If Trump only rallied the same people who voted for McCain or Romney, he would have lost the election just as badly as they did. Despite losing the popular vote, he swung enough Obama voters from blue states to win the Electoral College.
They were willing to take a risk on him since he campaigned as anything but the typical Republican -- populist rather than elitist, and isolationist more than globalist. That combination was right up the alley of Rust Belt voters who want to re-industrialize the dilapidated economy, who want to protect and enhance the social safety net, and who don't give a shit about "America's standing / leadership in the world".
The empty words of his speech yesterday on drug prices are just the latest example of abandoning the populist themes of his campaign. GOP partisans trapped in the Fox News bubble might not remember, but the moderates, Independents, and non-partisans who might tune into their competitor MSNBC got a vivid reminder last night when Chris Hayes & co. got to dunk on Trump for an entire segment.
And unlike the eye-rolling conspiracy theories that begin the evening shows, the later segments are sadly true enough -- they re-broadcast a detailed description that Trump gave to Joe & Mika during a town hall in February 2016, where he says our drug prices are sky-high because the government refuses to use its massive collective buying power (through Medicare D) to negotiate down the prices. He said other politicians won't tackle that problem because they're all bought off by the drug companies and their lobbyists, but not me -- I alone can fix, because I'm putting up my own money for my campaign. When I become president, I'm going to negotiate those prices down so fast it'll make ya head spin, and we'll save $300 billion a year.
He has supported single-payer healthcare for the better part of 20 years, and made it known on an hour-long episode of Larry King Live, when he was thinking of running on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. He still does: Michael Wolff recounts, in Fire and Fury, that during the healthcare discussions early in his term, the president asked the other Republicans bluntly, "Why don't we just have Medicare cover everybody?" The other GOP-ers pretended not to have heard such a heresy against Reaganism, which requires maximizing profits for the wealthy even if it impoverishes the majority. Medicare has minimal overhead and administrative costs because it's not profit-maximizing and does not pay its managers obscene salaries.
After surrendering without a fight on single-payer, Trump has wimped out even further by not even delivering on the promise of negotiating down drug prices. As a cosplay president, he acts as though his only role is to be an "ideas guy" who tosses out these heterodox policies -- but if they get shot down by the dinosaur GOP, well, hey, I tried. Maybe he'll bring up the ideas again and again -- but he will never wield power to force the GOP to carry out his orders, which come straight from the American people.
Indeed, as an utter novice in the government, he has no political capital other than the ability to mobilize the collective action of his supporters. But after more than a year of surrendering to the moribund Reaganite Establishment, he has allowed that support base to die off rather than cultivate it. Sure, he's still got the Tea Party and other partisan GOP people -- but just ask McCain and Romney how far that gets you in nationwide elections.
Using the government's buying power to negotiate down drug prices would have been the perfect chance to corral some of his alienated non-partisan supporters back into the fold -- especially during mid-term season when healthcare costs are such a major concern for voters of both parties. Nothing like a little unorthodox policy-stealing to leave the Dems with nothing left to run on other than "It's Mueller time!"
Mouth-breathing GOP partisans will support him no matter what he does, so it makes even less sense to cater to them. "What's that? -- Trump is transitioning us toward single-payer healthcare? Now that's my president! Looks like Barack Hussein Obama is just jealous that a Republican is going to give us Medicare for all! In your face, liberals!" Of course, if Trump pushes for the exact opposite policy, they'll hoot it up over that too. "No president of ours, especially not Trump, is going to lead us into the single-payer grave! Looks like Barrack Hussein Obama is just jealous that a Republican is going to thwart his backdoor plan for single-payer AKA Obamacare. Suck it, liberals!"
With the partisan mouth-breathers locked in no matter if he supports one policy or its polar opposite, he must cater to those who are issue-based voters, and particularly those who swung the election to him in a way that McCain and Romney could not manage. Not abortion issue voters, or gun issue voters -- but Medicare-for-all issue voters, terminate NAFTA issue voters, non-interventionist issue voters.
Instead he has wasted every opportunity to maintain and grow whatever goodwill he initially enjoyed from the other side, who were Independent Obama voters rather than partisan liberal Democrats. His approval rating was actually even-steven around his Inauguration, and I recall a good chunk of non-Trump voters saying at the time, "Hold on, give him a chance, let's wait and see, at least he'll be better than typical Republicans," and so on. After the first couple months as it became clear this would be a Ted Cruz presidency, that goodwill collapsed, and he has been underwater by about 10 points ever since -- sometimes a little higher or lower, depending on the events of the week, but nowhere near his initial breaking-even point.
That's true even for the conservative-leaning Rasmussen poll, where he began in the low-to-mid 50s, before falling to the low-to-mid 40s for most of the time since. During his recent upswing, he's still only in the high 40s, occasionally touching 50-51, but not higher, noticeably below his initial ratings.
How worrying should this be?
According to the American National Election Survey, among Trump's general election voters, 50% had already voted in the primary stage, and of those, 5% voted for Bernie Sanders (only half as many had voted for Hillary in the primary). That means 2.5% of Trump's total voters were Bernie voters -- not just Bernie supporters or sympathizers, but who were populist enough to actually cast a ballot for him, as opposed to other wimpy populists on the Dem side who voted for Hillary in the primary.
Trump's share of the vote in close Rust Belt states was about 48% -- MI, WI, and PA -- meaning that he got just over 1 of those percentage points from Bernie voters (2.5% of 48 points). In fact, Bernie voters probably made up an even larger share of his total in those states, since they were more Bernie-friendly in the primaries than was the nation overall. And he won all three of those states by less than 1 point. The only reason he won the election was by coaxing over these wary Bernie Democrats, not by pandering to the maxed-out Reaganite base.
He used to brag about that fact, which distinguished him from the other Republicans in the primary -- "I'm the only one who can get Democrats to cross over, folks. The Bernie people are really gonna like me on trade, that I can tell you."
Yet the only measure he's taken to appease these voters has been to "announce" tariffs on steel, before carving out exemptions for every major source of steel into our country, minus Japan. Even there, the admin's goal seems to be using that tariff threat in order to get back into the TPP, which is led by Japan. Trump left the TPP negotiations early, but has several times expressed the desire to get back into them, knowing damn well there is no good deal there for Rust Belt industrial workers. In other words, the admin's goal is to break one promise in order to break another promise -- to exempt Japan from steel tariffs in order to entangle the US back into the TPP.
Tariffs were supposed to be actually implemented, in order to force factories back into this country where they would be staffed by American citizens -- not the immigrants who Trump keeps insisting will be the only ones to get those jobs, in order to keep down labor costs for greedy employers. And if tariffs are to be only a threat, the concessions ought to benefit the working class and Bernie voters here -- not the 1% and other corporate pigs who have already sent so many factories and jobs out of this country.
The outcome is unsurprising -- ever-widening trade deficits. He rarely mentions the trade deficit anymore, and only offers vague promises to do better sometime in the future -- despite month and month, and soon year after year, of his administration fucking it up even worse than it was under Obama.
The partisan mouth-breathers may think that these wary Bernie voters who took a chance on Trump will ignore all of these actions taken to either blow them off or actively alienate them. They think a populist Obama voter is going to trap themselves in post-purchase rationalization since they can't take back their vote.
But if that were true, his approval ratings should have at least remained steady, and if anything gone up since Inauguration -- all the more time for rationalization to kick in, and with all the more anti-populist outcomes that ought to have created the cognitive dissonance needed to spur rationalization. We would see more, not fewer, Bernie surrogates in the media championing the admin's outcomes, or at least making excuses for them, or expressing sincere deeply felt hope.
Instead, his numbers with that side have tanked, and none of them are even expressing hope for things to turn around, let alone fervently defending him against his detractors. What is there to defend? -- putting more corporate rape back into the healthcare sector, intervening in more Middle Eastern conflicts, and announcing tariffs that never get implemented? They may not indulge in the phony Mueller probe bullshit, but they still don't support him overall.
And in the next general election, they won't have to -- Bernie supporters will get to vote for Bernie himself in 2020, rather than take a risk on Trump. The uncertainty of that gamble has been cleared up, and whether they blame Trump personally, the GOP writ large, the conservative media, or whatever else on that side of the political world, they have seen their risky bet fail to pay off. OK, no biggie, they'll just go with the more certain populist choice next time.
This is not to mention the easy dunking that anyone will be able to do on Trump about immigration. No wall, no payment from Mexico, illegal population size unchanged, illegal border crossings exactly where they were during Obama's second term, and so on and so forth. You'd think these criticisms will come from anti-immigration activists, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Bernie campaign uses this as another easy chance to dunk on Trump -- "Not that I actually support those policies, but it's yet another example of their broken promises, failure to deliver the goods, and total fragmentation of their party and administration. They can't get anything done to please their own voters -- only their corporate globalist donors."
Between the demoralized anti-immigration voters on the GOP side, and the "back to Bernie" populists on the Dem side, Trump will have little to show on election day 2020 except for the Republican rationalizers. Again, just ask McCain and Romney how much that army's worth in a nationwide battle.
May 12, 2018
May 9, 2018
Conservatives fumble Schneiderman: Blind to vacuous consent-based morality, sociopathy, and Social Darwinism
In a further sign of the total breakdown of the GOP and conservative movement, their response to the gruesome revelations of sexual assaults by New York A.G. Eric Schneiderman couldn't do any better than partisan dunking -- "What a surprise, liberal Democrat rapes again!" Partisan attacks are self-defeating because the other side can always snipe back at the other other side -- "What a surprise, lardass conservatives marching us toward nuclear war in the Middle East in order to keep gravy train going to missile-makers!"
The real answer to these kinds of stories is how empty and endangering it is to prop up a moral system on the hazy notion of "consent". Did Schneiderman's victims overtly declare their consent before sexual activity began, then verbally withdraw that consent as he was in the middle of slapping them around and spitting in their face? Or at least, did they use their body language to signal withdrawal of consent, say by struggling free, leaping out of bed, and running toward the door?
No? Well, then, it was all "consensual" -- and even if they didn't overtly declare so beforehand, at least it was implied at the outset, and they never clearly withdrew their consent during the acts.
Or perhaps they were simply paralyzed by fear, especially if their attacker was in a position of power over them -- either physically, owing to being a man rather than a woman, or socially, owing to his higher status. Or perhaps they were so caught off-guard that they were not so much fearful, as they were in a state of shock. In either case, being frozen and not knowing how to respond, other than maybe numbing themselves to the attack by going into a dissociative state.
And according to consent-based morality, if she has withdrawn into a dissociative state, she isn't objecting, and it's OK to keep doing what you're doing.
This is the dead-end of a moral system founded on the concept of "consent" -- it's not how real-life human beings interact, so it remains hazily defined and largely inapplicable when evaluating whether some act was right or wrong.
