The crunch was coming no matter who was elected--if we wanted to avoid it we should have picked different representatives years ago. I judge that the policies and priorities of the Democrats have made things worse than they should have been, and that too much power was handed to the unelected. Still, some things came from the society as a whole and not the political elite: sky-high divorce rates, plummeting birth rates, borrowing for pleasures and not for production, an eroding sense of integrity (numbers would be hard to come by, but I suspect that the upper echelons of the business world have ethics as bad as in the Gilded Age), lassitude, an irritable sense of entitlement, and so on.
We're very tribal, explicitly parsing ourselves out by ethnic groups (except whites, who aren't supposed to play that game). But because of that divorce rate and family fragmentation, most of those tribes aren't very resilient against calamity: cousins who aren't quite related anymore are not so likely to take you in and share resources when you can't pay rent.
That leaves the churches and Uncle Sam to help out, and Uncle Sam's record of tolerating alternative loyalties hasn't been very good recently. So who gets the big slices of the diminishing pie? California has one answer (the Praetorian Guard), but their big test hasn't come yet. Will benefits to the "hispanics" (which flavor?) or "asian" (which flavor?) or teacher's union be paid first?
Look at India for how affirmative action quotas become entrenched and cheated and battled over--and then look at how immigration offices here are told to automatically waive fees for "hardship" on appeal by particular favored groups. It is no secret that having the wrong ethnic mix can be proof of discrimination, and the circle of associations affected by that presumption seems to be growing larger--it isn't just universities and businesses trying to sell to the Feds. Do you cut back on the number of asian students in order to increase the number of black students? So far, yes, but what happens when the asian-ancestry groups start wielding clout?
I suspect the tribal divisions will dominate the pie-division. I could be wrong on that: sometimes people will band together, especially if there's a common enemy.
Either way--tribal divisions or a common enemy--the state is already on the path to control of the economy, which always means favors for the connected and interminable rules and taxes for everyone else. It needn't mean war, or even civil war (who would be fighting for which territory?), but it would mean loss of liberties.
Who would support such a thing? Besides -redacted to avoid dispute, but he sponsored CFPB-.
You might be surprised, but you might not. The link is to a 1941 article "Who goes Nazi?" about the kind of people who gravitate to that kind of thing. The article (go read it!) shows its age. There are new types that appear today. Think of the OWS types: some of them would be down with a neo-N government if it used their language, and others might fight it. (I suspect that the anarchist type would support it at first.)
One of the article's assertions is that when the barbarians seem to be ascendant, character matters. It matters in the crunch time. I don't remember seeing much about good character in the kid's school books, nor in the large swaths of the pop culture that I can't avoid.
But focus on character turns up here and there in the culture. "With great power comes great responsibility." And the churches are still preaching. And by definition I don't hear much from the ordinary people who don't get the microphone. I wonder what the crunch will show.
Whatever happens, ten years from now we'll be saying "We obviously should have done X."
In a science fiction short story I read years ago, a man asked the rhetorical question: why would people fight and die to support one group of parasitical kings instead of another. The why is complicated, but look at the vampires that rule Detroit and marvel at the support they continue to have from the subjects they flatter. Tribalism.
No comments:
Post a Comment