That’s a weird characterization, given that the trend has been in the opposite direction: https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/6/3/11843780/democrats-we...
Also, frankly, the attempt to make it seem like the “left” has a monopoly on “people of color” and “immigrants” is offensive. Trump got almost 30% of the Hispanic vote, and it’s not because of the lovely things he said about Hispanic people. Abbott got over 40% of the Hispanic vote in Texas.
The idea that billionaires are going to form a coalition with nazis to oppress “people of color” is a leftist fever dream.
For the Democrats, I am not talking about AOC and Bernie Sanders (who will always be demonized in the media) but referring to most democratic politicians (and Republicans, of course) who bend over backwards to protect corporate interests.
Currently, the billionaires in this country are split pretty much equally between the two sides, the same way the country is split pretty much equally. They are a good representation of the society we created here. While many on HN know that model is flawed, unsustainable, and that we need to try something new, we also know that dinosaurs have a hard them to let go. The movie, music, and video game industries are example of groups led by greedy dinosaurs who resisted changes brought by the internet.
With AOC, we should be promoting and rewarding community success, as opposed to that of an individual like we do with the current pseudo-merit travesty system that we have. I do not see how this conflict with being highly profitable. I actually think that more people would be more motivated and more profitable with a more inclusive system.
For example, the Republican Party used to enjoy the majority of the black vote, but this shifted towards the Democrats during the latter half of the 20th century. Likewise, prior to 9/11, the Republican Party enjoyed the majority of Muslim voters, who shifted their support leftward in the following decade.
As for the Democrats, they used to have much stronger support from the white working class, but this once reliable voting bloc started eroding away from them since the 1970s.
The sustained economic prosperity of the post war years in the US mainstreamed market liberalism for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, giving birth to “neoliberalism”, rejecting their parent’s depression-era “new deal Democrats” skepticism of unfettered market capitalism.
Political demographics aren’t set in stone. They will change with events of the nation.
If AOC, Sanders and Warren took the reins of the party, they'd not only lose all support from billionaires, they'd go into vicious attack mode, funding whomever they thought could defeat them - both inside and outside the party.
I also wouldn't want to presuppose who the "other" might end up being. The far right might very well embrace Jews, Hispanics and Blacks while they turn on immigrants and muslims. But, there will be an "other" and their "otherness" will become a bigger and bigger deal over time.
I can’t find the article, but there was a story during the run-up to the 2012 election covering wealthy donors who switched to Romney in 2012. They interviewed one guy and his entire motivation for dropping support for Obama was, I kid you not, Obama telling him at a White House party in 2010 that he hadn’t gotten around to reading his self-published book yet. The donor thought it was really insulting that after all the money he gave Obama he hadn’t read his crappy book. This is especially absurd when you consider Obama was in the midst of battling the massive financial collapse and two foreign wars.
This is why I think bargaining with billionaires is dangerous. You’re never going to be good enough for them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/08/super-rich-iro...
> Last July, before he had written the [harshly critical] letter [about Obama], Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)
Here's a more recent retelling:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/leon-cooperman-eliza...
> For those unfamiliar with Cooperman’s history of bitching and moaning, this isn’t the first time he’s complained about being treated just sooo unfairly by a politician. During the Obama years, he claimed that the president’s description of Wall Street leaders as “fat cat bankers”—made in the immediate wake of the financial crisis before he would go on to be extremely business friendly—was encouraging “class warfare,” and that Obama’s “polarizing tone” was “cleaving a widening gulf…between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them,” i.e. the rich. Speaking of tones, Cooperman, like many of his brethren, chose to liken Obama to Adolf Hitler, and also got his knickers in a major twist over the fact that the president had the audacity not to write a thank-you note to Cooperman’s 14-year-old granddaughter for her unsolicited book of poems. So Liz Warren better shape up, and fast.
I'm particularly interested in watching African-American voting sentiments in the age of Trump. He seems to be bringing change.
I don't think you've adequately supported that criticism.
The article you're citing discusses the "top 4%" of income earners. That's a very different thing to "billionaires" of which there are 607 [Edit: in the USA].
Since the US has a FPTP system, the first layer of fighting is for both party nominations and is poor majority against (centrist) rich minority, which would have a clearer outcome if money in politics had clearer rules.
Edit- clarity
This is a fairly apt description of the Southern Strategy that Nixon rode to power.
Doesn't make you racist or a bad person to concede, in a debate, that which really is just millennia on millennia of human evolutionary biology at work. Does it make politicians irresponsible when they employ tribalism? Absolutely. No question. But it's abundantly clear the left and the right employ that strategy all the time.