The truth is that acts are right or wrong regardless of whether anyone "consents" to them. Whether it is outright assault -- unprovoked striking, choking -- or degradation and humiliation -- spitting, belittling words, etc. Only libertarians are immune to the recognition of the second class of wrongdoing, which falls under depurification rather than harm or violence. Even liberals recognize some degree of taboo against debasing what ought to be elevated, polluting what ought to be pure, and making ugly what ought to be pretty.
These taboo acts are even more wrong when they are done in a context where one party assumed it was safe, only to be betrayed by the other party -- it is wronger to trick someone into letting down their guard in order to do wrong things to them, than to try to do those wrong things to them when they're only unsuspecting (and therefore more guarded than when they are trusting).
In an ordinary world, where people are socially connected to one another and where social news (gossip) travels quickly and broadly, once it got out that Schneiderman had degradingly sexually assaulted these women after tricking them into a vulnerable state, he would have gotten the overkill treatment by the community for such brazen anti-social behavior. Not just a swift death sentence, but with more degradation to his body than he had inflicted upon his victims -- bone-breaking, burning, beheading, etc. The agents of justice would have probably been the menfolk of the victims, or their close neighbors, or a neutral third party unaware of liberal morality.
In the modern world, especially a large anonymous urban metro like New York, sociopaths can blend into the faceless sprawling crowd, and the victims will have no one to turn to, being unrooted or uprooted from people who would actually give a damn about them if they were done wrong to, especially their extended family.
Conservatives have no way to even diagnose these pervasive problems, let alone come up with a treatment, because they have corrupted themselves into libertarian apologists for laissez-faire, deregulation, the law of the jungle, and Social Darwinism.
How can you square the idea that the weak and vulnerable ought to be protected from the strong and untouchable, with the idea that we're just supposed to let things happen however they're going to happen? No intervening -- especially not by the gubmint -- no rule-setting (regulation), no protecting. Each individual must pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and fend for themselves, including a 110-pound woman being slapped around, choked, and spit on by a man who tricked her into thinking he was normal.
There is no such concept as "abuse of power" (whether physical or social) in laissez-faire morality because this system supports "survival of the fittest". In the minds of conservative pundits, if you find yourself getting slapped around, choked, and spit on during sex -- maybe you should just carry a gun to defend yourself, or not make stupid decisions like getting in bed with a liberal Democrat.
Conservatives blind themselves to sociopathic behavior, which tricks its victims into letting their guard down, because they need to blame the victims (she made an obviously stupid / risky choice, rather than she got tricked by a con-man, or pressured by someone more powerful and overpowering). Libertarian morality exists to apologize for the abuses of the powerful, including by con-men -- notwithstanding the pro forma condemnation that libertarians show toward "fraud," which they are somehow never howling for to be punished.
If they were to agree to the existence of sociopaths and sociopathy, and their outsized influence on anti-social behavior -- especially the higher-ranking in society that they are -- they would be cornered into the choice of either defending unmasked Satanic anarchy, or surrendering their warped worldview altogether. Rather than face that untenable level of cognitive dissonance, they block out awareness of the problem to begin with.
For, once you agree to regulation and protection in one domain of life, like "what two (or more) adults do behind closed doors," you are led to apply that principle in other domains, like "how employers treat their employees". If a sociopath is allowed to trick a woman into bed, where he subjects her to choking, slapping, and spitting -- why is a sociopath not also allowed to trick a worker into thinking he's a well-meaning manager running a nice normal workplace, where he then subjects his employees to unpaid overtime, making them ask permission to take a piss, pays them whatever their illegal immigrant competition would accept in wages and benefits, and is always reminding them that he can fire them at any time for any reason if they ever feel like withdrawing their "consent" to being managed in those ways.
At this crucial turning-point in our social and political zeitgeist, the GOP, conservative commentators, and Republican voters, have totally dropped the ball. They are still busy defending the law of the jungle, and only slamming Schneiderman to say, "See, your tribe has criminals, too, not just our tribe, you hypocrites!"
It may be worse: I get the feeling that Republicans think that Schneiderman's behavior is only weird and embarrassing, so ha-ha for your side being caught with an embarrassing weirdo. Like, we GOP-ers are not here to kink-shame -- if you want to slap and choke a bitch in bed, not judging, not hating, but how embarrassing that the public found out! I don't sense their thinking this was profoundly immoral and requiring a death sentence.
They were supposed to be in a "re-alignment" toward communal solidarity, but have revealed themselves to be an ossified dinosaur party and movement that will get swept into extinction by a whole new paradigm, led by the Bernie revolution.
If conservatives want to prevent further degradation, they will abandon the sinking ship of their official movement, and climb on board the Bernie boats, to make sure they are steered in a wholesome direction.
Most liberal Gen-X and Millennial women can already sense how empty the consent model of morality has proven itself to be. They may not be able to articulate what's wrong with it, but they sense that it's just plain wrong to humiliate and subject others to degradation, especially if they're weaker, and especially if you've tricked them into letting their guard down -- regardless of some hazily defined and hard-to-verify notion of "consent".
They're struggling to latch onto a more solid moral system than the law of the jungle, and they are already staunchly opposed to Social Darwinism in the economic domain. If conservatives do not put aside their suicidal partisanship, the neo-Progressive Era will re-discover the moral system of solidarity, communal values, and the wholesomeness that it leads to, as it leads away from do-anything degeneracy. If conservatives cannot play a guiding role in that moral transformation, they are not only worthless -- they must be actively sidelined so that they don't get in its way.
It will fall more to the Bernie progressives to identify the material basis of these social ills -- such as anonymous urban environments, where people are rootless, driven to being uprooted from their families by the strip-mining of our once abundant economy in all but a few locations, and so on and so forth. They will also figure out how to mitigate and solve those material problems, by re-industrializing the economy, especially bringing such work back to revive small towns, where people and their families and communities can remain in place over generations, without having to scramble all over the map like Somali nomads in search of the few oases amidst their economic desert.
"Social-cultural conservatives for Bernie" will become more of a cohesive bloc the more that we slide from our Midcentury golden age, and harken back to it as the ideal -- an industrialized economy with strong labor unions, and a protectionist government, which supported small towns, healthy social relations, and a wholesome culture.
The real answer to these kinds of stories is how empty and endangering it is to prop up a moral system on the hazy notion of "consent". Did Schneiderman's victims overtly declare their consent before sexual activity began, then verbally withdraw that consent as he was in the middle of slapping them around and spitting in their face? Or at least, did they use their body language to signal withdrawal of consent, say by struggling free, leaping out of bed, and running toward the door?
No? Well, then, it was all "consensual" -- and even if they didn't overtly declare so beforehand, at least it was implied at the outset, and they never clearly withdrew their consent during the acts.
Or perhaps they were simply paralyzed by fear, especially if their attacker was in a position of power over them -- either physically, owing to being a man rather than a woman, or socially, owing to his higher status. Or perhaps they were so caught off-guard that they were not so much fearful, as they were in a state of shock. In either case, being frozen and not knowing how to respond, other than maybe numbing themselves to the attack by going into a dissociative state.
And according to consent-based morality, if she has withdrawn into a dissociative state, she isn't objecting, and it's OK to keep doing what you're doing.
This is the dead-end of a moral system founded on the concept of "consent" -- it's not how real-life human beings interact, so it remains hazily defined and largely inapplicable when evaluating whether some act was right or wrong.
The truth is that acts are right or wrong regardless of whether anyone "consents" to them. Whether it is outright assault -- unprovoked striking, choking -- or degradation and humiliation -- spitting, belittling words, etc. Only libertarians are immune to the recognition of the second class of wrongdoing, which falls under depurification rather than harm or violence. Even liberals recognize some degree of taboo against debasing what ought to be elevated, polluting what ought to be pure, and making ugly what ought to be pretty.
These taboo acts are even more wrong when they are done in a context where one party assumed it was safe, only to be betrayed by the other party -- it is wronger to trick someone into letting down their guard in order to do wrong things to them, than to try to do those wrong things to them when they're only unsuspecting (and therefore more guarded than when they are trusting).
In an ordinary world, where people are socially connected to one another and where social news (gossip) travels quickly and broadly, once it got out that Schneiderman had degradingly sexually assaulted these women after tricking them into a vulnerable state, he would have gotten the overkill treatment by the community for such brazen anti-social behavior. Not just a swift death sentence, but with more degradation to his body than he had inflicted upon his victims -- bone-breaking, burning, beheading, etc. The agents of justice would have probably been the menfolk of the victims, or their close neighbors, or a neutral third party unaware of liberal morality.
In the modern world, especially a large anonymous urban metro like New York, sociopaths can blend into the faceless sprawling crowd, and the victims will have no one to turn to, being unrooted or uprooted from people who would actually give a damn about them if they were done wrong to, especially their extended family.
Conservatives have no way to even diagnose these pervasive problems, let alone come up with a treatment, because they have corrupted themselves into libertarian apologists for laissez-faire, deregulation, the law of the jungle, and Social Darwinism.
How can you square the idea that the weak and vulnerable ought to be protected from the strong and untouchable, with the idea that we're just supposed to let things happen however they're going to happen? No intervening -- especially not by the gubmint -- no rule-setting (regulation), no protecting. Each individual must pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and fend for themselves, including a 110-pound woman being slapped around, choked, and spit on by a man who tricked her into thinking he was normal.
There is no such concept as "abuse of power" (whether physical or social) in laissez-faire morality because this system supports "survival of the fittest". In the minds of conservative pundits, if you find yourself getting slapped around, choked, and spit on during sex -- maybe you should just carry a gun to defend yourself, or not make stupid decisions like getting in bed with a liberal Democrat.
Conservatives blind themselves to sociopathic behavior, which tricks its victims into letting their guard down, because they need to blame the victims (she made an obviously stupid / risky choice, rather than she got tricked by a con-man, or pressured by someone more powerful and overpowering). Libertarian morality exists to apologize for the abuses of the powerful, including by con-men -- notwithstanding the pro forma condemnation that libertarians show toward "fraud," which they are somehow never howling for to be punished.
If they were to agree to the existence of sociopaths and sociopathy, and their outsized influence on anti-social behavior -- especially the higher-ranking in society that they are -- they would be cornered into the choice of either defending unmasked Satanic anarchy, or surrendering their warped worldview altogether. Rather than face that untenable level of cognitive dissonance, they block out awareness of the problem to begin with.
For, once you agree to regulation and protection in one domain of life, like "what two (or more) adults do behind closed doors," you are led to apply that principle in other domains, like "how employers treat their employees". If a sociopath is allowed to trick a woman into bed, where he subjects her to choking, slapping, and spitting -- why is a sociopath not also allowed to trick a worker into thinking he's a well-meaning manager running a nice normal workplace, where he then subjects his employees to unpaid overtime, making them ask permission to take a piss, pays them whatever their illegal immigrant competition would accept in wages and benefits, and is always reminding them that he can fire them at any time for any reason if they ever feel like withdrawing their "consent" to being managed in those ways.
