this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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US Authoritarianism
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Michael Moore interviewed a bunch of GOPs of various ages. He separated them and asked the same question. "At what point did America veer off course?"
They all said the same thing; America was fine until they personally hit their 20's. The ones born in the 1950s thought the 1970s were the problem, and the ones born in the Disco Era blamed the Clinton years.
At risk of being downvoted, I am a conservative. I am a conservative for moral/social reasons. I consider our going off-course was a consequence of WW2 as those who fought would go home and seek a different way forward. That different way took a few years to brew but really came to light in the 1960's. Religiously, we had Vatican II council and the modern-rite Mass that gave the appearance the Church was throwing out her traditions and moral teachings. Socially, we had the introduction of "the pill" quickly followed by no-fault divorce and widespread legal abortion. Like these changes or hate them, there is no denying that these would have a HUGE effect on average family dynamics. Then Nixon opened China to the world and began the process of exporting industry to China. It started slow but continued to pick-up steam, hitting maximum industrial transfer during the Clinton administration. I was born after all these things. The effect is children being raised by only one parent, fewer children, men who cannot provide for their families without having a working spouse, and a whole host of trickle-down-effects like the fact that we now need 2x the housing to accommodate families of divorce.
Smart phones, AI, 9-11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and everything else people my age cite ... these are peanuts compared to the destruction of the family unit that happened by destruction of our religion, promotion of anti-natalism, dividing families, destroying jobs that are key to young people starting families, and creating an artificial housing crisis by doubling the number of houses needed per family.
First of all, thanks for showing a different perspective.
But that's just the way capitalism works. It not only destroys families, but everything in the way of profit maximization for the few chosen ones at the top. What conservative politics are striving to restore is merely narratives: of "good old days," of "a honest buck." But that's really only lip service. The system is fundamentally flawed. The selling out of the working class will continue until there's a violent revolution.
In the same vein, all this public kowtowing to our axiomatic corporate overlords as "job creators" is fundamentally flawed, because a) workers could organize all aspects of work themselves, but are being suppressed by an artificial notion of "competition" designed to divide the working class, and b) the jobs being created in the current system are often of the bullshit kind anyway. What a pointless exercise.
I'm a self-employed independent contractor because I don't like employer-employee relationships, so I agree with you concerning aspects of our current system. A better world is where workers are self-employed and own their own operations and everything that can work on a smaller scale does operate on a smaller scale. I'm not opposed to larger operations having democratic processes and would be happy to see labor unions buy up enough shares of the companies the workers work for to own the board of directors and make decisions for themselves.
I also agree that the commodification of everything is a problem. Take abortion, for example. There's an entire industry around promoting and earning revenue from commodifying the lives of these unborn children. We also need to stop defining success by career aspiration or income or other metrics that create a cultural desire for abortion of "inconvenient" babies.
That said, the big changes in family life did not happen because of capitalism. Families survived capitalism. It was some other change that happened. It was a change in the underlying religious and philosophical values of our society. The change was Vatican II and the modern rite Mass.