A lot of people I know like to express symmetrical fears about the political environment. They fear both Trump and the young Democratic radicals. Jews complain about anti-semitism on the left and on the right. Etc.
My fears tend to be more asymmetric. One reason relates to this song from Cabaret. Listen to it if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Ten years from now, what will the battlefield look like? My thoughts:
1. Hundreds of thousands of Trump soldiers will be dead, of old age or opiates.
2. Hundreds of thousands of new college graduates will have been schooled in leftist doctrine.
Regardless of whether symmetric fears are justified at the moment, I think that for the next ten to fifteen years, the most important threats will come from the left.
But my sense is that a relatively small proportion of the most extreme leftists want to have children. That gives me hope for the longer term.
I think we already are in the next ten years, a long drawn out regional battle over taxes and debt. The battle lines drawn when Cuomo doubled down his cmplaint against the mortgage deduction cap. Grassely on not giving that up, and Newsom of California going after another 3% per capita, in total. Local cities everywhere raising sales taxes to maximum. This is a tax sharing battle like we never seen. It is five years alone, if ever, to get New Yorkers to agree among themselves. California has a two year prop 13 battle ahead, a reinstatement of Obamacare taxes. And Trump will be facing a big jump in ten year rates if he can’t tax and sequester, for quite a while.
This is ten years, Trump and Gavin are in a legal battle over taxes ten years ago, this is long term.
Leftist not having kids would matter if we didn’t have immigration. But we do, which means even without having children leftist can hold and even increase their power. If anything lack of family and children just radicalized them more, especially the women.
Take a good hard look at demographics even with ZERO immigration. A non-white future is already here, it’s baked into the babies born in this county today. Also keep in mind that you don’t need the entire country to flat out be majority non-white. Some portion of whites will always be leftists, whereas the browns rarely split their vote to much.
The GOP think tanks already ran this math and concluded they won’t win any national contests in 10 years time.
Something a lot of people miss is the conversion of young middle americans into liberal urban americans. Talented and smart white kids from conservative families go to college and move to metro areas and become the next generation of liberals, replacing the liberals who didn’t have that many kids, and reducing the effective number of conservatives who did.
White folks gave us Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. Even if you had the magic to keep out immigrants, you’ve solved the wrong problem.
Mixed market economies with a welfare state aren’t the end of the world dude. Denmark is a pretty sweet place to live. Keep your eye on the prize.
I dunno, the divergence of the internet dreamscape from the tangible world is so stark that I find it hard to gauge where we are headed. Can the lefties really be as numerous and crazy as the pixellated mob appears to be? That notwithstanding, I expect the coming fiscal crisis to reset everyone’s notions of just what scarcity and wealth are. The last century has produced a long catalog of countries haplessly governing themselves to destruction. We shall see just how far American exceptionalism carries.
Young people are given to extremes of moral enthusiasm, but tend to grow out of it in time. Boomers were radicals once.
I doubt that leftists are going to have any significant control over the political system anytime soon. The popular ideas on the left right now (Example: Job Guarantee) are simply unrealistic and people recognize that. And even if they grow up and are elected, they probably won’t hold the same unrealistic ideas as they did before.
Something to this, yes. Gavin Newsom upon becoming CA governor made many on the left upset by bailing on the high-speed rail dreams.
The media-driven symbolism and imagery of hostility against men and whites can absolutely coexist with a cold fiscal austerity and grown-up attitude toward government spending.
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/norcross-fiscal-rankings-2018-mercatus-research-v1.pdf
Looking at a list of state fiscal situations the liberal states stick out as disasters (with a few basket case Appalachian states thrown in). California is ranked #42 out of 50.
Granted a lot of this is unfunded pension liability not quite due, but its not like its going to be easy to shirk those bills.
All of these states also have very top heavy tax funding. Rich peoples taxes rise and fall more sharply with the economy.
I’m just not seeing all this cold fiscal austerity. Sure, “moderates” will cancel a discretionary spending boondoggle or two from time to time. But the meat of fiscal problems has always been long term liabilities. Those are the things that always end in disaster, because by the time they slam you politicians are not equipped to handle that big of a sudden fiscal impact. If Venezuela hadn’t gone whole hog selling rights to future oil revenues that never materialized it wouldn’t have this bad of a downward spiral.
Note that the states in the best fiscal health are red states, despite much lower per capita incomes in many cases. Nebraska, what is your secret? It can’t be boring conservative white people…can it?
I’m not sure what to believe on this front. North Dakota always comes up as “best state to do business” despite no businesses wanting to flock there. If blue states are such fiscal disasters, then why do all the biggest, most impressive and profitable businesses want to be there?
Certain industries flock to established places for network effects. And many of those networks were built decades ago. When Silicon Valley was becoming Silicon Valley it was Reagan country. Wall Street has been in NYC forever.
New businesses seem to locate in other places. It’s obvious to me the VA was chosen over DC and Maryland for Amazon because it’s in a better fiscal situation and further to the right. Amazon had no problem moving away from AOC New York once it was apparent what NYC has become.