At this crucial turning-point in our social and political zeitgeist, the GOP, conservative commentators, and Republican voters, have totally dropped the ball. They are still busy defending the law of the jungle, and only slamming Schneiderman to say, "See, your tribe has criminals, too, not just our tribe, you hypocrites!"
It may be worse: I get the feeling that Republicans think that Schneiderman's behavior is only weird and embarrassing, so ha-ha for your side being caught with an embarrassing weirdo. Like, we GOP-ers are not here to kink-shame -- if you want to slap and choke a bitch in bed, not judging, not hating, but how embarrassing that the public found out! I don't sense their thinking this was profoundly immoral and requiring a death sentence.
They were supposed to be in a "re-alignment" toward communal solidarity, but have revealed themselves to be an ossified dinosaur party and movement that will get swept into extinction by a whole new paradigm, led by the Bernie revolution.
If conservatives want to prevent further degradation, they will abandon the sinking ship of their official movement, and climb on board the Bernie boats, to make sure they are steered in a wholesome direction.
Most liberal Gen-X and Millennial women can already sense how empty the consent model of morality has proven itself to be. They may not be able to articulate what's wrong with it, but they sense that it's just plain wrong to humiliate and subject others to degradation, especially if they're weaker, and especially if you've tricked them into letting their guard down -- regardless of some hazily defined and hard-to-verify notion of "consent".
They're struggling to latch onto a more solid moral system than the law of the jungle, and they are already staunchly opposed to Social Darwinism in the economic domain. If conservatives do not put aside their suicidal partisanship, the neo-Progressive Era will re-discover the moral system of solidarity, communal values, and the wholesomeness that it leads to, as it leads away from do-anything degeneracy. If conservatives cannot play a guiding role in that moral transformation, they are not only worthless -- they must be actively sidelined so that they don't get in its way.
It will fall more to the Bernie progressives to identify the material basis of these social ills -- such as anonymous urban environments, where people are rootless, driven to being uprooted from their families by the strip-mining of our once abundant economy in all but a few locations, and so on and so forth. They will also figure out how to mitigate and solve those material problems, by re-industrializing the economy, especially bringing such work back to revive small towns, where people and their families and communities can remain in place over generations, without having to scramble all over the map like Somali nomads in search of the few oases amidst their economic desert.
"Social-cultural conservatives for Bernie" will become more of a cohesive bloc the more that we slide from our Midcentury golden age, and harken back to it as the ideal -- an industrialized economy with strong labor unions, and a protectionist government, which supported small towns, healthy social relations, and a wholesome culture.
Categories:
Crime,
Dudes and dudettes,
Economics,
Geography,
Kinship,
Morality,
Politics,
Psychology,
Violence
May 8, 2018
Ohio populists for Kucinich, and other primary discussion
If you're a populist in Ohio and are frustrated by the GOP refusing to follow the populist demands of their own primary voters from 2016, and instead running their standard slate of corporate elite Establishment types and Tea Party crazies -- you don't have to waste your vote on any of them in today's primary.
It's all the more galling since Trump himself intervened in the selection of the state GOP chair in January 2017, supposedly to elevate the populist-nationalist wing and kick out the corporate globalist Kasich wing. Well, over a year later, you wouldn't know the difference -- same candidates on offer as if the Kasich machine were still in charge. The party absolutely refuses to adapt to the demands of its own voters.
Meanwhile there's a real populist in the Democrat primary, Kucinich for governor. Ohio has open primaries, so anyone can vote for him.
Aside from being populist domestically (like favoring Medicare to cover everybody), Kucinich is a trade hawk and anti-interventionist on foreign policy, like the old Trump campaign, for which he was a quasi-surrogate on Fox Business. He wanted Bernie to win the primary, but once Crooked Hillary rigged the nomination, he said it's sad to say, but Trump is running better on trade and foreign policy than the Democrat.
He's not a hardliner on immigration per se, but his economic populism would eliminate immigration indirectly -- since the only reason immigrants come here is to meet American employers' demand for cheap labor.
Raise the minimum wage to $15, cheap labor becomes illegal, employers decide that if they have to pay a decent wage they might as well hire a good American rather than an immigrant, and immigrants return home when they can't get hired under the higher minimum wage.
That approach to draining the immigration swamp will not only stand a better chance with general election voters, it will target the true underlying source of immigration -- greedy employers' demand for cheap labor -- rather than superficial symptoms like the immigrants themselves. If you deport immigrants without blocking the employers' demand for cheap labor, they'll come right back at the behest of the employer class -- whose GOP puppets will refuse to build a wall or whatever else, lest that block the supply of cheap labor.
Enough of the do-nothing Republicans. It's time to support a real change agent like Kucinich for governor.
(Feel free to use the comments for remarks about other primary races today, like West Virginia, or primary season in general.)
It's all the more galling since Trump himself intervened in the selection of the state GOP chair in January 2017, supposedly to elevate the populist-nationalist wing and kick out the corporate globalist Kasich wing. Well, over a year later, you wouldn't know the difference -- same candidates on offer as if the Kasich machine were still in charge. The party absolutely refuses to adapt to the demands of its own voters.
Meanwhile there's a real populist in the Democrat primary, Kucinich for governor. Ohio has open primaries, so anyone can vote for him.
Aside from being populist domestically (like favoring Medicare to cover everybody), Kucinich is a trade hawk and anti-interventionist on foreign policy, like the old Trump campaign, for which he was a quasi-surrogate on Fox Business. He wanted Bernie to win the primary, but once Crooked Hillary rigged the nomination, he said it's sad to say, but Trump is running better on trade and foreign policy than the Democrat.
He's not a hardliner on immigration per se, but his economic populism would eliminate immigration indirectly -- since the only reason immigrants come here is to meet American employers' demand for cheap labor.
Raise the minimum wage to $15, cheap labor becomes illegal, employers decide that if they have to pay a decent wage they might as well hire a good American rather than an immigrant, and immigrants return home when they can't get hired under the higher minimum wage.
That approach to draining the immigration swamp will not only stand a better chance with general election voters, it will target the true underlying source of immigration -- greedy employers' demand for cheap labor -- rather than superficial symptoms like the immigrants themselves. If you deport immigrants without blocking the employers' demand for cheap labor, they'll come right back at the behest of the employer class -- whose GOP puppets will refuse to build a wall or whatever else, lest that block the supply of cheap labor.
Enough of the do-nothing Republicans. It's time to support a real change agent like Kucinich for governor.
(Feel free to use the comments for remarks about other primary races today, like West Virginia, or primary season in general.)
May 5, 2018
Pop music cycle enters mellow vulnerability, after manic invincibility of 2013 era
What first drew my attention to the 15-year cycles in bouncy upbeat music was the contrast evident on the radio last year. They were still playing songs from the manic peak of the not-so-distant past of five years ago, alongside the much more mellow songs just being released. Now that those older manic songs have noticeably dropped off in airplay, and there's another year's worth of mellower songs, you can really sense how different the current mood is.
Rather than manic and invincible, the prevailing mood has shifted to mellow and vulnerable. Here are just a few examples from the 2017-'18 mood (compare to the songs in the first post on the 2012-'13 mood):
Looking back over previous cycles, this seems to be a recurring mood change. After the upbeat high-charging peak of 1997-'98, the next phase of 2002-'04 was more downcast and vulnerable. From the Spice Girls to Avril Lavigne in girl-pop, from the Backstreet Boys to John Mayer in sensitive-guy land, from Third Eye Blind to Linkin Park on the emo front, from Smash Mouth to Nickelback in alternative rock, and from Chumbawumba to Pink in the danceclub.
Some went through both phases of that cycle, with Christina Aguilera starting off with a sexualized techno sound in the late '90s ("Genie in a Bottle"), then switching to soft emo piano ballads by 2003 ("Beautiful"). In the current cycle, we see the same shift in Kesha from "Die Young" in 2012 to her new piano ballad duet with Macklemore, "Good Old Days". Daft Punk began upbeat with "Around the World" in '97, then mellowed out by 2001 with "One More Time". They took part in the current cycle's phases as well, starting with the high-energy "Get Lucky" in 2013 and mellowing out by last year in their collaboration with the Weeknd shown above, "I Feel It Coming".
Without going into so much detail for the time being, the same sequence of phases showed up in the earlier cycles.
After the manic peak of 1982-'84, the mood became more low-key and vulnerable by '87-'88 -- from new wave to power ballads, even within the same artist's career, such as the George Michael of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" to the George Michael of "Faith" and "Father Figure".
After the manic peak of 1967-'69, there was a major mellow-out by '72-'74 -- from the Monkees, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sly and the Family Stone, to "Lean on Me," "Killing Me Softly with His Song," and "The Way We Were".
Although it would be hard to call any part of the 1950s "manic," the early half was still more upbeat, like the Ames Brothers and the Four Aces, compared to the lovesick teenager mood of the late '50s, like the Everly Brothers and Ritchie Valens.
Having established two phases of the cycle -- a manic phase, followed by a vulnerable phase -- that still leaves the third phase. My hunch is to call it "decadent," but that doesn't really relate to the theme of invincible and vulnerable. It's more like terminal, moribund, and giving-up. Some respond to the "giving-up" mood in a submissive surrendering way, others in an assertive decadent way, but it's all based on the cycle coming to an end.
That will have to wait for another post, but to preview things, just think of the music of the late 2000s, the early '90s, the late '70s, and the early '60s.
Rather than manic and invincible, the prevailing mood has shifted to mellow and vulnerable. Here are just a few examples from the 2017-'18 mood (compare to the songs in the first post on the 2012-'13 mood):
Looking back over previous cycles, this seems to be a recurring mood change. After the upbeat high-charging peak of 1997-'98, the next phase of 2002-'04 was more downcast and vulnerable. From the Spice Girls to Avril Lavigne in girl-pop, from the Backstreet Boys to John Mayer in sensitive-guy land, from Third Eye Blind to Linkin Park on the emo front, from Smash Mouth to Nickelback in alternative rock, and from Chumbawumba to Pink in the danceclub.
Some went through both phases of that cycle, with Christina Aguilera starting off with a sexualized techno sound in the late '90s ("Genie in a Bottle"), then switching to soft emo piano ballads by 2003 ("Beautiful"). In the current cycle, we see the same shift in Kesha from "Die Young" in 2012 to her new piano ballad duet with Macklemore, "Good Old Days". Daft Punk began upbeat with "Around the World" in '97, then mellowed out by 2001 with "One More Time". They took part in the current cycle's phases as well, starting with the high-energy "Get Lucky" in 2013 and mellowing out by last year in their collaboration with the Weeknd shown above, "I Feel It Coming".
