The last time we were here it was with Hoover, also a businessman that thought he could save the world. However, he gave us instead The stock market Crash of 1929 with men jumping to their death from skyscrapers, then men starving to death that were once millionaires because they bought on margin when they shouldn't have, then Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and the rest and 100 million dead from World War II on top of the millions that starved to death during the Great depression. Then after that 50 years of Cold war that killed another 100 million people in various gruesome ways. How many billions will Trump start the deaths of during the next 4 years worldwide?
begin quote from:
The Washington Post ... end of the end of history.
That's become a familiar theme the past year. From Europe's
anti-immigrant parties edging closer to power to Britain's
all-but-winning it with the country's …
begin quote from:
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ... end of the end of history.
That's become a familiar theme the past year. From Europe's
anti-immigrant parties edging closer to power to Britain's
all-but-winning it with the country's …
Donald Trump and the end of history
The Washington Post.
The last time we blew up the international system, it took two World
Wars, a Cold War, and a Great Depression before we were able to get it
back to where it'd been in 1913. With any luck, it won't require quite
as much this time around.
That, make no mistake, is what Donald Trump's election might mean. I
say "might," because we really don't know what he'll do in office. He's
gone back and forth and back again on almost every issue. But if he's
serious about jailing his political rivals, about cracking down on the
free press, about potentially abandoning our allies, about encouraging
them to get nuclear weapons of their own, and about ripping up free
trade agreements, then the liberal international order that has
bequeathed us a relative Pax Americana the past 70 years will be no
more. It'll be the end of the end of history.
That's become a familiar theme the past year. From Europe's
anti-immigrant parties edging closer to power to Britain's
all-but-winning it with the country's vote to leave the European Union
to Trump's ascension to the White House, Francis Fukuyama's famous idea
that free-market liberal democracy had vanquished all its ideological
foes and was the "final form of human government" seems to be, well, a
little more temporary. Just as he could have told you himself. Fukuyama,
you see, believed that just because we'd reached the end of history
didn't mean we'd stay in the end of history. That peace and prosperity
might not be enough for some people who would, "struggle for the sake of
struggle" simply "out of a certain boredom" from living in a world that
doesn't seem to have meaning or identity any more. And so we might see a
227 year-old republic succumb to someone who evinced only the slightest
respect for constitutional norms and even less for minority groups.
How has it come to this? Well, the white working class is letting out a
wail across the Western world against a political system they don't
think recognizes them, and a society they don't recognize themselves.
Add in the monotony of day-to-day life - why not smash it up just to see
what happens? - and you've got a global revolt against the global
order. Really, though, it's white men who are the ones rebelling against
an economy that they feel devalues their work, against a culture that
they fear is devaluing their once-preeminent place in it, and against a
mundane existence that devalues any kind of meaning. In other words,
it's about economic anxiety, it's about racial resentment, it's about
misogyny, but it's also about a general ennui.
Now, by a happy coincidence, the first 25 years of the postwar liberal
order had maybe the best and most broadly-shared growth in all of human
history. We built the UN to keep the peace, NATO to defend Europe, the
IMF to help countries out of economic trouble, and a middle class that,
if you were white, got the help it needed to own a home and go to
college. And then it was over. Productivity growth stalled in the 1970s,
and, at least in the United States, what economic growth there was
overwhelmingly accrued to the top 1 percent in the 1980s and beyond.
Part of this was due to Western workers having to compete with billions
of Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian ones after the Berlin Wall came down.
An even bigger part was good-paying jobs being automated into
obsolescence. And the rest was policy-tax cuts for the rich,
deunionization for the rest, and deregulation for Wall Street - which is
why inflation-adjusted median incomes stagnated even more in the U.S.
than in Europe.
But it's not as if Trump only won the people who have been hit hard by
technology and globalization. Sure, exit polls show that he did 16
percentage points better with people making $30,o00 or less than Romney
did in 2012. But in general, Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell has
found, Trump supporters aren't any more likely to have come from places
that have lost a lot of manufacturing jobs or have a lot of immigrants.
The opposite, actually. Nor are they just people who are barely getting
by. They tend to be a rung or two above that - decently middle class or
more - who nonetheless might feel economically insecure because they
haven't gotten a raise in a long time, and see everyone else around them
doing even worse. Indeed, their towns are the ones where white people
are dying younger than they used to due to the ongoing epidemic of
suicides and drug overdoses.
