It’s a Red Herring….why talk about REAL issues?
The whole slew of Republican candidates don’t even acknowledge that climate change exists…
Maybe the plan is to ignore climate change to the point where the US turns into a desert and then the illegal immigrants that used to cross over to pick the crops will no longer have a reason?
Seems logical.
Well, the vast majority of the discourse of every national election I've seen is a red herring. We occasionally move forward or backward on social hot button issues, but the actual structural issues of our society go unaddressed. That is why income inequality between blacks and whites is worse in 2015 America than in apartheid South Africa. Capitalism marches on, and the government functions in the interest of elites regardless of who is elected.
I don't think we're actually going to see positive change in regard to structural issues. I used to think that people would want some sort of reform based revolution (i.e. not a Marxist revolution, since a Marxist revolution is pretty much an impossibility), but I remember a conversation I had with an older guy from Lebanon about this sort of stuff. He basically said that discontent will never achieve enough of a buildup for anything to happen in a 1st world country like the United States. We have it too nice here with all of our roads, electricity, water- and we also have everything that regimes have used to suppress people directly and indirectly like widely available cheap liquor, more people in prison than totalitarian China, a strong hold of conservative religious organizations, and an educational system that doesn't foster critical thinking. We also have so many distractions nowadays that most people can just absorb themselves into the internet, smart phones, games, etc.
You have to ask how bad would things have to get for people to care, and I've just become so cynical. I don't think that the conditions will ever really arise to foster positive structural change. I read Capitalism in the 21st Century (which is necessary if you want to be up-to-date on political economy), and he has basically demonstrated how the rise of the middle class is a historically anomaly that was brought about by rapid growth, and we're now returning to a slow-growth regime which, like every slow growth regime in history, is pretty much made up of a large underclass and a small upper class.
I really am cynical to the point where I think we're just going to remain in an oppressive system, even that our system could become far more oppressive than it currently is, and people wouldn't stop it. We're also going to continue destroying the earth through industrial processes until we get into some sort of global warming, water, or other crisis that really hurts or ends us. The reason I'm so cynical is because I think that when things get really rough, when this country drops into another recession worse than the 2008-2009 one, people will turn to anger, hatred, bigotry, etc. instead of recognizing the problems and working to fix them. Like, if you look at the rise of Hitler, he wasn't so popular in the elections prior to the Great Depression. Then it happened, and suddenly his sort of hate speech captured a large portion of the vote. I think the fact that Trump is gaining so much support shows that we already have an undercurrent of this in our society. So to sum up, I think we're going to head toward fascism when the going gets rough.
People these days don't even want to question the dogma of the United States, our common political assumptions, because they don't realize that so much of what we do is shoved off onto other nations. There are so many externalizes in the production of goods we use for our unsustainable lifestyles, but those externalities are disproportionately borne by the poor and poor nations. So I think that by the time our lifestyle captures up with us, it will be too late. We can ignore global warming because we have air conditioning. We can ignore drought and water resource depletion because our country is rich enough to pump it from large distances away. We can ignore trash build up and such because we literally dump it onto other countries. We can also ignore the presence of toxins in the environment because we're largely removed from our natural environment whereas people in other countries, who have to actually drink out of wells and rivers and such, cannot.
So there is my rant.
