[MD] Dynamic Development at all costs?

[Krimel]

Chris,

I get the idea that your vision of a "right winger" is a bit different than
what it is over here. Left and right have meaning only with reference to a
center and what the Great Satan Raygun did in this country was radically
shift the center to the right. Prior to Raygun people like today's FOX news
and AM talkshow creeps were considered fringe crazies. Raygun legitimized
them. As you know any historical analysis is incomplete but I can think of
several things that allowed this to occur.

In his autobiography Bill Clinton identifies one of them as the civil rights
movement. While it finally made Americans face the consequences of our
fundamental belief that ALL men are created equal; it produced a huge
Dynamic shift. And that shift had negative consequences as well as positive
ones. Since democrats were seen in the South as pushing the changes; all the
blue states in the South became red states. In my state the Republican party
was so weak that even into the 70s they didn't even have primary elections.
Now they run the place. 

Perhaps a bigger factor was the Cold War which is where a lot of Platt's
rhetoric comes from. In second grade I remember being told what evil people
the Chinese communists were because they tortured people who didn't toe the
party line by sticking chopsticks in their ears. Also what evil people the
Russians were because they censored scientific research that did not conform
to the party dogma. What I took from this is that torture and censorship are
evil and that people who do it are evil. When I look around today what I see
is the communists are gone but we are censoring free thought and torturing
people.

This was a time when there was a real and present threat of nuclear war
every single day. Paranoia over the red menace resulted in concrete changes
in the US political system. Fear of the rise of a communist or socialist
political party resulted in changes to ballot access laws. This insures, to
this day, that political parties other than the two in power have almost no
chance of getting started, much less taking getting elected.

Yet another factor was assassination. The Kennedys and King provided sources
of inspiration and moral leadership and the vacuum they left behind was
never really filled. Johnson was one of the most politically effective
presidents in US history but he was not likable or charismatic enough to
actually move the hearts as well as the minds of the people.

>From the assassinations of the 60s and the radical changes of civil rights
to the defeat of our military in Vietnam to the political trauma of
Watergate the US currently suffers from a kind of collective PTS. We just
want it all to stop and be static for a while.

Raygun was a kind of dream come true. He was what Baulldriad might call a
simulation of a president. Not a real president but a hyperreal president.
An actor playing the part of a president so that the simulation no longer
had reference to the real at all. It has become its own justification. His
thinking was so simplistic, he took us all back to a kind of fantasy
"Pleasantville" were everything was black and white and Mrs. Cleaver always
wore pearls at diner time.

There was not shortage of oil, no complexity to the economy, no race
problems, no pollution; just a bunch of bureaucrats making life tough for
good honest folk trying to make a living. 

So when Raygun was once asked, "How can an actor become president?" His
answer was, "How can a president not be an actor?" The simulation has become
the reality. That transformation is complete. An AWOL drunken cokehead can
recreate himself as a war hero more valiant that decorated veterans and
former POWs. It is no longer truth that matters. No longer reality that
counts. It is the appearance of reality and the simulation of truth that
count.

But maybe reality has more substance in your world.





[Chris]
Oh, we have our few extremists here too, every country have I think, but in 
the real political debate, even the right wing parties and the 
Christian-democrats would be considered too far to the left were they to 
promote their agendas in America. The political climate or culture in a 
country has many different sources and roots, but the main theme in 
Scandinavian politics has been that of the development of a stable welfare 
state, in both Sweden, Denmark and Norway based on a broad cooperation 
between social democrats and agricultural-parties. Simply put, the 
development of the democratic system has for different reasons been one 
where the broad masses of the people have been a very active part in the 
formation of the state - especially during the 50's and 60's, and this has 
produced a tradition where the state is seen not as a unreachable, hostile 
entity, but a part of peoples lives that is natural. This I think, and many 
would agree, has to do with the democratic tradition. When the democratic 
tradition is a natural thing that reaches down through all of society to 
work at all levels people feel that they can affect the social patterns 
around them, and so this democratic tradition is quite probably the most 
important thing to explain the emergence of the Nordic Model.  In the case 
of Sweden this tradition have suffered somewhat over the last 20 years or 
so, young people have lost interest, and don't feel connected or don't have 
faith in the system. Most probably this has an intimate connection with the 
unemployment rate, something that in turn is in direct relation to 
international business cycles , oil crisis etc. Thus people feel alienated 
and left out, and within the political Establishment argues over how to 
handle this; by regulating the market in the old fashioned way or by 
allowing more privatisation and liberal free market ways. Everybody is quite

agreed about the need for moderation and balance though - you will find it 
very hard to find a real political party who wants to have a completely free

market without welfare policies.

Also I am inclined to agree with those analysis's who say that the youth 
today, having grown up within this system and not knowing it's historical 
development take it far too much for granted, and only when the current 
right wing government starts to change things around to much does people 
wake up and see all the things that has actually been built up during the 
years. That is just a personal parenthesis from my side though.


 - You have to forgive me if I bore you to death, the thing is that I have 
just been reading a lot about all of this, and I find it all quite 
interesting, and also useful to line things out like this.

Regards
Chris 

Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/