Archdruids may take vacations but politics never sleeps, and during the month that’s elapsed since the last post here on The Archdruid Report, quite a number of things relevant to this blog’s project have gone spinning past the startled eyes of those who pay attention to the US political scene. I’ll get to some of the others in upcoming weeks; the one that caught my attention most forcefully, for reasons I trust my readers will find understandable, was the reaction to a post of mine from a few months back titled Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment.
It’s not uncommon for a post of mine on a controversial subject to get picked up by other blogs and attract a fair amount of discussion and commentary. On the other hand, when something I write takes not much more than a week to become the most-read post in the history of The Archdruid Report, goes on to attract more than half again as many page views as the nearest runner-up, and gets nearly twice as many comments as the most comment-heavy previous post, it’s fair to say that something remarkable has happened. When a follow-up post, The Decline and Fall of Hillary Clinton, promptly became the second most-read post in this blog’s history and attracted even more comments—well, here again, it seems tolerably clear that I managed to hit an exquisitely sensitive nerve.
It may not be an accident, either, that starting about a week after that first post went up, two things relevant to it have started to percolate through the mass media. The first, and to my mind the most promising, is that a few journalists have managed to get past the usual crass stereotypes, and talk about the actual reasons why so many voters have decided to back Donald Trump’s aspirations this year. I was startled to see a thoughtful article by Peggy Noonan along those lines in the Wall Street Journal, and even more astonished to see pieces making similar points in other media outlets—here’s an example,, and here’s another.
Mind you, none of the articles that I saw quite managed to grapple with the raw reality of the situation that’s driving so many wage-earning Americans to place their last remaining hopes for the future on Donald Trump. Even Noonan’s piece, though it’s better than most and makes an important point we’ll examine later, falls short. In her analysis, what’s wrong is that a privileged subset of Americans have been protected from the impacts of the last few decades of public policy, while the rest of us haven’t had that luxury. This is true, of course, but it considerably understates things. The class she’s talking about—the more affluent half or so of the salary class, to use the taxonomy I suggested in my post—hasn’t simply been protected from the troubles affecting other Americans. They’ve profited, directly and indirectly, from the policies that have plunged much of the wage class into impoverishment and misery, and their reliable response to any attempt to discuss that awkward detail shows tolerably clearly that a good many of them are well aware of it.
I’m thinking here, among many other examples along the same lines, of a revealing article earlier this year from a reporter who attended a feminist conference on sexism in the workplace. All the talk there was about how women in the salary class could improve their own prospects for promotion and the like. It so happened that the reporter’s sister works in a wage-class job, and she quite sensibly inquired whether the conference might spare a little time to discuss ways to improve prospects for women who don’t happen to belong to the salary class. Those of my readers who have seen discussions of this kind know exactly what happened next: a bit of visible discomfort, a few vaguely approving comments, and then a resumption of the previous subjects as though no one had made so embarrassing a suggestion.
It’s typical of the taboo that surrounds class prejudice in today’s industrial nations that not even the reporter mentioned the two most obvious points about this interchange. The first, of course, is that the line the feminists at the event drew between those women whose troubles with sexism were of interest to them, and those whose problems didn’t concern them in the least, was a class line. The second is that the women at the event had perfectly valid, if perfectly selfish, reasons for drawing that line. In order to improve the conditions of workers in those wage class industries that employ large numbers of women, after all, the women at the conference would themselves have had to pay more each month for daycare, hairstyling, fashionable clothing, and the like. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the slogans of an earlier era liked to claim, but it’s clearly not powerful enough to convince women in the salary class to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of women who don’t happen to share their privileged status.
To give the women at the conference credit, though, at least they didn’t start shouting about some other hot-button issue in the hope of distracting attention from an awkward question. That was the second thing relevant to my post that started happening the week after it went up. All at once, much of the American left responded to the rise of Donald Trump by insisting at the top of their lungs that the only reason, the only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters.
It’s probably necessary to start by unpacking the dubious logic here, so that we can get past that and see what’s actually being said. Does Trump have racial prejudices? No doubt; most white Americans do. Do his followers share these same prejudices? Again, no doubt some of them do—not all his followers are white, after all, a point that the leftward end of the media has been desperately trying to obscure in recent weeks. Let’s assume for the sake of argument, though, that Trump and his followers do indeed share an assortment of racial bigotries. Does that fact, if it is a fact, prove that racism must by definition be the only thing that makes Trump appeal to his followers?
Of course it proves nothing of the kind. You could use the same flagrant illogic to insist that since Trump enjoys steak, and many of his followers share that taste, the people who follow him must be entirely motivated by hatred for vegetarians. Something that white Americans generally don’t discuss, though I’m told that most people of color are acutely aware of it, is that racial issues simply aren’t that important to white people in this country nowadays. The frantic and passionate defense of racial bigotry that typified the Jim Crow era is rare these days outside of the white-supremacist fringe. What has replaced it, by and large, are habits of thought and action that most white people consider to be no big deal—and you don’t get a mass movement going in the teeth of the political establishment by appealing to attitudes that the people who hold them consider to be no big deal.
Behind the shouts of “Racist!” directed at the Trump campaign by a great many affluent white liberals, rather, lies a rather different reality. Accusations of racism play a great many roles in contemporary American discourse—and of course the identification of actual racism is among these. When affluent white liberals make that accusation, on the other hand, far more often than not, it’s a dog whistle.
I should probably explain that last phrase for the benefit of those of my readers who don’t speak fluent Internet. A dog whistle, in online jargon, is a turn of phrase or a trope that expresses some form of bigotry while giving the bigot plausible deniability. During the civil rights movement, for example, the phrase “states’ rights” was a classic dog whistle; the rights actually under discussion amounted to the right of white Southerners to impose racial discrimination on their black neighbors, but the White Citizens Council spokesmen who waxed rhapsodic about states’ rights never had to say that in so many words. That there were, and are, serious issues about the balance of power between states and the federal government that have nothing do with race, and thus got roundly ignored by both sides of the struggle, is just one more irony in a situation that had no shortage of them already.
In the same way, the word “racist” in the mouths of the pundits and politicians who have been applying it so liberally to the Trump campaign is a dog whistle for something they don’t want to talk about in so many words. What they mean by it, of course, is “wage class American.”
That’s extremely common. Consider the recent standoff in Oregon between militia members and federal officials. While that was ongoing, wags in the blogosphere and the hip end of the media started referring to the militia members as “Y’all-Qaeda.” Attentive readers may have noted that none of the militia members came from the South—the only part of the United States where “y’all” is the usual second person plural pronoun. To the best of my knowledge, all of them came from the dryland West, where “y’all” is no more common than it is on the streets of Manhattan or Vancouver. Why, then, did the label catch on so quickly and get the predictable sneering laughter of the salary class?
It spread so quickly and got that laugh because most members of the salary class in the United States love to apply a specific stereotype to the entire American wage class. You know that stereotype as well as I do, dear reader. It’s a fat, pink-faced, gap-toothed Southern good ol’ boy in jeans and a greasy T-shirt, watching a NASCAR race on television from a broken-down sofa, with one hand stuffed elbow deep into a bag of Cheez Doodles, the other fondling a shotgun, a Confederate flag patch on his baseball cap and a Klan outfit in the bedroom closet. As a description of wage-earning Americans in general, that stereotype is as crass, as bigoted, and as politically motivated as any of the racial and sexual stereotypes that so many people these days are ready to denounce—but if you mention this, the kind of affluent white liberals who would sooner impale themselves on their own designer corkscrews than mention African-Americans and watermelons in the same paragraph will insist at the top of their lungs that it’s not a stereotype, it’s the way “those people” really are.
Those of my readers who don’t happen to know any people from the salary class, and so haven’t had the opportunity to hear the kind of hate speech they like to use for the wage class, might want to pick up the latest edition of the National Review, and read a really remarkable diatribe by Kevin Williamson—it’s behind a paywall, but here’s a sample. The motive force behind this tantrum was the fact that many people in the Republican party’s grassroots base are voting in their own best interests, and thus for Trump, rather than falling into line and doing what they’re told by their soi-disant betters. The very idea! It’s a fine display of over-the-top classist bigotry, as well as a first-rate example of the way that so many people in the salary class like to insist that poverty is always and only the fault of the poor.
May I please be frank? The reason that millions of Americans have had their standard of living hammered for forty years, while the most affluent twenty per cent have become even more affluent, is no mystery. What happened was that corporate interests in this country, aided and abetted by a bipartisan consensus in government and cheered on by the great majority of the salary class, stripped the US economy of living wage jobs by offshoring most of America’s industrial economy, on the one hand, and flooding the domestic job market with millions of legal and illegal immigrants on the other.
That’s why a family living on one average full-time wage in 1966 could afford a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other necessities and comforts of an ordinary American lifestyle, while a family with one average full time wage in most US cities today is living on the street. None of that happened by accident; no acts of God were responsible; no inexplicable moral collapse swept over the American wage class and made them incapable of embracing all those imaginary opportunities that salary class pundits like to babble about. That change was brought about, rather, by specific, easily identifiable policies. As a result, all things considered, blaming the American poor for the poverty that has been imposed on them by policies promoted by the affluent is the precise economic equivalent of blaming rape victims for the actions of rapists.
In both cases, please note, blaming the victim makes a convenient substitute for talking about who’s actually responsible, who benefits from the current state of affairs, and what the real issues are. When that conversation is one that people who have a privileged role in shaping public discourse desperately don’t want to have, blaming the victim is an effective diversionary tactic, and accordingly it gets much use in the US media these days. There are, after all, plenty of things that the people who shape public discourse in today’s America don’t want to talk about. The fact that the policies pushed by those same shapers of opinion have driven millions of American families into poverty and misery isn’t the most unmentionable of these things, as it happens. The most unmentionable of the things that don’t get discussed is the fact that those policies have failed.
It really is as simple as that. The policies we’re talking about—lavish handouts for corporations and the rich, punitive austerity schemes for the poor, endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, malign neglect of domestic infrastructure, and deer-in-the-headlights blank looks or vacuous sound bites in response to climate change and the other consequences of our frankly moronic maltreatment of the biosphere that keeps us all alive—were supposed to bring prosperity to the United States and its allies and stability to the world. They haven’t done that, they won’t do that, and with whatever respect is due to the supporters of Hillary Clinton, four more years of those same policies won’t change that fact. The difficulty here is simply that no one in the political establishment, and precious few in the salary class in general, are willing to recognize that failure, much less learn its obvious lessons or notice the ghastly burdens that those policies have imposed on the majorities who have been forced to carry the costs.
Here, though, we’re in territory that has been well mapped out in advance by one of the historians who have helped guide the project of this blog since its inception. In his magisterial twelve-volume A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee explored in unforgiving detail the processes by which societies fail. Some civilizations, he notes, are overwhelmed by forces outside their control, but this isn’t the usual cause of death marked on history’s obituaries. Far more often than not, rather, societies that go skidding down the well-worn route marked “Decline and Fall” still have plenty of resources available to meet the crises that overwhelm them and plenty of options that could have saved the day—but those resources aren’t put to constructive use and those options never get considered.
This happens, in turn, because the political elites of those failed societies lose the ability to notice that the policies they want to follow don’t happen to work. The leadership of a rising civilization pays close attention to the outcomes of its policies and discards those that don’t work. The leadership of a falling civilization prefers to redefine “success” as “following the approved policies” rather than “yielding the preferred outcomes,” and concentrates on insulating itself from the consequences of its mistakes rather than recognizing the mistakes and dealing with their consequences. The lessons of failure are never learned, and so the costs of failure mount up until they can no longer be ignored.
This is where Peggy Noonan’s division of the current population into “protected” and “unprotected” classes has something useful to offer. Members of the protected class—in today’s America, as already noted, this is above all the more affluent half or so of the salary class—live within a bubble that screens them from any contact with the increasingly impoverished and immiserated majority. As far as they can see, everything’s fine; all their friends are prospering, and so are they; spin-doctored news stories and carefully massaged statistics churned out by government offices insist that nothing could possibly be wrong. They go from gated residential community to office tower to exclusive restaurant to high-end resort and back again, and the thought that it might be useful once in a while to step outside the bubble and go see what conditions are like in the rest of the country would scare the bejesus out of them if it ever occurred to them at all.
In a rising civilization, as Toynbee points out, the political elite wins the loyalty and respect of the rest of the population by recognizing problems and then solving them. In a falling civilization, by contrast, the political elite forfeits the loyalty and respect of the rest of the population by creating problems and then ignoring them. That’s what lies behind the crisis of legitimacy that occurs so often in the twilight years of a society in decline—and that, in turn, is the deeper phenomenon that lies behind the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. If a society’s officially sanctioned leaders can’t lead, won’t follow, and aren’t willing to get out of the way, sooner or later people are going to start looking for a way to shove them through history’s exit turnstile, by whatever means turn out to be necessary.
Thus if Trump loses the election in November, that doesn’t mean that the threat to the status quo is over—far from it. If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we can count on four more years of the same failed and feckless policies, which she’s backed to the hilt throughout her political career, and thus four more years in which millions of Americans outside the narrow circle of affluence will be driven deeper into poverty and misery, while being told by the grinning scarecrows of officialdom that everything is just fine. That’s not a recipe for social stability; those who make peaceful change impossible, it’s been pointed out, make violent change inevitable. What’s more, Trump has already shown every ambitious demagogue in the country exactly how to build a mass following, and he’s also shown a great many wage-earning Americans that there can be alternatives to an intolerable status quo.
No matter how loudly today’s establishment insists that the policies it favors are the only thinkable options, the spiraling failure of those policies, and the appalling costs they impose on people outside the bubble of privilege, guarantee that sooner or later the unthinkable will become the inescapable. That’s the real news of this election season: the end of ordinary politics, and the first stirrings of an era of convulsive change that will leave little of today’s conventional wisdom intact.
**********************
On a not unrelated theme, I’m delighted to announce that my next book from New Society Publishers, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead, is now available for preorder. Readers who favor the sort of feel-good pablum for the overprivileged marketed by Yes! Magazine and its equivalents will want to give this one a pass. (It’s been suggested to me more than once that if I ran a magazine, it would have to be titled Probably Not! Magazine: A Journal of Realistic Futures.) On the other hand, those who are looking for a sober assessment of the mess into which we’ve collectively backed ourselves, and the likely consequences of that mess over the next five centuries or so, may find it just their cup of astringent tea.
321 comments:
4/6/16, 11:11 AM
goingnowhereslowly said...
4/6/16, 11:24 AM
Neo Tuxedo said...
(* Fragment attributed to Opyros, quoted by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the epigraphs of his Kane the Mystic Swordsman novel Darkness Weaves)
4/6/16, 11:26 AM
Robert Tweedy said...
4/6/16, 11:35 AM
Sackerson said...
4/6/16, 11:53 AM
Esquon said...
4/6/16, 12:21 PM
Ceworthe said...
A book I recommend to read about working class people and how to understand them I "Deerhunting for Jesus:Dispatches from America's Class War" by Joe Bageant, who is unfortunately deceased. I think he would have been utterly fascinated by the political goings on nowadays.
I had a rather amusing incident where I suggested to one of my university area liberal friends that if they wanted to understand why rednecks act and vote the way they do, they should read the aforementioned book. I was told that they didn't want to read anything about Jesus because they were Buddhist, even though I described what they book was about, and Jesus was not really any particular part of it. This from otherwise intelligent people, who don't realize how much they are bigots too, just not of people of color.
By the way, I feel like, as Joe Bageant did, that I can understand both the "back country" people and the liberal college educated cityots,aka educated fools, having gone to college myself. As for the term cityots, country people think city people are clueless people who don't know how to do anything useful, so the city people's scorn for the country people is often reciprocated. And I have to mention that your description of the Nascar man stereotype was missing him holding a can of cheap beer ;-)
4/6/16, 12:30 PM
Ceworthe said...
4/6/16, 12:31 PM
Mikep said...
"In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious." anyone who comes up with a quote like that is clearly worthy of respect.
Mike
4/6/16, 12:34 PM
RAnderson said...
4/6/16, 12:41 PM
John Roth said...
This scrivener opined that if we fixed our trade policy to only trade with countries where they paid and treated labor the same as we did, they'd lose out, and that would be morally reprehensible. It apparently never occurred to him that those self-same trade policies have ripped up a reasonably well working village culture to provide those under-paid laborers, fueled the drug wars in Columbia, facilitated ripping up large swaths of land for mono-culture plantations and fostered a trade imbalance that's reduced a large part of our population to debt peonage.
4/6/16, 12:53 PM
El Gaucho said...
4/6/16, 1:04 PM
Dan the Farmer said...
I keep thinking about the amphetamine of the intellectuals.
4/6/16, 1:12 PM
Michael said...
4/6/16, 1:17 PM
Martin B said...
I've recently been turning over in my mind the thought that there's one assumption we always make and conveniently ignore in discussing economic matters, and maybe it's time to state it out loud.
It's this: Everything else remaining the same.
For example, I could put a ton or two of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it would be absorbed without any measurable effect; or as a factory owner I could make a few people redundant and society would absorb them and there would be no repercussions that anyone would notice.
Except that now we seem to be at a tipping point. The pile of sand is about to slip, but we don't know exactly which grain will start rolling first. Somewhere, soon, something else will no longer remain the same and the big slide will start.
Those with the most power need to move the most cautiously. But I think someone in the 1% will blunder thoughtlessly and set off an avalanche no one can control.
4/6/16, 1:19 PM
ed boyle said...
http://www.ichingfortune.com/hexagrams/18.php
I oracled trump with the iching and got 18 (decaying/corruption)with changing lines 9 on 2nd, 3rd and 6th lines and 6 on line 5. Future hexagram is 8(alliances).
One could see the situation of US politics as a corrupt enterprise which can be changed through alliances.
I have the idiot's guide to iching which is quite intelligent. Revolution is afoot globally against the postwar order. Radivcals against consensus politics in europe and usa and the sino-russian-iranian-indian axis building an alternative financial-diplomatic-military-trade and infrastructure base. So while the West collapses on its systemic corruption the East is post collapse and building up a climbing society based on fairness.
The russian revolution happened a generation before the West's last great crisis so they were able to build up a new identity before the crisis and protect their cultural independence and spread an alternate ideology. It seems the same is repeating itself now. As western social wefare state, military industrial finance complex based on consumerism and fake democracy gets shaked up internally, trump, sanders, Le Pen and co. being symptoms like mussolini and hitler were in 30s the russians provide military, diplomatic, theoretical structure of a survivable post democratic, post oligarchic consumerist slimmed down efficient state,military,etc. Chinese give financial backing and manufacturing base. More eurasian countries are becoming convinced all the time,like lots of westerners, that cia, ngos, soros,nato,etc. are not out to spread democracy. The mindset regarding treaties with indian tribes in19th century is that which the oligarchy uses against the lower classes and all foreign countries. Treaties are, like the US constiution, just pieces of paper, to the hereditary elite. Exporting factories, importing workers,ninja loans destroyed middle class. Perpetual warfare is destroying muslim world. Financial warfare by banks, IMF loans have destroyed NICs, latin American countries many times over the last decades, inaddition to coups originating in US embassies. The elite are a handful of people. CIA originators were Wall Streeters.This is all the same story. The love of money is the root of all evil.
4/6/16, 1:32 PM
David said...
JMG--
Your analysis is as unrelenting and clear-cut as always. I am very aware of my own class status (not upper, but certainly well within the salaried class) and I have a moral obligation, as I see it, to use that income to improve my community and the lives of everyone in it. (Finding effective ways to translate that sentiment into actions that make a difference is, of course, the challenge.)
On a related note, I have to report the local election results from yesterday. Yours truly managed to place sixth (i.e. last) in the city council election. The top three candidates won seats. All-in-all, the experience was very positive, though I likely handicapped myself by choosing to 1) be myself and 2) lay out my case as I saw it, rather than being/saying what was needed to win. One of the other candidates mentioned that he thought I had good ideas, but that I talked like an engineer and came off as too smart.
Oh, well. There are other (and perhaps better) ways I can work to improve/prepare the community for what cometh.
Thank you again, John, for your regular dose of sanity.
4/6/16, 1:37 PM
Urban Harvester said...
This post makes me realize how the promises of salary class status get dangled like carrots at wage class underlings, enrolling their hopeful participation; while what is required of them to advance to that protected class more often than not leads them into the very instruments used to further estrange them from their resources (student loan debt, racketeered university degree/licensing programs, etc).
Looking back over your posts on Péladan, thaumaturgy and binaries, it seems these dog whistles would classify as thaumaturgical tools designed to incite binary-stress responses, inhibit logical thought, and elicit conformed participation while the unwitting subjects get fleeced. In which case those same essays give me some ideas for how to defend against them (as well as food for though for your new writing competition).
"Grinning scarecrows of officialdom" is a keeper!
4/6/16, 1:43 PM
Pantagruel7 said...
4/6/16, 1:49 PM
Eric S. said...
4/6/16, 2:07 PM
SLClaire said...
For reasons that I don't need to explain, I have had the great good fortune to learn how poor people do the best they can in this kind of economic climate. I'm not poor myself at this point because our income is from a combination of interest, pensions, and Social Security and we have been working for many years to reduce expenses to a minimum. But I can tell you that once again in 2015, we failed to earn enough income, by a long way, to have to buy medical insurance, for which I am once again profoundly grateful. And I am taking very careful and detailed mental notes on how to survive true poverty, because I expect my husband Mike and I will find ourselves in that position at some point.
4/6/16, 2:13 PM
Misty Barber said...
4/6/16, 2:23 PM
Marcu said...
Welcome back! I hope your break was fruitful, productive and enjoyable. The world seems a crazier place without your insights.
#############################
The next meeting of the Green Wizard's Association of Melbourne will be held in the last week of April. All interested parties are invited to attend. For people who are unsure about the nature of our meetings imagine a long decent support group with some intentional living discussion mixed in. If you are interested meet us on the 30th of April 2016 at 13:00. In honour of the Archdruid's return we are trying a new venue, the Druids Cafe Bar, at 409 Swanston St Melbourne Victoria, Australia.
Please RSVP, or send queries and comments to limitstogrowth1972[at]gmail.com.
Just look for the green wizard's hat.
4/6/16, 2:36 PM
MindfulEcologist said...
Once, if you were a construction worker you might have built a hospital, or perhaps a school sometime in your career. Today you are more likely to spend the whole of your working life building hotels for the business perk class.
I think it is also worth pointing out that the salaried class has so transformed the type of work we do that fewer and fewer today are able to find a means of "right livelihood" aka meaningful work. In light of the hard road ahead to spend our time doing what most people are paid to do is, well, incoherent at best.
I suggest there is an even deeper fissure than class resentment in the semi-conscious recognition that we are trashing the biosphere for the sake of trinkets. When the work you do is basically meaningless, just what are the Values in the Workplace?
4/6/16, 2:42 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Neo, to my mind class and race are two of many variables making up the convoluted landscape of American injustice. They're distinct -- a lot of white people are on the receiving end of vicious class prejudice, and a significant number of people of color are well ensconced in the salary class -- but they intersect in complex ways with each other, and with all the other divisions of differential privilege.
Robert and Sackerson, thank you.
Esquon, nicely summarized.
Ceworthe, he'd have had to have three hands, in order to hold onto the beer can too!
Mikep, you're welcome and thank you.
RAnderson, thank you.
John, bingo. Of course the pundit didn't get around to mentioning how much of his own lifestyle depends on the pauperization of the US working class.
4/6/16, 2:42 PM
Sven Eriksen said...
4/6/16, 2:59 PM
whomever said...
Meanwhile, the leaks from the Panamanian law firm have started hitting and have already brought down one PM and possibly damaged a second (though honestly, does anyone NOT think Cameron is a sleazeball at this point?). No Americans yet, but who knows what come up in the future. There was much speculation as to why Romney was so cagey about his taxes for instance.
4/6/16, 3:24 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Did you enjoy your break from blogging? Congratulations on the attention that your excellent work and analysis is getting and I do hope that some good comes from that attention - or it at least raises some uncomfortable questions in certain quarters.