Without going into so much detail for the time being, the same sequence of phases showed up in the earlier cycles.
After the manic peak of 1982-'84, the mood became more low-key and vulnerable by '87-'88 -- from new wave to power ballads, even within the same artist's career, such as the George Michael of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" to the George Michael of "Faith" and "Father Figure".
After the manic peak of 1967-'69, there was a major mellow-out by '72-'74 -- from the Monkees, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sly and the Family Stone, to "Lean on Me," "Killing Me Softly with His Song," and "The Way We Were".
Although it would be hard to call any part of the 1950s "manic," the early half was still more upbeat, like the Ames Brothers and the Four Aces, compared to the lovesick teenager mood of the late '50s, like the Everly Brothers and Ritchie Valens.
Having established two phases of the cycle -- a manic phase, followed by a vulnerable phase -- that still leaves the third phase. My hunch is to call it "decadent," but that doesn't really relate to the theme of invincible and vulnerable. It's more like terminal, moribund, and giving-up. Some respond to the "giving-up" mood in a submissive surrendering way, others in an assertive decadent way, but it's all based on the cycle coming to an end.
That will have to wait for another post, but to preview things, just think of the music of the late 2000s, the early '90s, the late '70s, and the early '60s.
Categories:
Dance,
Excitement cycle,
Music,
Pop culture,
Psychology
May 4, 2018
Democrat elites will concede on free speech etc. when GOP elites concede on climate change etc.
Although conservatives correctly complain about liberal Democrats abusing their control over the media sector to marginalize information that they don't want to be widely adopted, liberals can just as well complain about conservative Republicans abusing their control over the energy sector to marginalize energy sources that they don't want to be widely adopted. This generalizes to any abuse of power in any sector that one party controls.
See this post for the full analysis of which sectors of society use which party as their political agent to shape society in their own interests. But suffice it to say that the Democrats are the party vehicle of the finance, internet, and media / entertainment sectors (informational), while the Republicans are the party vehicle of the armed forces / law enforcement, energy, and agriculture sectors (material).
The elites of each sector have a quasi-monopoly on some critical resource in the operation of society -- funding, information, consensus shaping, force, energy, and food. As operators of a cartel, they can abuse their power, and the victims can do nothing within that sector but complain or numb out their awareness of the abuse.
One sector could mobilize against another sector, though, pitting its own distinct monopolistic strength against the other's. And given the society-wide scale of the battle, the sectors tend to form coalitions in order to maximize their collective strength and minimize the number of fronts that they do battle on. These coalitions of elites from various sectors are formalized as political parties, who carry out their ultimate battles in the political realm.
So it's not only that conservatives complain about liberal elites restricting conservative opinions from the consensus-shaping process that plays out in the mass media. They also complain about the entertainment sector's consensus portrayal of the abnormal as normal and vice versa, the (shadow) banning of conservatives from social media, the relegation of conservative sites to the distant results pages of search engine queries, and now the potential attempts by the big banks to no longer lend the money that would keep gun-makers' businesses operating.
On the other hand, liberals complain not just about the energy sector elites thwarting efforts to limit fossil fuel use, compared to more carbon-neutral energy sources, with an eye toward mitigating climate change. They also complain about the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and cruel living conditions of livestock in factory-farms, about militarized police forces, over-zealous prosecutors, and a hawkish interventionist foreign policy.
One solution to this stand-off is de-escalation, whereby each side agrees to give relief to the aggrieved party in the sector where they themselves are in control, in order to get relief from the other party in the sector where they themselves are aggrieved.
The mass media could make conservatives 50% of the anchors, panelists, writers, and producers who shape consensus over crucial events -- provided that the military makes non-interventionists 50% of their general staff who shape our nation's posture of collective violence toward other nations. The big banks could provide no-interest loans or forgive existing debt for agribusiness, provided that they eliminated genetic engineering / chemical pesticides / factory-farming of livestock. Twitter agrees to stop banning conservatives, provided that the pharma industry yields to a Medicare-for-all healthcare system.
The other solution to the stand-off is a partisan battle of wills, whereby the overall victor (if not the 100% victor) will be the party that is the dominant, agenda-setting, framework-establishing one for its historical period. E.g., the Democrats during the Jacksonian period or the New Deal / Great Society period, and the Republicans during the Civil War / Reconstruction period or the Reaganite period.
Since we currently live in a highly polarized climate, the elites choose the battle of wills option. So far, during the Reaganite period that we are still in, that has benefited conservatives and Republicans over liberals and Democrats. Even if conservatives haven't gotten 100% of their demands during the Reagan period, their complaints about Hollywood, CNN, Twitter, and Wall Street amount to only 10% defeat. It is the liberals or leftists who have gotten only 10% victory, and 90% defeat, during our current period -- getting mostly nothing on the environment, labor unions, food production and consumption, and use of armed force (domestic or international).
But because Trump is an end-of-his-era president who tries but fails to radically alter his party's longstanding paradigm, we are about to shift into a new period led by today's opposition party, who will deliver the goods where the ossified dominant party had failed. Drawing on Stephen Skowronek's theory of political regime cycles, that means a populist, anti-globalist paradigm led by Bernie-affiliated Democrats.
Assuming the elites are still in the battle of wills mode, that means the overall victor will soon be the liberals and Democrats (maybe they will call themselves progressives), as conservatives and Republicans find themselves largely left out of society's operation.
It's in the interests of conservatives and Republicans to change from the battle of wills solution to the de-escalation solution. In that situation, they make concessions but also enjoy concessions from the other side. And since the shift from Reaganism to Bernie-ism has not yet been completed, the other side might be willing to hear out the idea of truce talks, while they're still temporarily the weak side.
If the conservatives and GOP keep pushing the battle of wills solution, thinking that they will not soon be on the weak side of a multi-decade political order, they will get shut out and shut down as completely as the liberals and Democrats have been during the Reaganite period.
And given that partisan polarization keeps rising, the next shift may be even more acrimonious and humiliating than the Reaganite period has been for its losers. Peter Turchin in Ages of Discord shows that polarization was only this high leading up to the Civil War. That suggests that, whether or not there is outright war, during the upcoming Bernie period the Republicans will fare like the Democrats did during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and not merely like the Whigs did during the Jacksonian period.
With T-minus two years to the most seismic election since 1980, there are few conservatives entertaining the idea of truce talks, other than perhaps Marco Rubio's recent overtures on desanctifying the Reaganite vision of corporate profits uber alles. Trump of course pitched himself in 2016 as half-Republican and half-Democrat, but he's more of a moderate than a conservative to begin with -- and more importantly, nobody on his side is willing to follow that lead, instead dragging him over toward their conservative, partisan GOP side.
We'd like to believe that "there's still plenty of time left to change," and that "history does not always repeat itself," but the way things look now, the odds are that the GOP won't figure it out, and that the hardline conservative base will refuse to pressure their side's elites to make concessions to liberals in the sectors that they control (armed forces / law enforcement, energy, agriculture), even if it were matched by the liberal base pressuring Democrat elites to make concessions to conservatives in the sectors that they control (finance, internet, media / entertainment).
Civil War 2.0, here we come -- the goal now is to keep it as cold and bloodless as possible.
See this post for the full analysis of which sectors of society use which party as their political agent to shape society in their own interests. But suffice it to say that the Democrats are the party vehicle of the finance, internet, and media / entertainment sectors (informational), while the Republicans are the party vehicle of the armed forces / law enforcement, energy, and agriculture sectors (material).
The elites of each sector have a quasi-monopoly on some critical resource in the operation of society -- funding, information, consensus shaping, force, energy, and food. As operators of a cartel, they can abuse their power, and the victims can do nothing within that sector but complain or numb out their awareness of the abuse.
One sector could mobilize against another sector, though, pitting its own distinct monopolistic strength against the other's. And given the society-wide scale of the battle, the sectors tend to form coalitions in order to maximize their collective strength and minimize the number of fronts that they do battle on. These coalitions of elites from various sectors are formalized as political parties, who carry out their ultimate battles in the political realm.
So it's not only that conservatives complain about liberal elites restricting conservative opinions from the consensus-shaping process that plays out in the mass media. They also complain about the entertainment sector's consensus portrayal of the abnormal as normal and vice versa, the (shadow) banning of conservatives from social media, the relegation of conservative sites to the distant results pages of search engine queries, and now the potential attempts by the big banks to no longer lend the money that would keep gun-makers' businesses operating.
On the other hand, liberals complain not just about the energy sector elites thwarting efforts to limit fossil fuel use, compared to more carbon-neutral energy sources, with an eye toward mitigating climate change. They also complain about the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and cruel living conditions of livestock in factory-farms, about militarized police forces, over-zealous prosecutors, and a hawkish interventionist foreign policy.
One solution to this stand-off is de-escalation, whereby each side agrees to give relief to the aggrieved party in the sector where they themselves are in control, in order to get relief from the other party in the sector where they themselves are aggrieved.
The mass media could make conservatives 50% of the anchors, panelists, writers, and producers who shape consensus over crucial events -- provided that the military makes non-interventionists 50% of their general staff who shape our nation's posture of collective violence toward other nations. The big banks could provide no-interest loans or forgive existing debt for agribusiness, provided that they eliminated genetic engineering / chemical pesticides / factory-farming of livestock. Twitter agrees to stop banning conservatives, provided that the pharma industry yields to a Medicare-for-all healthcare system.
The other solution to the stand-off is a partisan battle of wills, whereby the overall victor (if not the 100% victor) will be the party that is the dominant, agenda-setting, framework-establishing one for its historical period. E.g., the Democrats during the Jacksonian period or the New Deal / Great Society period, and the Republicans during the Civil War / Reconstruction period or the Reaganite period.
Since we currently live in a highly polarized climate, the elites choose the battle of wills option. So far, during the Reaganite period that we are still in, that has benefited conservatives and Republicans over liberals and Democrats. Even if conservatives haven't gotten 100% of their demands during the Reagan period, their complaints about Hollywood, CNN, Twitter, and Wall Street amount to only 10% defeat. It is the liberals or leftists who have gotten only 10% victory, and 90% defeat, during our current period -- getting mostly nothing on the environment, labor unions, food production and consumption, and use of armed force (domestic or international).
But because Trump is an end-of-his-era president who tries but fails to radically alter his party's longstanding paradigm, we are about to shift into a new period led by today's opposition party, who will deliver the goods where the ossified dominant party had failed. Drawing on Stephen Skowronek's theory of political regime cycles, that means a populist, anti-globalist paradigm led by Bernie-affiliated Democrats.
