Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Well, like Germany then, we do have this wee debt issue...
Seriously, however, you have no faith in the system. The country withstood the Great Depression and a Civil War. We desperately need a reappraisal of our political system (our two party, corporate-owned system more specifically). We also need to stop the parties from focusing us on wedge issues to turn us into warring factions.
So when Mueller drops the other shoe, we will see a Constitutional/Political crisis. And maybe that will be what we need to wake us from our complacency.
Watergate should have been a wake up call regarding the quality of person attracted to politics. The point didn't stick. Carter's "malaise" speech should have been a Joseph Welch chiding McCarthy moment. Instead, it was ignored. Reagan's Morning in America started a debt bomb. No one cared. Clinton's wrongful impeachment was a national disgrace. No reform followed. Iraq should have been the mother of all scandals. Instead, people disagreed over the irrefutable proof that the Administration lied. While all this took place, the middle class was hollowed out by globalization and automation, and the environment went to shit. People complained about the environment some, but no one gave a fuck about the middle class.
Then we elected a quasi-criminal con man. And we all agreed that the middle class was still getting fucked, and that was a big part of why he was elected, but no one had a real plan to fix it. He made it worse with tariffs. And now he's going to be embroiled in his very own Watergate. And what have we done in response? Splintered into warring factions, arguing about Nazis.
Trump very well may be thrown out of office. Or he may become our national Caligula. These things will happen. What will not happen is anyone offering a credible solution to or manner of addressing the hollowing out of the middle class. Allusions to Germany in the thirties are a few years too late. We're shrugging and squabbling like it's 1929.
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It's true that our system is more resilient than Wiemar Germany's, and has been - and, looking back historically, that's actually one of the more interesting distinctions between Germany 1933 and today. If we had a more historically literate population 1920s Italy might make for an interesting comparison, but people know 1930s German much better.
As to solutions addressing the relative income stagnation that has occurred for people below the top 40% of households, there are plenty of them, but they generally include things like addressing the aging of the US population through immigration, re-unionizing the middle class, and focusing on massive rebuilding of infrastructure, including educational infrastructure, all things that the Red States viscerally oppose.