Entropy is eating our resource base, we're consuming our infrastructure and our numbers are increasing which basically means that there is less of the pie to go around with every passing day. The privileged class are attempting to hang onto what they can, but with declining resources per capita, that simply means - to my mind anyway - that they have to take from others. And they are desperately trying to avoid inflation - by any possible means. The reason for that is because inflation “disappears” their wealth (which in many cases are merely little bits and bytes in a computer memory somewhere).
Down here there have been some shocking revelations that overseas students have been exploited in many, many industries. And if the students complain then, well, they've breached their student visa's and they risk imminent deportation. I won't even mention the plight of the slaves that are down here.
My view is that the only way we can move forward is if the people holding the preponderance of power and wealth let go of some of that wealth and redistribute it more evenly across the population. Recessions and Depressions are made because no one has any money to spend on stuff - which is useful because in turn that keeps other people employed.
Anyway, whilst I'm being very controversial I'm going to say this: Growth based on debt is not growth. Economists are smoking weed if they believe their own line about growth. I've been considering the derivative and futures markets recently and the thing that I find fascinating about those is that they are so far removed from the realities that I'm not even certain that they can be traced back to their supposed reality. And that is where the salaried and privileged class are keeping their wealth, and it is going to tank, and then rebound, and then tank again in a strange cycle that mirrors oil prices (funny that huh?). Each time will throw a few more people off the boat (with no lifeboat either). Fun times.
Glad you're back and I enjoyed the essay.
Cheers
Chris
4/6/16, 3:28 PM
whomever said...
The absolute, total and utter contempt that is being expressed is absolutely breathtaking. I mean, it concludes with "Kevin is right. If getting a job means renting a U-Haul, rent the U-Haul. You have nothing to lose but your government check." So if you are stuck somewhere due to, oh, family, or underwater mortgage, or whatever, good luck. The poor are poor because it's their fault.
As a side note, I think that US culture has always had a bit of this, and 19th C. England was also famous for it (see, eg, Irish potato famine), it's interesting to think about in a historical context. But still, if you write things like this you can't then act surprised at the pitchforks.
4/6/16, 3:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Dan and Michael, thank you.
Martin, excellent! Yes, and that's a crucial point. The fantasy that everything else will stay the same is way up there on the list of the narratives that are dragging this country and this civilization to its ruin.
Ed, I'd be slow to assume that the rising Eurasian system is "based on fairness," as you've suggested. Hegemony is hegemony, and the opposite of a bad thing is usually another bad thing.
David, sorry to hear that things turned out that way! I hope you feel it was worth the attempt, though.
Harvester, got it in one. We'll be talking more about binaries as the new series of posts gets under way.
Pantagruel, thank you.
Eric, as I see it, a contest between Clinton and Cruz would be an election America could only lose. Two clueless political hacks, fatally disconnected from the realities of life outside their respective bubbles of privilege, and suffering from the fond delusion that a sense of entitlement is adequate qualification for the highest office in the land...it would be purely a matter of seeing which of them got to play the role of Louis XVI. Seriously, if that's the way the election comes out, I'd give even odds that we have a full-blown domestic insurgency under way by 2020.
SLClaire, that's a very sensible thing to do just now.
Misty, at this point anything that didn't make things actively worse would go a long way to satisfy the very low expectations of American voters. Stil, no question, a Trump or Sanders election would be only the beginning of a long and difficult process of change.
Marcu, thank you.
Mindful, that's a good point.
4/6/16, 3:44 PM
Bike Trog said...
4/6/16, 4:10 PM
Justin said...
Regarding NAFTA:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain
JMG, what do you think the odds that Trump understands our actual predicament passably well are? I'm quite sure Clinton gets it, but doesn't have a path forward other than doubling down on the same and Sanders... well, free college, even if some of the beneficiaries go into petroleum geology, isn't going to help.
4/6/16, 4:14 PM
Gabriela Augusto said...
good to read you again!
For many Europeans the Trump phenomenon is totally incomprehensible. People here understand that his popularity indicates some dissatisfaction of the American voters, what they can't understand is: why aren't the Americans happy?
Economy is booming, unemployment so low it doesn't even count, they can print money to pay their debts, they now have an Europe-like healthcare, and no masses of newcomers willing to force them to pray 5x a day or dress funny :)
I know that when Odoacer came, he and his army walked around the italic peninsula for more than 10 years unchallenged. Nobody bothered to find an army to stop him from taking the administrative capital of the western empire, in fact, nobody care…and Rome fell.
Good thing Washington DC is well protected by two oceans :)
4/6/16, 4:19 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Since neither of them really has down-ballot allies to sweep in as a wave with them, either presidency would be severely hobbled by existing structures. And both Parties are working hard to prevent either from being nominated.
4/6/16, 4:21 PM
Mark said...
I'm interested in what's happening in the middle of the economy, where the lower end of the salary class and the upper end of the wage class still have a lot more day to day connection than the entitled executive type and the struggling lower-wage worker have with each other. That's the part of the economy where I live, for the most part, and is where the general class consensus around American Dream optimism was forged, and still hangs on to some degree. Trump seems to draw much of his support from this middle group, where there is still a desire to make the old promises work. So ironically, he may be the upper end of the salary class's last chance to avoid that middle turning their angry eyes to them.
So much is happening now.
4/6/16, 4:25 PM
Ceworthe said...
4/6/16, 4:36 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
It's a pity that Toynbee and Oswald Spengler aren't required reading for high school and college students.
4/6/16, 4:38 PM
234567 said...
Eventually, one of them said, "You know, there's no way for any of these guys to pay for anything new. I just saw where our student loan debt is 30% of projected government income - so we're totally f&%ked."
That brought them, through lots of jocular convolutions, to the fact that with the electoral system and the whole Democrat/Republican thing, there is no way to ever fix this. Especially since all the older generations only vote red or blue, was the consensus.
"Maybe we just need to tear this whole sh*t up. Nobody is going to change anything, and we get to look forward to being in debt for 10 or 20 years for 4 damn years of college, IF we don't get thrown in jail because we can't find a f*%king job!"
"We got no decent income and already got taxed before we even earned it," said one, irritated.
"Wouldn't take much you know," said another. "Totally easy to shut things down - remember that last bomb threat?" Lots of laughter.
"That wasn't even real, and the entire school was shut down for 2 days."
"Yes, wouldn't take much. I might do some crazy sh&t if they were going to send me to jail when I can't get a job to repay my loans. No reason not to."
This is paraphrasing - but it certainly caught my attention. They wandered away from the barn, and the rest was lost.
That entire conversation among those 5 or 6 kids grabbed my attention and I can't let go of it...
4/6/16, 4:44 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
The arrogance and cluelessness of people like Williamson is sickening. No doubt the white wage class has often been its own worst enemy and there is a lot of self-inflicted damage like the drug abuse he alludes to.
But what about the responsibility of the salary class, both Republicrat and Dempublican, who have sold the wage class down the river and cannibalized much of the American economy in order to maintain their own status? What are people supposed to do when so many of the decent wage class jobs have been shipped overseas or automated out of existence and the only jobs they can find even when they can find work are dead-end, minimum wage jobs?
If we get to the stage when the tumbrils start rolling, it will be because the clueless elites and their bought-and-paid-for apologists (like Williamson) left the masses with no alternative.
4/6/16, 4:49 PM
Nastarana said...
About Kevin Williamson, everyone did notice, I hope, that the places he designates for ethnic cleansing are places where house prices have fallen low enough that non-salary class persons can have a shot at ownership, if personal circumstances allow and the omens are favorable.
4/6/16, 4:51 PM
Avery said...
I live in Japan, and it's very simple to lay out the situation here. The country is stagnant, and will undergo its own democratic revolution as soon as the American Caesar arrives (whoever it might be). The ability to dispute the central command of the party was swept away in 2006 under PM Koizumi, and his eventual replacement, PM Abe, has used that centralization of power to knock out Japan's economic backbone and replace it with undying obedience to the US and a pledge of commitment to the American security agreement. Everything that has been done in this country, even the protests against Abe, has operated on the incredibly naïve assumption that America is always going to have a Clinton/Obama kind of president who will say nice things while continuing to maintain the status quo. To Japan's elites Trump represents pure chaos, and they've been demanding an explanation from their American establishment counterparts for months now. I wonder what they will be saying come August.
4/6/16, 5:08 PM
John the Peregrine said...
Once again thank you for the insightful and level-headed commentary. A month's absence is unbearable when events are moving so fast! On the topic of Hillary Clinton, it's worth mentioning that, given her legendary corruption, the elites of a previous era would have been glad to sacrifice her to set an example to the rest of us that no one is above the law. Even if Hillary loses the general election, her escape from prosecution for the crimes she obviously committed (and I'm not referring here only to the e-mail server incident), when millions in America are in jail for comparatively harmless drug crimes, will deal a crushing morale blow to the country.
If you don't mind me asking, could you comment on your writing habits? You said a while ago that not owning a television allows you to squeeze extra hours out of the day that most people spend vegetating in front of a glass screen. Is there anything else that you consider to be equally important?
4/6/16, 5:12 PM
Moshe Braner said...
"MileIQ is the leading automatic mileage tracking app that saves people an average of $6,500 per year in business mileage deductions or reimbursements and hours of time each week.
As part of Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we’ve recently welcomed MileIQ to the Microsoft family."
4/6/16, 5:16 PM
Genevieve Hawkins said...
4/6/16, 5:18 PM
Rita said...
But seriously--I have been reading a book of essays by W. H. Auden and a passage in "The Poet and the City" struck me. "There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revolutionary issues." He explains that in party issues both sides agree on the goal but differ on the means, whereas on revolutionary issues "Different groups within a society hold different views on what is just." He asserts that on party issues tempers should be kept and rhetoric controlled. "Outside the Chamber, the rival deputies should be able to dine in each other's house; fanatics have no place in party politics." But when revolutionary issues are at stake "argument and compromise are out of the question; each group is bound to regard the other as wicked or mad or both." At the time of writing this (late 40s or early 50s) Auden saw racial equality as the only world-wide revolutionary issue and berated the leaders of both capitalist and communist nations for not realizing that the disagreement on how to provide mental and physical health for all citizens was a party, not a revolutionary issue. Interesting point of view. He was apparently not politically sophisticated enough to see how blowing up the other side into the enemy of all things good and right benefited those in power in both the West and the Soviet bloc.
It seems that what passes for party politics in the U.S. is actually being presented to the voters as more closely approaching revolutionary politics. Not that anyone throws that term around lightly. But the demonization of the opposition on both sides justifies the deadlock that is really, in what I read as the view of this blog, the result of inability to address the real questions without requiring those who pay for elections to give up money, privilege and power. No Western politician feels able to say "the party is over" because real steps to stop resource depletion, etc. would threaten the dividends. The essay may be found in the collection _The Dyer's Hand_
4/6/16, 5:20 PM
Bob Wise said...
4/6/16, 5:21 PM
pygmycory said...
most of the people I talk to HATE Trump, and often can't figure out why he'd be popular in the US. I've tried explaining that the US working class is enraged with the status quo to the point that any change seems better than the current situation.
The reaction to this has often been 'oh, now I get it', sometimes with 'but he isn't going to solve their problems if elected/he's evil'. I suspect a lot of this is that living in a different nation, we get most/all of our info on Trump and the USA via the media, and you know what the mainstream media is like generally, and more specifically with regards to Trump.
4/6/16, 5:27 PM
Unknown said...
4/6/16, 5:30 PM
Michael Connolly said...
4/6/16, 5:58 PM
Eric Backos said...
I’m working on middle school teaching certification in hope of returning to the salary class. In a presentation last Monday, I introduced my classmates to the use of hard science fiction as a method for discovering the sciences. The World Beyond the Hill by Panshin and Panshin provided the theory, and Star’s Reach demonstrated the practice. Green Wizardry got a tie-in plug because it is such a great source for lesson plans.
Thank you so much for your help with my coursework.
Eric
4/6/16, 5:58 PM
Dan Mollo said...
4/6/16, 6:00 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
@JMG I agree that the country desperately wants change. What people seem to want, at least based my experience, is Trump vs. Sanders. Instead of a putative outsider (a Senator or billionaire as outsiders--yeah, right) vs. an obvious insider, the U.S. would get what it wants, two insurgent candidates. Instead, it's the woman who wins the mainstream media vs. Springtime for Trump.
4/6/16, 6:14 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
You should keep in mind, JMG, when assessing other people's reaction to events in the US, that most foreigners still do believe that the streets of NY are paved with gold.
4/6/16, 6:21 PM
ARodrigo said...
He may get chosen as the nominee, but then HORRORS! Shocked, shocked they will be by the court challenge filed by the Democrats (or ungodly 3rd party candidate Trump). Enter the establishment candidate, dropping from the rafters like a pasty, middle aged ninja.
And don't count Sanders out yet- he's had an uphill slog all the way, yet seems to be gaining momentum, in contravention to the laws of physics. This may even shape up to be a 4-way fight for the crown...not likely, but actually within the realm of possibility. I never thought I'd see the day.
4/6/16, 6:27 PM
Shane W said...
I'm always amazed at how cluelessly liberal even your readership can be. I've had this strange situation where I'll be discussing your blog and books with readers who claim they're avid fans, yet contest every point you make. Most recently, someone said that the wage class was voting "against their own interests" in voting for Trump, and recently, I was treated to a rehashing of all the ugly wage class stereotypes you listed. I'm left scratching my head at these bizarre encounters, thinking, "what ADR are you reading, and what JMG are you a fan of?"--your writing seems pretty straightforward to me! I literally can't have a conversations with some of these people. So very strange--interesting how the human mind works and how it functions.
I'm reminded through repeated encounters recently that I have way too many clueless liberal salary class acquaintances, and not enough wage class contacts. The gods are trying to tell me something. One thing that I see through and through amongst the salary class people I know and their cluelessness is an overarching death wish, be it alcoholism, New Age spirituality, or other forms of unwillingness to cope or face reality--I'm thinking that maybe the salary class is complicit in its destiny w/the pitchfork.
4/6/16, 6:38 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
4/6/16, 6:43 PM
Shane W said...
what's your take on the email scandal and the chances of an indictment? Lots of people think that the FBI wouldn't be going to the trouble to do all this investigation & subpoena witnesses if it all came to naught. They're saying that the Justice Dept. would be hard pressed not to pursue anything if there was something illegal. Some are saying the Dems could be more roiled than the GOP this year. I'm interested on your take and how it will all come down...
4/6/16, 6:47 PM
Justin said...
4/6/16, 6:55 PM
David said...
Thank you, John. It was most certainly worth doing, even if it didn't turn out as I'd hoped. A newcomer ("not born here") in a smaller city has a hill to climb when it comes to things like this. There are many ways I can do the work that needs doing.
On the other hand, my banjo lessons are going well :)
4/6/16, 6:57 PM
Zachary Braverman said...
I think Trump consciously courts accusations of racism, and not only to appeal to racists.
You don't have to be a racist to think that accusations of racism fly far too fast and easy in America today. By demonstrating his willingness to bear the brunt of those accusations, Trump also appeals to the huge swath of the American public who resents this environment.
4/6/16, 7:15 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
https://www.traditionalright.com/the-election-2/
And calling out Republican "conservatives" and pointing out they are really pseudoconservatives, just like the Archdruid did a while back:
https://www.traditionalright.com/the-election-the-republican-establishments-theft-of-the-word-conservative/
4/6/16, 7:43 PM
foodnstuff said...
4/6/16, 7:51 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
4/6/16, 8:26 PM
tawal said...
Blessings, tawal
4/6/16, 8:28 PM
Matthew Casey Smallwood said...
4/6/16, 8:32 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
The efforts of the two political parties to ensure than they get an establishment nominee could be characterized as neoantidisestablishmentarianism.
Yeah, I know, a more accurate description would be contraantiestablishment, but that (a) has an unfortunate double "a" in it, and (b) is not as funny.
4/6/16, 8:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Whomever, I've heard exactly the same thing from other clueless members of the privileged classes. Tumbril time cometh...
Cherokee, thank you! It wasn't really a vacation as such -- I had a couple of big writing projects on tight deadline, and spent the month writing my fingertips down to nubs. It's good to be back. Not surprised that Australia is right up there with the US in the same idiotic policies, and I suspect they'll have very similar fates.
Trog, yeah, that's not exactly a good sign.
Justin, I don't think Clinton gets it at all. Trump? I think he gets some aspects of it, but nothing like the whole picture. For example, I've never seen any evidence that he gets the limits to growth.
Gabriela, your friends have no clue what it's like over here. The US economy isn't booming, it's in the tank, and unemployment over here is sky-high -- the statistics are faked by excluding long-term unemployed from the figures. We don't have European-style health care; we've got a law that says we have to buy health insurance that only pays a fraction of our health care costs, for whatever price the insurance companies want to charge. It's true that our newcomers don't want to make us pray any particular way, but corporate interests are using them to drive down wages to starvation levels. Washington DC is protected by oceans from east and west, but not from the south...and I expect when our Odoacer shows up, he'll get the same kind of welcome.
Bill, I'll talk about Sanders if he turns out to have a shot at the nomination. You'll notice that I haven't talked about Cruz, either, even though he's considerably scarier than Trump.
Mark, no argument there. The thing the "Never Trump" brigade doesn't get is that he's probably their last chance to avoid dangling from lampposts. If he wins, and gives Middle America a few benefits, we may yet avoid a civil war. Otherwise? probably not.
Ceworthe, but the shotgun is central to the stereotype, and it's the stereotype I want to discuss.
Sojan, delighted to hear it. I'd happily see high school history classes take Spengler and Toynbee as their textbooks.
234567, and there you have the first stirrings of America's next civil war.
Nastarana, why, yes, that would follow, wouldn't it?
4/6/16, 9:01 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Moshe, funny. Having lived in the Seattle area when Microsoft was doing its first big boom, I can testify to the serene detachment from reality that pervades the Gates empire.
Genevieve, you're missing the difference between the wage class and the welfare class. A lot of people in the wage class don't actually get much government aid -- that's doled out to groups that manage to market their support to politically influential power centers, and the wage class hasn't by and large been good at that for too many decades.
Rita, Auden was very naive in some ways, and he also had the attitudes appropriate to his class and background.
Bob, thanks for the link!
Pygmycory, and that's the problem, of course -- the US media is about as honest these days as Pravda was under the Soviet Union.
Unknown, with all due respect, I think you're wrong. Certainly that's not the way it's used where I live.
Michael, I supposed we've earned a certain amount of gloating from overseas, haven't we?
Erik, glad to hear it.
Dan, the book does some expansion, yes.
Pinku-Sensei, I admit I'd rather see a Sanders vs. Trump contest than anything else. That would be fun.
Bruno, that's funny. It would be amusing, in an ironic sort of way, if all kinds of salary class people in the US fled to other countries, and all kinds of salary class people in other countries fled to the US!
ARodrigo, I certainly hope you're right!
4/6/16, 9:25 PM
jcummings said...
Welcome back! We all missed you and your exceptional observations - best served cold with a dash of wry amusement... I hope your break was restorative!
I wrote this story in response to your latest challenge. I'm not sure it's quite what you were after, but it's what came out. All the best!
http://adrchallenges.blogspot.com/2016/04/candy-land.html
4/6/16, 9:40 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
4/6/16, 9:49 PM
jcummings said...
My own experience tells me that y'all can most definitely be singular, but isn't often. Much depends on context. Y'all in the singular is kind of a formal version, like "vous." You'd never use y'all in the singular sense with your wife, for example. You might if you were trying to pick someone up at a bar, however. Y'all in the plural sense, however, is more generic, and can be used interchangeably with all y'all.
All y'all avoids any confusion, and is always plural.
4/6/16, 10:02 PM
nuku said...
you said "money is the root of all evil"
I think not. How about "Humans are the root of all evil"?
4/6/16, 10:30 PM
Mark Rice said...
As near as I can tell the only people who use y'all as singular second person are bad TV script writers. They have a character use y'all to let us know a character is from the South. But these script writers do not know that y'all is plural -- not singular.
4/6/16, 10:45 PM
John Zelnicker said...
Although these are contributing causes to the problem of stagnant wages, perhaps the most important is the concerted effort to keep wages from increasing along with the increase in productivity over the past 40 years. This has been accomplished by a massive, coordinated campaign by the corporate elites through the think tanks, co-opted media, and academic economists they support. (See the Powell Memo from 1971, written by Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a few months before he was appointed to the Supreme Court). Virtually all of the gains from productivity have gone to profits (and executive compensation) rather than wages. Since the mid-'70's productivity has increased, IIRC, about 97%, while the median wage has increased somewhere in the single digits. The ongoing campaign to destroy the unions, the substitution of casual employment for long-term job security (cf. Uber), and, yes, the off-shoring of manufacturing have all contributed to this. The overarching concept behind this is the idea that a corporation's single, most important goal is to increase "shareholder value", which means continually increasing profit. Contrary to what many people believe, there is no rule or law that supports this. It was promoted by neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman beginning in the late '70's. (BTW, prior to the '80's, stock buybacks by corporations were a violation of SEC rules. I think that was changed during Reagan's term in office.)
The issue of immigration is a bit more complicated. The use of H-1B visas to bring in high tech workers has certainly contributed to wage suppression in those fields. However, this is a relatively new phenomenon. The tech industry has also used the age-old method of collusion to keep wages down. Many of you may remember the exposure of several of the biggest tech companies' coordinated efforts to prevent bidding wars over programmers, etc., a couple of years ago. Intuit, Google, Adobe, Apple and others were implicated.
The problem of undocumented immigrants (I hate the term "illegal immigrants". How can a human being be illegal?) is often misunderstood. Here in Alabama a few years ago, a draconian law was passed that allowed law enforcement to demand immigration papers from anyone they stopped, as well as other provisions that basically made life miserable for anyone who appeared to be Latina/o. Even documented immigrants were afraid to leave their homes. One result was that farmers in North Alabama were unable to find workers to harvest their crops and the entire tomato crop rotted in the fields that year. The point is that undocumented immigrants do not always take jobs from Americans. In another incident, the manager of the Mercedes Benz assembly plant near Tuscaloosa was detained because he did not have his immigration papers in his car. The German press had a field day with that one.
One other fact to keep in mind about undocumented immigrants is that they are also consumers and spend most of their income in the local economy, increasing aggregate demand. They also pay taxes such as sales tax, property tax (through the rent payments to their landlords), and other taxes, including FICA, for which they never receive any benefit. If you work through the calculations, undocumented immigrants are actually a net positive for the economy, contrary to the propaganda put forth by the elites.
4/6/16, 10:58 PM
John Zelnicker said...
4/6/16, 11:02 PM
John Michael Greer said...
David, banjo lessons are a good fallback!
Zachary, that could well be. Trump's very clever, and he's adept at getting the privileged to attack him in ways that endear him to his base.
Sojan, a Trump-Sanders ticket would likely blow the current political stasis in this country to smithereens. Definitely worth putting by some popcorn!
Foodnstuff, thank you! I gather from my friends and readers Down Under that the US and Australia are pretty much following the same track right off a cliff.
Matthew, one way or another, this is shaping up to be the most interesting presidential campaign of my lifetime. It would be good if the conservatives were to start defining themselves; it would be better if they threw out the free-market zealots, the theocrats, and all the other utopian fanatics and got back to being actually conservative for a change!
Bill, hah! Okay, that earns tonight's gold star. I once won a spelling bee by being able to spell "antidisestablishmentarian," which I'd learned from the Guinness Book of World Records; three more letters won't hurt. ;-)
Jcummings, hmm. It wasn't really what I had in mind, no, but I'll consider it -- it's well written and well paced.
Bill, modern English is sadly lacking a second person plural -- "you" as both singular and plural causes much confusion -- and I think the rest of us should be grateful to all y'all in the South for providing one. I'm not sure if you're aware, though, that there's competition -- in Pittsburgh and some other corners of western Pennsylvania, "yinz" (a contraction of "you 'uns") has come into general use. It's not impossible that a few centuries from now, two languages descended from modern English will be instantly distinguishable by their second person plural pronouns...
Jcummings, that's fascinating -- in other words, "y'all" is evolving to have the same functions as the second person plural in other Indo-European languages, in which it very often serves as a respectful second person singular on occasion.
