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Originally Posted by TheBig3
1. That's fair. I read X responses and just gave my response generally.
2. I'm not calling new generations weak. I'm calling older generations weak. I was born in 1982 and this ride has sucked pretty hard in general. If you were born in 1946 to the early 60's, you've got too comfortable. I assume we agree on that so I'll leave it there. But those people are looking for threats and don't recognize real problems.
Maybe. But it was less about believing the promise and more about being OK with pulling up the ladder after they'd be given theirs. That and the economies protectionist policies had left the industry pretty bad. The recalls issued on Detroit cars when Japan hit the American market was insane. The whole "lets store Government cheese" in a cave" period was just the death of the New Deal. Something needed to change - not everything, but some stuff wasn't working.
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You're starting the fault with the baby boomers and bitching about how voters won't wake up and that's kinda my issue with your viewpoint. It's not the people within the system who fail to fight, it's the system that frames their worldview.
The Greatest Generation and generations before them who fought the capitalists and their thugs in the streets made possible the concessions of the New Deal and union healthcare and pensions that had been denied them since the start of the industrial revolution. And upon accepting those concessions they gave up their fighting spirit and the capitalists started the clock running on when they would take those concessions back.
You can't even blame them for accepting those concessions cause they allowed for a quality of life their parents could have only dreamt of because the systems they lived under had probably made it unthinkable.
But then their children didn't know the hardships that had driven them to fight and of course they were complacent. It would be absurd to expect a middle class kid in the 60s to have the same mentality as a working class iron worker choking on fumes and living three families to an apartment.
That's why liberal incrementalism makes no sense. Give people just enough to feel comfortable and they won't have any fight in them while the capitalists will still be plotting on just how little they can given to the lower classes while still forestalling labor organizing and violence.
Give me medicare for all and I'll be happy as **** but you're also taking some of the edge off my anger while preserving the capitalist system that waits like a vulture to chip away at the gains I just made. And medicare for all is a "radical" idea in America rather than traditional US incrementalism.
Which is why you need to focus on the larger system of US capitalism itself rather than people stuck in that system for not voting the way you want when most people at this point are just hoping for a little extra to help them live.
Unless you think you can make up for the lack of a powerful labor movement by just protest voting.
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Yeah? I don't know where you're getting that from. Germany in WW2 wasn't exactly a bastion of wealth.
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I mean I'm not an expert on the Weimar Republic and **** is always complicated, but the idea that Germany was destitute and desperate for any strongman to save it is a myth. By the early 20s the economy was recovering and while the bottom end of farmers and workers were still hard pressed it was probably at least somewhat comparable to the US in the last decade where the middle class are hanging on but still insecure and looking for a simple, emotionally satisfying reason to pin their fears on, be that the Versailles Treaty and the Jews or Mexicans and China.[/quote]
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No. I don't think they're comfortable at all. But if they'd rather have god and guns than a paycheck, I don't know how we can help them.
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Yeah it's a nearly impossible problem with a solution that may not work but a functioning labor movement is probably the only option.