Assuming the elites are still in the battle of wills mode, that means the overall victor will soon be the liberals and Democrats (maybe they will call themselves progressives), as conservatives and Republicans find themselves largely left out of society's operation.
It's in the interests of conservatives and Republicans to change from the battle of wills solution to the de-escalation solution. In that situation, they make concessions but also enjoy concessions from the other side. And since the shift from Reaganism to Bernie-ism has not yet been completed, the other side might be willing to hear out the idea of truce talks, while they're still temporarily the weak side.
If the conservatives and GOP keep pushing the battle of wills solution, thinking that they will not soon be on the weak side of a multi-decade political order, they will get shut out and shut down as completely as the liberals and Democrats have been during the Reaganite period.
And given that partisan polarization keeps rising, the next shift may be even more acrimonious and humiliating than the Reaganite period has been for its losers. Peter Turchin in Ages of Discord shows that polarization was only this high leading up to the Civil War. That suggests that, whether or not there is outright war, during the upcoming Bernie period the Republicans will fare like the Democrats did during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and not merely like the Whigs did during the Jacksonian period.
With T-minus two years to the most seismic election since 1980, there are few conservatives entertaining the idea of truce talks, other than perhaps Marco Rubio's recent overtures on desanctifying the Reaganite vision of corporate profits uber alles. Trump of course pitched himself in 2016 as half-Republican and half-Democrat, but he's more of a moderate than a conservative to begin with -- and more importantly, nobody on his side is willing to follow that lead, instead dragging him over toward their conservative, partisan GOP side.
We'd like to believe that "there's still plenty of time left to change," and that "history does not always repeat itself," but the way things look now, the odds are that the GOP won't figure it out, and that the hardline conservative base will refuse to pressure their side's elites to make concessions to liberals in the sectors that they control (armed forces / law enforcement, energy, agriculture), even if it were matched by the liberal base pressuring Democrat elites to make concessions to conservatives in the sectors that they control (finance, internet, media / entertainment).
Civil War 2.0, here we come -- the goal now is to keep it as cold and bloodless as possible.
Categories:
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Food,
Media,
Politics,
Technology,
Violence
May 1, 2018
Catalysts of Korean unification in the past, to predict the peninsula's future
Having looked in part 1 at the causes of ethno-national unification in general, and the record on political unification vs. division within the Korean peninsula, let's see what forces have caused Korea to unify over history. We can then compare those forces to the current forces, in order to predict what will happen going forward. We'll start with the most recent period and work backward.
Joseon period (1400 - 1900)
The most recent unified Korean polity was controlled by the South, and lasted 500 years, roughly 1400 to 1900 (the Joseon kingdom). Recall that unification of one group builds in response to expansion by another, highly different group onto their territory.
It was the expansion of the Japanese into the Korean peninsula that largely drove the cohesion of the Joseon kingdom, with the southern region bearing more of the brunt and therefore leading the way in counter-Japanese cohesion.
Pirates from Japan began to harass southern Korea around 1350, and it got bad enough by the early 1400s that the nascent Joseon kingdom sent a naval expedition to wipe out the pirates' base on Tsushima Island, lying between Korea and the Japanese mainland.
That didn't stop them, and by the late 1500s, the whole peninsula was invaded by an army of over 150,000 commanded by the leader of a unified Japan. The northern part of Korea got back-up from Ming China, who knew they were next on the list if the Japanese took over Korea. That relegated most of the fighting to southern Korea, where civilian militias had to fill in for the lack of a large empire like China to help them out.
After a lull of peace, in the 1870s the Japanese used gunboat diplomacy to open up Korean ports to trade, with most of the targets lying in southern Korea. Things escalated until 1910 when Japan annexed Korea outright, and kept it until they lost WWII, when the Allied victors split it between themselves (Soviets in the North, Americans in the South).
Thus, from roughly 1350 to 1950, an expansionist Japan put incredible pressure on Korea, primarily where the peninsula lies closest to Japan. This made southern Korea more acutely aware than the north of the need to band together as one people, lest they be over-run by a people who were utterly alien to them.
The Japanese spoke a language belonging to a distinct family, their folk religion was unique, and their subsistence mode and growing civilization relied more on a maritime way of life -- making them seem, in the eyes of a sedentary Korean population, like a group of nomads, albeit ones who roamed by boat rather than by horse. They were like the Phoenicians or the Sea Peoples of the ancient Mediterranean who laid waste to sedentary agrarian societies.
During the Joseon period, the north did get invaded from Manchuria circa 1630, forcing the Koreans to pay tribute to the upstart Manchus of the Qing dynasty of China, and no longer to the Ming. Although this may have been a more humiliating single invasion than the Japanese occupation of a few decades earlier, the Manchus were not part of an ongoing expansion into Korea that was drawn out over many centuries, as the Japanese were.
As laid out in the first post, it is the "chronic" encroachments, rather than an "acute" strike, that cause the invaded group to slowly and steadily build its ethno-national cohesion. Even today, Koreans of either the North or South are more antipathetic toward Japan than toward China or Manchuria.
Goryeo period (900 - 1400)
Before the rise of the Japanese during the 14th century, the main threats to the Korean peninsula came from the north -- primarily the nomads from Central Asia and Manchuria, the most infamous being the Mongols.
These related groups spoke languages distinct from Korean or Chinese or Japanese, belonging to the Mongolic and Turkic families, which are similar to each other (whether due to descent from a common ancestor, or to contact-based sharing and influence). They shared their own religion, Tengrism, based on worship of the "eternal blue sky" that prevails across their territory, the Eurasian Steppe. In that environment, they followed a nomadic pastoralist way of life, herding livestock and traveling long distances by horse, not being tied down to the same plot of land to sow and reap agricultural crops.
That set up a meta-ethnic frontier between them and the people of northern Korea, separated by the Yalu River, the mountainous terrain, and the small area of the peninsula, all of which prevent Koreans from evolving into nomadic pastoralists.
Northeast Asian nomads had begun unifying during the second half of the first millennium, culminating in the Khitan Empire (or Liao dynasty) conquering much of northeast Asia from roughly 900 to 1100. Without missing a beat, another nomadic group took over -- the Jurchen, ancestors of the Manchus, who founded the Jin dynasty from roughly 1100 to 1200. They lacked the lands of Mongolia and further west that the Khitans had, but they still penned in Korea to its north and west. Then right on top of them, the Mongols broke out and invaded Korea over the middle part of the 13th century.
It was this chronic expansion of nomadic empires from northeast Asia that caused the Korean peninsula to unify during the Goryeo period. And because the threats were coming from the north, it was the more exposed northern Koreans who developed the strongest sense of solidarity needed to repel a common enemy, and they led the way in unification more than the southerners.
Ultimately the blow from the Mongols proved to be too much to withstand, and Goryeo was reduced to a vassal state of the Mongols (or the Yuan dynasty) from 1270 to around 1350. This weakened status of the northern-led kingdom, combined with the rise of Japanese threats from the south, led to the southward shift in the center of ethno-political gravity during the Joseon period that followed.
Contemporary parallels
Today there appears to be less of a threat coming from Korea's north and west, as the nomads of the Steppe have gone into hibernation after the raids of the Mongols and Turks. However, those Central Asian Steppe explosions break out at least once a millennium, and it's already been 800 years since the Mongols. But those are not happening now, so they won't play a role in building pan-Korean solidarity in the meantime.
The other potential major encroachment from that direction would be China, and they don't seem interested in taking over Korea. Their grand vision is the One Belt One Road initiative to link most of the Eurasian landmass economically, and the Korean peninsula -- both North and South -- is nearly alone among East Asian countries in its exclusion from that plan. China is more worried about Southeast, South, Central, and West Asia. But given China's general plans of expansion, it's still a possibility that will make Koreans want to band together to repel.
Instead, it will likely be Japan that puts the most pressure on Korean ethnic solidarity and political unification. Japan still views itself as superior to Korea, and will continue to act on that, even when the American empire leaves both South Korea and Japan. And China's ongoing expansion is likely to make the Japanese cohere more strongly in the contest for regional dominance. The natural starting point for such a counter-Chinese expansion by Japan would be into Korea, where China has historically had little political control. Japan would start with an easier battlefield on which to challenge China for regional dominance.
Squeezed between China and Japan vying for control over East Asia, the Korean peninsula will likely unify rather than remain divided. And given the stronger pressure coming from Japan than from China, a unified Korea will likely be centered more toward the South, as it was during the Joseon period. The northern-centered Goryeo period came before the rise of the Japanese, when the only threats were to the north and west.
Unless the Japanese vanish as a regional power, it would take one hell of a chronic invasion from China or Central Asia over the Yalu River to make the northern part of Korea the leader of a unified peninsula.
The next post will briefly look at periods in Korean history when the peninsula was divided (before 900), to show that they are not applicable to the present day.
Joseon period (1400 - 1900)
The most recent unified Korean polity was controlled by the South, and lasted 500 years, roughly 1400 to 1900 (the Joseon kingdom). Recall that unification of one group builds in response to expansion by another, highly different group onto their territory.
It was the expansion of the Japanese into the Korean peninsula that largely drove the cohesion of the Joseon kingdom, with the southern region bearing more of the brunt and therefore leading the way in counter-Japanese cohesion.
Pirates from Japan began to harass southern Korea around 1350, and it got bad enough by the early 1400s that the nascent Joseon kingdom sent a naval expedition to wipe out the pirates' base on Tsushima Island, lying between Korea and the Japanese mainland.
That didn't stop them, and by the late 1500s, the whole peninsula was invaded by an army of over 150,000 commanded by the leader of a unified Japan. The northern part of Korea got back-up from Ming China, who knew they were next on the list if the Japanese took over Korea. That relegated most of the fighting to southern Korea, where civilian militias had to fill in for the lack of a large empire like China to help them out.
After a lull of peace, in the 1870s the Japanese used gunboat diplomacy to open up Korean ports to trade, with most of the targets lying in southern Korea. Things escalated until 1910 when Japan annexed Korea outright, and kept it until they lost WWII, when the Allied victors split it between themselves (Soviets in the North, Americans in the South).
Thus, from roughly 1350 to 1950, an expansionist Japan put incredible pressure on Korea, primarily where the peninsula lies closest to Japan. This made southern Korea more acutely aware than the north of the need to band together as one people, lest they be over-run by a people who were utterly alien to them.
The Japanese spoke a language belonging to a distinct family, their folk religion was unique, and their subsistence mode and growing civilization relied more on a maritime way of life -- making them seem, in the eyes of a sedentary Korean population, like a group of nomads, albeit ones who roamed by boat rather than by horse. They were like the Phoenicians or the Sea Peoples of the ancient Mediterranean who laid waste to sedentary agrarian societies.