Mark, this does not surprise me at all.
4/6/16, 11:15 PM
Charles Richardson said...
Hoping that your hiatus was enriching, and both the birds in the trees and the neurons in my head are blissfully chirping at your return and latest post. Marvelous. Thank you. You are the polymath diagnostician.
Inspired by your earlier posts, I would like you to share some of the noteworthy current efforts you are aware of in sustainability at different tech levels. We don't know how rough a beast slouches toward us and what it's going to stomp on, and we may find ourselves in radically different scenarios as TSHTF.
I am beginning to see that there is no higher calling than to help heal the world and the hearts of men, and to provide some temporary light against the darkness.
Thanks again for what you do.
4/6/16, 11:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Charles, I'll certainly consider it.
Norton (offlist), do you know what the word "genocide" means? It means the actual or attempted extermination of an entire category of people defined by race, religion, class, or some other general label. In saying that you want the American wage class to die off because you don't approve of the values of the candidate it supports, you're advocating genocide. How does that make you feel?
4/6/16, 11:29 PM
len said...
I too am grateful for your writings. Your post explaining the Trump phenomenon was really helpful to those of us in Canada who had been perplexed.
The election in your country this season is really interesting and the establishment is loosing its grip - visibly. I thought of the electoral process as being given new life. It is now a direct forum around which people can coalesce. What I mean is that the media has done a good job isolating individuals from possible collective push back. Now, citizens are starting to see that they are not the exception (e.g., only my family, only my community, only my town, etc.) struggling in the middle of a "booming" economy with lots of available jobs - if that were the case and others were doing well, they would not be turning out and voting for the establishment outsiders. As such, the voting process is itself a forum. The last thing the elites want is engaged citizenry - they must be panicking by now. In their greed, they simply disenfranchised too many people - they probably thought they had it all stitched up after decades of gradual strip mining of the populace without much fuss - turns out that they are hitting the limits on just about every resource - funny that!
4/6/16, 11:36 PM
steve pearson said...
4/6/16, 11:41 PM
steve pearson said...
4/7/16, 12:02 AM
Ben Echols said...
4/7/16, 12:13 AM
William Hays said...
4/7/16, 1:08 AM
Rhisiart Gwilym said...
4/7/16, 1:19 AM
patriciaormsby said...
Japan is such an America wannabe. Essentially the same thing is happening here, with its own peculiar twists. The TV all but gloated over Trump's Wisconsin defeat and a week ago, it mentioned difficulties with Hillary's campaign, and that Biden might need to replace her. And what about Bernie? Bernie who? Meanwhile, Japan has a growing problem with child poverty which is serious enough that a "Children's Cafeteria" initiative has sprung up here in a country that has only a very recent history of charity. If I can locate one nearby I'll start donating our produce. The issue of poverty is still well hidden here, because most of the victims are the younger generations, who live at home with their elderly parents on pensions. People my age had part of their pensions stolen in a nifty bureaucratic paper-shredding incident and are now facing the prospect of trying to get by with very little.
I am not sure how the Japanese revolt. I think there will be a lot of suicides. Under a Confucian moral system, they prefer stability, and my impression here is that the average citizen has long given up any illusion of a political voice. In China, though, corrupt officials face execution, because under Confucian ethics, they are considered more dangerous that a murderer. Thus people who try to take advantage of their good fortune under the American system may ultimately be called to account. There is, in fact, a venerable tradition of swordsmen exacting revenge against corrupt officials (including one of the folks involved in the paper-shredding scandal), and it has always been of great interest to me how the Yakuza maintain the old, Confucian ethics in Japan.
4/7/16, 1:26 AM
Unknown said...
It is my view that politics, globally, will never improve the lot of the wage class while ever it is structured around the party model. There are too many conflicted interest issues that allow the few to dictate to the many.
I favor and advocate for a far greater role for independent representatives and more use of the debating chamber to thrash out where the greatest common good lies and how best to pursue it.
A question, where in your model do farmers fit? Unless they are vertically integrated corporate model entities they are being hung out to dry by virtue of being price takers in marketplaces dominated by corporates run by the salary class.
They often have considerable capital invested, are unable to move rapidly to respond to changing conditions,and suffer many of the problems of the wage class.
Cheers from Tasmania
eagle eye
4/7/16, 1:26 AM
Mikep said...
This may be true but you do have something that we in the old countries generally don't have, GUNS! From over here it seems that every time one of your establishment types uses the words gun and control in the same sentence ya'll head of to the nearest gun shop. You have to wonder if the push for greater gun control is motivated entirely by a desire to make it more difficult for young urban blacks to remove themselves from the gene pool. The day may not be far off when we get to see which is the better investment a more or less functioning NHS or a basement full of automatic weapons.
4/7/16, 2:26 AM
Spanish fly said...
Look at the others policemen reaction, ha ha...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrOVH-bLrq8
4/7/16, 2:28 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
4/7/16, 2:51 AM
Gigoachef said...
For a strange ;-) case of synchronicity your first post this month and Ugo Bardi's post a few days back deal with the same subject: the true meaning of Trump's rise. And it's interesting that you both conclude that it is the loss of control the governing elite exert of the polity, what leads to civilization collapse.
Ugo supports his thinking with a System Dynamics model, which he includes in his post. If you haven't it's worth checking out: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/donald-trump-and-collapse-of-western.html
4/7/16, 3:08 AM
Unknown said...
Dear David,
I'm told there is a Yiddish saying that translates to, "Being poor is no disgrace. It's no great honor either." The same applies to coming in sixth out of six in your first run for office. You accomplished the first step in a budding political career: bringing yourself to the attention of the voters and the local political establishment.
If you have sufficient ego and I imagine you do, the result doesn't mean giving up on being a candidate ever again. It is a signal to prepare the ground more next time.
If you are working on a strategy to do that, here’s one idea. My town has a bunch of standing committees and commissions that report to the council and make recommendations in specific areas. They include economic development, capital program monitoring, financial, flood, open space, dog park, arts, bicycle/pedestrian advisory, community facilities, library, parks and recreation, historical, quality of life. These committees are composed of volunteers and I frequently see solicitations for applicants to fill vacancies. They want people who have already demonstrated an interest or have relevant expertise.
I imagine this is a typical arrangement and that some of the committees would be more permeable than others to willing newcomers (e. g., not the planning commission). If there happens to be a vacancy on a committee for which your engineering background is useful, you’ve already demonstrated your seriousness and you would have a good chance of getting on. Serving on such a committee would be worthwhile in itself, give you useful information on how things get done, and put you in the way of connections for your next run for office.
4/7/16, 3:23 AM
YCS said...
Fantastic to read your work again. I hope you had a good rest!
I'm currently doing Macroeconomics 1 (meant for the completely uninitiated novice) and it physically pains me to study this course.
Then I realise, that all the future 'policy experts' walking out of my ('prestigious') program walk into government and use their clueless conceptions of growth to fuel their confirmation bias. No surprises why policy makers exhibit the behaviours of insane people: the model through which they view the world is so fundamentally flawed, and their fear of reality so deep that they prefer to treat things like a set of lever or switch, not realising that what they're dealing with isn't a machine.
Incidentally the engineering side of my program prepares me much more to understand systems and clearly catch the blind spots in 'economic thinking'. Most of the engineering and science oriented people I know refuse to even deal with the absolutely flawed piece of bogus that is modern economics. It pities me that my economics lecturer actually believes what he teaches.
Of course, you can't even comment on modern economics without having some qualification due to widespread use of appeal to authority fallacies by the establishment. The only thing that keeps me going is that I know that the house of cards is going to fold in my lifetime, and there will be need for somebody to build something from scratch based on actual reality to replace this nonsense. The allocation of resources is going to be an important issue and if I can at least highlight that the natural world actually exists to our bioblind contemporaries and help build a model that works practically (which is really what engineers do best) then learning the entire thing wrong, as it is being taught to me, won't have been a waste.
YCS
4/7/16, 3:31 AM
Christine4 said...
4/7/16, 4:19 AM
Shane W said...
It warms my heart to hear that youth are finally getting a clue and coming in from the wilderness where they've been ever since the radicalism of the late 60s-early 70s ended...
4/7/16, 5:23 AM
NJGuy73 said...
If undocumented immigrants are actually a net positive for the economy...
...then why should any immigrant be documented at all?
I say only let in undocumented ones. Given the choice between:
a) one who puts into FICA without getting any out, or
b) one who puts into FICA and will get some out,
it should be obvious as to what our government should want.
I say we shut down all the agencies. Just a big waste of paperwork.
4/7/16, 5:25 AM
Dylan said...
If I follow Spengler correctly, we're expecting a Marius figure at this point in history's curve, not an Augustus, as you suggested in a comment to your last post.
We've had our two Gracchan reformists assassinated already; that was the 1960's. Now we should expect a Marius figure, a populist leader who rides his popularity to the top job entirely legally and THEN begins to distort the legislative framework in favour of his wage-class supporters.
The 'Sulla moment' is when the establishment strikes back and for the first time begins openly killing citizens.
If Roman history were a perfect analogue (which it isn't), we'd still be about fifty years away from the appearance of the true Caesars, who have the charisma and military might to personally smash the state and rebuild it in their image.
4/7/16, 5:30 AM
gregorach said...
In those terms, these policies have actually been wildly successful for their originators and intended beneficiaries, which explains exactly why they have persisted for so long. The problem is not so much that political elites have become so isolated that they can't see that their policies are failing the majority of people, it's that they've become so isolated that they think it doesn't matter as long as they're making out like bandits.
It's not that the con has failed (it's been a stunning success), it's just that we're among the marks, rather than the grifters or the shills.
4/7/16, 5:48 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
At any rate, "thou" blended into "you" in common speech for exactly the same reason that everyone of any rank (certain dishonorable regional exceptions noted)became "Mister, Miss, and Missus." From president to pig keeper. Now falling out of use as respect for the person slips out of fashion and foreign PhDs are addressed - in writing - by their first names, like children and, in some regions I lived in as a transplanted Yankee child, to my shock, the adult help.
Okay - TMI from a language geek. But postmodern English has had a few very major lacks. Y'all fills one of then, "Ms" -pronounced "Miz", another Southernism orally - is another. And for the collective 3rd person general-reference singular, we're back to the early modern "they", driving the grammar nazis into screaming fits.
Language is like water and air - rushing in to fill a vacuum.
4/7/16, 6:02 AM
David said...
All--
I'd like to pass along an interesting election data point. My brief commute to work runs along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and for the past many months, there has been a sizable (~4x6 foot) pro-Trump sign prominently displayed on one of the roadside properties along that main drive. This morning I noticed that the pro-Trump sign had been replaced by an anti-Ryan sign ("Paul Ryan" with the universal "no" symbol). Even more noteworthy, of course, as this is Ryan's home state.
@BillPulliam regarding the grammatical discussion -- My appreciation for the concise explanation to everyone. As one who grew up (more or less) in the South, the distinctive second-person plural is one of the regionalisms that occasionally creeps into my speech. This far north of the Mason-Dixon line, it tends to get noticed.
4/7/16, 6:07 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
In languages that have an official standard second person plural (i.e. most other Indoeuropean languages) all this is understood without confusion. And the same is true for Southerners; we never get confused about "Do you have eggs?" "Do yall have eggs?" and "All yall need to go out and buy some eggs." It's not just a weird dialectical quirk, it's a very useful grammatical distinction that standard English is poorer and weaker for not having.
JMG - yes I have encountered "yinz." Back in the 70s when I first came across it, it was tabboo and those who used it were called "yinzers," the local equivalent of "hillbilly." Buy, like "hillbilly" it has been reclaimed as a badge of regional pride. As for the competition, "yall" is standard in african-american speech and is very commonly heard in Hip Hop. Because of this it is becoming more widespread and understood by younger people outside the South. And our last three US Presidents have been yall speakers in casual conversation and interviews. But it only takes one or two celebrities from northern Appalachia to put "yinz" in the national pop culture lexicon and everything might be different!
4/7/16, 6:08 AM
David said...
@tawal -- Thank you. I do intend to keep up the effort. I'm a member of our community garden (which is going on its 3rd year), serving on the city zoning/land use commission, and still working on getting a community discussion group going (in the vein of the "transition" movement, but not necessarily exactly so) that would hopefully act as a seedbed for ideas for community action, local businesses, co-operative projects, etc. Just have to acknowledge that it's a marathon, not a sprint...
4/7/16, 6:20 AM
Goldmund said...
4/7/16, 6:22 AM
Stu from New Jersey said...
Welcome back!
The paragraph with the phrase:
The leadership of a falling civilization prefers to redefine “success” as “following the approved policies” rather than “yielding the preferred outcomes,”
is brilliant, and was worth waiting a month to read.
I noticed this happening in the corporate world, too, but could not figure out if it was a function of the senescence of a company or of society as a whole.
4/7/16, 6:27 AM
nuku said...
I recently had a conversation with a man who claimed that European Jews were murdered en mass so that the Nazis could "get their money". Never mind that rich Jews were only a small fraction of the 6 million killed. The real reason for the Jewish Holocaust was rampant anti-Semitism and the Nazi ideology of the superiority of the Aryan race.
4/7/16, 6:42 AM
barrymelius said...
4/7/16, 6:46 AM
ProvidenceMine said...
I personally don't know if these privileged Liberals ever cared for immigrants, underclasses of color or sexual minorities. It seems to me that they use these populations as lip service in order to appear more tolerant than they really are, quite frankly.
It's like what Chris Hedges said about the Liberals in Harvard Divinity School-they would talk all this concern about the poor, but they didn't like the smell of the poor. At least Hedges practiced what he preached and spent time in a parish in the poor section of Boston called, I think, Roxbury.
As for the white underclass, I suspect that the elites have frankly lied to them-telling them that they were special, that they were just like them-and when the economy was doing well for these white working people it was easy to fool them with all of the goodies that go with a strong economy. Now, the elites are not even pretending to have any connection to this population anymore. Liberals like Jerry Springer and reality television poke fun at the white underclass with abandon. The Conservatives poke fun of Trump supporters as well( many of the supporters being of the white underclass), clueless to the fact that they, along with the mainstream media, created the monster that is Trump!
Whoever wins the election, the results will not be good for the people. As much as I don't like Trump, I find Clinton to be the more frightening figure of the two-I think she will do a hell of a lot more damage than Trump ever could. As for Sanders, who is simply a repeat of the 'hope and change' nonsense of Obama( you'd think people wouldn't fall for that bull again), he would be a disappointment in the same way that Obama was.
Just my little views.
Please keep up the good work! :D
4/7/16, 6:50 AM
My donkey said...
"College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. [...] These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values — civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class — while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. [...] There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities."
Hedges certainly doesn't claim that racism is "the only reason, the only possible reason" that anyone supports the Trump campaign.
Did you accidentally link to the wrong article?
4/7/16, 7:08 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
4/7/16, 7:10 AM
Eric S. said...
4/7/16, 7:12 AM
subduedcrew said...
4/7/16, 7:15 AM
Matt and Jess said...
I really need to read up more on history and politics. I do wonder overall what the differences would be between a Trump presidency disrupting the status quo now, and years of more failed policies resulting in a worsening situation for most of us. You know--when someone like Trump wants power, does he try to keep it by actually putting better policies in place? I don't know whom in history he might be comparable to and what the possible positive outcomes of his presidency might be. Clearly a lot of people are hinging their hopes on him.
4/7/16, 7:24 AM
Paulo said...
Working class folks are definitely 'not stupid'. I grew up as a carpenter and bush pilot before finally breaking out and attending university to obtain a teaching degree. What, you think a faller dropping a 250' fir doesn't know 'trig'? You think a logging truck driver inching down a frozen mountainside road doesn't know physics? You think a seiner skipper doing a set on Johnstone Strait doesn't understand weather or tides as well as an oceanographer?
Anyway. I grew up making wages and working piecework, and retired on a salary with a pension. Back in 1981 I was laid off from a flying job by the owner trying to break our Union. The date was Nov. 24th, and this allowed him to forgo paying me Christmas and Boxing day stats. He turned down 2 weeks of solid flying revenue for the company to deny me 2 days of holiday pay. I knew at that moment the comapny would always be a terrible place to work, regardless of our pay and benefits, and went back to construction. That very lean Christmas, (wife at home and young children...mortgage) I discovered the following song by Merle Haggard, "If We Make It Through December". I have played it every Christmas for the past 35 years as part of our Christmas 'experience, and have never forgotten the words or what it conveyed. It would help the 'salary class' to understand what working folks endure, as they feather their nest on wage earners sweat and taxes, especially if they went through being pitched out on the street or out of their career merely to 'break their Union'. Anyway, I have loved Merle Haggard ever since and learned through life just who is and was on my side. It definitely wasn't politicans, corporations, universities, school districts; 'the system'. The only real supporters were family, friends, and neighbours, (rural redneck neighbours......God bless 'im. And, my family Doctor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-IJxTd8dCo
regards
4/7/16, 7:37 AM
trippticket said...
I have this image of you desperately trying to take a vacation and relax, but being unable to with the richness and depth of dung falling all around us this month! (He jumps for the keyboard...no, no, I'm on vacation...) Hope I'm wrong. But either way, I'm awfully glad you're back. And such thick porridge to chew on this morning, too.
Something fresh to ponder while I'm cleaning chick brooders today...
4/7/16, 7:38 AM
George R Fehling said...
Happy to have you back. I just pre-ordered my copy of Dark Age America. Fantastic book cover!
George
4/7/16, 8:05 AM
barrymelius said...
4/7/16, 8:19 AM
Ekkar said...
As always very good and provocative post. The thing that provoked me, and I have to admit disappointed me, was the dropped pronouncement; "Does Trump have racial prejudices? No doubt; most white Americans do." Ugh...All white people have racial prejudices. Also all Black people. All Brown people. All Yellow people. All Red people. Etc...
Prejudice is part of any thinking creature modus operandi. What we don't know we fill in the blanks with what feels comfortable to our personal narratives. Hate and stupidity are completely different things than being prejudice.
In fact that very statement was not only prejudice but racist. My six year old son, being that he like me is a white male, in that out look, is just a underdeveloped women hating, white privileged, racist, awaiting the day he is a white man, king of the world.....phooey
Thanks for everything else in the blog post!
Perhaps I am putting too much into that statement. Or perhaps places like this blog is where I go to get away from all that type of witch-hunt-style-pseudo-anti-racism.
4/7/16, 8:20 AM
John Roth said...
The comment about "illegal immigrants" gave me a chuckle at the phrase, because it obscures a rather important distinction. We have both an "illegal guest worker" and "illegal immigrant" problem, and they are quite distinct. The former are the people who come in to work and send money home, the latter are the people who come here to stay because they want to live here. While Trump's wall is pure fantasy, he finally said how he was going to get Mexico to pay for it: stop all the money flowing back home from illegal guest workers. He missed the simple fact that, if he could actually do that (and it wouldn't be all that hard, BTW), there would be a massive exodus of illegal guest workers. They're here to earn money for their families back home.
All the kids being sent north by their parents to escape the chaos in Central America are the actual illegal immigrants. That's a humanitarian issue, not a guest worker issue. Except for the Natasha trade, which is an entirely different issue.
4/7/16, 8:37 AM
Ceworthe said...
4/7/16, 8:52 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
There is another problem in the poorer areas though; actually a set of problems: drugs, alcohol, poor prenatal care, poor diet, untreated chronic health conditions like diabetes, etc. And of course now young vets with varying degrees of PTSD, since these are the communities that disporoportionately staff the US military with their youngsters. All these things really do damage the mind and body in ways that can't always be recovered from. And the mainstream culture's seeming willingness to let these things burn through poor and rural areas uncontrolled, so long as they don't affect the kids of the people with money, really does constitute slow-motion genocide.
Now, would President Trump actually do one single fracking thing for these communities? HAH! I would not bet a single penny on THAT! President Bernie? He might try, but Congress won't give a flip and without Congress the President is mostly impotent on domestic matters.
4/7/16, 8:54 AM
Kevin CIMMYT said...
Welcome back, and thanks for an interesting post as usual. As a non-American I do not really have a horse in the US presidential race, although of course as the US is a major world power the outcome will undoubtedly have global effects. As you say, Mr Trump appears to be a demagogue who mostly *appeals* to the squeezed American wage-labor class, but do you think his election would *actually* benefit this section of American society if he came to power ? Thanks....
4/7/16, 9:04 AM
Martin B said...
In any event, once again this month the labor department bureaucrats did not go out and actually count 242,000 new jobs or even extrapolate them from a valid, scientific sample survey of the Gallup variety.
Folks, they never left their cushy offices; they plucked these numbers from a computer model!
He goes into lots of detail to back up his statement in this article: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/a-modest-proposal-gift-the-bls-to-the-democratic-national-committee-or-sell-it-to-cnbc/
4/7/16, 9:09 AM
John Roth said...
Has the following snippet become standard English when I wasn't looking?
"There is a head nurse on each shift. When they comes on shift, they will..."
For people who don't catch what's wrong, the verb in the second sentence is singular, which is required for concordance with a singular subject.
This is probably not the place to thrash out the actual grammar of "singular they." Let's just say that using "they" with a singular antecedent has been standard English since as long ago as Chaucer, but it's always been used in a context where the antecedent has been understood as plural, hence the plural is legitimate, regardless of what the pedants say. For people who want to investigate the grammar further, the topic to look up is "notional agreement" or "notional concord."
Claiming that it's been used as an singular epicine (that is, gender-neutral) pronoun before second wave feminism is misrepresenting the historical record.
4/7/16, 9:11 AM
John Roth said...
With respect to Fourth Turning, you might want to read John Xenakis' on-line draft of "Generational Dynamics for Historians." If he's right, a "Crisis War" is inevitable at this point. http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ww2010.book2.htm
As far as getting back to "real conservatism," there have been several people who have been trying to do that, but they've been drowned out by the free traders and theocrats, as well as the segment that's been defining the party as "hate Obama" to the exclusion of talking actual policy.
4/7/16, 9:24 AM
Eric S. said...
But there are some things he supports that legitimately frighten me. Scapegoating and stereotyping of broad groups of people does get to me, and yes, that does include scapegoating of Trump supporters, which I have called out on every turn (and lost a few friends over it), but as a religious minority, scapegoating of other religious minorities (regardless of my feelings on their ideology) gives me a sick and familiar feeling in my stomach. I do worry about the way a lot of his rhetoric about illegal immigration has gotten the anger of his followers directed not at the employers, who are bringing in undocumented workers for pay that consists of a warehouse sleeping mats, a bucket, and the threat of deportation. It feels like the anger is getting directed at the wrong people… at people who are themselves mostly victims… and as that anger builds into a movement, the possibility that there will be people swinging from trees in the wake of this grows, and I’m afraid that it won’t be the representatives of the power establishment the mobs turn on. I hope I’m wrong, I really do, but there does seem to be a mean streak directed not at the people profiting off of the issues in our society, but instead at groups of people who are poor, marginalized people themselves…
This passage from an Archdruid Report you wrote a few years back keeps churning through my mind every day as I watch this election cycle unfold, and in a lot of ways, I think it could go down as one of your more accurate predictions:
“Imagine along these lines, dear reader, that sometime in the next year or so you start hearing media reports about a rising new figure in American politics [who] looks as though [he] might just be able to break the stranglehold of the established parties on the political system. Some of his ideas come straight from the fringes, and he’s been reported to have said very negative things about Arabs and Islam, but he’s nearly the only person in American public life willing to talk frankly about the difficulties Americans are facing in an era of economic collapse, and his party platform embodies many of the most innovative ideas of the left and right. Like him or not, he offers the one convincing alternative to business as usual in an increasingly troubled and corrupt system. Would you vote for him? Millions of Germans did.”
I’m thinking a lot lately about the life of Oswald Spengler himself, who voted for Hitler, seeing him as the best chance to break Germany out of the stranglehold of its decline, thinking that some of his more unsavory ideas were unlikely to influence the Germany he created… only to spend the last 5 years of his life watching in horror, and insisting at the top of his lungs that Hitler was a dangerous ideologue who would rather destroy businesses than see Jews in them and writing about his defeat, which he never lived to see. I’ve been feeling twisted up inside. I really do understand the anger, and I really do understand why some of Trump’s policies could be a break in a positive direction, though there are some things that I’m a little more doubtful on. But there are some things going on that just tug the wrong way on my conscience and I don’t really know how to feel about it. I suppose there have always been a lot of people like this at the cusp of every period of great change, stuck in the middle, tugged between their core human values and practical solutions…
4/7/16, 9:27 AM
Nastarana said...
