SimpleDon
Veteran Member
The title of this thread could be a template for any number of threads that we have seen here recently. The various threads seem to be searching for explanations for the current partisan divide that was exposed by the results of the recent election. Needless to say, this the same on every political and economics blog in the US.
I have another explanation for it from reality economics that you may haven't heard yet, but which is at the very least, a step in the direction of an answer.
To understand this explanation you have to understand what the word "precarity" means. I have heard it called economic PTSD for the age of neoliberalism.
More formally, Dictionary.com says,
Understanding that leads us to the word "precariat", the segment of the population that is suffering from precarity.
According to The Nation, 2020 Was the 'Precarity Election' subtitled Democrats’ failure to address the issue of economic precarity undermines their claim to be the party of the working class.
They argue that the moderate Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism with its use of precarity to suppress wages and liberals obsession with social justice issues for minorities and women will doom the Democrats to continue to be the party that will increasingly see the votes of the precariat go, ironically, to the main sponsors of neoliberalism and income inequality, the Republicans, since people who are buffeted by insecurity don't want to see political change and feel better with conservatives in office. As the authors of the article put it,
This is one of the advantages that conservatives have in the political arena. Fear drives voters to vote for the Republicans. Instability drives voters to vote for the Republicans. More often than not it is the fear and instability that the Republicans have created. We are in the fourth wave of a cycle where the incompetence of conservative governance creates a crisis so serious that the voters elect a Democrat.
We had Watergate and the exposure of the criminal Nixon that lead to Carter.
We had the S&L deregulation delusion I crisis, Iran-Contra, and austerity-driven recessions doomed Bush Sr and lead to to the election of Clinton.
Then we had 9/11, wars started by intentional mistakes, the bungling of the occupation of Iraq, Karina, numerous cabinet scandals, and the deregulation delusion II Great Recession all by Bush II and lead to the election of Obama.
Then we are up to the Trump administration and almost daily reminders of the incompetence of conservative governance, bordering on authoritarianism and fascism, attacking the foundations of our democracy, culminating in the total incompetence handling the pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, barely doomed the petulant Trump, the first impeached president to run for reelection, and elected the moderate Biden.
In the previous three waves, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, the conservative propaganda machine got to work immediately, inventing scandals and crying socialism and crime running rampant in the streets along with thinly veiled appeals to racism, all accompanied by the maximum amount of Republican obstruction in Congress, all to scare voters to re-embrace conservatism until the next time that it becomes obvious that conservatives can't run the government.
Once again, I ask the question, what do you expect, you vote for people who say that the government is the problem to run the government, why would you expect them to run the government any other way but incompetently?
Would you pick the CEO of Apple who didn't believe that computers work, that computers are a problem and not a solution?
I have another explanation for it from reality economics that you may haven't heard yet, but which is at the very least, a step in the direction of an answer.
To understand this explanation you have to understand what the word "precarity" means. I have heard it called economic PTSD for the age of neoliberalism.
More formally, Dictionary.com says,
Understanding that leads us to the word "precariat", the segment of the population that is suffering from precarity.
According to The Nation, 2020 Was the 'Precarity Election' subtitled Democrats’ failure to address the issue of economic precarity undermines their claim to be the party of the working class.
They argue that the moderate Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism with its use of precarity to suppress wages and liberals obsession with social justice issues for minorities and women will doom the Democrats to continue to be the party that will increasingly see the votes of the precariat go, ironically, to the main sponsors of neoliberalism and income inequality, the Republicans, since people who are buffeted by insecurity don't want to see political change and feel better with conservatives in office. As the authors of the article put it,
This is one of the advantages that conservatives have in the political arena. Fear drives voters to vote for the Republicans. Instability drives voters to vote for the Republicans. More often than not it is the fear and instability that the Republicans have created. We are in the fourth wave of a cycle where the incompetence of conservative governance creates a crisis so serious that the voters elect a Democrat.
We had Watergate and the exposure of the criminal Nixon that lead to Carter.
We had the S&L deregulation delusion I crisis, Iran-Contra, and austerity-driven recessions doomed Bush Sr and lead to to the election of Clinton.
Then we had 9/11, wars started by intentional mistakes, the bungling of the occupation of Iraq, Karina, numerous cabinet scandals, and the deregulation delusion II Great Recession all by Bush II and lead to the election of Obama.
Then we are up to the Trump administration and almost daily reminders of the incompetence of conservative governance, bordering on authoritarianism and fascism, attacking the foundations of our democracy, culminating in the total incompetence handling the pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, barely doomed the petulant Trump, the first impeached president to run for reelection, and elected the moderate Biden.
In the previous three waves, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, the conservative propaganda machine got to work immediately, inventing scandals and crying socialism and crime running rampant in the streets along with thinly veiled appeals to racism, all accompanied by the maximum amount of Republican obstruction in Congress, all to scare voters to re-embrace conservatism until the next time that it becomes obvious that conservatives can't run the government.
Once again, I ask the question, what do you expect, you vote for people who say that the government is the problem to run the government, why would you expect them to run the government any other way but incompetently?
Would you pick the CEO of Apple who didn't believe that computers work, that computers are a problem and not a solution?
