Are Americans so angry about politics because the U.S. is declining as a world power?

[Stoneburg]

The point of economical politics is to redistribute wealth. Democratic governments do it democratically (somewhat). If you raise taxes, you redistribute it. If you lower taxes, you redistribute it. If you leave them the same you just keep redistribute them as you were before.

There’s political/democratic redistribution of wealth and there’s capitalist/market driven redistribution of wealth.

[marshmallow]

This is the old theory about America being a drunk chasing its biggest high when it was the sole hegemon over the world. A concern for elites and central planners, definitely, but I find it hard to imagine your average Joe cares much. He just wants a good job, healthcare, and some decent TV.

[Stoneburg]

@marshmallow

This is the old theory about America being a drunk chasing its biggest high when it was the sole hegemon over the world. A concern for elites and central planners, definitely, but I find it hard to imagine your average Joe cares much. He just wants a good job, healthcare, and some decent TV.

I agree. And the bigger the gap between the haves and have-nots, the more problem.

But the problem isn’t just for the have-nots. The haves are frustrated by the have-mores. The have-mores are frustrated by the have-everythings. And the have-everythings are scared that the have-mores will catch up.

There’s a balance to be found somewhere. The US at the moment is pretty much the extreme end of the spectrum so it’s not surprising that they would have extreme problems.

Beyond a certain point, more material wealth simply does no good. If the US wealth was split evenly across the whole population, people would have more money than they need. Bigger gaps and more consumption isn’t going to give you happiness or increase your health. It’s going to make you miserable and kill you.

[Pleonast]

@Stoneburg

The point of economical politics is to redistribute wealth. Democratic governments do it democratically (somewhat). If you raise taxes, you redistribute it. If you lower taxes, you redistribute it. If you leave them the same you just keep redistribute them as you were before.

There’s political/democratic redistribution of wealth and there’s capitalist/market driven redistribution of wealth.

Umm, I’m not sure what your point is then. That the US redistributes wealth but doesn’t like to use that phrase? Or that Americans use the term “redistribution of wealth” differently then you do?

[BrainGlutton]

@athelas

This article is a must-read for why some folks are “angry” about politics (the adjective, by the way, always seems like a way to delegitimize the opposition rather than engage its points.

:dubious: Look, you know very well we’re not talking about a legitimate opposition here. We’re talking about this decade’s equivalent of the Anti-Masonic Party – a RW fringe so utterly divorced from reality that it would be more possible and desirable for mainstream Republicans to meaningfully engage with Communists, than for mainstream anybody to meaningfully engage with the Tea Partiers.

[XT]

@Stoneburg

And the bigger the gap between the haves and have-nots, the more problem.

I’m not seeing this as a major problem, to be honest. Basically, the problem right now is that the US is having a recession coupled with the partial collapse of our housing market due to a bubble.

But the problem isn’t just for the have-nots. The haves are frustrated by the have-mores. The have-mores are frustrated by the have-everythings. And the have-everythings are scared that the have-mores will catch up.

Where do you get this stuff from? It’s like you are projecting. The ‘have-mores’ constitute the majority of people in this country. AFAIK, they aren’t in any kind of serious angst about the ‘have-everythings’. And, again from my own perspective, the ‘have-everythings’ aren’t sitting about in a panic worrying about how they will keep the ‘have-nots’ and ‘have-mores’ down. Things simply don’t work that way here, at least not in my own experience.

There’s a balance to be found somewhere. The US at the moment is pretty much the extreme end of the spectrum so it’s not surprising that they would have extreme problems.

What extreme problems are you talking about that have to do with this old style class warfare bullshit? We have RACE problems, and we have economic problems (at the moment), but what ‘extreme problems’ go along with our supposedly extreme position on some kind of psudo-spectrum?

Beyond a certain point, more material wealth simply does no good.

Sez who? Why? Based on what? What do you think ‘material wealth’ is, and how is it used?

If the US wealth was split evenly across the whole population, people would have more money than they need.

Then our economy would collapse and the you Euro’s might actually look good for a change, ehe? If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets…

Bigger gaps and more consumption isn’t going to give you happiness or increase your health.

Depends on your definition of happiness I suppose. As for health, I guess it depends on how important that is to you. In my own experience, a lot of American’s aren’t really all that focused on heath as a major concern…if they were, they wouldn’t eat like they do, they would exercise more and take better care of themselves. These things have little to do with health care, if that’s what you were talking about, and more to do with what’s important. I agree that more consumption isn’t going to make folks happy or make them healthy. But less consumption is unlikely to do those things either if one’s focus isn’t on being healthy. As for happiness, well, one is only guaranteed the chance to pursue it…catching it (whatever ‘it’ is for each individual) is really up to each person.