4/7/16, 9:28 AM
Himanshu said...
Regarding the taboo topic of class in USA, I have one name for you and this blog's participants: Joe Bageant
Himanshu
4/7/16, 9:38 AM
Roger said...
The wine-sipping Toronto intelligentsia reviled Ford for daring to actually beat (by a wide margin) their anointed candidate, a gay white man with a husband and an adopted Black baby boy.
Having said that, Ford didn't exactly help himself, he was a drunk and a drug addict. Oh yeah, Ford hung with two-bit hoods. Oh, and he made sure to be far away in the family cottage during Pride Week.
So naturally, Ford voters - so-called Ford Nation - were bigots and morons. End of discussion. It couldn't POSSIBLY be that Ford voters had legitimate interests. And it couldn't POSSIBLY be that Ford addressed those same concerns.
No matter that bigotry wasn't and isn't the sole preserve of one social class, after all, somehow it's ok to revile Westerners and disdain rural and blue collar people. See, there's acceptable and unacceptable bigotry. But you and I aren't qualified to make that call. No, it's only certain people with social antennae tuned within certain universities and social circles allowed to make that judgment.
No matter also that we have a long tradition of drunken political leaders, some of them highly effective.
To cut to the chase, the electorate got it wrong and the result could not stand. And so the intelligentsia did everything short of assassination to up-end the results of a fair and square vote.
But, despite tailing him for months, the cops couldn't lay a glove on Ford. Regardless, in the end, the intelligentsia got its way and the election was up-ended. City council stripped Ford of his powers. Somehow it was all legal.
If it's Trump in the White House next January the voters will have got in wrong like the voters in Toronto. By hook or by crook, they'll stymie Donald like they stymied Ford. Short of a pistol-shot, it will somehow be legal.
Rob Ford passed away last month. RIP Rob. For what it's worth, in my estimation, the voters did not get it wrong.
Good luck to you guys down there.
4/7/16, 9:42 AM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
4/7/16, 10:28 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
A story I read years ago, somewhere, has stuck with me. I think it was in New England. It was an obituary for an old fellow who lived to be about 86. His family had moved to the area, when he was five or six. He was very well liked and respected, in the community. The kicker was the line "We loved him like one of our own." :-) Lew
4/7/16, 10:51 AM
aiastelamonides said...
It's good to have you back!
It's a pity that the social-and-economic-justice oriented left has tied itself so strongly to the elite. There was a time when people advocated for equality and mutual respect on the grounds of American patriotism, but it didn't work out and now the movement's ideas have become doubly politicized, first in their own right and then as flags of allegiance to the elite. Of course, there are plenty of people in the wage class fighting the good fight, but the elite left has mostly abandoned them and identified their ideas with heavy-handed paternalism at best and raw class hatred at worst.
As for the election, it looks like another Clinton presidency at the moment. If Kasich allies with Trump at the convention in exchange for the VP spot, I'd give the pair even odds against Clinton, but otherwise Trump is going to have a hard time winning the nomination (50% chance Trump, 40% Cruz, 10% other) and a harder one winning the White House (70% chance Clinton, 30% Trump).
I'm not sure that Toynbee's civilization-length waves of creative and dominant minorities (I think that in the West's case we've actually had a couple such waves already, but that's another discussion....), or even the higher-frequency "rhythm of disintegration," are on the right time-scale for talking about this election. A similar dynamic seems to happen cyclically in American politics, going once around every 50 years or so (sometimes a deal longer), going back possibly as far as the French and Indian War or farther (I don't know enough colonial history to even speculate well about anything much earlier than the Revolution). This election may be a watershed in a longer process, but it is most likely smaller than that (though still very significant compared to those immediately adjacent).
4/7/16, 10:53 AM
onething said...
Tell your friends that a salaried, academic job at a good university that must surely pay some part of the medical insurance for this young and healthy family of four still has to pay $1200 per month for their medical insurance. And that when the dad got very ill with an intestinal bug so that his potassium got so depleted that he more or less fainted, they took him to the ER. He was there about 3 hours, got two bags of saline and some potassium pills. A blood draw of course. The bill came to $5,000, and the part that this family has to pay is $2,000.
4/7/16, 10:54 AM
onething said...
When I was in first or second grade, I absolutely loved the word antidistestablishmentarianism. And you've added another syllable. Bravo.
4/7/16, 11:10 AM
Helix said...
Or, in the case mentioned here, "hypergrifts"
4/7/16, 11:11 AM
donalfagan said...
I think no matter what happens in this election, a movement of Tea Party/Trump supporters is going to be with us for a good long while. They were easily coopted after the great recession, but they seem more skeptical of the establishment now. Not being young myself, I'm sure where the Sanders movement is headed. If the economy strengthened I would expect them to return to the Democratic fold, but I don't expect a strong economy anytime soon. One of my friends thinks they could be the beginning of a LaFollette-type progressive movement.
4/7/16, 11:16 AM
Mister Roboto said...
I have changed my mind somewhat on the situation. Upon discovering this gem of information, I've decided I would vote for Hillary Clinton if Ted Cruz were to get the Republican nomination, just out of sheer self-preservation. The Republicans have to realize that handing the nomination to Ted Cruz would be the single stupidest thing they could do. After all, not only could the man get yours truly to actually vote for Hillary, but he also has a reputation for being utterly detested by nearly everybody in politics who knows him at all. (And fundamentalist Dominionism has seriously politically "jumped the shark" in 2016.) So I think there is a strong possibility for an open Republican convention this summer in which either Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan will be drafted to be the party's nominee for November.
But of course, we both know that sweeping all that simmering resentment under the rug will prove to be the most pyrrhic of victories for our feckless and doddering political class, don't we?
4/7/16, 11:26 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
4/7/16, 11:29 AM
Helix said...
Here in central Virginia, "y'all" is always plural but refers to a small number of people. "All y'all" is applied to larger groups, or to disparate groups -- those where some are friends of the speaker and others are not, for example -- when "y'all" is meant to be all-inclusive.
4/7/16, 11:34 AM
jeffinwa said...
For some reason "effluent half or so" reads just as well.
Great to have you back JMG; hope your working vacation had some play time.
4/7/16, 11:41 AM
MIckGspot said...
4/7/16, 12:47 PM
Mark said...
4/7/16, 12:59 PM
111DFC said...
@ JMG. It was a pleasure to read you again
About Toynbee he take a lot of his ideas from Ibn Jaldun (or Ben Khaldun), the “father” of historical sociology and he praised him as the “one of the more important thinkers of the human history” (or something similar)
Jaldun stressed the impact of conflicts of groups inside societies in the historical evolution, and the relationship with the dynamics of markets, price, benefits, luxury, population, etc…in a similar way of Bloch and Braudel. It was really a systemic approach of history from a man born in the XIV century (so, “nihil novum sub sole”)
I have heard too many discussions around “resources scarcity” and so on as a way to explain, in a mechanistic way, the fall of societies/empires, and some of them falls in the pinnacle of their theoretical power and resources at their disposal. The lack of resources was a consequence of the paradigm crisis, not the opposite
As you said civilizations or societies does not “fall” because lack of resources (human or natural), or wealth, or technology, but I would say, they fall because the “dreams”
Hernán Cortes and a few hundred soldiers could defeat the Azteca Empire because almost all aztecs “dreamed” (literally) their demise; from Moctezuma to the last servant, all dreamed the coming of Quetzalcoatl. The key person in the conquest was not Cortes, but “La Malinche” who knows that “dreams”, the fears, the hope, and at the end the “thanatian” desires (in the freudian sense) of all the groups inside the empire, and she managed to give then the sum of fears and hopes they were waiting for. At the end it was really a civil war (as almost all the successful conquests)
In the same way: how a few thousands muslim warriors could conquest the old spanish visigoth kingdom? In fact they did not, it was also another civil war
Like you, and even the powerful elite, too many people are “dreaming” the fall of the Empire now, so the end could not be far away
4/7/16, 1:16 PM
Annette Simard said...
4/7/16, 1:36 PM
Shane W said...
4/7/16, 1:54 PM
Dammerung said...
4/7/16, 1:55 PM
Unknown said...
4/7/16, 2:15 PM
Graeme Bushell said...
Re: the second person plural pronouns, in Australia we sometimes just add a plural "s" to "you", usually spelled "youse" to make the pronunciation a bit clearer.
Cheers,
Graeme
4/7/16, 2:49 PM
Lucius Cornelius Sulla said...
4/7/16, 2:51 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
4/7/16, 3:53 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Welcome back.
The rise of local demagogues is something I've been watching for since last year. So far no blips on my radar. What I think is happening is that the hope and anger is currently being channelled through Sanders and Trump, and if they fail then it'll find purchase in others. So, instead of having one or two big demagogues, we'll get dozens or hundreds. Each espousing their own ideologies, first directed at the elite then at each other.
David,
Sorry to hear about your temporary set back. Now you have time to regroup and plan. By the way, with my paper now in print I need a correspondent in the north. How do I get in touch with you?
Regards,
Varun Bhaskar
Editor
View on the Ground
4/7/16, 4:06 PM
pygmycory said...
4/7/16, 4:38 PM
Don Plummer said...
A couple personal thoughts about D. Trump, racism, and the disrespect the salaried class shows for the "cracker" class:
You are correct that not all Trump supporters are racist; at least, they're no more racist than most of the rest of us. The problem I see with Trump is his rhetoric; a rhetoric that inflames sentiment against people of color, immigrants (legal as well as illegal), and religious minorities (especially Muslims). Trump's rhetoric is far from benign; already, some of my Muslim and Latino students are worried that they might be targeted by Trump supporters; it's already happened, as you probably know. His slogan, "Make America Great Again," when stripped of its facade, seems to mean, "Make America White Again," or at least "Making America Great Entails That White People Stay In Charge." Pitting American against American is an old ploy of elitists, of course. Trump hardly belongs to the wage class himself, obviously.
I must speak out against a politician who pits Americans against other Americans, who scapegoats people, and who advocates violence against protesters at his rallies.
Regarding salaried class' disrespecting wage classes, you are correct, of course. But the problem here is that wage classes and their supporters seem to be doing things to encourage that kind of disrespect. Case in point: the Tennessee state legislature passing legislation making the Barrett .50 caliber rifle the "official state fiream" (a rifle so powerful, according to the Washington Post, it can destroy commercial aircraft) and more recently passing another piece of legislation making the Christian Bible the "official state book." You can complain all you want about "elitist" attitudes toward the wage classes, but acts like these seem to invite ridicule.
4/7/16, 5:15 PM
Ezra Buonopane said...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2/
There's a PBS quiz titled "do you live in a bubble?" that's been circulating online quite a lot recently. It measures how isolated you are from the culture of the working class americans who make up the core Trump-voter demographic. Of course, it has been denounced widely by salary-class bloggers, many of whom don't really understand what they're arguing against. Here's an example from Grist:
http://grist.org/cities/if-you-live-in-a-city-this-pbs-quiz-tells-you-youre-an-elitist-dont-believe-it/
His first rebuttal completely misses the point of the question, which asks "Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college?” by pointing out that large cities are poorer than surrounding suburbs. It was completely lost on the writer that the "surrounding" suburbs are considered part of the metropolitan area. Towns like the one I live in in central Pennsylvania, which has 6000 people and is over 100 miles away from any large city really don't exist in the worldview of people from places like New York City, which my town, and others near it even more so, is probably poorer than.
His last paragraph is even more revealing when he says "Many city dwellers, even wealthy ones, are far less insulated than suburbanites who shuttle in oversized automobiles from their McMansions to air-conditioned indoor malls." Those are, again, not the people the quiz was asking about. Working class people in rural areas definitely don't live in McMansions or drive SUVs. This view of America is only "outdated and racist" because salary class individuals in cities have no idea that anyone lives between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or in the central US "flyover country".
Of course, yes, cities are filled with working class people who don't fit the description of the quiz, but fact that the author ignores the existence of the working class people the quiz is asking about is frankly, disturbing and much of the reason they're voting for Trump.
4/7/16, 5:28 PM
Brian Chadwick said...
I checked out why you would think that Yes Magazine was feel good pablum. The first article I read was a well written story of a fisherman reinventing his life to a more environmentally sustainable job.
These positive stories are happening worldwide but if popular writers like yourself ignore them how we going to change.
It seems you welcome the devastation.
B Chadwick
4/7/16, 5:38 PM
benjamindavidsteele said...
I would clarify a point. Trump actually gets a disproportionate percentage of supporters from the upper working class to lower middle class, not the working poor or even worse off. Instead, it is Sanders who has won over the lowest income Americans, poor whites included.
https://newcoldwar.org/bernie-sanders-not-donald-trump-winning-white-working-class/
“Writing for In These Times, author Jack Metzgar notes that the basis for this assumed white working-class support for Trump is his popularity among Republican voters who lack a college degree, who have indeed preferred him to the other Republicans in the race. “Among all adult whites,” however, “nearly 70 percent do not have bachelor’s degrees,” the definition of working class used by pundits. One recent survey found that 55 percent of this group support Trump, meaning “the white working-class is under-represented among Trump supporters,” Metzgar observes, which means “his supporters are disproportionately college-educated whites.”
“This becomes clear when one takes a step back from the tiny weird world of the U.S. right and looks at the electorate as a whole. In a general election, polls Sanders would not only beat Trump but destroy him: Reuters currently has him up by nearly 10 per cent overall, and that with far less media coverage. Among white voters in particular, Sanders’ margin of victory in the most recent poll does drop to just under 5 per cent — but among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, his margin of victory actually grows to 15 per cent. Among unemployed white voters, that number rises to 16 per cent. Practically no one who isn’t white is voting for Donald Trump.
“Commentators are right, then, to believe the Trump phenomenon is a white people problem — it’s just the data shows it’s not working-class whites who are the heart of this problem."
4/7/16, 5:51 PM
John Zelnicker said...
We need to increase aggregate demand in our economy and there are only three basic ways to do that. One is to increase the the amount of exports over imports, which is not entirely in our control and right now is seriously negative and does not appear to be improving. A second is to increase spending by the private, non-government sector, which also ain't happening as most households are still trying to pay off debt acquired during the run up to the financial crisis and as you note, their incomes are not increasing. And businesses won't increase spending unless they can clearly see more customers demanding their products and services. The third is to increase government spending, specifically the federal government. This isn't happening either right now because the morons in Congress and the Federal Reserve and the mainstream economists who support them still believe that cutting federal government spending is somehow going to cause households and businesses to increase their spending. Money is the fuel that runs the economy. If you reduce the amount spent, either through savings (or debt reduction), increased imports over exports, or reducing government spending, the economy cannot grow.
So, it seems the only solution is to increase federal government spending since it is the only entity whose spending is not constrained by the amount of income available.
Explaining that last sentence would take a separate blog altogether and there are others who have already done so far better than I can. For those interested, if you are not familiar with Modern Monetary Theory, I recommend checking out Warren Mosler's blog at Center of the Universe and his "Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds", and the economics professors from the University of Missouri-Kansas City who blog at New Economic Perspectives.
4/7/16, 6:46 PM
HalFiore said...
As for "you all," I disagree with Bill P. It is still used, at least in the Mississippi Delta, though I grant mostly by older folks. It is easy to miss, because it doesn't come across like Minnie Pearl hamming it up for the tourists at the Grand Old Opry or Elly Mae in the Beverly Hillbillies. (YEW AWL, NAYUW, SAY-UT A SPAYUL.) Rather, it tends to be pushed together into a soft "yuall" that isn't too different from "y'all."
Tying to the class discussion, it's of the aristocratic Planter class vernacular, as opposed to the more popular southern accents (e.g. "hill country," "redneck," "piney woods," to name some MS variants.) I was reared to speak the higher form, but picked up such redneck pieces as "we('ll) see y'all" (spoken by a lone person to a single listener) in my teenage years, much to the chagrin of my family.
4/7/16, 9:56 PM
Bryan L. Allen said...
I only heard about Yes! Magazine about a week ago. I specifically noticed it since a colleague of mine, Peter Kalmus, has written a couple of recent articles for it. He's an (IMO) rather brave climate scientist willing to walk the walk, even if that's career-threatening. He told his bosses he'd not be flying anymore, for personal travel or to attend conferences, which he was doing to the tune of ~50000 miles/year. He has an online draft of a book called Becycling where he details many of the adjustments to his life he's made. Quite interesting, with two kids and wife and ancient veg-oil powered car and bees and chickens and an old house and composting and bike commuting and humanure and even civil disobedience. A kindred soul, I think, so perhaps not ALL of Yes! Magazine is deserving of opprobrium... but like I implied I'm unfamiliar with the history of Yes! magazine. In any case, felicitations!
4/7/16, 10:39 PM
shastatodd said...
dont forget that net energy has been declining since the 1970's.
4/7/16, 11:24 PM
Shane W said...
I think those youth you encountered are perfect candidates for learning about limits to growth and the missed opportunity of the 1970s. I think if I were there and had their ear, I'd tell 'em that their predicament was laid out 20 years before they were born, rattle off JMG's recommended reading of JMG's 70s era ecology/systems theory books, and tell them to make sure and make friends with their wage class veteran friends who are skilled in the use of violence, who have seen guerrilla warfare up close and person enough to know how it works...
4/8/16, 1:01 AM
Shane W said...
since we're discussing uses of the term "racist" and its meanings, what do you make of the whole campus-based SJW (social justice warrior) phenomenon, with it's microagressions, trigger warnings, and offenses over "Trump 2016" chalkings? Is this going to all go away once other, more important issues come to the fore? When the ivory tower/student loan bubble bursts? What's the likelihood that it becomes the basis for a future fascism/Fred Halliot?
4/8/16, 1:42 AM
Mitch Davis said...
Small nit-pick: I understand "dog whistle" differently. A dog whistle is something said for a larger audience, which is intended to resonate (and send a different message) to a smaller, quite select audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
I think in describing the connection between "states' rights" and the rich southerners who benefited from racist policies, "states' rights" may be a proxy, or a euphemism. A term we used when we can't bring ourselves to admit the white elephant has no clothes.
4/8/16, 2:19 AM
Zach said...
I'm a salary class guy who comes from a wage class family and community, so this all seems painfully obvious to me. (First to complete college, etc.)
Possibly key: I did not throw my family and community under the bus when "arriving." This is such a common dynamic: "Oh, yeah, I grew up in a little hick town - what a bunch of racist fascist sexist homophobes! I'm so glad I got out of there!"
Obvious subtext: "I'm not one of them! Please accept me as a genuine member of the privileged class!"
I saw the Williamson piece, and the doubling down of NR, and spent several days alternating between white-hot rage and cold fury. I suppose it's good to get that sort of contempt out in the open where it's no longer a deniable dog whistle. Williamson is a fool if he doesn't expect that contempt to be returned.
Interesting times ahead for sure.
peace,
Zach
4/8/16, 4:15 AM
Shane W said...
4/8/16, 4:48 AM
patriciaormsby said...
Mujica has met with Putin, but probably not with Obama, or else the TV would have shown that, I think. Now I will pray each day that the rabid dogs of Hillary et al. are not sicced on this humble gentleman.
4/8/16, 4:54 AM
Shane W said...
I still have reservations about Sanders. He conformed on gun control and immigration to the party line. He's voiced support for whomever gets nominated for the Democratic party. I just have a reservation that he might be "hope and change", part II. IF (and that's a big IF) Trump enacts some of his policy platforms, it stands to benefit the wage class...
4/8/16, 5:17 AM
Shane W said...
4/8/16, 5:35 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Hal -- The south is a huge place, I don't need to tell you, and regional differences are enormous. Sometimes I think there's more diversity just within the southern US than in all the rest of Anglophone North America combined. A Tennessee Henry Higgins could probably tell you which holler in which county your parents came from by listening to you talk. So not surprised if there's some variation here, especially among older folks. Southern speech has changed a lot in the last two generations. Non-rhotic speech (R-dropping) is all but extinct in people under 60 in most areas, even in places it used to be common. My mother-in-law from Savannah GA used both R-dropping and an intrusive R at the end of words ("Savanner"), as well as some amazingly drawled vowels. The vowel in the number "eight" was two full syllables -- "Ayuht." Sadly, I think that distinctive accent may have died with her last year; I have not heard it in anyone else.
And by the way since these regional speech patterns are often used as class signifiers, this is actually kinda on topic...
4/8/16, 5:50 AM
Himanshu said...
I just wanted to comment that the title of your recent book ID the same as Dr. Morris Berman's 2006 book: Dark Ages America.
Himanshu
4/8/16, 5:54 AM
David said...
@BillPUlliam
"Now, would President Trump actually do one single fracking thing for these communities? HAH! I would not bet a single penny on THAT! President Bernie? He might try, but Congress won't give a flip and without Congress the President is mostly impotent on domestic matters."
I would agree, with one caveat. Without Congress, the President is mostly impotent on domestic matters...under the current arrangement of power. The logjam-breaking figures that arise in these times, however, tend to be less bothered by legal niceties. For good or for ill, I think that is the situation toward which we are heading, whether it is this election cycle or one in the near future.
@Deborah
Thank you for the encouragement. I actually have been serving as a public citizen member of the planning commission for 6 years now and have two more years left on my last term before I have to rotate off. The good news is that we have city council elections every year (9 member council, 3 year terms, 3 seats elected every year, all seats at-large), so I can always try, try again :)
@Varun
I'd love to contribute to your effort. If you go to my campaign blog (englandfortworiverscitycouncil.blogspot.com) and send me your email in a comment (which I won't put through, of course), I will email you back.
4/8/16, 6:33 AM
David said...
@Lewis
I checked off on item on that list. My wife is a native, going back several generations :)
4/8/16, 6:39 AM
Ceworthe said...
4/8/16, 6:57 AM
anton mett said...
http://www.earwolf.com/episode/americas-secret-caste-system/
Cracked.com recently had a conversation about the social classes in America in a way that really showed me a blind spot in my own world view. Basically, Americans would prefer to believe that we are a classless society, but if pressed, we are willing to admit that there are economic classes (upper/middle/lower). We might even be willing to admit that some of these classes have more power and privilege afforded to them than others. However most of us just assume that you can change class by getting more or less money. The point that they drive home in their conversation is that economic class is not the same thing as social class, and that social class is a thing that exists in America. While economic class is driven by how much money a person has, social class is based more on speech, beliefs, and behavior.
Making this distinction has definitely helped me in clarifying me thought and conversations. It's very hard to understand our culture without admitting that social class is a thing that exists and a thing that is important to American society. It's kind of like finding a hammer in your toolbox halfway through a building project.
You probably understand this concept already, but you may still find it interesting to listen to a couple of guys working through the cognitive dissonance that most of our public has on the issue.
4/8/16, 7:37 AM
Phil said...
You might be addressing the Bernie Sanders issue sooner than later if you consider these two Huffington Post articles that provide a good argument for the idea that the Clinton campaign and support is rapidly collapsing and will very likely lead to a contested convention even if Hillary manages to hold on to a delegate lead http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/the-democrats-are-headed-for-a-contested-convention-too_b_9620362.html and/or Clinton may very well headed for an indictment over her emails - which could force her to concede http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/wisconsin-just-elected-bernie-sanders-president_b_9622772.html.
Whatever happen's one can't deny that this is the most interesting and unexpectedly bizarre candidate race in decades!
4/8/16, 8:01 AM
Eric S. said...
https://newrepublic.com/article/132407/voters-angry-its-1099-economy-stupid
4/8/16, 8:04 AM
Ekkar said...
4/8/16, 8:08 AM
Donald Hargraves said...
Trump supporters talk about him being a businessman (however flawed a businessman he is), Bernie supporters talk about his stands and of starting a revolution. All I hear from Clinton supporters is their disdain for the other candidates and how she is "electable."