During the Joseon period, the north did get invaded from Manchuria circa 1630, forcing the Koreans to pay tribute to the upstart Manchus of the Qing dynasty of China, and no longer to the Ming. Although this may have been a more humiliating single invasion than the Japanese occupation of a few decades earlier, the Manchus were not part of an ongoing expansion into Korea that was drawn out over many centuries, as the Japanese were.
As laid out in the first post, it is the "chronic" encroachments, rather than an "acute" strike, that cause the invaded group to slowly and steadily build its ethno-national cohesion. Even today, Koreans of either the North or South are more antipathetic toward Japan than toward China or Manchuria.
Goryeo period (900 - 1400)
Before the rise of the Japanese during the 14th century, the main threats to the Korean peninsula came from the north -- primarily the nomads from Central Asia and Manchuria, the most infamous being the Mongols.
These related groups spoke languages distinct from Korean or Chinese or Japanese, belonging to the Mongolic and Turkic families, which are similar to each other (whether due to descent from a common ancestor, or to contact-based sharing and influence). They shared their own religion, Tengrism, based on worship of the "eternal blue sky" that prevails across their territory, the Eurasian Steppe. In that environment, they followed a nomadic pastoralist way of life, herding livestock and traveling long distances by horse, not being tied down to the same plot of land to sow and reap agricultural crops.
That set up a meta-ethnic frontier between them and the people of northern Korea, separated by the Yalu River, the mountainous terrain, and the small area of the peninsula, all of which prevent Koreans from evolving into nomadic pastoralists.
Northeast Asian nomads had begun unifying during the second half of the first millennium, culminating in the Khitan Empire (or Liao dynasty) conquering much of northeast Asia from roughly 900 to 1100. Without missing a beat, another nomadic group took over -- the Jurchen, ancestors of the Manchus, who founded the Jin dynasty from roughly 1100 to 1200. They lacked the lands of Mongolia and further west that the Khitans had, but they still penned in Korea to its north and west. Then right on top of them, the Mongols broke out and invaded Korea over the middle part of the 13th century.
It was this chronic expansion of nomadic empires from northeast Asia that caused the Korean peninsula to unify during the Goryeo period. And because the threats were coming from the north, it was the more exposed northern Koreans who developed the strongest sense of solidarity needed to repel a common enemy, and they led the way in unification more than the southerners.
Ultimately the blow from the Mongols proved to be too much to withstand, and Goryeo was reduced to a vassal state of the Mongols (or the Yuan dynasty) from 1270 to around 1350. This weakened status of the northern-led kingdom, combined with the rise of Japanese threats from the south, led to the southward shift in the center of ethno-political gravity during the Joseon period that followed.
Contemporary parallels
Today there appears to be less of a threat coming from Korea's north and west, as the nomads of the Steppe have gone into hibernation after the raids of the Mongols and Turks. However, those Central Asian Steppe explosions break out at least once a millennium, and it's already been 800 years since the Mongols. But those are not happening now, so they won't play a role in building pan-Korean solidarity in the meantime.
The other potential major encroachment from that direction would be China, and they don't seem interested in taking over Korea. Their grand vision is the One Belt One Road initiative to link most of the Eurasian landmass economically, and the Korean peninsula -- both North and South -- is nearly alone among East Asian countries in its exclusion from that plan. China is more worried about Southeast, South, Central, and West Asia. But given China's general plans of expansion, it's still a possibility that will make Koreans want to band together to repel.
Instead, it will likely be Japan that puts the most pressure on Korean ethnic solidarity and political unification. Japan still views itself as superior to Korea, and will continue to act on that, even when the American empire leaves both South Korea and Japan. And China's ongoing expansion is likely to make the Japanese cohere more strongly in the contest for regional dominance. The natural starting point for such a counter-Chinese expansion by Japan would be into Korea, where China has historically had little political control. Japan would start with an easier battlefield on which to challenge China for regional dominance.
Squeezed between China and Japan vying for control over East Asia, the Korean peninsula will likely unify rather than remain divided. And given the stronger pressure coming from Japan than from China, a unified Korea will likely be centered more toward the South, as it was during the Joseon period. The northern-centered Goryeo period came before the rise of the Japanese, when the only threats were to the north and west.
Unless the Japanese vanish as a regional power, it would take one hell of a chronic invasion from China or Central Asia over the Yalu River to make the northern part of Korea the leader of a unified peninsula.
The next post will briefly look at periods in Korean history when the peninsula was divided (before 900), to show that they are not applicable to the present day.
Categories:
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics,
Violence
April 29, 2018
Will post-US Korea unify or stay divided? Historical perspective
Ahead of a high-profile, first-ever summit between the leaders of the US and North Korea, there is a lot of attention being given to the individuals involved, exacerbating the tendency to focus on personal rather than societal factors. So let's zoom out and see what the historical background and the current context suggest about how the relations will play out.
This look will be broken up into several posts, starting with the forces that cause national unification over the time-scale of centuries, and ending with the forces that cause paradigm shifts in political regimes over the time-scale of decades. After all, a unified Korean peninsula would certainly require paradigm shifts in both the North, South, and the US, compared to the status quo of the Cold War.
Beginning with the conclusion, I think when the American empire leaves the Korean peninsula, it will in fact unify, to become as strong as possible under the pressures of both China and especially Japan (and a fat-tail risk from Islamic radicalized nomads from Central Asia). The state will be centered more toward the south than the north, as southerners will feel greater pressure to band together in the face of threats from Japan, while northerners will feel relatively less pressure from their north.
However, that may have to wait until paradigm shifts occur in the regimes of the major players -- already there in the South, perhaps soon in the North, but not yet in the US. Still, the process should be observably under way within the next couple decades, mainly waiting on a change of regimes in the US -- from Reaganism to Bernie-ism, as Tulsi Gabbard takes Mike Pompeo's place as Secretary of State.
Brief history of unification and division in the Korean peninsula
First, we emphasize that a unified polity in Korea is not a given, over the region's history -- nor that a unified peninsula would be centered toward the south.
It was under unified control for the last thousand years, from roughly 900 to 1400 (Goryeo kingdom, centered toward the north) and roughly 1400 to 1900 (Joseon kingdom, centered toward the south), but not for the thousand or so years before then. From roughly 1900 to 1950, it was occupied by Japan. After Japan lost in WWII, it was split between the major victors, with the Soviets supporting the North, and the US the South.
During the roughly 200 years before unification began, the peninsula was divided between northern and southern kingdoms (Balhae and Silla), with the north having a greater record of expanding outside its natural boundaries (e.g. into Manchuria). For the roughly 700 years before that -- back to the start of the first millennium -- there were in fact three kingdoms, with the southern region being sub-divided into two, and one of them (Baekje in the southwest) being an off-shoot of the northern kingdom (Goguryeo). Even before the Three Kingdoms period, there was one kingdom in the north (Gojoseon) and a confederacy of states in the south (Jin).
Over the millennia, the boundaries between north and south -- when the peninsula has been divided -- have remained close to what they are today.
The point is that the current division is not necessarily an artificial status imposed by external powers, as though the peninsula had an inherent tendency to be unified. For awhile it was, and for awhile before that, it wasn't. Should it remain divided long after the US pulls out, it will not necessarily be due to a "legacy of imperialism". For the longest time, the peninsula was in a stable state of division along roughly the current north-south lines, and it's possible (though unlikely) that it will return to that stable division for whatever reasons kept it stably divided before 900 AD.
And if it does unify, it's not inherently going to be centered toward the south, since during the two equally long periods when it was unified, one was more northern and the other more southern. We have to analyze what made unification more northern or more southern in the past, and see which of those sets of forces is the closest to the current set of forces.
Causes of national unification
That brings us to the matter of what forces cause smaller polities to merge into larger ones, from a loose tribal confederation up to a multinational empire.
There must be a "meta-ethnic frontier" dividing two very different sides -- different language, religion, subsistence pattern (farming vs. herding), physical appearance (bodily as well as adornment), historical territory, and so on. This sets up the strong sense of "us vs. them".
One of those sides must be already unified and expanding, so that it encroaches upon the other side. When one side is highly unified and literally moving in your direction, your own side had better unify its various little groups in order to withstand the advance, repel it back to where it came from, and maybe even conquer them in turn.
The advance by the other side must last over a long period of time, rather than be a fluke. If it were only a one-off "acute" encounter, you deal with it as best you can but don't bother changing your societal structure long-term. If, however, the encounters are "chronic," you had better change society to deal with it. That means that unification will be slow and steady, rather than a rapid response, as the people on the receiving end of the expansion are trying to figure out if they are dealing with an acute or a chronic problem.
Ethno-political unification shows hysteresis because it is not cheap or easy to do, given all the usual competing interests across the small-scale groups and among the individuals involved. It is not like flicking on a light switch whenever you enter a room and need to see.
When a process is very costly and difficult to kick into gear, it will want to stay turned on and "idle" when there is an apparent lull in the reason that it turned on in the first place. That's why you don't turn off your car at every red light you come to, and then turn it back on again when it changes from red to green. The process only winds down when there is a sustained absence, rather than just a lull, in the reason for turning it on.
Peter Turchin lays out the social mechanics of this process in technical and popular books (Historical Dynamics, War and Peace and War), illustrated with numerous examples across time and geography.
To give one example, the Romans unified into larger and larger groups due to the expansion of the Celts from the butter region of Europe into the olive oil region. Eventually the Romans became a unified expansionist nation of their own, and turned the tables on the Celts during the Gallic Wars. After a sustained absence of the original Celtic threat, the Roman Empire began losing its raison d'etre, its elites began in-fighting over status rather than banding together against a common foe, and the Romans devolved back into a smaller-scale group.
Having set up this basic framework, the next post will look at the expansions into the Korean peninsula that have caused it to unify before, so that we can compare them to current or likely expansions against the peninsula, to predict where the situation goes from here.
This look will be broken up into several posts, starting with the forces that cause national unification over the time-scale of centuries, and ending with the forces that cause paradigm shifts in political regimes over the time-scale of decades. After all, a unified Korean peninsula would certainly require paradigm shifts in both the North, South, and the US, compared to the status quo of the Cold War.
Beginning with the conclusion, I think when the American empire leaves the Korean peninsula, it will in fact unify, to become as strong as possible under the pressures of both China and especially Japan (and a fat-tail risk from Islamic radicalized nomads from Central Asia). The state will be centered more toward the south than the north, as southerners will feel greater pressure to band together in the face of threats from Japan, while northerners will feel relatively less pressure from their north.
However, that may have to wait until paradigm shifts occur in the regimes of the major players -- already there in the South, perhaps soon in the North, but not yet in the US. Still, the process should be observably under way within the next couple decades, mainly waiting on a change of regimes in the US -- from Reaganism to Bernie-ism, as Tulsi Gabbard takes Mike Pompeo's place as Secretary of State.