Many commenters here appear to be testing the extents of mental flexibility in order to render their side of the political divide innocent of tribalism. I assume they are doing so because they believe conceding that fact is tantamount to being a racist. My assertion is that conceding this fact is not racist, it's just laying out contemporary political realities. It's just laying out behavioral evolution. We, as in "our society", put the screws to certain groups, because in our society doing so delivers votes. When it no longer delivers votes, maybe we won't do it? But for now, it's just how the game is played.
And all political sides play this game. It's just that different political sides put the screws to different "tribal" groups. And some tribes have the rare misfortune of coming under pressure by all political sides.
Nixon is obviously a good example of a politician who used tribalism to his benefit. I don't argue that at all. Because, again, conceding that doesn't make me a bad person or a racist. Just makes me a guy stating a fact.
Conceding the fact and still voting for them is. Yes, this is rampant on "both sides." It is still morally repugnant, and it continues because it doesn't cost them enough votes.
Political realities exist because people accept them.
> It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth.
More important, that alliance is already mathematically impossible. Trump only won by courting blue collar whites and a critical mass of conservative people of color. By 2050, Hispanic people will comprise 30% of the population. To ratchet up the racism while still managing to win elections (you can’t “annihilate” anyone without having political power), the right would have to pull in almost all white Democrats. But those are the most liberal group in the entire electorate, and a big chunk of the electorate’s socialists.
The mathematics of the situation is that there are billionaires, and 10-20% of the population that are riding the wave behind them. (These folks are disproportionately urban and suburban white people, and also disproportionately liberal.) There is no way to build a coalition with those people that involves scapegoating fully half the population that comprises people of color and immigrants.
You can limit people of color's access to the ballot box and turn away immigrants. Like rich people have regularly done for most of this countries existence.
Despite US culture’s obsession with slotting people into racial categories like “Hispanic”, Cubans in Florida actually have very little in common with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in California, Texas and the Southwest.
Whether that’s the case or not, I’m not sure how it’s relevant to the discussion of who Florida Cubans align with politically, since it hasn’t been proposed or discussed by Trump or anyone else.
Is there any particular reason to conceive of these people as belonging to the same interest group(s)? No. Do they even like each other? No.
That’s not what the parent said, they said that the right scapegoats various minority groups as a way of dividing the lower classes and bringing segments of them into alliance with itself. It’s true that fascistic scapegoating doesn’t operate along standard US racial frames, but not that the right won’t resort to them.
The other thing you’re eliding is the incoherent tribalism inherent to fascist ideologies. Since they have no real commitment to meaning or truth, all it takes is identification with their precepts and a particular authoritarian manifestation to adhere to them.
Pytester: If you're in the Bay Area, please get lunch with me. You are insanely bigoted and hateful against conservatives. Have you talked to a real conservative in the last five years? I have never seen such hate-filled tripe on HN.
Then
You are insanely bigoted and hateful against conservatives. Have you talked to a real conservative in the last five years?
You do see the irony here, yes?
>The British Labor Party, whose leaders compete with their Con-servative counterparts in advancing national interests, is hard put to save even a modest program of partial nationalization. In West Germany, which has outlawed the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, having officially rejected its Marxist programs, is convincingly proving its respectability. This is the situation in the leading industrial countries of the West. In the East, the gradual reduction of direct political controls testifies to increas-ing reliance on the effectiveness of technological controls as instruments of domination. As for the strong Communist parties in France and Italy, they bear witness to the general trend of circumstances by adhering to a minimum program which shelves the revolutionary seizure of power and complies with the rules of the parliamentary game.
The UK Labour Party didn't really cease being of the left and away from nationalisation until 1983, which started the march to being "Tory Lite" of Blair's New Labour. [1]
Around 1980 the centrist people split away from the party to form the SDP (they would much later merge with the liberals to become the LibDems).
What killed the left was "the longest suicide note in history" - Michael Foot's 1983 Election Manifesto. 1983 was the early election that Thatcher used to cash in the Falklands dividend. The Tories were on course for a major loss, or at best scrape a hung parliament prior to the Falklands, after they got a doubled majority and the pattern of the rest of the decade was set. No Labour manifesto policies could have answered that. Yet between that and the SDP it started the journey to Blairism, and almost destruction of the party.
Brexit may end up doing similar to the Tory party - they've kicked many of their moderates. Depending what the December election brings, it could get ugly... Bring popcorn.