Most surprisingly, I get this from the blacks who ride with me to and from their appointments. The same people who proudly told Hillary to Stand Down are now proclaiming her the only electable candidate. One wonders whether the disappointment of the Obama years is such that they've lost the imagination that inspired them eight years ago.
4/8/16, 8:35 AM
Nastarana said...
"We need to increase aggregate demand in our economy." I think we need to lower fixed costs for working families, such as costs of housing, transportation, and health care. $15. an hour wage doesn't do me a durn bit of good if the landlord promptly raises rents to keep on getting his or her cut. People in the wage class and underclass don't want more immigration primarily because we know perfectly well that immigration pushes up the costs of necessary amenities like a place to live and electricity and running water. To me, this an ethical issue: are we going, as a nation, to continue to privilege rent seeking over production, or not?
I think the underlying issues of this election are two: one is do we allow the elites to start a general war we cannot win in a desperate attempt to hang on to their power, and, second, who gets to own what.
4/8/16, 8:39 AM
Peter VE said...
4/8/16, 10:41 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
"Were you taught to fix, grow, or make anything useful (meals included) as a kid?"
"Do you still do so?"
Full disclosure: my score was 20 points, or "First generation upper-middle-class, of middle-class parents."
My mother taught me to sew both by hand and machine, to cook and bake, to wash dishes by hand, and to hang out clothes on the line. She also made grape jelly and jam from the arbor in our back yard, crocheted, and made afghans. My grandmother taught me to knit. This was an utterly standard 1940s upbringing.
4/8/16, 11:03 AM
Michelle said...
English did at one time have both a formal/informal split (you/thou, which later rather reversed, making 'thou' more formal than 'you) and a 2nd person singular/2nd person plural, in the form of 'ye'. As in "Hear ye, hear ye!"
In Spanish, there is a split between 2nd person formal/informal singular (tu and usted) and also plural (vosotros and ustedes). Interestingly, the 2nd person plural informal (vosotros) is seldom taught, at least in US Spanish classes, and I understand its use varies from one Spanish-speaking country to another. I have a friend from Spain who deliberately uses vosotros just to keep it in circulation (and to ensure his children learn the form).
4/8/16, 11:09 AM
donalfagan said...
Interesting that you say that. Last summer, at a family picnic, I met another one of my wife's cousins from Texas. She was the first IRL person I met who raved about Trump, and is not at all from the poor and struggling class. I suspect many Trump supporters are the ones who are used to being successfully middle class, but see success slipping away - either for themselves or for their children.
@Phil & Donald,
Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight is insisting Sanders can't win.
Bernie Sanders Is Even Less Competitive Than He Appears
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-is-even-further-behind-in-votes-than-he-is-in-delegates/
4/8/16, 11:34 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
4/8/16, 12:31 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
1) When I order huevos rancheros, I expect:
a) Whole black beans and brown rice, eggs sauteed in olive oil, served with a tiny dish of chopped green chile, no sauce. Melted gourmet cheese.
b) refried pinto beans, rice or potatoes, fried eggs covered with ranchero sauce, and generously topped with shredded lettuce and cut-up tomato. Grated cheddar or longhorn or Mexican cheese.
2) When I see a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I think:
a) How can I twist this into cutting-edge art?
b) How vulgar!
c) Mother of God.
3) If I speak Spanish, it's
a) From that nice trip to Spain - remember, dahling?
b) From a textbook.
c) In order to talk to the help.
d) From my neighbors and/or spouse and inlaws
e) From my family as a kid.
4) Do you have any relatives:
a) In rural villages?
b) In state and local government?
c) In the South Valley?
d) South of the border?
e) Excuse me?
5) In an emotional crisis I go to:
a) A New Age practitioner
b) A qualified professional psychiatrist
c) A priest or pastor
d) A curandera/o
e) My bartender
Okay, folks - regional variations cheerfully appreciated, y'all.
4/8/16, 12:57 PM
Grebulocities said...
It's amazing to watch how seriously this disturbs the regular 'SJW' types. They'll start calling him things they won't even call the actual conservatives, because he dares to defend a group of people who are despised by the salary-class left and (ostensibly) supported by conservatives. Even the ones who are supposed to be Marxists and therefore see the world in class terms actually hate the poor who don't happen to fall into some other oppressed class, and nothing makes them angrier than having their own internal contradictions pointed out.
Of course then I have to clean up the flames and give people infractions and time-outs while dealing with their angry messages, which is annoying, but it's worth it just to watch hypocritical ideologues get "called out" on their own prejudices.
4/8/16, 1:26 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Steve, no doubt. Or he could be wearing one of those novelty hats that holds a beer can or two, with a long flexible tube descending to his lips. "You guys" -- yes, I've heard that. So we have American English splitting into several languages, in which the second person plurals six or seven centuries from now will respectively be "Yal," "Yuze," and "Yi'gaiz."
Ben, one of Clinton's difficulties is that she seems to be utterly oblivious of how she comes across to other people. It's a common bad habit of privileged elites on the way out.
William, thank you. I suspect you're quite correct about 2020.
Rhisiart Gwylim, diolch y fawr!
Patricia, I wonder what people in the Heian period thought about the future as the Japanese system of that time ground slowly and gracefully to a halt. Did they imagine the Sengoku jidai? I suspect not...
Unknown Eagle, depends very much on the farmer -- that label covers everything from landowners well integrated into the corporate system to family farms struggling to maintain some semblance of the old profit-class attitudes.
Mikep, that's just one of the interesting features of the current situation.
Fly, thanks for the link.
Bruno, as noted in an earlier post, probably not, because the resources that enabled FDR to do what he did got burnt a long time ago. Still, it's possible that Trump could become the catalyst for a series of transformations that might actually do some good.
Gigoachef, doesn't surprise me at all. Ugo and I read each other's columns pretty regularly.
YCS, it's crucial to know what the other side is thinking, especially when what they're thinking has no connection whatsoever to reality. Knowing the rules under which they operate makes it easy to run rings around them, since most people who believe in conventional macroeconomics seem incapable of recognizing that there's any other way to understand the world -- much less another way that makes much more sense.
Christine4, fascinating. "Youse" seems fairly widespread, then -- it's much spoken in New York City, for example.
4/8/16, 1:46 PM
Eric S. said...
4/8/16, 2:00 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Personal current election forecast: Trump gets GOP nomination when party realizes Cruz is the only candidate with worse unfavorables than Trump, and chosing anyone other than one of those two would alienate all their base. Clinton gets Democratic nomination simply by superdelegate math regardless of which one has a tiny edge in pledged delegates by then. In general election, Trump's negatives prove to be bigger, and Clinton wins by a fairly substantial electoral margin with large and deeply polarized voter turnout. So four out of five consecutive presidents have been named Bush or Clinton, and the Bareorgeillary Obushinton Administration and policies continue for four more painful years.
And at the end of those 4 years, Scalia's Supreme Court seat has still not been filled, and there has been another vacancy, so the 7-member court has at least been able to avoid ties.
4/8/16, 3:11 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
4/8/16, 3:17 PM
Shane W said...
@234567,
if Gramma & Grampa Boomer/Silent are expecting Papa & Mama Gen X to keep their Gen Z offspring in line and conforming to the system, they may have another thing coming. (Young 20 something college grads now more likely than not have Gen X parents) I'm sure a lot of Gen X parents remember how their angst and rage was turned inward during the grunge era, and how they were made out to be slackers, etc. One of the biggest touchtones for our era was a suicide, the suicide of Kurt Cobain. It was made clear to us in no uncertain terms that we were the smallest generation ever, and were to take a back seat to the most important generation to ever walk the face of the Earth. So our rage was turned inward. I'm sure that there are a few Gen X parents who would take vicarious pleasure in seeing their offspring torch the system that they felt powerless to do anything about, the same way some Boomer parents took vicarious pleasure in seeing their offspring join a garage band, go to a Dead concert, etc.
4/8/16, 4:01 PM
pygmycory said...
4/8/16, 5:20 PM
onething said...
Which is why Sarah Palin, though rich, is still white trash. By the way, I decided to check in on them, and it turns out that sometime last year the entire family went to a party which turned to fighting and the police had to come break it up. And yes, the Palins were involved.
***********
Speaking of whether Trump would change things for the better and if he even could, the Market Ticker guy says that much of the incredible price gouging in medicine is already illegal and that the president is already charged with upholding the law. He's speaking about lack of price transparency, monopolistic practices of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and overcharging when people are "in extremis" such as helicopter rides and perhaps ambulance rides. I find all that interesting. Because while it is becoming more and more obvious that we are abandoning the rule of law as a nation, these nefarious practices have been getting slowly worse for quite a few years.
And I have an idea for a grassroots way to fight at least one of these prongs - the lack of price transparency - the way that you can't find out what they plan to charge you for anything, whether at a clinic or hospital. A website should be set up with a big data base so that people could post what price they were just charged for something and where. Zip codes, towns, streets and names of institutions. When possible, they should black out personal information and take a picture of the bill. Armed with this information, people can begin negotiating. At first, the information is after the fact, but soon it will be obvious what a place has recently charged someone, and the customers can begin to bargain. If they won't tell a price, walk away. If they find out that they were charged double what the place across town charged, that goes public. I think that people are starting to get some clarity about how this scam works and the ignorance of the public has allowed these institutions to get away with it. Once people help one another to price shop, the game could change.
4/8/16, 5:57 PM
Max Osman said...
It is tax cuts that are causing jobs to leave. Immigrants are just energy subsidies into our economy, just like the Gas sipping Chinese are used instead of the gas guzzling Americans.
If Trump gets elected them the country will be a black soot filled wasteland. We arbitrage environments with the Chinese and we import plastics that would take a huge amount of money to make and buy as subsidies.
There is no way to fix American Thermidor.
4/8/16, 7:27 PM
latheChuck said...
Later, I was listening to a discussion of climate-fiction, and someone commented that authors like to use climate disaster, like nuclear disaster, as a way to reset society to a (simpler, dramatic, self-reliant) pioneer setting. My first thought was, "... but the original pioneers have already exploited and exhausted the easy resources that allowed them to be successful: shallow aquifers, fertile soil, timber (in some regions), wild game, rich ores... it won't be so easy (as if it was ever easy) next time."
4/8/16, 7:30 PM
mr_geronimo said...
Things are spinning out of control everywhere in the western civilization. In Latin America the old political system that communist rebels from the sixties and plutocrats bent on pillaging whole countries built together is cracking everywhere. Here in Brazil there are a few dead bodies on the streets: yesterday two communist militiaman were killed by cops in an ambush. Last month many VIPs that knew too much died in suspicious circunstances: planes falling, larceny and falling from balconies. And the russians are bringing lots of guns and gunships to many places in Latin America while american plutocrats finance neoliberal agitators. At the same time a philosopher with new, strange and dangerous (to the regime and the wannabe neoliberal successors) is being read and discussed by the masses, in some ways similar to the Ayatollah during the prelude of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. At least the weather improved and the dams are full of water.
In Argentina the neoliberals are ruling and the people are getting poorer and poorer but It seems that things will improve since foreign investment is back once the bolivarians were gone from the power. And Venezuela looks like Somalia just before the breakdown. All it takes is a bullet on Maduro's chest and the country will blow up and become even worse.
And in Europe the sons of the goths and franks are on the receiving end of a classical barbarian migration. The ironies of destiny.
Toynbee also said that old faiths, the "souls" of societies absorbed by another don't really die but stay dormant, underground, mutating into something else, like what became the Islam gestating in the borders of the hellenic society until it matured with the prophet. And we see dead religions walking everywhere... the Santa Muerte, followers of Odin, neoplatonists and many others.
The 2nd great crisis has alredy begun, the flame rises and is quite hot in the colonies.
4/8/16, 7:31 PM
John Zelnicker said...
@nuku - Agreed. There is much evil that is related to power relations rather than money, such as you said, although power and money are closely related. The conversation you mentioned elicited a WTF!!! I'm Jewish and have never heard that. What a f---ing idiot.
@Mark - I just looked it up and it appears that the majority of translations use "root of all kinds of evil" or "root of all sorts of evil". However, the King James Bible says "the root of all evil". From Timothy 6:10.
@Nastarana - You are correct, I did not include those, but how do we lower fixed costs in the economy such as housing and transportation. Health care costs for the people can be reduced to nothing by instituting a Medicare-for-All plan, cradle to grave, everyone in, no one out, no co-pays, no deductibles, paid for by the federal government. This would eliminate the 35-40% that insurance companies add to the cost of health care. Pure economic rent.
The only way I know of to directly reduce those other fixed costs is through price controls and that creates more problems. If, however, we were to institute a Job Guarantee that offered a living wage to anyone who was able and willing to work, the increased demand would cause developers to build more housing and competition would keep a lid on unconscionable rent increases. Perhaps a bit of temporary rent control would be necessary while new construction caught up to demand.
Please explain how "we know perfectly well that immigration pushes up the costs of necessary amenities". Utilities such as water and electricity are regulated and if the regulators are honest (I know, many are not), rate increases are capped. I agree that rent seeking needs to be stopped. As Keynes said, we need to euthanize the rentiers.
I agree that the risk of a hot war is incredibly high right now due to the aggression of the American Empire and the increase in the placing of armaments near Russia's borders through NATO. No one would win. There is already some talk in some circles about using tactical nuclear weapons. There are no words to adequately describe how horrific and frightening this is.
4/8/16, 8:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Gregorach, I have a hard time believing that the people who came up with the current policies were enthusiastically planning to destroy the political and economic power of the US, and their own power and wealth with it. That's what those policies are doing, you know.
Bill, "Yinzer" has now been enthusiastically adopted as a self-description by people in Pittsburgh and environs, so the emergence of "yinz" on the national scene may not be too far off.
Goldmund, you may well be right.
Stu, thank you! It seems to be a general thing, and one that's found in most senile societies.
Barrymelius, I used it to catch up -- I was writing long hours all month.
ProvidenceMine, sure the liberals care for the poor and underprivileged. Who else is going to provide them with cheap daycare, undocumented and underpaid domestic servants, consumer goods produced at sweatshop wages, and all the other things that keep affluent liberals comfortable?
Donkey, er, and after those first few paragraphs, what does he say?
Bill, oh, granted.
Subduedcrew, exactly. I'll be talking about that next week.
Matt and Jess, exactly what Trump is likely to do if he gets elected is a very interesting question with no immediate answers. The one thing he has going for him is that the bar is so low. Current policies are having such a cascade of bad effects that almost anything else has a good shot at being a change for the better.
Paulo, the affluent end of the salary class doesn't want to know what life is like for the wage class. Try playing that song for one of them sometime and watch the sneering contempt and anger you get in response.
Tripp, thank you.
4/8/16, 8:40 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Barry, good. If you have a television, consider going on a weeklong TV fast and watch how your brain clears. It's a remarkable experience.
Ekkar, nah, you've misinterpreted what I'm saying. Next week's post should clarify things a bit.
John, it's by no means as cleancut as that. A lot of guest workers have zero interest in going back to their countries of origin, you know.
Ceworthe, that's the one. A lot of affluent white liberals get very impressively freaked out about guns in the hands of the wage class.
Bill, of course pervasive poverty and the worst educational system in the industrial world has its effects! As you know well, though, "poorly educated" is not a synonyn for "stupid."
Kevin, Trump might actually benefit the wage class. At this point, all you'd have to do is get rid of certain policies that are making things worse, and things would get noticeably better.
Martin, Stockman is quite correct. Job numbers at this point are among the more egregious pieces of economic fiction churned out by the propagandists of government.
Eric, understood. Yes, I thought of that essay of mine more than once as the Trump campaign got under way.
Himanshu, he's already been cited.
Roger, yes, I'd heard about that from Canadian friends and correspondents. The same class bigotries exist all through the English-speaking world, and of course there are equivalents everywhere else.
Ien, thank you! Fortunately Spengler can be read in brief doses...
Aias, it seems to me that Toynbee's analysis can be applied fractally, with short cycles alternating creative and dominant minorities shaping the destinies of nations on a time scale of decades, with longer cycles rising up from there possibly to scales far larger than the ones Toynbee himself analyzed.
Helix, funny. "Hypergrifts" is a keeper.
4/8/16, 9:01 PM
jcummings said...
I've been digging into this question a little more, and found this completely non-scientific, but otherwise interesting article:
http://theweek.com/articles/443859/yall-used-refer-single-person
We are all basically recapitulating the author's salient points: true southerners vehemently deny any singular use, some singular use reported and the context, etc. As a lighthearted topic of conversation, it's worth a read.
@JMG - thanks for the props!
4/8/16, 9:02 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mister R., this entire blog, from the first post in May 2006 to now, is the working out of a single thought in all its implications, so a certain amount of repetition from time to time is unavoidable.
Robert, most interesting.
Jeffinwa, thank you. No play time worth noticing, unfortunately.
MickGspot, thank you!
111DFC, true enough. I've cited ibn Khaldun in a couple of posts here, for that matter.
Unknown, well, I was wondering about that. It interested me that within a week or so of my Trump post appearing, big name media types abruptly started talking about something that had been unmentionable, or at least unmentioned, until then.
Graeme and Sulla, thank you. I gather that "youse" is well ahead in the race for second person plural pronoun!
Patricia, okay, now you've rattled my worldview -- Brin and I actually agree on something. ;-)
Varun, of course. It's the aftermath of the election that's going to decide a lot.
Don, is the Tennessee legislature composed of members of the wage class? No, they're affluent salary class. You've fallen into the same trap I anatomized in my post, of believing that "Southern" and "wage class" are interchangeable terms, and until you get past that, you'll find no shortage of reasons to hate the wage class. I'll be talking about the very curious narrative behind that kind of thinking next week.
4/8/16, 9:18 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
4/8/16, 9:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Brian, really? You cite one article from one issue. According to that article, one person who was involved in an ecologically destructive profession quit and did something else -- an action that did absolutely nothing to stop the destruction, since he'll have been replaced five minutes after he quit, but relieved him of any sense of personal responsibility for it. You insist that such stories are somehow going to motivate "us" to change, and then leap to the conclusion that because I don't circulate that brand of pablum, I must be in favor of the destruction of the Earth. If I'd set out to come up with a clueless response to my comments on Yes! Magazine, one that embodied its most embarrassing features, I don't think I could have done a better job than you did.
Benjamin, you're ducking my point. As I said -- in so many words -- the divisions I'm discussing are between classes: the salary class, the wage class, and the welfare class. The poorest white people belong to the welfare class, while Trump's main base of support is the wage class. Please do take the time to make sure you understand what I'm saying before you misstate it and accuse me of getting it wrong!
John, what you've suggested here has been the conventional wisdom for decades, and it hasn't worked. Do you recall what "doing the same thing and expecting different results" is a definition of? Attempting to increase the demand for labor at this point can't be done without accelerating resource depletion and environmental damage, which are already costing the global economy more than it can afford and promises to get much, much worse as we proceed. We cannot grow our way out of problems that are caused by too much growth.
You've also insisted, without argument or evidence, that for some reason it's impossible to deal with the supply end of the oversupply of labor. That's a remarkable example of begging the question, because there are straightforward ways to do this: enforcing US immigration laws, and eliminating a handful of visa programs that allow big corporations to bring in workers from overseas en masse, would do the job promptly. Insisting that this is somehow unthinkable makes a great dodge for those who are happy with the consequences of the impoverishment and immiseration of the US wage class, but it's circular reasoning of the worst sort -- and makes a very good example of the kind of dubious thinking that has landed us in the present crisis.
Bryan, glad to hear about your colleague. My dislike of Yes! Magazine comes largely from the way that it's become the Reader's Digest of the green Left. Heartwarming stories about this or that individual doing something praiseworthy are all well and good, but when they're presented in a relentlessly feel-good context about how this or that person is building a shiny green future for us all, they very quickly turn into an excuse for inaction. Did that article mention the thousands of other climate scientists who heard about your colleague, scuffed their feet, and went on flying to climate conferences? (If your colleague is Dr. Peter Kalmus, I read about him some time ago when he first brought this issue up, and recall what was said then about the reaction of his colleagues.) For that matter, have you yourself decided to follow his example?
4/8/16, 9:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Shane, we'll get to that next week. For reasons that will be clearer then, I don't see a Fred Halliot coming out of that movement; one relevant point here is that fascism gets power by appealing to the majority, not to minorities. The social-justice movement draws support only from very limited enclaves within modern American society, and the fact that it's getting into the same sort of "circular firing squad" behavior we used to see in waning Marxist parties and the like is not a sign of robust health or future prospects.
Mitch, there I disagree. Everything I've read suggests that when white politicians in the South talked about state's rights in the 1950s and 1960s, they and everyone else south of the Mason-Dixon line knew exactly what they were talking about -- that is, the continuance and enforcement of Jim Crow laws. The wider audience was the rest of the country, who needed to be at least partly bamboozled by dog-whistle talk.
Zach, thank you. My dad had a salary class job but came out of a wage class background, and my own downward mobility -- I've never earned a salary; I worked for wages until I got enough royalty income to write full time -- has given me a similar perspective.
Patricia, fascinating. I'll want to follow up on that.
Himanshu, so?
4/8/16, 10:14 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
4/8/16, 10:18 PM
My donkey said...
He says lower-class whites want the freedom to embrace the core sentiments of an American fascism – sentiments engendered by the collapse of the liberal state; that Hillary Clinton has sold out the poor and the working class to corporate power; that members of labour unions, unorganized unskilled workers, and the nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for; that this class of people who were formerly "politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment" will feel disenfranchised and trapped within a condition that Durkheim termed “anomie”, and that this will make them easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements, but also give them a voice and sense of empowerment; that fascism is "aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst"; that fascism replaces rational debate with sensual experience, and transforms politics into aesthetics.
Given those various points discussed in the article, I don't know how you decided it was an example of someone "insisting at the top of their lungs that the only reason, the only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters."
4/8/16, 10:55 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Phil, frankly, I hope so. I have serious problems with some of Sanders' stances but I'd rather have him in the White House than Clinton any day of the week.
Eric, thanks for this! Yes, that's another way in which the salary class has been throwing the wage class under the bus, and it's intriguing to see that fact finally beginning to get the air time it deserves.
Ekkar, thank you. I understand -- and I think next week's post will help clarify things more than a little.
Donald, I see that as one of the classic symptoms of the flight to the lowest common denominator that's ruled our political discourse for decades now. "She's electable" fails to mention any reason why we should want to elect her; "she can get things done" fails to inquire about whether the things she'll get done ought to be done at all, and so on. The unstated logic behind it all is that the policies she is to follow are agreed on by everyone who matters, and no innovation is allowed.
Michelle, relevant nerdery is always welcome. ;-)
Grebulocities, well played. I'll be talking next week, among other things, about the Oppression Olympics -- the bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred struggle to see which group of people gets to have its sufferings privileged over everyone else's -- and in the process, we'll talk about (a) why social-justice activists lose it so completely when class issues get brought up, and (b) who actually benefits from that state of affairs.
Shane, true enough. Assist the rich to exploit others, and sooner or later it'll be your turn to suffer.
Onething, that would be worth trying. I bet the American Medical Association would move heaven and earth to get it shut down, though.
Max, then present an argument. Don't simply say "this is true" without presenting any evidence or reasoning to back up that claim.
LatheChuck, that's very reminiscent of the French aristocrats who toyed with liberal ideas and denounced the system that sustained them. Memo to the NPR guy and his affluent friends: if we do get a political revolution in this country, you will not end up on top of the heap.
Mr. G., you'll have to forgive me for being hopelessly out of touch with Brazilian affairs, but who's the philosopher?
Patricia, I disagree (forcefully) with Brin's basic presuppositions, but I don't discount his intellect or his talent.
4/8/16, 11:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Donkey, I read his article as a discussion of why the American wage class is vulnerable to racist and fascist appeals, very carefully written to avoid talking about whether, say, enforcing immigration laws is actually racist or fascist.
4/8/16, 11:11 PM
John Roth said...
It’s easy to write a pile of *** that looks dimly at someone you don’t like very much. You might wonder why actual economists believe the BLS statistics? As it happens, there’s a second data series from a private company, using their own resources: the ADP employment report. ADP (formerly Automatic Data Processing) is a payroll processor, and it processes a huge proportion of the small business payrolls in this country. Now, the ADP report doesn’t match the BLS report exactly, but it’s close enough that real economists are pretty sure that the BLS report isn’t a pile of steaming you know what.