Brief history of unification and division in the Korean peninsula
First, we emphasize that a unified polity in Korea is not a given, over the region's history -- nor that a unified peninsula would be centered toward the south.
It was under unified control for the last thousand years, from roughly 900 to 1400 (Goryeo kingdom, centered toward the north) and roughly 1400 to 1900 (Joseon kingdom, centered toward the south), but not for the thousand or so years before then. From roughly 1900 to 1950, it was occupied by Japan. After Japan lost in WWII, it was split between the major victors, with the Soviets supporting the North, and the US the South.
During the roughly 200 years before unification began, the peninsula was divided between northern and southern kingdoms (Balhae and Silla), with the north having a greater record of expanding outside its natural boundaries (e.g. into Manchuria). For the roughly 700 years before that -- back to the start of the first millennium -- there were in fact three kingdoms, with the southern region being sub-divided into two, and one of them (Baekje in the southwest) being an off-shoot of the northern kingdom (Goguryeo). Even before the Three Kingdoms period, there was one kingdom in the north (Gojoseon) and a confederacy of states in the south (Jin).
Over the millennia, the boundaries between north and south -- when the peninsula has been divided -- have remained close to what they are today.
The point is that the current division is not necessarily an artificial status imposed by external powers, as though the peninsula had an inherent tendency to be unified. For awhile it was, and for awhile before that, it wasn't. Should it remain divided long after the US pulls out, it will not necessarily be due to a "legacy of imperialism". For the longest time, the peninsula was in a stable state of division along roughly the current north-south lines, and it's possible (though unlikely) that it will return to that stable division for whatever reasons kept it stably divided before 900 AD.
And if it does unify, it's not inherently going to be centered toward the south, since during the two equally long periods when it was unified, one was more northern and the other more southern. We have to analyze what made unification more northern or more southern in the past, and see which of those sets of forces is the closest to the current set of forces.
Causes of national unification
That brings us to the matter of what forces cause smaller polities to merge into larger ones, from a loose tribal confederation up to a multinational empire.
There must be a "meta-ethnic frontier" dividing two very different sides -- different language, religion, subsistence pattern (farming vs. herding), physical appearance (bodily as well as adornment), historical territory, and so on. This sets up the strong sense of "us vs. them".
One of those sides must be already unified and expanding, so that it encroaches upon the other side. When one side is highly unified and literally moving in your direction, your own side had better unify its various little groups in order to withstand the advance, repel it back to where it came from, and maybe even conquer them in turn.
The advance by the other side must last over a long period of time, rather than be a fluke. If it were only a one-off "acute" encounter, you deal with it as best you can but don't bother changing your societal structure long-term. If, however, the encounters are "chronic," you had better change society to deal with it. That means that unification will be slow and steady, rather than a rapid response, as the people on the receiving end of the expansion are trying to figure out if they are dealing with an acute or a chronic problem.
Ethno-political unification shows hysteresis because it is not cheap or easy to do, given all the usual competing interests across the small-scale groups and among the individuals involved. It is not like flicking on a light switch whenever you enter a room and need to see.
When a process is very costly and difficult to kick into gear, it will want to stay turned on and "idle" when there is an apparent lull in the reason that it turned on in the first place. That's why you don't turn off your car at every red light you come to, and then turn it back on again when it changes from red to green. The process only winds down when there is a sustained absence, rather than just a lull, in the reason for turning it on.
Peter Turchin lays out the social mechanics of this process in technical and popular books (Historical Dynamics, War and Peace and War), illustrated with numerous examples across time and geography.
To give one example, the Romans unified into larger and larger groups due to the expansion of the Celts from the butter region of Europe into the olive oil region. Eventually the Romans became a unified expansionist nation of their own, and turned the tables on the Celts during the Gallic Wars. After a sustained absence of the original Celtic threat, the Roman Empire began losing its raison d'etre, its elites began in-fighting over status rather than banding together against a common foe, and the Romans devolved back into a smaller-scale group.
Having set up this basic framework, the next post will look at the expansions into the Korean peninsula that have caused it to unify before, so that we can compare them to current or likely expansions against the peninsula, to predict where the situation goes from here.
Categories:
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics,
Psychology,
Violence
April 28, 2018
In Rust Belt, Trump betrays "Hire American" promise, shills for cheap-labor immigrants
At one of his rallies that nobody bothers watching anymore, Trump addressed a Rust Belt audience in Macomb County, Michigan, on the theme of employment and immigration.
Did he say, "We're going to deport immigrants so that the greedy employers will have no choice but to hire struggling American workers and pay them a decent American-level wage"? Of course not. While actually in office, the fake populist has reverted to his cheap-labor instincts as a greedy employer himself.
From Breitbart's write-up:
The Foxconn plant in Wisconsin -- now there's another beauty. They will only be hiring immigrants, as is their practice at their other plants already in America. Chinese will do the professional jobs, and illegals (probably also Chinese) will do the less skilled jobs.
The president admitted as much in his speech to CPAC (see the first link), that at any factory that comes back to our country, immigrants will be used to keep down labor costs and boost profit margins for the owners, rather than to give good jobs to the bottom 80% of Americans. Foxconn, Chrysler, you name it.
Promising to gut the hell out of NAFTA was the only way he flipped so many Rust Belt states, including the very close race in Michigan. Yet he barely mentioned it during the rally.
And we know the reason why -- his economic team has surrendered on re-industrializing our economy to benefit the working and middle classes, and has inverted the "NAFTA re-negotiation" theme to get even better deals for the large farm-owners who already benefit like crazy from NAFTA, and to get white-collar professionals a larger slice of the Mexican market in their sector (finance, tech, etc.).
The same applies to the fake trade war against China -- that is being used solely to get more benefits for white-collar professionals here who work in intellectual property, as well as moguls in finance, tech, and media, who want to enter the Chinese market in those sectors. None of it is bringing back the industrial commodities and manufacturing sectors to American soil, where they would provide solid employment and incomes for the increasingly precarious American citizenry.
On the one hand, every time Trump shills so shamelessly for cheap-labor immigration, it drives his true supporters up the wall. Aside from the harm it deals to our material standard of living, as those cheap-labor policies get enacted by his administration, it shifts the Overton Window entirely back in the opposite direction from what his campaign accomplished -- toward elitism, toward globalism.
The entire basis for mass immigration is for greedy employers to secure an endless supply of cheap labor, so when he touts the value of it in one sector like agriculture, and then another like manufacturing, he's really making a general argument for unmitigated immigration.
"Gotta keep those labor costs down for the employers, folks -- if it dumps another 50 million immigrants into your communities, just move somewhere else, unless you're OK with being losers for the rest of your lives."
On the other hand, his serving as the ventriloquist dummy for the Koch brothers only helps to accelerate the downfall of the GOP, as voters see how thoroughly incapable it is of undoing -- or even mitigating -- the cheap-labor globalist policies of Reaganism. Even electing the biggest joke of a politician, just because he was promising the right things on the right issues, could not compel the GOP to follow the orders of its own voters.
That will clear the way for the Bernie revolution to sweep into the government and take over where the GOP had failed. After Trump's historical upset victory, the Democrats learned that they have to fight populism with populism, if their shut-out party wants to dethrone their rivals as the dominant, paradigm-setting party, rather than play within the boundaries established by the GOP and occasionally win the White House.
That may have been appropriate when the voters wanted Reaganism, but now that the GOP's own hardcore primary voters have chosen the candidate who campaigned on doing something very different from Reaganism -- something populist and non-interventionist -- the signal has been sent that we want something anti-Reaganite from a Democrat candidate as well.
In the meantime, support for the GOP will continue collapsing, as none of its candidates for the mid-terms are campaigning on restricting immigration in order to ensure that Americans get hired, and at higher wages. The president himself keeps campaigning on exactly the opposite program.
Once the Bernie people take over the government, the populist-nationalist Trump supporters will enjoy some action at last on the issue of employment and immigration. They're all about dramatically raising the floor on the income scale -- "abolish cheap labor" will be their slogan. And once you abolish cheap labor, you abolish immigration de facto as well.
And guess what -- debt-burdened, dead-end-job-having Gen X-ers, Millennials, and Gen Z-ers are not going to give an absolute shit if the same policies that raise their own standard of living have the side effect of ending immigration.
So while the wave of the future will not indulge former-Trumpers' nationalism rhetorically, it will deliver on the issue nevertheless. And that will be totally fine -- results over rhetoric, material issues over cultural concerns. The wrong pitch would be ending immigration as the central issue, with the side effect being higher incomes.
Former Trump supporters should get out in front of this paradigm shift and help it to stay neutral and declare a truce on cultural matters, rather than let the identity politics warriors among the Dems try to hijack the labor issue to benefit immigrants over already-struggling Americans. With Bernie supporters and former Trump supporters teaming together, the moribund identity politics movement doesn't stand a chance.
Did he say, "We're going to deport immigrants so that the greedy employers will have no choice but to hire struggling American workers and pay them a decent American-level wage"? Of course not. While actually in office, the fake populist has reverted to his cheap-labor instincts as a greedy employer himself.
From Breitbart's write-up:
President Donald Trump told American farmers on Saturday that he would allow guest workers to come into the country, despite his promise to protect American workers.
“For the farmers, OK, it’s going to get good, and we’re going to let your guest workers come in, because we’re going to have strong borders, but we have to have your workers come in,” the president said during his campaign rally in Washington, Michigan on Saturday.
Trump said that the unemployment numbers were so good that it was possible to allow guest workers in the country to work the fields and do seasonal labor.
“We have to let people come in. They’re going to be guest workers, they’re going to come in, they’re going to work on your farms, we’re going to have the H-2Bs come in, we’re going to have a lot of things happening,” Trump said.
The crowd of supporters did not cheer in response to his comments.
“But then they have to go out,” Trump concluded, prompting cheers again.
The president quickly changed the subject to manufacturing, talking about how Foxconn factories were being built in Wisconsin.
The Foxconn plant in Wisconsin -- now there's another beauty. They will only be hiring immigrants, as is their practice at their other plants already in America. Chinese will do the professional jobs, and illegals (probably also Chinese) will do the less skilled jobs.
The president admitted as much in his speech to CPAC (see the first link), that at any factory that comes back to our country, immigrants will be used to keep down labor costs and boost profit margins for the owners, rather than to give good jobs to the bottom 80% of Americans. Foxconn, Chrysler, you name it.
Promising to gut the hell out of NAFTA was the only way he flipped so many Rust Belt states, including the very close race in Michigan. Yet he barely mentioned it during the rally.
And we know the reason why -- his economic team has surrendered on re-industrializing our economy to benefit the working and middle classes, and has inverted the "NAFTA re-negotiation" theme to get even better deals for the large farm-owners who already benefit like crazy from NAFTA, and to get white-collar professionals a larger slice of the Mexican market in their sector (finance, tech, etc.).