It's no surprise that these kind of economic grievances can ratchet up
racial ones. After all, as Harvard economist Ben Friedman found in The
Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, "a rising standard of living for
the clear majority of citizens more often than not fosters greater
opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to
fairness, and dedication to democracy." So a stagnant one can make
people meaner, less generous, and more suspicious of people who don't
sound, look, or worship like they do. But it's important to point out
that a weak economy isn't necessary for this kind of backlash. Any time
white people - and really white men - feel like their position in
society is being challenged in any way, this has happened. Like it did,
for example, even when the economy was booming during the civil rights
movement.
Or, it turns out, when the country's share of immigrants got close to
an all-time high this year. The fact is that a lot of white people don't
like being around minorities who haven't assimilated, and they don't
want to assimilate to a culture where they'll soon be a minority
themselves. Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos, for one, found that
even white liberals who aren't used to hearing Spanish in public became
much more opposed to increased immigration and much less in favor of
letting kids who were born here stay here if their parents were
undocumented once they were exposed to Spanish-speakers during their
morning commutes. Which seems to explain why, as the Wall Street Journal
found, the counties that experienced the fastest minority growth
between 2000 and today voted so heavily for Trump. His promises to keep
Muslims out, kick Mexicans out, and, as his crowds will tell you, build
the wall, are what a white majority that's scared of no longer being one
want. As researchers Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found, all you
have to do is remind them that the country is on track to being
majority-minority to make them endorse these kind of racially
conservative policies.
But it's not just minorities who white men are worried about. It's
women too - or one woman in particular. That was clear enough if you
listened to Trump's supporters. They weren't chanting that they wanted
to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but rather that they wanted to
"Lock Her Up." And in case you didn't get the message, they were wearing
shirts emblazoned with "Trump That Bitch," "Hillary Sucks But Not Like
Monica," and "Don't Be A Pu**y, Vote For Trump." Now, this isn't the
only reason they hated Hillary Clinton so much - far from it - but it is
part of the reason. There's still a socially-accepted hostility to
women being in charge, a fear that this would make a man not a man, and a
feeling that women shouldn't even try to act like men. Researchers
Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescall found that people experienced "moral
outrage" when they were told that a hypothetical female politician was
ambitious, but nothing when they were told a male was.
The last part is harder to quantify. It's that life at the end of
history can get, well, kind of tedious. You get up, you go to work, you
come home, you watch TV, you go to sleep, and then you repeat 20,000
times. For a lot of people, there is no great cause, no great conflict,
no great meaning to it all. The big battles have already been won, and
now there are just bills to pay and weekends to look forward to. The
problem with this, Fukuyama wrote, is that "if men cannot struggle on
behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an
earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause."
There are hints of this reality TV-ification of our politics in the
Trump supporter who admits he "could be as bad as Hitler" or the one who
thinks Trump is actually "a blend of Hitler and Hirohito." What, they
wonder, is the worst that could happen? Tune in tomorrow to find out!
The answer, of course, is that the world as we've known it might cease
to exist. From Turkey to Poland to Hungary, democratically-elected
leaders who don't believe in liberal democracy have already consolidated
power by curtailing the freedom of the press, the courts, and the
opposition. Now that might happen here. Trump's threats to "open up" the
libel laws, his attacks on a judge because of that judge's ethnic
background, and his praise for Putin even when it's been pointed out to
him that Putin has almost certainly been behind the murder of
journalists and political opponents are something dark and new in our
politics. And it's something that his supporters don't seem to mind.
Earlier this year, 84 percent of them said that "what we need is a
leader who will say or do anything to solve America's problems."
Constitutional conservatism this is not.
It's not clear what is to be done. It's true that for almost 35 years
now the liberal international order has failed to give rich world
workers the rising standard of living they expect. Insofar as that was
what was motivating Trump's supporters, we could redistribute more to
try to make the economy work for everyone. But Europe already does that,
and it hasn't stopped the rise of right-wing nationalists there. That's
because they just blame immigrants for stealing benefits instead of
stealing jobs. But insofar as Trump's voters were really driven by a
fear of a future where white men are no longer politically,
economically, and culturally dominant, there's nothing we should do.
Some things should not be accommodated.
It's possible that 2016 will be our own 1914. Not that we'll descend
into a paroxysm of suicidal violence, but that a world that was defined
by openness might give way to one that's not. For the last 70 years,
liberal democracy has guaranteed people's individual rights, and the
U.S. has guaranteed liberal democracy's right to exist. All of that is
doubt now. What will President Trump do if Putin sends the tanks into
Tallinn or Riga or Vilnius to ostensibly defend ethnic Russians against
persecution? Or if North Korea threatens to overrun Seoul? Whatever its
flaws, the liberal international order gave us peace and prosperity on a
scale heretofore unknown in human history. And perhaps in our future
too.
History was better when it was over.
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