This is the case with a lot of government reports: there are reports from private companies and industry associations that cover much of the same territory. It tends to keep the government reports honest.
The economics blog I follow, Calculated Risk (the name of someone’s yacht, not a statement of investment policy), looks very closely at both reports.
You have to be careful of confirmation bias.
@111DFC:
As I understand it, two factors played a large part of why Cortez managed to conquer the Aztec Empire: disease and an alliance with outlying tribes that the Aztecs had conquered and who wanted revenge.
@Mitch Davis:
Yeah, that’s what “dog whistle” meant to me, too.
@Bill Pulliam:
That’s the way I see it playing out too. As far as the Supreme Court, it depends on whether the Democrats can get a majority in the Senate. There’s a real possibility of getting rid of a number of the Republican senators that were elected in the Tea Party blowout in 2010, and are up for reelection now.
@JMG
Yes, I know that a lot of people who came here to work, send money back home and then leave have decided to stay, for one reason or another. Turning off the money spigot, though, will make them confront an issue they may have been avoiding. Some will jump one way, some the other, but it’s not at all certain that everyone who’s here and intending to stay will stay when the money spigot gets turned off.
Enforcing the immigration laws is a lot easier said than done.
@Bill Pulliam:
As far as why your neighbors keep voting for someone who you regard as completely inappropriate, you may want to read Albion’s Seed. It’s about the groups that founded Colonial America. The one that’s relevant here is the Borderers, also known as the Scots-Irish. There’s a built-in attraction in that cultural background to people with the trappings of power. I can’t sympathize, but it’s fairly obvious in some ways.
4/8/16, 11:12 PM
Sven Eriksen said...
4/9/16, 1:55 AM
. said...
There's something about that equation that doesn't seem to be commonly known in Europe and even less so in the US. There is a belief on the far left that nations are 'imaginary constructs' that are inherently racist and that serve the interests of capitalism by dividing the global working class. It follows that borders are racist, all of them, and state enforcement of borders is racist and authoritarian (translates to 'fascist'). It also follows that border controls serve the interests of capitalism. This is the theory and reality is irrelevant. Internationalism you could call it.
what people other than conspiracy theorists really don't seem to know is that this pretty fringe idea has far more influence on mainstream politics than the numbers of adherents would suggest. Scratch the background of many anti-racism or migrant rights activists and you'll see it. They work within and alongside your governments too.
I can't prove this because no mainstream journalist will look into those backgrounds. I know it because i am, or was, an insider and i know some of them personally. They're an international lot, well educated, get jobs in NGO's and state bodies. They're not evil conspiracists, they mostly mean well -apart from a few inevitable agents provocateurs. They're just taking post-modern subjectivism to its logical conclusion by dissolving categories.
They support migrants of all kinds, for any reason, anywhere, any time, to breach borders, by force if necessary -because they believe they have a moral right to dismantle racist structures. And because they believe that that kind of civil disobedience is a legitimate way to achieve the goal of a borderless world.
It's a utopian goal that was once intended to happen democratically, voluntarily, as part of a global revolution which would end all glaring differences of global wealth, power, freedom etc. but they're happy to push for it in the short term, in the world as it is now - unequal, unjust, wars, terrorism and all.
The reason they have disproportionate influence is that they unwittingly serve the actual interests of capitalism (among others). They're used as the PR troops of those interests who seek cheap labour, while not being trusted by them either. They can't see that clearly because the Theory tells them the opposite.
I've had the weird experience of talking about open borders policies with Sanders-type supporters in the US. They genuinely didn't seem to know what I was talking about, or else had no idea that the concept is more than a fringe one in the US. They seemed to think that the scale of illegal immigration into the US was unintentional and that no one supported it.
It's actually easy to prove this for yourself. Learn the terminology of No Borders, then interview anti-racism activists who treat migrant rights as part of antiracism. Many of them have no coherent theory of the connection. They've just picked up the vague idea. But ask enough and you'll find the ones who really do believe that anything less than the dissolution of all borders and total freedom of movement is racist and a breach of human rights. That's the theoretical underpinning of the link between border policy and racism. The fact that opposition to immigration is sometimes motivated by racism actually has little or nothing to do with it.
Mallow.
4/9/16, 2:01 AM
Phil Knight said...
We're going through a similar process in the UK with the vote to leave the EU, which looks like it's going to be very close. It's clear to me that many of the advocates of remaining in the EU, as well as peddling it as "realism", do have a kind of spiritual belief in the EU, which is a classic utopian "end of history" project. Part of the magic of the EU is the assumption that it owns the future, that there was a bad past of small, confused nations endlessly fighting, but which are now in the process of permanent replacement by a benign monolith that will endure for eternity.
The salary class, or the elite, do not just draw economic sustenance from Neoliberal globalisation - they are deeply emotionally, psychologically and spiritually invested in it. The global economy, the blurring and erasure of borders, really is their pride and joy - it is what they have collectively strived for over decades. This is explains the anger of the likes of Kevin Williamson towards those who might take it away. There are elite British pundits who are similarly panicking, such as here: (It's paywalled, but the first paragraph will give you the idea.)
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/dcpros-lb7r63rbj
I think the Neoliberals are not going to go down without a very vicious fight because ultimately, for all the "realism" that they endlessly regale us with, they are true believers, and the end of the global economy, like the end of the Soviet Union, will psychologically destroy those who were invested in it.
4/9/16, 3:09 AM
Don Plummer said...
Yes, why indeed do wage class folks continue voting for people like your rep? That's a great question and one which I've wrestled with for a long time also.
John, I by no means hate the wage class; brought up in it myself and worked a wage job also for many years and got to know and appreciate the people who do that kind of work intimately. I'm only pointing out that what the TN legislature did reinforces the contempt that you'll find. It's by no means limited to Tennessee, or to the South for that matter; it's just that it was the first (probably because it's the most recent) example of legislative foolishness that came to my mind. I could easily find similar examples coming from Midwestern state legislatures, including my own Ohio legislature, if I had the chance to dig around a while.
The thing is, it's wage class people who put and keep people like Bill's state rep in office, and that's part of the key to the contempt, I think. To stay in office, they keep promising them things that they want or think they want, or like, while once in office they continue the process of undermining the economic lives of the people who vote for them.
4/9/16, 3:44 AM
Don Plummer said...
At least Bernie Sanders is talking about policies that could actually help the wage classes, though I wonder if he would be able to enact them should he be elected.
4/9/16, 5:12 AM
Bruno Bolzon said...
4/9/16, 5:21 AM
Allen Thoma said...
Again welcome back.
4/9/16, 5:21 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
By the way, all this class stuff, and the "blaming the wage class in the South" stuff in particular, is exactly why I an among the few who felt "Go Set a Watchman" corrected the sins of "To Kill a Mockingbird," and liked the new book. In "Mockingbird," the hero is a salary-class white man attempting to save a black man from the racism and oppression foisted on him by the lower class whites. But it was not the "rednecks" who created slavery and Jim Crow. Their ancestors did not practice or directly benefit from slavery, they did not write or enact the segregationist laws. This was the doing of men like Atticus and his ancestors. And this is made clear in "Watchman," which is probably why it was not acceptable for publication in the 1950s. The characteras in "Watchman" are less fleshed out, but they behave the way southerners of that era actually did. The Citizen Council is the white upper class, they are the ones fighting desegregation, promoting racist ideology, and passing the laws. Not the "rednecks" and the "white trash."
4/9/16, 5:43 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
- Clarence Darrow"
4/9/16, 5:52 AM
Don Plummer said...
4/9/16, 5:57 AM
Chris Travers said...
I am currently a member of the salary class (though now in Sweden) and before when I was in the US, I was a member of the profit class (i.e. a small business owner). I have also lived most of my life in small towns (which makes me feel right at home in Sweden and in Jakarta). I want to share about how I suddenly became aware of the massive class divisions in society.
I had a major client in a big city, who brought me in to do some onsite work. They were willing to pay for a taxi between their site and the hotel, but I discovered I could take bus and cut the travel time in half (since it meant not waiting for a taxi). I told one of the directors of the client this and the look of horror was unforgettable. So much so that I mentioned my transportation to get a second opinion from the owner of the restaurant around the corner (a wonderful man and immigrant). His eyes lit up and he said "I love busses!" And suddenly I understood.
But that brings me to a second point, that there is another massive division in the US today and that is between rural and urban. In fact rural Americans of any social class, are effectively politically wage-earners Small towns don't afford the same luxuries regarding class divisions that large cities do and the correctional officer, the lawyer, the doctor, and the gas station attendant likely all know eachother, talk politics and economics, and the like. I the cities this never happens.
Finally, I wanted to talk briefly about the arc of history when it comes to decline and fall. I think one of the things which is typically missing when one looks at the British and American empires is the development of industrialization. While those which industrialized later often did so in a different way, in both the US and the UK, industrialization was furthered by intentionally and massively impoverishing a large class of people. In the UK this was done by seizing the monasteries and enclosing the common fields (thus forcing peasants off the land and into the cities to look for work). In the US, this was done by freeing the slaves and then insisting that the strategy out of poverty was to get a job (Andrew Johnson in fact strongly resisted any effort at land reform). The result is that you get a large, perpetual underclass (and in the US this is a racial underclass as much as an economic one).
This leads, I think to a kind of hard stratification that doesn't necessarily happen in other societies, where different groups live in different social realities which exist in competition with eachother.
4/9/16, 7:16 AM
onething said...
4/9/16, 8:49 AM
pygmycory said...
I get the impression downward mobility is seen as an aberration where it enters the media's worldview at all, which it rarely does.
4/9/16, 9:27 AM
rapier said...
In other words he could not possibly have even entered into the salary class and is not of it which in turn is why he so appalls that class which includes everyone who is anyone. One odd fact about this group is that every 'news' person and commentator most Americans have ever heard of are full blown organization people but they hardly know it. The limits of what one can say about anyone who works within a corporation or institution or those companies or institutions and the endless circles of clout and status among the elites are so ingrained into young prospective 'news' people that they do not recognize they serve a class. Those who do have an inkling rarely try to enter institutional organizations and those who do are quickly weeded out.
Trump represents a triumph of old fashioned individuality which is supposed to be an American ideal but is actually anathema to the institutional world of our elites save for their hobbies like skydiving or fetishistic sex or otherwise consuming conspicuously and being good a parties. If we can revel in the rise of a true individual with Trump we can also appreciate the downside. Cooperation and working for common goal or good is the essence of human society. A loudmouth A-hole know nothing is not going to successfully lead any nation much less the worlds most powerful one.
Americans always yearn for leaders who are not politicians but there is no such thing as a leader who isn't a politician. One who balances interests and builds relationships via favors and thus gives and garners loyalty. Americans love Trump for being the anti Party man, anti organization man which is fine. The leader of a nation is not made of such.
4/9/16, 9:57 AM
Jason B said...
4/9/16, 10:30 AM
Glenn said...
The failure of the creators of the quiz to recognize downward mobility says much about the blindness of our declining civilization.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
4/9/16, 10:46 AM
aiastelamonides said...
I agree that the curve on the legitimacy-wave is fractal, and that the basic process driving it is the same at all levels, but the idea that the dominant minority equivalent creates the problems that tear it apart (rather than failing to avoid problems that are coming from outside its own ranks) seems more correct at lower levels than higher ones. That is, your summary of Toynbee for this post describes what is happening in the election, but it doesn't seem to me to be quite the same thing that Toynbee talks about. Toynbee even seems to be unsure about the idea that something like a creative minority could take power after the Breakdown, or else he's just being coy about knowing whether the West has broken down.
Incidentally, have you read Carroll Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations? It presents the same mechanism as Toynbee (Quig doesn't think it's the same, but I think he's misreading Toynbee) in clearer and more generalizable (i.e. fractal-friendly) terminology, though he's not much good with the deaths of civilizations. His analysis of Western civilization is also interesting, though I think his comparison of it to other civilizations confuses different levels of the fractal pattern. It's a short book, so not as detailed as Toynbee (almost as digressive, though!).
What are these longer waves you mention? The first thing that comes to mind are the "religious sensibilities" you've mentioned in earlier posts, but they seem to come at the rate of one per generation of civilizations, albeit staggered by a half-millenium or so from the political cycle.
4/9/16, 11:58 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
I don't blame them. Medical care is cheaper here in Brazil, but also of lower quality. It's zero cost if you want it to, actually, through the national healthcare service, but it is so low quality and crowded that everyone who can gets a private plan. Much cheaper than $1200, though. I'm a healthy young male of 29, and I pay roughly $75 per month for a full coverage plan.
Anyways, when you are living in a country that has around seventy thousand homicides per year - that's 70,000/year, no typo - along with an economy going so bad engineers are driving cabs and ubers, thinking about living abroad is quite reasonable.
4/9/16, 12:35 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
As JMG has thought transitions so troughoutly through, I go along with them. A reduction of societies complexity in every aspect of live, with smaller nations evolving from that within the next couple of hundred of years. Through the inability of us humans, to get a ecological and economical optimum reached via undisturbed rational and planing, we will have to get through turnmoils first. Destroying on its way, much of the present infrastructure. After 2 to 300 years, we go stabilise at some maybe medival sort of society level. And from then on, things will start afresh, except deteriorated fossil energy and mineral ressourses are limits to whatever shall develop then.
Inevitable of all will be the leaving behind of former symbols of wealth, as wealth dries out. Like former cultures did. Romans, Babylonians, Mayans, Easter-Islanders, Stonhedgians etc. The elites are blamed with it, so they´ll be kicked out of their leading position. In order to survive people will, after a periode of annoyance and distribution battles, return in full scale to agrarian society, with trading spots and transportation centres here and there. Quite the ordinary live, we humans had these last 10.000 years. Certainly looking back at these golden age with wonder and fear.
4/9/16, 1:14 PM
sanguinesophrosyne said...
I note from the comments that you are familiar with SJW's, have you encountered their counterparts, the Alt Right? It is a motley crew, formerly called Red Pill, the idea taken from The Matrix movie, where you could take a blue pill and continue accepting delusion, or take the red pill and awaken to harsh reality and start getting work done. Donald Trump is well regarded as something of a father figure among the rank and file. Very interesting that a group so dedicated to personal freedom and development so quickly form behind such an authoritarian figure.
I ask because, if I understand correctly, we have a budding contingent of mages -who don't know they are practicing magic- on our hands. The roots of the movement seem to be a reaction to the 90's Gurl Power, which was all well and good, however the added emphasis on getting women to succeed was paid for at the expense of guiding young men, including yours truly. (Elliott Rogers being a particularly horrendous example.) Basically upon graduating college, the narrative cut right out, and what garbled remains did still play clearly didn't work. Into this void stepped the pickup artists -part big brother, part seasoned slimy salesman- mostly Gen X'ers who had managed to piece together a coherent worldview of their own in the absence of doting helicopter parents, who found a very receptive audience in their foundering millennial counterparts. Central to the overall premise was Neuro-Lingustic Programming. NLP, as far as I can tell, is basically magic (changes in consciousness in accordance with will) in scientific drag. I recall the dots connecting when you first began talking of magic on this blog and TWoG, I was fairly well versed in red pill culture and the parallels were remarkable.
What rings a warning bell is that the situation could be ripe for the common hubristic thought processes that get us into so much trouble today; repeating forgotten past mistakes in the name of progress and originality. For instance in skilled and informed hands, picking out and combining certain useful behaviors from larger methodologies, such as merging magical orders to form new traditions to get new results. But the trouble comes in when there is no further context, such as mystery schools or lodges grounding the process in history and experience, and people go wielding tools and teaching others, perhaps without understanding critical limits or with missing safety components. This is further complicated in that another contingent of the Alt Right comes from the social cesspool of 4chan, a breathtakingly creative and irreverent website that also spawned the Anonymous hackers who make headlines on occasion with their cyber antics (good and ill).
For my part I have been attempting my own magic practice, unfortunately consistency is one of the key ingredients that I first have to work on, in addition to tendencies of over-emphasizing theory before practice itself. But it seems to me that part of my green wizardry calling could be mapping out some of the ancient ruins of magic and disseminating the info. Complicating this is that the movement is also comprised of hyper intellectuals, well versed and educated as anyone in the generations who write off anything not "properly scientific" with an aplomb that would do a Vulcan proud.
4/9/16, 1:39 PM
sanguinesophrosyne said...
4/9/16, 2:03 PM
Jon from Virginia said...
It feels strange to realize that I've been dog whistled. That must be how they work, you don't hear them at all, you just feel them.
4/9/16, 2:11 PM
Bryan L. Allen said...
Hah, hah, hah, or even an excuse for counter-productive action! One person at my workplace, in the interest of being "Green", built a retirement house in the country and told us about it at our institution's so-called Green Club. I was horrified to compute that just the FOUNDATION of that house caused the same atmospheric carbon impact (good ol' concrete) as burning the amount of fuel needed for a relatively-efficient car to travel about 150,000 miles!
Did that article mention the thousands of other climate scientists who heard about your colleague, scuffed their feet, and went on flying to climate conferences? (If your colleague is Dr. Peter Kalmus, I read about him some time ago when he first brought this issue up, and recall what was said then about the reaction of his colleagues.
I'm not sure about climate scientists in general, but I know the institutional response to Peter is that he is rather pleasantly daft. He freely admits he's doing the things he does because they are personally appealing and gratifying, and doesn't expect his fellow scientists to follow suit. A huge reason why, I think, is that having an electric car and solar panels on your roof enhances (for now...) your status, whereas not flying to conferences, riding your old bike to work, wearing old clothes, and doing humanure definitely is a status-step downwards!
For that matter, have you yourself decided to follow his example?
Ah, hah hah hah again! Arguably, it may be the other way around, as I was already doing various status-lowering things before Peter, and making myself a bit of a thorn in the side of our institutional Green Club. I have the advantage of age (Harry S Truman was President when I was born) so have a bit of a head start on Peter. But I'm certainly no exemplar; for instance, my wife and I fly to France, her birthplace, about once a year to visit her family and to ride our bikes across the countryside.
Forgive me if you've stated it before, but it's appearing to me that having all those feel-good solar panels and electric cars and other trappings of Green has the potential to make all those having them VERY unsafe in the upcoming decades. A modification to your evocative phrase might be: "Collapse Now and Avoid the Mob."
4/9/16, 2:31 PM
Nastarana said...
Prices of utilities has risen in tandem with housing prices over the past few decades, regulations notwithstanding.
4/9/16, 2:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sven, watch that space. Proxy struggles between the military and the civilian government could mean something rather less distant in the near future.
.Mallow, exactly. And of course a great many of the people who believe in that ideology just happen to belong to the class that benefits most from driving down wages and the prices of consumer goods, so they have an unstated incentive to believe those things...
Phil, you may well be right. Hmm. I'll want to look into that.
Don, you're either missing or evading my point. The Tennessee legislature is not the wage class. The wage class has a much lower rate of participation in elections than the salary class, and in Tennessee, as elsewhere, who gets into the legislature is mostly determined by the salary class, partly because they vote in disproportionate numbers, partly because they control political institutions. Pointing to the actions of legislatures and claiming that this justifies contempt for the wage class is like pointing to the actions of the New York City government and claiming that this justifies contempt for Nebraska -- and what lies behind that bizarre claim, of course, is the rhetorical paralogic that deliberately confuses the South (and the flyover states generally) with the wage class.
Bruno, thank you!
Allen, thank you. It's one of the constantly repeating themes of history that elites on their way out are always stunned to discover just how fragile their power always was...
Bill, exactly. We'll want to take this conversation further after next week's post, which fits very nicely with your comments about Harper Lee's two novels.
Don, good. Now ask yourself what happened to unions between the time when they were generally supported by the wage class and the time when they came to be generally rejected by the wage class. In the same way, when asking why the wage class doesn't support liberal politicians, it's helpful to ask whether the policies supported by liberal politicians over the last forty years or so have helped or harmed the wage class. Those are uncomfortable questions for today's affluent liberals, but they have to be asked and answered in order to make any kind of sense of the crisis in contemporary American politics.
Chris, thank you! All good points. You may well be right about the origins of Anglo-American class divisions, though I'd want to hear from readers in other societies to find out whether similar divisions between the wage and salary classes exist outside the Anglosphere.
4/9/16, 4:40 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jason, I gather the point of this post went right on over your head. I'm not promoting Trump, I'm talking about why he's so popular with so many people right now, and what that says about the future of American politics. You might try rereading the post with that in mind.
Aias, I read Quigley a long time ago; I should probably revisit him. The long cycles I have in mind are speculative -- since civilization on this planet is only about five thousand years old, it may be too early to get a sense of the longer cycles, but I notice the way that very old civilizations such as Egypt and China seem to have cycled through a broader arc in which several different rise-and-fall cycles had their place. Ask me again in a quarter million years and we'll have more evidence to work with... ;-)
Hubertus, good. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that what's happening now is a return to normal. Industrial society was a bizarre and temporary aberration, made possible only by all that cheap fossil fuel we burned so thoughtlessly. Now it's ending, and history is returning to the norm.
Sanguine, I've read a certain amount of Neoreaction, which I think is part of the same phenomenon you're discussing, and a very little bit of the PUA literature -- young men with limited social skills have always had trouble getting laid, but the PUAs are as far as I know the first group of them who tried to make a philosophy out of it, and I found that mildly interesting. NLP is another distinctly odd phenomenon, which combines some very useful tricks with a poorly founded conviction of its own omnipotence that has turned it into the butt of many jokes in the occult community. As I consider myself a moderate Burkean conservative, I'm pleased that the Alt-Right have noticed the difference between actual conservatism (which is about, you know, conserving things) and the bizarre Utopian fantasists of the Neocon world. As for magic, though, that's properly speaking a subject for the other blog, so I'll pass here.
Jon, fascinating.
Bryan, true enough. I used to live in a very self-consciously green town in southern Oregon, and got to watch as one of the big and very pricey houses in town got PV panels ostentatiously mounted on it. They were on the side facing the street, right above the two hybrid cars in the driveway, so everyone could see just how ecologically virtuous the homeowner was. The only problem with this arrangement was that the street was north of the house, so the PV panels were on the part of the roof that got no sunlight at all. Oh, but the fashion statement!
4/9/16, 5:14 PM
DaShui said...
I noticed Obama is changing labor rules so that if one is paid by their employer less than 54000 dollars a year, one has to be in the wage class, therefore eligible for overtime. So coming soon, a lot of today"s salary people will wake up and find themselves in the wage class. I'm sure Obama did this because a lot of businesses pay their employees a low salary while forcing them to work long hours.
I'm not sure this sudden change has any reverence to this weeks conversation, but maybe.
4/9/16, 5:50 PM
weedananda said...
Thanks be to the gods you're back in action! You've heard of food deserts? I feel as though I'm wandering in a critical thought desert when you're on 'vacation'. My week truly revolves around your post and the hundreds of thoughtful, diverse comments which follow. There are a handful of other worthy pandits out there but none IMHO are in your league. I'm profoundly grateful to you and the entire Archdruid Report community (apologies to all y'all and the rest of youse for the fawning sycophancy).
I had a good chuckle over your comment about YES! Magazine. It was a great magazine when it started, called IN CONTEXT. I remember well an article by the legendary Donella Meadows that rocked my world, maybe 1996. Then they went all hopey-changey and lost their edge for the most part. I'm sure there's still a decent article now and then but I mostly agree with your description. Please count me in as a charter subscriber if you ever start up PROBABLY NOT! Or how about NOPE! A Journal of Realistic Futures...Straight Dope, Not Hope. Can't wait for DARK AGE AMERICA.
Jim
4/9/16, 6:10 PM
HalFiore said...
Say WHAT?
4/9/16, 7:22 PM
Caryn said...
Thanks for this thoughtful essay to you, and to all of my fellow commenters - as always, great brain-food, a lot to chew on.
