A lot of ideas have been mooted to explain Christian radicalism and Fascist extremism among my generation of Americans.
Its cause is the same as that facing southern aristocrats in the 1850s, the accelerating pace of change.
I won’t relitigate the 19th century. But the 21st has seen change at ludicrous speed. Moore’s Law leaves nothing untouched. There’s no stability, whether in business or socially. Everything has gone online, from money to entertainment to community. What has come out looks frightening.
Just as was the case then, modern oligarchs have used these changes, and the fear they induced, to pit the middle class against itself, and against the poor. People like Bill Gates, Gordon Moore and Steve Jobs have been succeeded by assholes like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison. They’ve been joined by scions of inherited wealth, plantation owners like Harlan Crow who never did a damn thing in their lives except try to stay on top of the heap and make others’ lives miserable.
They act just as their Confederate ancestors did. They scare the middle class to death, telling them their lives are under threat but identifying that threat with people they want eliminated, not with economic and technological forces that could be controlled and channeled if we had the will to do it. Their aim is a Civil War they think will cement their status.
The trouble is that war is unhealthy not only for economies and other living things, but for oligarchs. The Confederate oligarchs were destroyed. The American alternative was the Great Compression of 1929-54, which drastically dropped the wealth gap between “High Society” and average workers. By the standards of the time Americans were lucky. Germans and Japanese who followed their fascist instincts were destroyed.
There’s enough wealth in America today not only to give everyone decency, but to do so without hurting our oligarchs to the degree the Great Compression did. The oligarchs just don’t believe that. With no clear idea where their wealth really came from (efficiency and the hard work of millions) America’s oligarchs have declared war on the rest of us. That’s how the Tea Party became Trump, and how Trump became Trumpism.
The only way through this mess is with an alternate vision. Joe Biden has provided one. It’s an industrial policy built around manufacturing and infrastructure. It’s about creating working class jobs that pay well and support the technological changes all around us. It’s not perfect. No policy in a democratic society is or can be.
But it beats the oligarchs’ alternative all to hell.
