AfricanTech
Honorary Master
agreed. it adds an extra dimension of weirdness to the whole thing because they conflate their culture war stuff with economics and think that the former is affecting the latter, seemingly without realising that they are for the large part not involved in decisions about economics at all.
and I think there are, but I also think we might be talking about different things. (not only do I have family in the states, and family who've worked on and off in the states, a big part of my job is the analysis of these things, so it occupies a lot of my thoughts.) comparing someone in the US to someone else in another developed country, they're much worse off than they should be. this isn't an accident, nor it is inevitable. in the 50s, coming out of the war, they had the same deeply corrupt relationship between the government, the military, and private military contractors that they have now (though it's increased in scale, obviously), but they had a powerhouse economy, and people had strong job security. at the same time they had strong unions, strong employee protections and a very high tax rate on the rich and on corporations.
between then and now, for the majority of people, this has gone away. there are a lot of reasons for this, but they all converge on the growing influence of business over politics, and the policies that this has led to: unions were attacked, corporate taxes cut repeatedly, employee protections removed, and so on. (you can look up a lot of this stuff, under wage stagnation and productivity to earnings and so on.) that's the actual meaning of "inequality". the new powerhouse economy is largely confined to a smaller and smaller part of the population.
these are the kinds of things that I'm calling "issues".
a large part of the Trump base, at least in 2015 and 2016, was aware of this. (a big part of his appeal then was his objection to global trade agreements and the restoration of the American manufacturing sector.) they didn't know or care that he was a huckster and would just be looking out for himself, they voted against the direction that both Republicans and Democrats took the country over 30-odd years. Sanders' support was similarly Americans voting against the status quo.
the BLM stuff is amplifying and entrenching the polarisation of Americans, but it's not causing it. without going into a lot of detail, that violence we've seen emerges from long, historical, and systemic racism. other than the civil rights protests, America never had to deal with it before, is all. this round blew up after the visible killings of people and the emotional effect that had. but cameraphones, social media and the consequent visibility was the match, not the wood.
the polarization of Americans has been a long-term work in progress. there was a huge political shift in the 80s, at the same time as the attacks on employment started, to move people's focus to culture war stuff and campaign on "soft issues", like religion etc, rather than policy. this was a useful way to be able to move votes, while at the same time meeting the needs of business. if you can get people to believe that the most important issue is whether women have to be treated as well as men, rather than whether jobs are protected, you can sacrifice the latter and still get support. a big part of this is relentless fear-mongering. Fox, under Murdoch, is a great example of how to do this. the Republicans have always been more open to this but either way, both parties are now totally inextricable from capital, finance, and corporate power.
this doesn't excuse the Dems, by the way. it just puts context on why so many people are rightly repulsed by Republicans, and why there is so much anger directed towards them. they did the same thing that Trump did - recklessly encourage hatred and destruction - and they did it on a larger scale, for much longer. Democrats pursued the same policy objectives as Republicans, they just made it look "nicer". they take a little longer, they throw some crumbs out, and they didn't fan the religious extremism, but they're just as culpable. in line with that, they did their own version of the "culture wars" putting on a big show of caring about minorities, while they profited from their poverty, and this has morphed into these weird "identity wars" that dominate the airwaves these days.
many Americans, as far as I can see, hate them for that hypocrisy. they despise the way they want to be seen to have their hands clean while still fvcking everyone over and i really find it hard to disagree with them. if i was voting in America, like many people did i'm sure, i'd have held my nose and voted for them, but only because, while they are destructive, they are destructive over a longer time and less of an immediate threat, which buys you time to try and force them to correct their ****. if there was a third-party that had actual policies, i'd move to them.
so all of that drives polarization and when you add the polarization to declining quality of life, less spending power, an open public discourse that demonises one person or another, you get a volatile mix. we're seeing that, and we will be seeing more of that.
comparing violence is interesting. i know a few people who, if not already involved, would probably have been involved with antifa (i should check. when the Zapatistas were the big thing, they worked with them.) when it kicked off, it was a reaction to the reaction, a kind of vigilante bodyguard for other protestors. it encompassed some DSA people who would turn up in support, the original BLM people, a lot of left-justice groups, some kind of bizarre anarcho-communist clubs, some punk movements, and kids who wanted to be edgelords. Anonymous in real life, basically. from what i can see now, what it's become is destruction for destruction's sake, a small, but highly visible rolling riot with no real purpose.
comparing that the Q bunch at the capitol, while the violence and stupidity is often the same, the movements underneath are very, very different. the riot at the capitol, as I've said somewhere else, was totally predictable. we've seen dry-runs for years. similar to antifa, in that it's an umbrella for a lot of smaller groups with different ideologies who find each other useful. it includes the Q-people who are straight-out, bugfvck crazy (and in my mind, a kind of weird mass schizophrenia), soverign citizen nutjobs, militia people who have been forming for decades and actively doing homemade terrorism, evangelical extremists, racists, and general conservatives caught up in the swing of the thing. in neither case are you going to find one person or group that you can point to, and say "these guys did it". it's a symptom, and symptoms reoccur until you treat the causes.
the reason i point this out is that, while the immediate response to the symptoms in both cases must be the same - policing, law, etc - the solutions to the root causes for each are different. also, we have our own set of dynamics here, and i don't think this ports to SA as an example, as much as you seem to.
edit: sorry it took so long to reply, but I had work to do.
Very much mirror's (much more eloquently) my own thoughts.
Thanks for sharing.