As a self-described progressive/liberal and arguably "kind of" member of the salaried class now, It's been an eye opening past few weeks of self discovery, through this site as well as several articles focusing on the present and past of our, and especially the Clinton policies. I voted for Bill and at the time, really thought he was a great president. I definitely feel like hanging my head and shaking it in shame. How very very wrong we got it. I'm personally, still processing this while trying (probably ineffectively) to argue with my fellow liberal salary class peers and acquaintances where we went wrong, and while we have the chance, why Hillary and more of the same is killing us all. Thus, I don't consider voting for Bernie or rejecting the Clintonian policies, "voting against my own self-interest", I think they are just more in my own long-term interest as opposed to 'grab it all before the world ends!' short term interests.
I know in the long continuum of fractal collapse it makes little difference, but for us, now immediately, I do think choosing better leaders, a better policy path can ease the hard landing we will experience. Happy to report, my vote for Bernie helped win him the 25 Democrats Abroad delegates. He also won big in my US Home base of WY. (probably all of 20 Dem's in the entire state of WY! haha!) Yes, I doubt he will get the nomination, but I am undeterred.
I also took the bubble quiz. My score was 67. I agree, it was a weirdly narrow definition of privilege vs. lack, working class to salary class. Most of the questions just didn't fit me at all. I've lived in a number of various bubbles, high, low, rural, urban, suburban, American, Irish, British, Chinese, International…. And I thought a number of the rural exercises like owning a truck or going fishing are nowadays things only someone with a fair amount of money can do - not things that would denote 'working class' or rural underclass. I've come to expect that actually we ALL live in one bubble or the other, it's most helpful just to see that that is true, to see the film/boundary of the bubble we are in and to consider that when other bubbles think radically differently than we, they have their reasons, just as validly as we have ours.
Perhaps luckily; most of my energy and attention has been taken up with my family's impending move, packing, sorting, throwing away, refurbishing furniture worth keeping….… Another big step in living with LESS. At times, it's clear I'm living in a mixed marriage, collapse-wise, and at other times, my husband seems to be way ahead of me on the curve. An interesting journey.
4/9/16, 8:12 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
"From criminals and contractors, Good Lord, deliver us ......"
"We thank God for this timely sucker....."
4/9/16, 8:29 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
What is missing, is a message away from the progress myth. Instead Sanders propagates evergrowing consumption, instead of small scale progress towards sustainability. He is living another myth, that of the supressed, fighting against the opressors. Instead, what would be needed, is the propagation of a destitutional economy, like in the WWII war-time. And then binging plenty of people into small scale sustainable labour, in particular agriculture. All turning into Amish like work-force.
Yet, that is impossible to ask a politican. That would clearly state a life of manual labour and the loss of most gadetry of todays consumer desires. People would turn away from a blood, sweat and tears message to any pied piper promising a shiny future for its followers.
So, that shall not happen. Instead of a voluntary time of rationally orchestrated austerity into a sustainable smallness, we keep on emotionally denying and rejecting. So that´s why annoyance and conflicts are on the rise. Distribution battle will spread. Forced by circumstances new societies will evolve.
4/9/16, 11:29 PM
nuku said...
The guy who insisted that the Nazis murdered the Jews for their money, not anti-Semitism, is a Jewish Hungarian refugee who emigrated to New Zealand just before WWII. He's also an accountant, maybe that explains it.
@JMG
I grew up in California in the 50's amd 60's at the time when a big wave of Mexican immigrants (legal and illegal) were coming North. Many of them started as field workers doing "stoop labor" all day in the hot sun. These are the folks that Cesar Chaves championed in the 70's.
I bring this up because I used to hear the theme that the Mexicans were brought in (and everyone turned a blind eye to illegal immigration) because "Americans wouldn't do those jobs. The work was too hard and below their dignity". I wonder if there is any truth in that? Anyone else aware of that theme?
4/10/16, 4:03 AM
Shane W said...
my experiences with the green end of things, and the salary class more generally, is that there's some kind of "reverse Midas touch" going on, whereby otherwise practical/useful ideas are reduced to impractical status symbols. I'm thinking it's intentional, for the reasons you've mentioned why the salary class benefits from the status quo.
Regarding Trump, racism, and the chattering classes: there was a noticeable lag time (at least months) between when Trump uttered his "ban Muslims" and "build the wall" remarks and the steady drumbeat of "Trump's supporters are racist" in the media. At first, it was just reaction to Trumps outrageousness. The fact that the "Trump supporters are racist" drumbeat took awhile is telling...
4/10/16, 4:54 AM
Shane W said...
4/10/16, 5:21 AM
Shane W said...
I did want to second Eric's remarks about immigrants--I see Trump focusing his comments with laser precision on the elite and the establishment in everything but immigration, where he changes to scapegoating--if he would focus his remarks on immigration with the same precision on the elite and establishment instead of the immigrants themselves, I'd be more comfortable. Mexico stands to be the most powerful country in North America once we're done imploding, and relations w/Latin America are going to be important in a post-superpower US.
4/10/16, 6:34 AM
Shane W said...
4/10/16, 6:58 AM
David said...
JMG, et alia--
One of the realizations that is driving me in my personal efforts (both internal and external) is that as the breakdown of our broader (read: national, and to some extent state-level) institutions continues, we will be left with our local institutions (county/city/town/village) and, more significantly, our personal networks to rely on. This is a sobering thought, for our current culture supports nothing that remotely resembles authentic human relationships. (FB "friend" counts notwithstanding.) One of the tools of empire is the isolation of its subjects from one another. We not only allow this, but actively invite it by our wholesale embrace of digital reality. (I realize, even as I write this, that I am reflecting a middle-and-upper class perspective, for the working and welfare classes have limited-to-no access to such things.)
My efforts to simplify and (re)build the kind of local structures and interrelationships that we will need in the future progress but slowly; however, that is how a solid foundation is constructed, I would say. My aforementioned banjo lessons continue, our 12-month rolling average electric usage dropped below 220 kWh this past month, I successfully made my first batch of (farmer's) cheese last night, and I made a double-batch of herb bread yesterday, gifting one loaf to an acquaintance of mine (an Iraq veteran and local business owner) who is rapidly becoming a friend. Is it too much to imagine that upon such things our future will depend?
4/10/16, 9:49 AM
Dennis D said...
One other point, in the Trump vs Clinton post comment numbers, Clinton required several more weeks of commenting to amass the higher total. Even on the ADR, She somehow manages an unfair advantage.
4/10/16, 9:53 AM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
http://michellemalkin.com/2012/05/02/sacaja-whiner-elizabeth-warren-and-the-oppression-olympics/
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7075
http://thedailybanter.com/2014/04/we-read-salons-interview-with-suey-park-so-you-dont-have-to-and-so-your-brain-wouldnt-explode/
http://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars/
4/10/16, 2:09 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
Of course, there followed the usual denunciations of "structural racism", demands for a apology from Microsoft, attempts to tar Donald Trump's supporters as neo-Nazi's and all the other predictable rhetoric we've come to expect from the SJW's. Personally, I found the whole kerfuffle to be rather entertaining, in a sick and twisted kind of way.
4/10/16, 2:29 PM
goedeck said...
"North Carolina voters last month voted overwhelmingly to borrow $2 billion to invest in a long list of state infrastructure projects, but roads and bridges didn't make the list. About two-thirds of the money will pay for new buildings and renovations at the state's public colleges and universities — the rest will pay for water and sewer systems, parks and other projects."
4/10/16, 3:09 PM
Matt said...
Matt
4/10/16, 3:14 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
The article said
"The numbers of migrants and refugees at the camp have risen in Oregon as part of the wider economic and cultural collapse of North American civilization.
At least 15 refugees have died overdosing on heroin in the park bathrooms since the start of the latest economic crisis.
White BOBO liberals fear someone will be mean to them amid escalating unrest in Portland as meth addicted migrants grow frustrated at their inability to obtain food stamps and spare change.
In desperate efforts to mooch off of everyone else, stupid white hippies have been repeatedly standing on the roads with cardboard signs, leaving police to resort to force in an effort to clear the lanes.
Aid groups have also regularly accused the riot police of brutality and overreaction when clashing with the camp’s inhabitants."
One interesting irony is that I first ran into the work of Olavo de Carvalho via an online debate he held with Dugin.
4/10/16, 3:27 PM
Justin said...
One of the strangest things about 4chan is the users (I check it out occasionally...) have a half-serious, half-joking belief in their ability to make things happen in real life through some sort of egregore they create by devoting their attention to various internet memes.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/
Although I suspect future societies will have healthier outlets for the energy that drives 4chan, I will miss it nonetheless.
4/10/16, 4:00 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Weedananda, yes, I also remember In Context. The thing is, of course, that if it hadn't turned into feel-good pablum, it would have gone out of print, the way Rain and so many other good magazines did. I don't object to the existence of Yes! Magazine; I just have no interest in reading it, and turned down an offer to write for it. (And I like Nope! Magazine a great deal; a satiric one-off issue might be worth doing one of these days.)
HalFiore, please see my post. I didn't say the reasons were good ones, just that there were plenty of them in contemporary American pop culture.
Caryn, you're welcome and thank you.
Patricia, my experience with affluent liberal white folks is that they don't take kindly to contractors, or other service providers, talking back to them -- even to save them from expensive stupidities. (I could tell you some colorful stories from my days working as a clerk in a photocopy shop, and in every case the customer in question was a well-to-do white person.) My guess is that the customer told the contractor where to put the panels, and the contractor was familiar enough with the clientele to take the money and do as he was told.
Hubertus, why, yes, and I've been saying that for getting on for a decade now, you know.
Nuku, I've always taken that as code words for "we pay crap wages and impose subhuman working conditions, and only the desperate will put up with that."
Shane, it's a source of some amusement to me that all through the Dark Age America posts, I had Morris Berman fans trying to post angry diatribes denouncing me for not crediting Berman for, well, the title, I suppose. Yes, I know he wrote a book titled Dark Ages America; it was about a completely different subject, and book titles aren't subject to copyright.
David, no, it's not too much at all. I should probably do a post down the road a bit about the replacement of institutions with personal relationships as a common feature of the transition to dark age conditions.
Dennis, funny! You'll be interested to know that she still trails Trump in the total readership poll, and Trump is continuing to draw ahead... ;-)
Sojan, the sad thing is that you can find the oppression olympics in full spate on the rightward end of the spectrum as well. I've long since lost track of the self-pitying attempted comments I've received from white American guys insisting that they're really the most oppressed of all!
Goedeck, yes, that's a classic. Thanks for passing it on.
Sojan, no, I don't read Dugin -- I've read some of his essays, of course, but as a moderate Burkean conservative I'm far from sympathetic with his general approach.
4/10/16, 4:09 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
4/10/16, 4:22 PM
Mon Seul Desir said...
I've considered that America could have another fate than the usually postulated civil war since I see extreme political division combined with weak capacity for military mobilization and the lack of a strong center with sufficient resources to overwelm the other regions. [ During the Civil War the industrial resources of the Northeast was the foundation of the Union's strength, I've pointed out the Pennsylvania scrapyard ]
This opens another possibility: The Great American Schism.
This is a situation in which the USA is still a united legal entity, but there is is two or more Presidents, each naturally declaring him/herself the only true President of the whole with different regions giving allegiance to their preferred, all of then extracting local rights for themselves as the price of allegiance or reward for service. You would see local conflict as the partisans of the Presidents fought each other like the Guelfs and Ghibbelines. Under this situation both American control over world affairs and Federal centralization would largely unravel while the schism could last for generations.
I think this could be a likely outcome in a resource constrained world were no party is able to secure overwhelming resources would create long term stalemates that lead eventually to new social and political arrangements.
4/10/16, 5:38 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Patricia, I gather you don't spend much time around the terminally overprivileged. Neither do I, these days, but my time in Ashland was kind of a total immersion experience in that culture and worldview.
Desir, hmm! Please consider writing that one up as a short story for the current Space Bats contest. That's by no means impossible, or even improbable, and it would be worth exploring further.
4/10/16, 5:43 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
JMG - I try not to spend any time around the terminally overprivileged. Yet, my own brother, a good and decent and quietly religious man who does a lot of pro bono work, could not wrap his mind around the concept of the woman who does my heavy cleaning and hauling being my social equal. We're part of the same circles, and like many other friends who share my culturally 'salary class' values, low income, lives simply, works gig jobs - and I don't mean starving artists!
My brother could not see how she could be anything but (pardon the expression; he'd never use it) servant class. Especially with a Hispanic surname. Shakes head. But then, I'm the socially strange, oddball, family hippie with known 'interesting' brain wiring. You know. "Everybody's out of step but Pat." I do hope my oldest daughter, come to babysit me through upcoming surgery, doesn't try to buy me a new dishwasher or clothes dryer, or get on my case about not having any sort of TV!
Shakes head indulgently.
4/10/16, 8:30 PM
Marinhomelander said...
"One other fact to keep in mind about undocumented immigrants is that they are also consumers and spend most of their income in the local economy, increasing aggregate demand."
Really?
It's been common observation that they triple or quadruple up in rentals, thus depriving the real estate tax base of 2/3rds or 3/4 of its potential, they use, trade and give away used cars, used clothing and other consumer items that they are given or are paid to haul away to begin with and they live very modestly, thus not contributing much to aggregate consumer demand. What they do buy, food is not taxed in many states.
OK, they do buy diapers and gasoline.
As to the multiplier effect of money recirculating in the economy, the $22 billion a year being sent out of the country their home nations, is money removed from the local economy, never to return.
The FICA and other taxes paid by them are more than consumed by the social costs for schools, emergency room care and other incidentals.
On this issue, Trump has my vote. On health care, Sanders. The two of them, running together as a third party is the dream ticket. Let's vote this year with our middle fingers.
4/11/16, 12:30 AM
Marinhomelander said...
He'd change the banking laws to disallow anyone without permission to be in the U.S. from sending money out of the country. Mexico would lose 12 billion dollars a year sent there from illegals, 3 times what the wall would cost. In addition he'd impose tariffs on Mexican imports.
Sure it's radical, but the numbers make sense.
4/11/16, 12:40 AM
John Roth said...
Comments like this make me shake my head. I take it you do know when Chaucer (who I referenced) wrote the Canterbury Tales? That part of the comment was intended to short-circuit the chorus of "it's been good English for centuries," which I would otherwise get from people who have knee-jerk reactions to objections to the current attempts to use "singular they" as a "singular" epicine pronoun, and revise history to justify those attempts.
4/11/16, 7:36 AM
pyrrhus said...
Epic!
4/11/16, 9:42 AM
justjohn said...
For a 4KW array in Portland, OR, 180 degree azimuth (due south) is 4557kWh. Due north (zero degree azimuth) is 3295kWh. So you take a 37% hit on solar production by using the north slope.
Now, you and I are probably both the type that would fight for every 1%, but I can think of three good reasons to mount them on the North. Without knowing more, maybe it isn't fair to accuse them of a Green fashion statement?
4/11/16, 10:12 AM
Candace said...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_wages_of_sin_20160410
I am worried about wheresome of this angry energy will go and how it will be used. I know connecting with neighbors and working to build community is one way to try to redirect the anger, but I think those efforts may be overwhelmed by the ease of giving into hate.
4/11/16, 10:29 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
We are returning to normal. I like that. I will add this to my mantra, saying that we are reaching the limits of growth, from which is coming unavoidably collapse and thereafter a compulsory simplification of life. Anyway, we are returning back to normal!
4/11/16, 10:54 AM
David said...
All--
I'm sure I'm not the only reader of this blog regularly perusing nakedcapitalism these days, but today's "Water Cooler" link list offered up an exemplar in the realm of labor-exploitation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/congratulations-youve-been-fired.html?emc=edit_th_20160410&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=47719915&_r=2
One can feel the pressure of labor frustration silently building (and extending into classes previously shielded from such treatment, like technical professionals), though history seems to indicate that you won't know the triggering event until after it has already occurred. ("It will be some d--- fool thing in the Balkans," I believe Otto von Bismarck is supposed to have said.)
4/11/16, 12:13 PM
Fred said...
I think I have the answer based on Trump's tweet the other night about Colorado. He said "How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger - totally unfair!" This is beyond dog whistle to full-blown fire house siren. Trump was referring to the awarding of all the delegates to Cruz, without even holding a primary or caucus. I can't think of a worst political tactic to pull in this election year. People are already enraged about how unfair the system is, and the Republican party did a bunch of backroom conversations to select who got delegates.
So what will be attacked after the denial of Trump's nomination at the convention? Probably all these convention delegates and nominees when they return home. I think about the threats people received who spoke out against the occupiers at the Malheur Refuge. The patriots threatened pastors, the sheriff, police, the refuge staff, and all their families. Any sort of Republican election office would be a target too.
How can the Republican party leadership be so blind? All the data they collect and analyze on everyone and they can't figure this out?
4/11/16, 12:58 PM
Raymond Duckling said...
Being a Mexican national, I find the hardness of your words difficult to stomach, but commend you on the clarity of your logic. You have nailed the issue in the head. I have just 2 comments to share.
First, you should not resent my paisanos for not contributing back to your economy. Their behaviors are guided by a couple of generations worth of experience surviving *disfunctional* public policies, so you should be emulating them instead.
Second, about the spigot thing. You fail to consider what the millions of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans are likely to do once you try to cut their *official* link to their families. I predict you will see the overnight raise of a 100% legal $12 billion "market" for ridiculous overpriced comodities that caters to that demography... while at the same time I see the... shall I say, emerging proto-warlords... engaging in $6 billion worth of random "charity".
4/11/16, 1:31 PM
Fred said...
Yes, 3 "media" per delegate, and yet the coverage will still be so slanted and so coordinated at the same time, it will make me nauseous no matter what station I watch.
People know the news media has been playing along with the elite and overlooking any type of reporting that would make a serious change to the ways things run. They parcel out small and medium scandals to up their ratings, but they never dig and expose the root of the issue. The wage class is always featured as the criminal - robbed a convenience store, broke into a home, robbed a bank - never the salary class who cheated people out of thousands or millions.
4/11/16, 1:50 PM
Fred said...
4/11/16, 1:57 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
4/11/16, 5:48 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
"I, for one, am not at all surprised about Tay’s 4chan-sponsored descent into bigotry. After all, this is the same Internet community that regularly ensures the destruction of corporate crowdsourcing initiatives, with efforts that range from mostly innocent jest to abject perversion.
4chan has ties to the Lay’s potato chip Create-A-Flavor Contest nosedive, in which the official site quickly racked up suggestions like “Your Adopted,” “Flesh,” “An Actual Frog,” and “Hot Ham Water” (“so watery…and yet, there’s a smack of ham to it!”).
Remember Time Magazine’s 2012 reader’s choice for Person of the Year? 4chan frequenters voted Kim Jong Un into first place and subsequently formed an acrostic with the runners-up that spelled “KJU GAS CHAMBERS.” And let us not forget Mountain Dew’s 2012 Dub the Dew contest for its new apple-flavored soda. PepsiCo killed the site after “Hitler did nothing wrong” topped the 10 most popular suggestions, followed by numerous variants of “Gushin Granny”.
While I not in favor of racism and other forms of bigotry, I am a traditional conservative who has a certain amount of sympathy for the alt right. I do find it hilariously funny when the SJW's, corporations like Microsoft and other elements of our increasingly dysfunctional status quo find themselves being turned into an object of ridicule by a group of young, rebellious and creative pranksters.
4/11/16, 5:49 PM
onething said...
I agree, it would be a dream ticket. God forbid he agrees to run with you know who.
4/11/16, 6:29 PM
Rita said...
Mentally the greatest obstacle is the expectation of progress. My grandparents picked crops. My dad's generation went to high school and got blue collar jobs--working in a service station, or retail or for the state. Some of my generation went to college. I didn't ever settle into a high paid career, for a variety of reasons, but my grandmother would roll in her grave if she thought her great-grandkids were going to end up picking cotton again. Dropping out and being a hippie, artist, etc. is one thing, but uncontrolled downward mobility is something white people are not prepared to accept as the norm. Yet.
4/11/16, 6:42 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
4/11/16, 7:38 PM
Shane W said...
I don't think anyone should be criticizing people for not participating or participating less in the consumer economy. Sounds like immigrants are already unknowingly (knowingly?) practicing Green Wizardry and living with LESS. As JMG has said, we're reverting to third world mean after our industrial binge, let's not criticize people who are ahead of us collapsing now. Perhaps you should view them as teachers of valuable lessons. I remember how the migrant ladies would take home the half-used rolls of toilet paper our wasteful society won't allow hotels to leave in the rooms for the next guest. It's not north facing solar panels, but it is conserving & Green Wizardry, nonetheless. Besides, let's not forget the other side of the coin, which is that illegal immigration creates a totally disenfranchised class of people who are exploited as well as depressing wages & working conditions. NAFTA is what drove a lot of them north in the first place--we never saw migrants in the southeast in large numbers until the 90s...
4/11/16, 7:44 PM
Shane W said...
a lot of it is mindset--accepting downward mobility and a dose of humble pie, and willingness to do anything--I'm seeing those traits now among the under 30, particularly under 25, white folk now, and it is refreshing...
4/11/16, 7:47 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
"The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."
4/11/16, 8:01 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Marin, and there's also the fact that flooding the labor market with many more workers than there are jobs, by driving down wages, decreases the income available to the entire wage class and so harms the economy that way.
Pyrrhus, thank you. By all means circulate it if you like.
Justjohn, differences in gain between south- and north-facing panels depends very much on the angle of the roof and also on how much of the solar arc is interrupted by landscape features. (I got certified to do this kind of survey back in the early 1980s, for whatever that's worth.) In this case, the south roof was readily available for use -- it just wasn't visible from the street -- so I think my interpretation is the most likely one.
Candace, except that here again, Hedges insists on seeing the whole thing in terms of racism, rather than talking about the class antagonisms that the Trump campaign is exploiting so effectively. Along the same lines, it occurs to me that there's one very obvious target for the anger and hatred that are being stirred up in the present campaign: the privileged classes themselves. Still, you won't hear Chris Hedges mentioning that possibility!
Hubertus, it's a useful thing to keep in mind.
David, exactly. How far can the privileged push everyone else into the corner, sneering at them all the while, before it's lamppost time? We're apparently going to find out.
Fred, that really is the question that matters. If a good fraction of the backlash takes the form of grassroots political organization and the creation of a movement that can seize control of the political dialogue, do an end run around our might-as-well-be-Pravda media, and change things, a lot of good could come of it. Otherwise? Well, as I've said more than once, we're probably less than two decades from a major domestic insurgency here in the US, and this might just trigger it.
Sojan, funny. It's a source of some amusement to me that the corporate types never expect that sort of thing -- I suspect it's another manifestation of the delusion of control I analyzed in a post last year.
Rita, that very cogent comment earns you tonight's gold star for pointing out unacceptable realities. Thank you.
4/11/16, 8:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Be that as it may, regular readers ought to know already -- and new readers may like to be informed -- that on this blog (as well as my other) I write what I want to write, when and how I want to write it. I greatly appreciate the fact that many readers seem to enjoy these essays, but I'm well aware that what I choose to write isn't everybody's cup of tea; and as far as those who don't enjoy them -- well, there are plenty of other blogs on the internet, you know.
4/11/16, 8:39 PM
HalFiore said...
"It's been common observation that they triple or quadruple up in rentals, thus depriving the real estate tax base of 2/3rds or 3/4 of its potential, they use, trade and give away used cars, used clothing and other consumer items that they are given or are paid to haul away to begin with and they live very modestly, thus not contributing much to aggregate consumer demand. What they do buy, food is not taxed in many states.
OK, they do buy diapers and gasoline."
Other than that last part, admirable qualities, and in all, why they are going to be better positioned to inherit this fiasco once it all falls down.
4/11/16, 9:50 PM
Allexis Weetman said...
In relation to the comments section I wonder do you think this term SJW "social justice warrior" is some kind of a 'dog whistle' term or snarl word. I myself cant see anything wrong with the basic idea of fighting for social justice, but the alt-right seem to mean something different by it and it really seems to get them frothing mad. Does the hypocritical and self-delusional "SJW" of alt-right fame really exist or is she just a straw woman of colour...?
4/11/16, 10:39 PM
nuku said...