The same applies to the fake trade war against China -- that is being used solely to get more benefits for white-collar professionals here who work in intellectual property, as well as moguls in finance, tech, and media, who want to enter the Chinese market in those sectors. None of it is bringing back the industrial commodities and manufacturing sectors to American soil, where they would provide solid employment and incomes for the increasingly precarious American citizenry.
On the one hand, every time Trump shills so shamelessly for cheap-labor immigration, it drives his true supporters up the wall. Aside from the harm it deals to our material standard of living, as those cheap-labor policies get enacted by his administration, it shifts the Overton Window entirely back in the opposite direction from what his campaign accomplished -- toward elitism, toward globalism.
The entire basis for mass immigration is for greedy employers to secure an endless supply of cheap labor, so when he touts the value of it in one sector like agriculture, and then another like manufacturing, he's really making a general argument for unmitigated immigration.
"Gotta keep those labor costs down for the employers, folks -- if it dumps another 50 million immigrants into your communities, just move somewhere else, unless you're OK with being losers for the rest of your lives."
On the other hand, his serving as the ventriloquist dummy for the Koch brothers only helps to accelerate the downfall of the GOP, as voters see how thoroughly incapable it is of undoing -- or even mitigating -- the cheap-labor globalist policies of Reaganism. Even electing the biggest joke of a politician, just because he was promising the right things on the right issues, could not compel the GOP to follow the orders of its own voters.
That will clear the way for the Bernie revolution to sweep into the government and take over where the GOP had failed. After Trump's historical upset victory, the Democrats learned that they have to fight populism with populism, if their shut-out party wants to dethrone their rivals as the dominant, paradigm-setting party, rather than play within the boundaries established by the GOP and occasionally win the White House.
That may have been appropriate when the voters wanted Reaganism, but now that the GOP's own hardcore primary voters have chosen the candidate who campaigned on doing something very different from Reaganism -- something populist and non-interventionist -- the signal has been sent that we want something anti-Reaganite from a Democrat candidate as well.
In the meantime, support for the GOP will continue collapsing, as none of its candidates for the mid-terms are campaigning on restricting immigration in order to ensure that Americans get hired, and at higher wages. The president himself keeps campaigning on exactly the opposite program.
Once the Bernie people take over the government, the populist-nationalist Trump supporters will enjoy some action at last on the issue of employment and immigration. They're all about dramatically raising the floor on the income scale -- "abolish cheap labor" will be their slogan. And once you abolish cheap labor, you abolish immigration de facto as well.
And guess what -- debt-burdened, dead-end-job-having Gen X-ers, Millennials, and Gen Z-ers are not going to give an absolute shit if the same policies that raise their own standard of living have the side effect of ending immigration.
So while the wave of the future will not indulge former-Trumpers' nationalism rhetorically, it will deliver on the issue nevertheless. And that will be totally fine -- results over rhetoric, material issues over cultural concerns. The wrong pitch would be ending immigration as the central issue, with the side effect being higher incomes.
Former Trump supporters should get out in front of this paradigm shift and help it to stay neutral and declare a truce on cultural matters, rather than let the identity politics warriors among the Dems try to hijack the labor issue to benefit immigrants over already-struggling Americans. With Bernie supporters and former Trump supporters teaming together, the moribund identity politics movement doesn't stand a chance.
Categories:
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics
April 26, 2018
Religious extremism comes from shallow roots in its historical development
(This post will serve as an overview, and a follow-up post or two will look at particular cases.)
Religious extremism comes in two opposite degrees of adherence -- fundamentalism and abandonment (apostasy). By "extremist," we're talking about the zealous kind of fundamentalism, rather than mere traditionalism. And we're talking about a zealous kind of apostasy, rather than mere fading away or lapsing.
The resonant phrase "zeal of the convert" suggests that most fanatics about religion -- pro or anti -- have shallow roots in the religion in question, while those who are more level-headed about the religion must have deeper roots. This phrase refers to events over the lifespan of an individual, but it applies at a higher time scale to whole communities or cultures, based on when the religion was adopted by the group.
Those who are recently converted have not been participants in the developmental process that created the religion up to that point. So if the religion is nascent, it is hard to distinguish converts from originators in how much of a hand they've had in its development. However, if it has been around for awhile and has mostly congealed into a mature form, converts will be mostly passive consumers of an elaborate product made by a wholly different group.
So the religion will feel organic to the community that adopts it early on, while it cannot avoid feeling somewhat alien to those communities that adopt it much later on.
Indeed, to late adopters it has become so elaborate and so hardened -- allowing no further development -- that it requires a huge leap of faith to accept it, or else total rejection as though it were an organ transplant from a different species.
Even for those late adopters who accept it, they will question why there is such a long developmental process, from the origin of the religion through centuries of evolution. To the early adopters, all of those changes have been organic and internal -- solving the initial problems, or smoothing out the initial wrinkles, until we got it just right. But to the late adopters, that developmental process feels artificial, as though adulterating the purity of the original -- the ongoing profane work of man, not the completed divine work of the gods.
Thus late adopters tend not only toward greater zeal, but toward fundamentalism, or seeking to strip away the later encrustations to reveal the pure original. This leads not only to erasing all sorts of canonical beliefs, but also practices and rituals -- it leads to cosplaying as though you were a member of the original group that started the religion.
By taking a time machine back to the early days, these cosplayers can start their own traditions. The trouble is that every several generations, they will want to go back to the beginning all over again, and start another set of traditions. They therefore do not intend these as traditions to be kept by future adherents, but more like contemporary interpretations of the original -- to help it make sense to today's members, unmediated by centuries of actual traditions.
Strong adherents from an early adopter group, though, will appreciate the rich history and traditions that have put the flesh onto the original skeleton of the religion. For them, "going back to the origin" would be tearing off and discarding the flesh of the organism, just to gawk at its skeleton -- puzzling, and disturbing.
And at the other end of the adherence spectrum, late adopters who reject the religion are not just fading away or downplaying something they still kind-of believe in. They see the centuries of elaboration, that they played no role in, as proof that this religion is just a creation of man, and not a revelation sent from the gods.
This kind of apostasy is cynical, bitter, and dismissive -- not the kind from a lapsed member of an early adopter group, whose atheism is more trusting, bittersweet, and charitable toward the believers and practitioners. The late adopter apostate never felt truly part of the religious community, so there's no love lost for them.
The early adopter apostate did feel organically part of the group, and does feel a loss upon leaving them. They may say that they are "still culturally a member" while not a practicing or believing member. The late adopter apostate does not affiliate even "culturally" with the group.
Having reviewed the social psychology, in the next posts we'll look at some specific historical cases of this phenomenon. The most familiar place to start with is Christianity, contrasting those who were Christianized early vs. later. Then we'll look at the other world religion, Islam, and see a similar pattern.
Apart from religious concerns per se, this will also touch on foreign policy, as the LARP-ers in both religions are obsessed with the contemporary politics of the lands where their religions were founded. Given how influential these groups are within their home nations, their status as late adopters of their religion is crucial to understand their obsession with the current affairs of such distant and seemingly irrelevant lands.
Religious extremism comes in two opposite degrees of adherence -- fundamentalism and abandonment (apostasy). By "extremist," we're talking about the zealous kind of fundamentalism, rather than mere traditionalism. And we're talking about a zealous kind of apostasy, rather than mere fading away or lapsing.
The resonant phrase "zeal of the convert" suggests that most fanatics about religion -- pro or anti -- have shallow roots in the religion in question, while those who are more level-headed about the religion must have deeper roots. This phrase refers to events over the lifespan of an individual, but it applies at a higher time scale to whole communities or cultures, based on when the religion was adopted by the group.
Those who are recently converted have not been participants in the developmental process that created the religion up to that point. So if the religion is nascent, it is hard to distinguish converts from originators in how much of a hand they've had in its development. However, if it has been around for awhile and has mostly congealed into a mature form, converts will be mostly passive consumers of an elaborate product made by a wholly different group.
So the religion will feel organic to the community that adopts it early on, while it cannot avoid feeling somewhat alien to those communities that adopt it much later on.
Indeed, to late adopters it has become so elaborate and so hardened -- allowing no further development -- that it requires a huge leap of faith to accept it, or else total rejection as though it were an organ transplant from a different species.
Even for those late adopters who accept it, they will question why there is such a long developmental process, from the origin of the religion through centuries of evolution. To the early adopters, all of those changes have been organic and internal -- solving the initial problems, or smoothing out the initial wrinkles, until we got it just right. But to the late adopters, that developmental process feels artificial, as though adulterating the purity of the original -- the ongoing profane work of man, not the completed divine work of the gods.
Thus late adopters tend not only toward greater zeal, but toward fundamentalism, or seeking to strip away the later encrustations to reveal the pure original. This leads not only to erasing all sorts of canonical beliefs, but also practices and rituals -- it leads to cosplaying as though you were a member of the original group that started the religion.
By taking a time machine back to the early days, these cosplayers can start their own traditions. The trouble is that every several generations, they will want to go back to the beginning all over again, and start another set of traditions. They therefore do not intend these as traditions to be kept by future adherents, but more like contemporary interpretations of the original -- to help it make sense to today's members, unmediated by centuries of actual traditions.
Strong adherents from an early adopter group, though, will appreciate the rich history and traditions that have put the flesh onto the original skeleton of the religion. For them, "going back to the origin" would be tearing off and discarding the flesh of the organism, just to gawk at its skeleton -- puzzling, and disturbing.
And at the other end of the adherence spectrum, late adopters who reject the religion are not just fading away or downplaying something they still kind-of believe in. They see the centuries of elaboration, that they played no role in, as proof that this religion is just a creation of man, and not a revelation sent from the gods.
This kind of apostasy is cynical, bitter, and dismissive -- not the kind from a lapsed member of an early adopter group, whose atheism is more trusting, bittersweet, and charitable toward the believers and practitioners. The late adopter apostate never felt truly part of the religious community, so there's no love lost for them.
The early adopter apostate did feel organically part of the group, and does feel a loss upon leaving them. They may say that they are "still culturally a member" while not a practicing or believing member. The late adopter apostate does not affiliate even "culturally" with the group.
Having reviewed the social psychology, in the next posts we'll look at some specific historical cases of this phenomenon. The most familiar place to start with is Christianity, contrasting those who were Christianized early vs. later. Then we'll look at the other world religion, Islam, and see a similar pattern.
Apart from religious concerns per se, this will also touch on foreign policy, as the LARP-ers in both religions are obsessed with the contemporary politics of the lands where their religions were founded. Given how influential these groups are within their home nations, their status as late adopters of their religion is crucial to understand their obsession with the current affairs of such distant and seemingly irrelevant lands.
Categories:
Psychology,
Religion
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