It’s going to make you miserable and kill you.

Blah blah blah. What makes YOU miserable or might kill you may have just the opposite effect on me. Again, you are projecting…you obviously don’t like the US or how things are set up here, so you are projecting your own misery around the image of if you had to suffer to live here. I’d probably feel exactly the same about your own country (whichever one that is).

-XT

[Wesley_Clark]

Exit polls after the 2000 election showed the majority of Americans thinking we are on the right track as a nation.

http://www.pollingreport.com/right.htm

The trend starts dropping from 50-70 (where it had been for 5-8 years) in spring of 2002, and keeps going down from the 60s, to the 50s, to the 40s, etc. It is now up from the teens and single digits in 2008 up to the 20s now.

So you have to wonder what role 9/11 and the Iraq war played in everything. Plus for the middle class/working class/poor (who make up the majority in this country) the last decade was a lost decade because expenses went up while incomes went down for them/us.

Maybe it is just fatigue. Tons of things have hit us as a nation in the last 10 years.
The events of 9/11
The Iraq war, and finding out it was an unnecessary war of lies
Living in a nation constantly at war (with terrorists, in Afghanistan, In Iraq) vs. the 90s when wars lasted a week
The lost economic decade of the aughts, where most people lost ground
A media culture that encourages outrage on both the right and the left
The great recession and economic collapse
Concepts like climate change, environmental sustainability and the economic sustainability of the welfare state started to seep into public collective consciousness, and people couldn’t ignore those problems anymore. ie, people are more aware of these problems now, but we aren’t really doing more to fix them.
Maybe it isn’t so much our standing in international grounds as much as national exhaustion due to one domestic trauma after another.

[XT]

Could be the fact that we had a pretty nasty recession starting around 2000 too…plus a lot of folks lost tons of money during the dot com bust. That tends to bum people out. On top of that we have now had a second nasty bubble burst, one that was even longer in the making, and it takes time for stuff to adjust after something like this.

-XT

[RickJay]

@gonzomax

What pisses me off is not that China is the emerging economic power, but that we made them that way. They did not invent a better mousetrap. They did not figure out how to manufacture things better.

Yeah, Chinese people are stupid, not like Americans. There’s no way the Chinese could have figured this stuff out. They’re inferior.

[MOIDALIZE]

@xtisme

Could be the fact that we had a pretty nasty recession starting around 2000 too…
-XT

The 2001 recession was short and rather mild compared to past recessions. Max unemployment peaked at just over 6%.

[MOIDALIZE]

@RickJay

Yeah, Chinese people are stupid, not like Americans. There’s no way the Chinese could have figured this stuff out. They’re inferior.

I’m sure the Bangladesh-based manufacturers who are looking to swipe business from China will succeed because the Bangladeshis are “smarter” than the Chinese, or “harder workers.”

[Little_Nemo]

That’s a good point, but I’d nitpick it to say “you can hear about politics 24 hours day”. Many people choose not to. And while there’s a lot of polarization in the political arena, the bigger division is between those who are engaged politically and those who are not.

True to some extent. But the fact that these media exist shows that many people are paying attention. And we’re social creatures. Even if you and I personally don’t watch the news, we’re going to be interacting with people that do. It’s like second-hand news.

[Candyman74]

@Mr.Excellent

And as for military strength - there’s no one even remotely close.

For particular scenarios, yes.

Nukes are the great equalizer. When a bodybuilder and a 6-year-old-girl both have guns, the size of the bodybuilder isn’t really a factor.

In specific scenarios where the guns can’t be used, then, sure, there’s nobody close. The bodybuilder wins.

[BrainGlutton]

@athelas

The split is not so much left-right as insider-outsider, with those dependent on or supportive of government intervention set against those who resent it. This explains why well-connected corporations like Goldman Sachs can somehow be on the same cultural side as college professors, the SEIU, and the AMA. The fact that the disagreement is expressed in left-right terms is partly due to the Democrats being in power. Under a Republican administration, it’s unlikely that the tea party movement would be left-wing (too many left-wingers, rich and poor, depend on government to actively oppose it), but it might be a bit more like the Ross Perot movement; largely bipartisan but still dismissed by Those In The Know as crazies.

This article is a must-read for why some folks are “angry” about politics (the adjective, by the way, always seems like a way to delegitimize the opposition rather than engage its points. There are folks on both sides who need anger management lessons.)