Ten years from now? That’s time enough for 20 million Trumpist voters to die of old age, and for 20 million Millennials or younger to graduate from college. Time enough to knock the zeal for politics off a lot of evangelicals, time enough for more people to accept same sex marriage as “ordinary”, time enough for courts and activists to establish whether abortion is legal and unobjectionable everywhere in the country or basically illegal everywhere. Time enough for adding another ten trillion or so to the Federal debt, and time enough for politicians right and left to reconcile themselves with a world increasingly dominated by Chinese and Indians and Africans. Time enough to add some new and exciting social issues to American debate — should selecting the genetic characteristics of embryos before pregnancy be something only the wealthy indulge in, for example, or should the government classify that as normal healthcare and make it available to all would-be parents?
The future looks … interesting.
>But my sense is that a relatively small proportion of the most extreme leftists want to have children. That gives me hope for the longer term.
that is what immigration and dysgenics is supposed to fix
>1. Hundreds of thousands of Trump soldiers will be dead, of old age or opiates.
Trump won, so there are obviously a lot of people besides old people who support him. The problem is these people are not in charge. Trump cannot do much, only tweet and sign impotent legislation.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Trump isn’t in charge because nobody is. The system has been running on inertia since Reagan.
The future belongs to people who have children. Think Amish, Mormons, Orthodox Jews. Think also of Phil Robertson, he of Duck Dynasty fame: 72 years old, 4 children, 13 grandchildren, and already a few great grandchildren.
The future will not be leftist, but instead more religious and tribal. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
Duck Dynasty has got nothing on Africa.
The right doesn’t like childless lefties but nor does it like immigrant brown people steeped in religion who have too many babies, for reasons vaguely like that which you’d have heard from a Democratic circa 1990, who didn’t like god-fearing people and overpopulation.
What the right wants is a moderately religious white family that has two kids and a dog.
The colleges have, for decades, been practicing discrimination against hiring Reps as professors. Their Gramscian March (thru the institutions) has been so successful that they have graduated into demonization of Reps.
Almost all colleges are indoctrinating their grads to demonize Republicans — and humans love love love to demonize. To be “morally superior”. All the top power, in Media, Academia, Politics, and now CEO businesses, are full of college indoctrinated grads who accept demonization of Reps.
This is terrible news.
We need vouchers for K-12, to reduce early indoctrination. We need more on-line colleges, with BS grad credentials that are as accepted as other credentials.
We need more Rep professors.
“The popular ideas on the left right now (Example: Job Guarantee) are simply unrealistic and people recognize that.” << I believe that Universal Basic Income is unrealistic. But a Job Offer Guarantee, that requires work in order to receive gov't benefits, is very realistic and plausible — depending on the level of pay.
One sample proposal: "Civilian Work Corps", with workers getting paid 80% of enlisted military folk, minus at cost deductions for dormitory housing, limited issued clothing, and cafeteria food, giving the gov't workers the duty to find useful work.
Something like this is coming, and is a better social safety net than most socialist ideas (paying the non-workers, for instance).
My initial impulse was to repeat Pat Buchanan’s point that the U.S. will be “The Brazil of North America.” This still looks plausible–but it doesn’t answer Prof. Arnold’s point, really. That prediction is rich with possibilities for analysis. And it’s less pessimistic than becoming the Argentina of North America.
One has to ask “Who does the future of Brazil belong to” and port that answer back to the U.S., looking for parallel examples.
= – = – = – =
Prof., I did watch the video and still don’t see your point. The future did not belong to the Nazis–they only thought it did. But they did wreck the society, largely through trying to rule much of Europe and then losing that war by fighting a coalition that far out matched them. So…the point of the video escapes me, unless you want us to grasp the moral certainty of the youth and the tendency of others to join the movement, or pretend to support it, based on the idea that everyone had to join
I understood the point of the inspiring “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is that inspiration can lead to hell. Paved with good intentions, and paved with great enthusiasm.
And moral superiority.
The fearful thing about socialists, including National Socialists, is their assumption of moral authority.
Like what AOC is claiming.
So that those who disagree can be, and are, considered evil. Therefore, it’s right to demonize them.
1. Will Trump get re-elected in 2020?
2. If so, the judiciary will have Trump appointments through out and push back agaisnt the far left
This is a worrying without a solution. If there is no solution, then there is no problem.
If “most important threats will come from the left.”, will Kling make political endorsements accordingly?
I still the future is the US is going down the road of Japan Inc. the last 28 years which is true with almost all modern economies as: All nations get very globally competitive, depend upon large companies with strong economies of scale and shrinking family formation. (With increasing government debt is main concern.)
1) Again don’t 80 – 90% go to college for a career and not be brainwashed? (And are the students are worse than 15 years ago?) While a decent number of people stay in the same Party, a lot people move conservative as they age.
2) One aspect with younger people (under 30) they have not worked in a thriving capitalist economy and may accordingly.
3) I would argue the Parties are moving faster and we have a policy well defined center in most cases. And most of dysfunction on politics is bad social media. (Compare the violence today to say 1968 – 1974 or 1919 – 1921. Or how crime drops continue to drop.)
4) I do wonder what happens to China & India and as their wages grow so might the working classes in the US. In the case of China they both seem to fundamentally fast but also hitting the Japan lost decade with a command economy.