This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are elected Republicans now saying that tariffs previously led to the worst depression our country has ever seen after supporting them just recently?”
Instead of asking why they “are now saying,” you should ask, “Why didn’t they say so before?”
The answer to your question is easy to figure out through simple “pocketbook logic.” It can be endured if something affects someone, be it health, mood, or anything.
The moment something affects their pocketbook, however, it becomes a serious matter.
Up until now, they believed their pocketbooks were safe. Now, they no longer believe that.
They now believe that their pocketbooks are being severely damaged. Now they think their long-term economic future is in jeopardy. They now fear losing their jobs and being forced into the poverty they have been creating for their constituents for decades.
In many ways, sadly, this harsh dose of life-threatening reality might be the kick in the butt of the complacency of a nation.
Nothing can motivate 350 million people into united action more effectively than all fearing for their lives.
The longer the public and the authorities allow this economic destruction to continue, the more likely the entire world will experience a severe depression. If that happens, there will be no placating the massive chaos that will ensue without taking dramatic steps to reign it in, such as by instituting Martial Law.
If Trump can maintain his power while instituting Martial Law, the odds are excellent that democracy will be set back one hundred years. We can then expect a return to an almost primitive social existence with gated communities for the elites and the rest of humanity living like herd animals.
If Martial Law is instituted through a military coup where Trump is hauled off to prison or shot for treason, then it will take the rest of this century for the world to restabilize. We will experience a dramatic restructuring of government processes, such as through a modern version of a “grand new deal.”
On the back end, for those lucky enough to survive the nightmare, humanity will earnestly face the environmental challenges we’ve been postponing.
The sooner we can reassert sanity, the sooner we can adjust our behaviours and restructure our collapsing societies as we transition into a fully automated system for human civilization to thrive.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “With the stock market plummeting, market prices soaring, and unemployment on the rise, is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?”
One would think so. One would hope so.
However, history dispels that delusion.
If people remembered who was responsible for what, there would be few Republican members of Congress today.
DonOld Trump is considered “below water” in his numbers at an historical level, but that only means less than half of 350 million people support his performance.
Here are the daily results on Real Clear Politics, which aggregates results from multiple pollsters:
47.8% Approve of his performance and 48.5% disapprove of his performance.
From a polling and historical perspective, these numbers are considered disastrous for this president. Still, the reality is that almost half of the nation, by extrapolation, supports this wrecking crew of an administration.
There are over 150 million people who should be paralyzed with fear over the prospects of their future who are cheering on the destruction engine as it wreaks havoc over every aspect of their lives that they count on to survive.
These people are more focused on politics as a team sport in which they view themselves winning even though they may be losing everything. As long as their team remains in power to hurt those they hate, they care for nothing more beyond that because they expect the lives they’ve grown accustomed to living to stay as they’ve expected. None can conceive of the great steamroller bearing down on them because they believe it’s meant to destroy only the neighbours they hate.
They won’t realize the horror of the situation they are creating for themselves until being directly confronted by it. Even then, they won’t admit to being responsible for making their fates and will deflect responsibility onto their ideological enemies.
The greatest lesson we are learning about modern humans that we have been able to overlook throughout history, primarily, is the impact of mental health on the stability of our societies.
We have been living with generational PTSD for thousands of generations and have accepted many toxic attitudes and behaviours as “normal,” while in today’s world, we’ve begun asserting a need to address these toxicities. The consequence has been an escalation of toxicity because those most afflicted cannot and will not seek help for their dysphoric conditions. They will escalate their rejection of responsibility for their destructive behaviours and attack those who seek to address those behaviours to help cure our species of their horrifyingly destructive impacts.
Anyone who has dealt with abusive behaviours understands how the abuser becomes most dangerous when they feel that their grip on power is loosening. They despise it when their victims become more capable of defending themselves against them. Their response is rarely an act of introspective self-awareness, leading to acknowledging how they are being asked to transcend their hatred. Their responses are almost always an escalation and a vicious attack against those who shine a light into their darkness to force them to confront its ugliness.
DonOld Trump will never acknowledge his responsibility for escalating international conflict because he sincerely believes himself to be victimized by his victims for not simply rolling over and capitulating to his demands.
Almost 150 million Americans think like he does to varying degrees and that means Americans will be plagued by Republican betrayals of basic human decency until, like addicts, they hit rock bottom and realize they won’t survive without acknowledging how much they depend upon the support of the international community in which they belong to and begin begging for assistance.
That won’t happen until at least after they trigger a deep depression.
That also won’t happen mainly because their opposition is also in denial over the severity of their problems. They still mistakenly believe that they can reason their way back to sanity.
The DNC is still primarily in denial that they and their nation are in a war that will destroy them unless they can stir up the passion of love of country to match the passion of destruction driving their opposition. They’re still trying to play by the rules of decorum while denying how those rules are irrelevant to a monster who ignores them at best and who weaponizes them against the DNC.
This approach turns off a large contingency of potential voters because it is construed as cowardice, and to a large degree, it is. They can’t help but continually lose against an aggressive enemy when they perpetually move toward compromise.
At some point, compromise is more toxically destructive than full-on aggression, and the DNC hasn’t yet realized that it has long passed that threshold. They lost the ability to compromise when they didn’t hold the Bush administration accountable for their war crimes and now the chickens have come home to roost.
This does not bode well for America’s future and spells hardship, at best, for the rest of the world.
This is a period in human history and global politics with at least as significant an impact on our international culture as WW2 has had. How much more severe the impacts will become is impossible to guess because we haven’t even come close to the horizon that will allow us to perceive, let alone acknowledge how massive the engine of destruction is that bears down upon us all.
thotbag 