@David, re "personal networks", I spent a lot of years cruising the S. Pacific on my sailboat, often hanging out for months with locals on small islands where tribal non-money social systems were still in operation.
What occurs to me is that we in the West have taken the individualistic personal freedom approach to life as far as possible. We "offshore" most of our basic support systems to various levels of government and professionals; we pay them to do the work for us. There is usually no personal relationship in the transaction.
Our security is how much $ we have in the bank. We are free of reciprocal responsibilities; we don't owe anyone anything other than money (except in our work environments if we work for someone else, and perhaps in our family relationships). When times get really tough and governments break down there is no safety net. When you run out of $ you sink to the bottom of the heap.
In the 3rd world societies I lived in, your security is the net of relationships you were born into and the relationships you make in living your life. You helped a friend build/repair his house; at some point you might call in that favor. You were born into the fisherman sub-tribe, and they by tradition give their catch to the whole village. The fisherman get their vegetables from the farmer sub-tribe.
So David, I've seen the personal and tribal/village nets of relationships work. Its not perfect, its not utopian, you give away some of your "freedom" because you can't afford to piss everyone off with bad behavior, and some behavior, like swimming on Sundays if the village is strongly Christian, just isn't done or you risk banishment (the ultimate sanction).
4/11/16, 11:43 PM
Mikep said...
4/12/16, 1:10 AM
Unknown said...
This problem certainly dominates Australian politics and my response is to promote the value of independent non party reps who answer only to the electorate and not to the party money men. It is they who raise politics from monochrome facade to full colour realism.
And that applies to all parties, especially the holier than thou greens who got their start in my home state of Tasmania.
Looking forward to the next installment, regardless of the subject.
eagle eye
4/12/16, 1:16 AM
Andrew Kieran said...
In liverpool they started saying "youze" some time ago (you lot, "what youze doing tonight?") and it's generally adopted in most regional UK accents. I expect it's varying in places, in my neck of the woods people often say "yiz" as we have a habit of shortening words and phrases as much as possible and syllables become a lot shorter and snappier
4/12/16, 3:32 AM
YCS said...
Just a quick pot-shot at the 'salaried class' here. Now, I myself hail from a long line of the salaried class but there's some structural differences with being transplanted from a traditional asian to a western society that I've noticed.
In Australia, the structure of the salaried class has a distinct racial tone. What's most interesting is how new arrivals integrate into it. Migrants' children primarily do the technical fields - science, engineering & medicine. Things that over here require demonstrable quantitiative and qualitative thinking. A huge proportion of the students in these fields are migrant kids like me who were either drilled or self-motivated to work long hours in their school years to perform well in national examinations, while piling on extra-curriculars to get admission and scholarships.
The children of the affluent white class, however, are rarely found in these fields. They prefer Law, PPE, and other humanities. And by no means do they excel at it - their main skill is 1) being well versed in the using appropriate style of writing required to get good marks (argumentation obviously not needed), and 2) the use of 'networking', ahem butchering meritocracy and ruthlessly utilising contacts. This is a generalisation, but being at a 'prestigious' Group of 8 university in Australia has shown me that the children of (what I consider to be) the entrenched aristocracy here, do not even put in a fraction of the amount of effort required to be where they are. Most of them barely scrape through the requirements, and some don't at all .
This reminded me of your post earlier on how the entrenched elite selectively allow members in. I have personally experienced that because of the profession I picked (engineering) and the culture it entails, I am be kept out of any offices with real power by elite-to-be. Has anyone ever noticed the absence of actual technical professionals in politics? Why isn't the infrastucture minister an engineer in any anglophone country?
Now, the most important thing. All of the most intolerant people I have ever met come from upper middle-class 'liberal' backgrounds. I have never ever faced bigotry from traditional christians, or rural folk in Australia (despite them being scapegoated as the scary racist 'bogans'). My involvement in university debating, and the contant contradictory and flawed basis by which all debates were conducted which ensured that the liberal salaried class viewpoint would always win, convinced me that the elite live in a bubble completely devoid from reality. I eventually left out of disgust.
I shudder to think what will happen when this facade breaks. It's still another 20 or so years away in Australia but it won't be pretty.
YCS
4/12/16, 3:38 AM
David said...
Late comment, I know, now that you are back on your regular schedule, but I wanted to respond to your last comment re the feedback with a loud "Amen!" I enjoy every single one of your essays and actually appreciate the discomfort of being reminded of my own class privilege. I would not be able to grow and change as I need to without it. So, thank-you!
4/12/16, 5:55 AM
Thomas Mazanec said...
4/12/16, 7:21 AM
whomever said...
http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant-trump-trump-trump/
It's written by a Bernie supporter and could be seen as leftish, but she makes a lot of the same points about race, class, history and todays progressive movement. For example, she points out that in the area of Arkansas she had lived, one of the larger employers (Tyson Chicken) had some executives convicted of illegally importing Mexicans (a very rare case of the employer class getting in trouble), meaning the people who complained "you had to be Mexican to get a job" probably were correct.
4/12/16, 7:52 AM
Ray Wharton said...
Where I grew up there was one immigrant fellow, a couple years older than me, who was gifted at flood irrigation. He was always is demand for his skill, and did pretty well for himself. Much trouble was went to to get him back into town after he had visited Mexico.
I consider the observation that a lot of immigrants are sending alot of their money back to their families in their country of origin. This is a big issue in rural areas, to stay economically healthy a rural area has to recycle its current several times to stay economically viable. Rural areas are generally hard up for cash, often because contemporary culture doesn't rotate local money enough to make rural areas functional. Its not the particular jobs done by immigrants that are off putting, as the intense hours they work, largely to be able to have a surplus to send home.
I think Greer's suggested policy of using fines on employers would be fairly sensible. Though I would recommend scaling them up over a few years, slap on the wrist, smack to the face, gut punch, knock out fine, so that areas dependent on foreign born workers have time enough to adapt.
More important that any policy is a cultural factor, the idea of downward mobility has to be redeemed. Any work that a whole population can fairly say they are too good for, we might say is too wretched to do. There are a lot of jobs which should simply go away, being too vile to justify their products.
In Greeley Colorado where I went to college there is a meat plant, and a nasty one at that, many of its jobs can only be filled by dispirit people. They did a botched sudden deportation of the Mexicans, it was a terrible mess. In less than a year they had to replace those workers with Somalians. Fundimentally the factory conditions were unsound, and the going rate for meat cannot support a sane work environment. A modest raise in meat prices would justify more sensible practices, like butchers, but that would upset the consumers.
4/12/16, 8:01 AM
onething said...
4/12/16, 8:42 AM
sanguinesophrosyne said...
Class and appearance has been on my mind a lot lately. NY was ranked the worst tax state in the union, and amongst the comments I noted several people claiming that they would rather live with higher taxes if it meant nice roads and an educated populace, rather than somewhere warmer with lower taxes and stupid poor people. The fact that aside from the snow, a good deal of upstate NY could pass for much of the impoverished south (complete with confederate flags) didn't seem to register with them.
More interesting however is the salary and investment class' "cultural appropriation" of the wage class. Nothing new as far as I can tell, given the popularity of jeans. A friend showed me some youtube commercials by Hormel where they exhibited "Urban Lumberjacks" attempting to start a chainsaw, use a bucksaw and throw an axe. It was very clear that they had never handled such tools in their lives, with comments like "does it have a key?" and "I don't hold axes, this is medieval!". https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL4kSBKMbD--I4GvcSYA8C_G6HD4hG49Br&v=ptvTVAE5Wx8 A good chuckle if you've got the time.
On a practical side, I have been wondering just what suite of characteristics makes a person (or home, car, etc) low, working, middle and high class. A previous comment about Sara Palin being white trash further got me wondering on the subject. How is it, for instance, that someone with much higher social status than I have, can take a shipping pallet and make a table or planter, and it is a Pinterest worthy creation regarded as "upcycling" and "shabby chic", or they can take old farm implements and decorate their house and it looks great. But when I try it, even with solid craftsmanship, it is just "shabby". Maybe I'm being too hard on myself, or I'm just on the wrong side of the "pull starter" rubicon. I've thought about the fundamentals, it seems to me that it comes down to having less clutter and more polish. Nothing I am deeply concerned with, just an interesting phenomenon.
4/12/16, 9:07 AM
Matt said...
I'm not sure that the even extends to the whole Anglosphere. My sense is that here in the UK the spread of salaries as a formal arrangement is sufficiently wide that the salary/wage distinction doesn't act in the same way as a proxy for 'real' class divisions. And we didn't see the same historic (but very rarely mentioned) increase in working hours through the 70s that US workers experienced.
I must admit to feeling a bit unsure about this as the discussion has progressed, and I don't think that's just because I draw a salary! I was excited by the approach in the first Trump post because it's so rare to see anyone speaking in class terms, and it seems that you have let a bit of a genie out of the bottle in that the trials of US workers are now at least mentionable, and mentioned.
But I have felt less comfortable as various commentators have portrayed these developments as purely or mainly the salary class's doing. In short, I don't buy that drawing a salary puts you in the frame in that way - it's much more complicated than that.
This 'paycheck' class model also seems to have something of a blindspot to the massive increase in inequality that we have seen in the last decades. This must represent something in class terms, surely, but is hard to track when so many of the super-remunerated are hired guns rather than owners (although share options complicates the picture somewhat). I don't think the idea of "the 1%" is a suitable counter, and I acknowledge that it contains plenty of its own evasions, but it does capture a flavour of the enrichment and relentless promotion of the interests of the truly wealthy that has been increasingly at the heart of politics and power since the 1980s.
Cheers,
Matt
4/12/16, 10:17 AM
Shane W said...
4/12/16, 10:42 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
Another book your readers may find interesting is "Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era" by Michael Kimmel (2013). I'm surprised more of the media isn't referencing it, given the curiosity and interest in Trump's followers. Lew
4/12/16, 11:16 AM
Fred said...
What if the status quo broke down before a rebellion happened? What would that look like?
4/12/16, 12:16 PM
Martin B said...
You say the independent ADP payroll report supports the BLS unemployment statistics which show only 5% unemployment.
David Stockman also cites independent data sources which show a very different picture:
"As we have indicated previously, the only meaningful number on the short-run employment trend is the daily withholding taxes collected by the IRS and faithfully published for all citizens to see. No business in America withholds taxes for phantom seasonally adjusted employees, and if they hire 20 hour per week part-timers versus 40 hour per week regulars, the withholding data reflects half jobs, not whole jobs.
Likewise, only real businesses send taxes to the IRS, not birth and death statistical constructs. So did the real employers of America sending real wage withholding taxes to Washington convey an economy that was “pretty darn great”.
No they didn’t. In light of wage rate growth of about 2% per year, the implied quantity of labor hours generated in the US economy during February was about negative 2%." -- http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/a-modest-proposal-gift-the-bls-to-the-democratic-national-committee-or-sell-it-to-cnbc/
I cannot square a 5% unemployment rate with the gloomy tone of this and other blogs. I think Shadowstats' unemployment rate of 22.9% is much nearer the truth. It includes "long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994". -- http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
It is not uncommon for an entire profession to spout demonstratively wrong "facts". After a recent health scare I have been researching statins and low-carb-high-fat diets. There is no doubt that statins are useless and LCHF is good for you. Every reputable study says so, as does my personal experience. But the bulk of the medical profession says otherwise. Deluded? Disingenuous? Deceitful? You be the judge. The point is, if what you observe isn't what the authorities are saying, be skeptical of the authorities.
4/12/16, 12:38 PM
Justin said...
There's a bit of woo here, but I think that kelp farming is very interesting:
http://greenwave.org/3d-ocean-farming/ (I am not affiliated with greenwave).
However I have to think that if it is viable in a post-oil world it would have existed in the pre-oil one, but I cannot readily explain why petroleum is necessary, except that without gasoline engines and cheap synthetic materials, it would probably be a net calorie sink (although a big source of protein and other nutrients).
4/12/16, 2:41 PM
Shane W said...
thanks for remarking on the difference in social reciprocity and community in the third world and the West. I find that to be true. IMHO, Americans today are congenitally unable to work together and practice social reciprocity--it's like herding cats. It wasn't always like this, particularly in the South.
I'm downwardly mobile, thanks to this blog opening my eyes about "collapsing now", I'm doing and learning a lot of things that were "beneath" me @ one point in my life.
4/12/16, 2:43 PM
dragonfly said...
I find JMG's readership to be incredibly diverse - hardly "primarily green liberal" as you accuse. It is partly for this diversity that I try and read each and every comment (in addition to the week's essay, of course!). Sorry if we're causing you too much "cognitive dissonance". Perhaps some assumptions need to be examined...
4/12/16, 4:34 PM
Ray Wharton said...
Thanks for that article, its pretty interesting. What very much interested me though was in the comment section.
There is one commentator named Jim, I thought he had very interesting and well stated view points. On several bits I disagree with him, but on the whole he seemed to be adding a valuable and well articulated view point from a comparatively conservative angle. I think it is very telling to read the way he gets responded to and talked about.
4/12/16, 6:06 PM
Ray Wharton said...
Search for the comment with this time stamp on the STIR website for a very concentrated serving of irony.
4/12/16, 6:13 PM
steve pearson said...
By the way, almost all the Americans I ever hired were useless and mostly drunks who felt that working was beneath them. Most of the Mexicans, on the other hand, were honest, hard working & friendly.
There are a lot of small time contractors who can't afford to keep a full time crew going, but often need extra people for a couple of days. Welcome to the collapse early economy.
4/12/16, 8:51 PM
Dan Bashaw said...
4/12/16, 9:00 PM
patriciaormsby said...
In Japan there is a major division between the salaried workers, who have job security just as long as they can tolerate truly vicious bullying, and the temporary and part-time workers, who were originally just seen as doing it for a little extra spending money and can be let go on a whim as well. As the latter is seen as "wives and children" it doesn't constitute the same sort of class division. I perceive a significant line being drawn, though, between government workers and everyone else, because the former has enough power to make moves to protect its pensions, while everyone knows the pension system for everyone else is getting ready to implode.
In response to JMG's response to my earlier comments, the Genji army, though headed by descendants of the imperial family, were barbarians who'd never participated in civilized society. They attacked from the outside, while the current barbarians (yakuza) have been deeply involved in Japan's polite society. Buddhism, not to mention Confucianism, had not spread beyond the elite. They both provide philosophical help for coping with the inequities inherent in civilized society.
I asked my husband how he thought collapse would proceed in Japan. He said, "It won't collapse." So I rephrased my question. Currently we have fringe groups of victims suffering, who can be brushed off as simply having "bad karma"--the unlucky, as in Fukushima, the morally questionable, as in single parents--but when the pension system fails, as some are saying will happen in as soon as in two years, massive misery will result. Then what? He said, "A few dishonest, hysteria-provoking individuals will arise, and lead citizens to attack a few scapegoats (which is what has happened in more recent panics). The majority of people will realize that they are attacking innocent people, but will go along with it because they are too scared of the bully. People always make the mistake of underestimating how evil humans really are." This is how Japanese society operates on a micro-scale--people are terrified of the power bullies have to inflict serious harm to their carefully balanced social world, with no possibility of recourse. This is apt to play out on the macro-scale like that too.
4/12/16, 11:42 PM
Kfish said...
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/11/1514011/-Please-just-listen-A-view-at-22
It's got everything: angry young folk, angry old hippies, patronising older folk and the End of Progress clearly recognised. The comments are almost more educational than the original article.
Respectfully, can people actually recognise when they're being patronising? Do people honestly believe that a statement beginning "I used to think like you, when I was your age..." is actually respectful or helpful to discourse? Because I hear that statement often (at 34) and I'd honestly like to know whether people are being deliberately or accidentally insulting. As it is, I bite my tongue a LOT these days.
4/13/16, 12:17 AM
Mean Mr Mustard said...
You speculated recently on the increasing fragility of Saudi Arabia. Those that disagree may buy their shares in Aramco now. Mind you, this article is dated 1st April, so it might be a wind-up...
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/01/saudi-arabia-plans-to-sell-state-oil-assets-to-create-2tn-wealth-fund#comments
cheers
Mustard
4/13/16, 1:32 AM
RCW - said...
It seems like little has changed since Chesterton's time and although Trump & Saunders have made good starts, I'm dubious about either garnering "the crown" this time as television & its pretty persuaders still possess far too much power to persuade. I wonder whether the time will ever come when voters, in mass, decide to turn on & tune out. the electronic piffle & claptrap.
4/13/16, 8:00 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
I ask: 'On a white horse, singing "Heeere I come to save the day!"?'
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/
4/13/16, 9:11 AM
234567 said...
My children were born in 1985-92 era. I have 4, and 2 of them want the BAU Bunch to win, one pulling for Libertarians and the other for the Dems. Both of these have salary jobs and live in the city.
The other 2 are simply moving on and ignoring the entire political circus. They are building cottage businesses actually making and growing things, and believe the entire political process is a huge time waster, since those that get to participate and influence are all of the upper salaried class. Both of these have their own businesses and live far-out-suburban or rural.
There is, from what I see personally interacting with my children and their friends, one group that wants change and another that simply wants to be left alone (my younger two) and find a new way to live and do business. There are multiple online communities that support the endeavors of my younger two children, and they leverage these to earn a living.
In all 4 cases, their incomes are low compared to my own at their age, and they have 4 or 5 year degrees, whereas I had none. None of them believe they could rear 4 children, much less put them thru college without loans, as things currently stand. All of them believe the "American Dream" is a lie or a nightmare.
The environment is not the same as when I was their age - government is against small businesses, wants to control every aspect of existence and expects people to shut up and pay them simply because we always have. This is changing, the first stirrings hitting this election cycle. Regardless of who is elected, we can expect a bad outcome as there are no cards left to be played by governing bodies and banking cartels once the financial house of cards begins to slide.
It is the inevitable collapse of the financial system that will likely be the cause of the tumult slouching towards us. Too much debt has been built to finance "lifestyles of the rich and famous" and to build a class of voting wage slaves beholden to government programs. Those at the bottom know who to blame, while those at the top will be looking for tasty scapegoats for the wage class masses to roast - while they run like hell.
Hypercomplexity has reached apogee everywhere you look - it (our existing world environment) is simply not sustainable. It is built on hypercomplex financial instruments designed to do one thing - enrich the salaried class. You cannot buy a car you can repair, a dishwasher you can fix or fresh vegetables you trust - because the lies are just too many to sift through.
None of these are American problems - they are global. My friends in Colombia, Venezuela, Germany, Malaysia, China and elsewhere see the same things in different shades, aspects of the same ills.
I do not see any way forward that makes sense other than to buckle up buttercup, keep your friends close and trust nothing in media or government. There are waves coming, and you either learn to surf or you get tumbled and maybe even drown. The 'buddy system' is your best bet to survive and even thrive.
4/13/16, 9:21 AM
steve pearson said...
4/13/16, 11:38 AM
Unknown said...
I'm typing one-handed, so this will be terser than usual.
Kfish writes, Do people honestly believe that a statement beginning "I used to think like you, when I was your age..." is actually respectful or helpful to discourse?
I'm about twice your age. I think a person who does not change any of their views or values after decades is either closed-minded or in denial. Also, older people have a harder time adjusting to changes than do younger people. Finally, as your parents may have told you, some old people can remember what it's like to be young, but few young people can remember or imagine what it's like to be old.
None of this means that age automatically brings wisdom. Sometimes youth has clearer vision. Some of the comments you take offense at may be sincere attempts to save you from having to repeat mistakes they have already made.
4/13/16, 12:58 PM
Martin B said...
It is impossible to feed the world on grass-fed steaks and wild-caught salmon, but cut out the breakfast cereals, stop buying between-meal snacks, sugary drinks, and giant helpings of fast foods, and there's enough money for modest quantities of healthy food.
I'm a pensioner on a tiny income, I shop at my local low-end supermarket (no steak or salmon for me), and since going LCHF I eat better and it costs me less. Note LC isn't the same as NC. I make and eat my own sourdough bread which provides cheap calories. With butter, not trans fat poison margarine.
Personally, I feel food is too cheap, thanks to industrialized agriculture. We should be paying more and the farmer should be getting a bigger percentage of the retail price. In return, he should look after the land for the next generation and not rely so much on industrial inputs.
4/13/16, 1:00 PM
Sojan Shieldbearer said...
"Trying to fit JMG's readership into an ideological box would be quite a trick! Lots of us come here from very different backgrounds and perspectives... I expect the reason that we come back is that we are all card-carrying members of 'the tribe that likes to have our truths challenged'. And that's a fine bunch of folk to join, I figure."
Truer words were never spoken. I have been reading this blog for many years and have noticed it attracts commenters from a wide range of perspectives. Greer himself has estimated that he probably gets as many readers from the right as the left and has pointed out that he has gained a significant following within the Neoreaction and alternative right movements. I have also noticed that Alexander Dugin, the right wing Russian philosopher that I referenced earlier, regularly reposts Greer's essays from this blog on one of his blogs, Fourth Revolutionary War.
Even though I am a conservative and pretty right wing politically, I am also the sort of intellectually curious person who regularly reads authors from the radical left, including SJW's whose views I vehemently disagree with. I do so because I want to hear all sides, instead of living a virtual echo-chamber, like so many do today.
I am definitely a card-carrying member of 'the tribe that likes to have our truths challenged', which is one of the reasons why this blog is one my favorites and one of the few whose discussion forum I actively participate in.
4/13/16, 1:39 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
4/13/16, 1:46 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
The employees of La Montanita Food Co-op (meaning members get discounts and dividends and vote for the board of directors)now belong to a union. Their concern was wages and working condition; a local newspaper said a while back they thought their voices were not being heard.
La Montanita began as a sure-enough hippie co-op way back in the day, when Nob Hill was that sort of neighborhood. They have always boasted of carrying local and organic food - but also a *lot* of imported gourmet food and cheeses etc, not to mention all the gluten-free, dairy-free, fat-free, salt-free, GMO-free.....etc.
Following the comment, I posted on their suggestion board that if the voices of the workers were not being heard, why not offer them free memberships as part of their package? "Just for starters," I added. So far, no reply.
One thing they are putting their money into, besides opening more branches, is getting into the emailed "Marvelous Sales! Dazzling Specials!" sort of advertising. Gotta stay competitive in this economy, y'know.
Okay... looks like the fig leaf is off.
4/13/16, 3:37 PM
Mon Seul Desir said...
Blogger Patricia Mathews said...
Mon Seul Desir - that's the thesis of John Barnes' DIRECTIVE 51 trilogy - first or second book, I think. Ecoterrorists have turned gasoline into sour milk and plastic into curds with a home-brewed chemical. Since most of them couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, the second question after "how to survive?" is Whodunnit? (answer is disappointing.) Leads to regional split into 2 nations, IIRC.
You did not quite understand what i proposed. It is the presidency that is divided, not the country. Let have a messy inconclusive election, then a divided, discredited Congress that cannot agree, inflamed partisanship and you get two inaugurations, eventually two cabinets, two Congress and so on. Then the different localities decide who they'll follow, with some trying to be neutral, some switching sides.
I've modeled this on the Great Western Schism of 1378-1438, which started I should point out during a period of deep economic depression.
To start the process I used a combination of military reverses and financial collapse. Then given a major crisis, don't expect America's ideologues to set aside their differences and work toghether, they will grow more pigheaded, uncompromising and sure their way is the only way. These division don't form clear territorial blocks so there are no seccesions, you get instead is divided administration, with the financial collapse crippling the government capacity to bribe or repress the country.
At first there the expectation this will somehow be "solved", this cannot possibly last and then months turn into years, years into decades and there now a full generation that has known nothing but a splitered government with its factional conflicts.
Is this clearer?
4/13/16, 6:29 PM
Ceworthe said...
4/13/16, 7:54 PM
Ceworthe said...
4/13/16, 7:57 PM
Fred said...
"Indiana hasn’t cast its ballots for president yet, but Donald Trump is already losing"
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/donald-trump-indiana-primary-221747
"Trump supporters turn rage on Indiana delegates"
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2016/04/11/indiana-delegates-say-theyre-getting-hate-mail-trump-supporters/82911068/
4/14/16, 5:36 AM
Seligne said...
5/5/16, 6:24 AM