Just how awful are things going to get?

The question that I keep asking myself is probably the same one you’re asking yourself, to wit, Just how awful are things going to get? Will we experience civil war or social collapse?

I’m hoping that we will pull it out of the nose dive sooner rather than later. I’m hoping that Trump will exit the White House with something like grace and with nothing like violence in 2020. I’m hoping, too, that America’s Power Elite -- i.e., the rich and powerful who have been so eager to drown government in the bathtub -- will wake up to the fact that they just can’t keep doing that without taking us all down the drain in the process.

And, in fact, there have been at least two periods in recent American history where the Rich and Powerful have done just exactly that. After the 1929 crash, particularly in light of the recent Communist revolution in Russia, America’s wealthy realized that if they continued to monopolize the nation’s resources without giving something back to the working and middle classes, they faced the real possibility of revolution themselves. So, they did, albeit grudgingly, and the result was things like the New Deal.

The second time came, again, after a world war, that is, in the 1950s and 1960s when, again, social unrest and an increasingly dangerous Communist threat convinced our Superiors that maybe it was better to compromise with unions and the middle classes than it was to endure riots in the street. So, we had the Great Society and the stirrings of the welfare state.

The problem was that then the Soviet Union collapsed and China became a capitalist state in everything but name. (I’ve heard the regime referred to as “Merchant Leninist,” Libertarian in economics, totalitarian in politics.) Suddenly, it didn’t seem so necessary to compromise with the middle or lower classes, particularly since globalization meant that you could effectively export your labor costs over seas. 

Okay, so, now we’re in a situation where our elites have very little reason to compromise with us or anyone. And, by George, we find ourselves in a real crisis, with plagues and foreign threats at every hand, but with a government that was designed to be ineffectual (“drown in a bathtub,” remember?) and so which cannot manage an effecive response.

What happens next will depend largely on the intelligence or lack there-of demonstrated by our elites. If they realize that they have to head back to the 1950s and even (gasp) take a pay cut, then there is a chance we’ll get out of this all right.

But if they refuse to mitigate their demands, if they continue to arm their deplorables and send them out to shut down state governments and intimidate their critics, if they refuse to do what the rest of us learned in nursery school and, you know, share...

Well then...

I don’t see how we are going to escape some very, very serious pain, indeed.



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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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