[1] OK, if you want to be pedantic, the IMF loan Healey got in 1974, and subsequent IMF supervision kicked them toward the centre -- temporarily. Everyone remembers it was Healey -- no one remembers the negotiations started the moment they got elected because the Tories left no public finances, and of course there was that minor oil crisis. :)
It’s a way for Cruz to signal membership as part of the large minority of Hispanic Americans who are religious, anti-socialist, and have conservative views on abortion, crime, drugs, etc.
It’s a shrewd way to stake out and define a distinct identity for minorities who lean conservative. Look at Sajid Javid in the U.K. (where the Tories are in the verge of pulling in the majority of the Indian vote): https://www.politico.eu/article/conservatives-lure-south-asi...
> “Most ethnic minorities believe in the Conservative values of family, self-reliance and aspiration.”
Could you point to some reading that would help one become educated on this past history?
> At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left.
This is the third stage of Paxton’s five stages, the first three being:
> 1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
> 2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
> 3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
You might want to look into the Weimar Republic (the period of the region what is approx known as Germany between WWI and WWII). I'd start with Wikipedia. Babylon Berlin is a (fiction) series about that period. I guess you meant a historic book reading though.
Because that's some regularly overlooked context to the rise of Hitler, with his brand of fascism focused on anti-Bolshevik/communist sentiments which neatly played into racial theories [1] and stereotypes [2] that were rather common back then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
That said, I'd caution against putting too much emphasis on the possible parallels, even as there's a lot to learn by looking at them. That initial bargain--or rather, series of bargains--was made under very unique circumstances that aren't really present today. Industrialists saw the threat of the Great Depression (both in terms of the destruction of their wealth through purely economic means as well as the political consequences of the depression) and the possible rise of a communist German state as existential threats to themselves and their society. Richard J. Evans' The Coming of The Third Reich touches on the sheer terror over the possibility of a communist revolution a bit and how it influenced Weimar politics, given the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917: it meant not only confiscation of property, but also torture and death on a massive scale. The failed revolution in Hungary, and the White Terror that followed it, also made it explicitly clear that even failed revolutions would have immense levels of political violence. Labor unions and political parties associated with them were easy to associate with this; it helps that they weren't exactly predisposed towards them in the first place for a variety of social and financial reasons. The Nazis capitalized on (and pushed) the fear of communist revolution, both with the public and traditional conservative interests. There was also a sort of normalization of the presence of paramilitary activities and violence in Weimar and their use by political parties; if one was so inclined, it was apparently possible at the time to rationalize the Nazis as just another populist movement that wouldn't translate into lasting political power, and could even be co-opted. You also had a lot of nostalgia for the Bismarckian past and a very unhealthy democracy in the Weimar Republic; as such there wasn't much interest in defending democracy, such as it was, by the end. It seems as if everyone figured it could be replaced with something "better" in their eyes.
As for the industrialists and the rise of the Nazi Party, I'd suggest Diarmuid Jeffreys's Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine. It's not focused solely on the role of the firm in the Nazi's rise to power, but it covers it as part of a broader look at the company's history and what it eventually led to. Adam Tooze's excellent The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is somewhat related, with regards to the relationship between the Nazi Party and rearmament efforts and the Nazi process of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, through which the Nazis established control of "social, political, and cultural organizations...according to Nazi ideology and policy."[0] There are a few other books that might be of interest, but I can't think of them at the moment
I can't speak for its accuracy, but as a sidenote I found it fascinating and somewhat painful to read how the writer deals with homosexuality (quite negative). I suppose in its time this was a common enough sentiment, but it was still rather jarring.
We assume the 1% is white, christian and male, but is it? And insofar as it isn't, I think it's unlikely that scapegoats will be picked in the traditional (e.g. racist) way. One non-racial scapegoat category be criminals -- the right is already successful scapegoating illegal immigrants for a remarkable variety of issues.
Whichever group it is, some wealthy people will probably get caught up in it and flee the country.
Someone please convince me otherwise?
But I think the US has a few more steps before reaching that stage. Making sure people are obedient is a process that started long ago, by denying them healthcare, housing or education, unless they are disciplined enough to work and not to question the system; while regulating in favor of well entrenched oligarchy.
I think the best way to coordinate is by starting cultural trends. Sudden change and revolution almost never lead to anything, and if we look at the history of the US, it's "power" is exactly that: cultural change. The tech "class" is already attempting this, but I think the approach and message are wrong and don't resonate with enough people, to create something at the scale of the hippie era.
