because so much wealth increase manifests as unrealized increases in asset values.
The more widespread becomes the understanding of this distinction, the faster the Overton window will shift toward making appropriate tax policy responses thinkable rather than cause for reflexive derision from the Sensible Center.
posted by flabdablet at 11:26 AM on March 8
Mod note: Several comments removed. Folks please don't turn this into another political debate, just answer the question and don't get into arguments with other members, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 2:19 PM on March 8
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 2:19 PM on March 8
As an external observer, I think you need to sweep away the obstacles that keep people from voting, especially poorer people, and people who are not white.
posted by zadcat at 3:14 PM on March 8
posted by zadcat at 3:14 PM on March 8
Another thing that needs to be taught earlier and spread wider is some basic media literacy.
posted by flabdablet at 3:19 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 3:19 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]
One of the honestly more relatable sources of support for authoritarianism in the US has been our debilitating political gridlock. If Congress can't manage to legislate or agree on spending, or can only do it under duress, or only do it once in a blue moon when all the conditions are exactly right, then people start looking for other ways to get stuff done. And most of those ways — take partisan control of the courts; misinform your opponents to create a sort of artificial consensus; disenfranchise your opponents; use protest tactics your opponents find extremely frightening to try to force their hand; expand the President's powers; expand the power of unelected bureaucrats — are corrosive to the sort of checks-and-balances democracy we're trying to run.
So yeah, I think we need to get really serious about avoiding gridlock, or else authoritarianism starts looking like a convenient and practical way to get shit done.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 4:03 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]
So yeah, I think we need to get really serious about avoiding gridlock, or else authoritarianism starts looking like a convenient and practical way to get shit done.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 4:03 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Who in hell thought it was a good idea to invent the corporation and create entities that were above the law?
we the corporations: how american businesses won their civil rights [g]
posted by HearHere at 5:13 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]
we the corporations: how american businesses won their civil rights [g]
posted by HearHere at 5:13 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]
This slide into authoritarianism isn't something that even most Trump voters voted for. I don't think trying to solve this via different education of the voting public is much of a solution; not that it isn't good to do that, but this is a fringe radical group capturing power beyond what they were voted into. If we want to solve this, we need to strengthen the systems that prevent people who want to do it from being able to do it even if they are voted into power. That's what separation of powers in our founding documents is supposed to provide, but America's old democracy systems are struggling to get up to the task at hand. We need to reform the basics of the political system, eg, increasing the number of representatives, having more parliamentary-type processes perhaps.
I do think the billionaire class is a big part of the problem, and reforms on how they are able to concentrate wealth and power are critical to solving these issues. Too many of our problems are bought and paid for by a small group of ultra-rich people, and fixing that concentration of wealth (which seems to damage the mental health of the ultra-wealthy in the process) feels daunting but necessary to prevent this in the future.
posted by ch1x0r at 10:48 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]
I do think the billionaire class is a big part of the problem, and reforms on how they are able to concentrate wealth and power are critical to solving these issues. Too many of our problems are bought and paid for by a small group of ultra-rich people, and fixing that concentration of wealth (which seems to damage the mental health of the ultra-wealthy in the process) feels daunting but necessary to prevent this in the future.
posted by ch1x0r at 10:48 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]
Some of things that come to mind.
1. Having so much executive power vested in a single person is dangerous. Consider the system widely used by other parliamentary democracies: The head of state is a ceremonial figurehead with no executive power - The CIC of the armed services is the head of state, not the holder of executive power. Executive power is vested in the leader of the majority party in parliament. This person can be removed from their position outside of an electoral term by: A) Being voted out by a majority of their own party B) Losing a confidence vote in parliament.
2. Democracy works better when it's not kneecapped - the US system needs root and branch reform. For example, dump the electoral college, institute proportional representation, make the conducting of elections a federal responsibility, take serious steps to prevent gerrymandering, voter suppression and stupid laws that allow challenges to electoral registration without due process.
3. Your politicians are far too susceptible to capture by wealthy donors - you need laws with teeth to fix that.
4. Updating your constitution is far too unwieldy.
The Nazis got absolute power after being voted in by approximately 1/3 of the electorate. It seems the U.S. is not too different.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 7:50 PM on March 9 [2 favorites]
1. Having so much executive power vested in a single person is dangerous. Consider the system widely used by other parliamentary democracies: The head of state is a ceremonial figurehead with no executive power - The CIC of the armed services is the head of state, not the holder of executive power. Executive power is vested in the leader of the majority party in parliament. This person can be removed from their position outside of an electoral term by: A) Being voted out by a majority of their own party B) Losing a confidence vote in parliament.
2. Democracy works better when it's not kneecapped - the US system needs root and branch reform. For example, dump the electoral college, institute proportional representation, make the conducting of elections a federal responsibility, take serious steps to prevent gerrymandering, voter suppression and stupid laws that allow challenges to electoral registration without due process.
3. Your politicians are far too susceptible to capture by wealthy donors - you need laws with teeth to fix that.
4. Updating your constitution is far too unwieldy.
The Nazis got absolute power after being voted in by approximately 1/3 of the electorate. It seems the U.S. is not too different.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 7:50 PM on March 9 [2 favorites]
Regarding point 1. Look at how quickly Liz Truss got biffed out after tanking the U.K economy.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 8:38 PM on March 11
posted by HiroProtagonist at 8:38 PM on March 11
« Older Where did my Amazon review checker go? | Orthotic to prevent jaw clenching compatible with... Newer »
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
2) Change the law so social media companies are forced to accept the same responsibilities as any traditional publisher.
3) Tax the fuck out of billionaires and use that money to help America's poorest people.
Not an exclusive list, and none of it would be easy, but what's the alternative?
posted by Paul Slade at 1:03 AM on March 8 [16 favorites]