So the US really needs the US to save itself, but by developing an ever stronger middle class, and mechanisms to protect each other's health, while allowing for money to move around freely. And I think tech can be a part of that solution (no, I am not thinking encrypted chat, AI to hack the gov, or other non american kinds of weapons, but rather genuine solutions). The more power they have, the more they can keep the government in check.
You don't have to form any alliances if you control both sides and you have the media and the lumpenproletariat to your disposal. In the worst case scenario, the working class will engage in an ethnic guerrilla warfare (thus making the state even weaker and easier to corrupt) rather that a revolution against the elites.
The far right's concern is those who seem different, but there is also an intersection between billionaires and those who seem different. >30% of the people on Forbes 400 are of Jewish ethnicity and the far-right loves to harp on about it.
While there is absolutely no denying that the PRC and DPRK are totalitarian regimes, many scholars of political economy and sociology would argue that they are simply totalitarian in a different way; for instance, one common theme is that the notion of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia has conditioned us to think of totalitarianism in a very specific way with specific consequences. The issue is that totalitarianism can acutally be conceived of in terms of totality, a concept critics of neoliberalism use a lot.
See the work of Herbert Marcuse, who, while before the time of neoliberalism, argued the notion of totality in the West, while quantitatively not as bad as the regimes you name, was still more pernicious in the fact that we don't consider them totalitarian. Orwell was somewhat of a break in this style of thinking, but now we conceive of totalitarianism as Orwellian rather than otherwise.
I have a comment here[0] with more about this. In short, we tend to start from the assumption that are own societies are not totalitarian because the totalitarianism is natural to us. But it's also a mistake to assume that there is a "view from nowhere" which can tell us which societies are tolatitarian and which are not.
Haven’t they already done through new forms of mass culture? Many of these “conservative intellectuals” are little more than bought and sold mouthpieces of the ruling class whose voices are then algorithmically targeted and boosted through platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
And in many cases, what they’re serving up is actually little more than warmed over Nazism. Few people, for example, know that hatred of trans people was something first cultivated by the Nazis, who claimed that their existence was a disease of “Talmudic abstraction” of gender from sex. [0]
How many of the “superstars” on the right have built a career on or parrot this kind of talk today?
[0] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4188-the-eradication-of-tal...
Abe Lincoln and the Union were "right" (republican),many of the modern GOPs initial members were free black people. Of course by 2019 standards everyone of that era is far right in the US.
You have to also consider that even now left/right can mean different things in different societies.
Here is one way to put it: billionaires will lie in bed with whoever has their best interest. The group that has their best interest is usually the group that can't acheive it's goals through democratic or other preestablished process. The popular side does not need them, and being popular means doing the bidding of the majority non-rich. If republicans are very popular,democrats will be in bed with billionaires to advance their agenda.
It is a simple economics of supply and demand. IMO, history actually shows how ideology means little compared to ability to weild power.
You like many have this Us vs Them attitude where you've been sociologically engineered to group yourself with certain groups,the same is happening to others. This makes divide and conquer very easy to all available hostile parties.
I think there are plenty of forces at work that desire the fall of the west and America's global dominance. Everyone knows that even if major nuclear powers unite,defeating america in nuclear or conventional war is very very hard and expensive. The best way to dismantle such a large and powerful enemy is from the inside out -- similar to what the wesr did to the USSR. The billionaires have money but money means nothing if you can't spend it and keep it. Nation states control billionaires and billionaires exert a lot of influence on nation states. The American lead liberal world order is not beneficial to nation states all over the world and it keeps getting worse from their perspective. Billionaires are good at moving their money elsewhere,the problem is America's reach is far. You can see how so many parties have to gain from the great american division. I think billionaires backed or encouraged by hostile nation states desire to instill division that can be used to control america and if it comes to it,destroy the west. Bear in mind this is just my opinionated analysis.
At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left. This is simple self preservation. The far left will, after all, seek to destroy billionaires whereas the far right will seek out easier targets who look/sound different (muslims, immigrants, jews, gays, people of color, etc.).
The point where things start to become terrifying will be the point where billionaires give up on status quo politicians and start to throw their weight behind the far right. That's when the far right switch from being a bunch of racist, loser skinhead misfits into a well funded, slick and violent ultranationalist nightmare.
As far as I can tell, the current weimaresque neoliberal age is sputtering to a close and we're seeing the beginnings of this pattern re-emerging.