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed…

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government…

As is often the case, a RW commentator has taken facts perfectly true if little marked, and completely misconstrued them. What Angelo Codevilla is describing there is not the government class – there is no such thing, it is an occupational category, not a social class – but a much larger thing, the white overclass, which is a social class and which supplies most of the institutional elite in government, corporations, etc.

From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind:

Understanding the white overclass requires revising the most common misconceptions about class. The discussion of social class has been confused for generations by Marxist thinkers, who made the mistake of completely identifying class with economic function. Like the Marxists, old-fashioned American liberal pluralists tend to misunderstand class. What they refer to as class is typically not a social class at all, but a mere occupational or income category, such as service-sector workers or millionaires. Meanwhile, the New Left which came to prominence in the sixties has tended to drop the idea of class altogether, in favor of race and gender. . . . In recent years, conservative ideologues have added further confusion by defining political factions and lifestyle subcultures as classes. . . .

In order to think about class in twenty-first century America, we must first clear our minds of these Marxist, liberal, New Left, and conservative definitions of class, and return to the older notion of class found in classical and European political thought from Aristotle to Montesquieu.

A class is a group of families, united by intermarriage and a common subculture, whose members tend to predominate in certain professions and political offices, generation after generation. Note that the class – the group of similar families – has an existence independent of the offices which its members tend to hold. Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about “the political class” or, with C. Wright Mills, about “the power elite,” are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite – top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country’s class system.

The United States at the end of the twentieth century has both an institutional elite and a dominant social class. The institutional elite is composed of upper-level officials in the federal and state governments, plus executives and professionals in the concentrated private sector and foundation and university executives (low-level government officials and small business owners are not part of the institutional elite). Almost all of the members of the American institutional elite also happen to be members of a single social class: the white overclass. To put it another way, the labor pool from which most elite positions are filled is the white overclass. The overlap is not complete. Though most members of the institutional elite belong to the white overclass, most members of the white overclass are not part of the institutional elite (since the overclass greatly outnumbers the elite); and – though this is uncommon – a person can become a high-ranking politician, military officer, judge, CEO, foundation president, or university president in the United States without having been born into the white overclass. It is possible to imagine a United States in which most members of the institutional elite did not have similar class origins. But that is not the country in which we live.

. . . The white overclass is the child of the former Northeastern Protestant establishment, produced by marriage (not only figurative but literal) with the upwardly mobile descendants of turn-of-the-century European immigrants and white Southerners and Westerners. Unlike the Northeastern establishment . . . this relatively new and still evolving political and social oligarchy is not identified with any particular region of the country (though it is concentrated in East and West Coast metropolitan regions). Nor does the white overclass dominate other sections through local, surrogate establishments, as the Northeastern establishment once did. Rather, overclass Americans are found in the higher suburbs of every major metropolitan area, North and South, coastal and inland. Unlike the sectional elites of the past, members of the white overclass are not even identified with the regions in which they happen (temporarily) to live. The white overclass, homogeneous and nomadic, is the first truly national upper class in American history.

Just as Mr. Codevilla says. But the point, athelas, is that the overclass, as such, does not have a vested interest in state power or an expansive role for public functions, as such – only to the extent such serve its class interests, or its individual members’ particular business interests or career prospects. Remember, these are the people who can afford to live in gated communities with private security; the effectiveness of the local police is proportionally less important to them than it would be to you or me.

[gonzomax]

@RickJay

Yeah, Chinese people are stupid, not like Americans. There’s no way the Chinese could have figured this stuff out. They’re inferior.

That was truly a stupid response though. China did not even have the use of decent computers. If you sold them one you could have gone to jail. But when our corporations found a way to get make more money , all the rules were gone. I don’t see any group as naturally more stupid than another. Most inventions come from China and India. That could not have happened without our corporations priming the well. It won’t be long before we are the backward nation.

[RickJay]

@gonzomax

That was truly a stupid response though. China did not even have the use of decent computers. If you sold them one you could have gone to jail.

And of course all the computers in the world were in the USA.

Seriously, Gonzo, what the hell are you talking about? Are you seriously telling us that Chinese are too stupid to figure out a way to get some decent computers?

[gonzomax]

@RickJay

And of course all the computers in the world were in the USA.

Seriously, Gonzo, what the hell are you talking about? Are you seriously telling us that Chinese are too stupid to figure out a way to get some decent computers?

Are you guys living in a vacuum? The US government had laws against us selling computers to China. They were after all ,our communist foes. We could not help the dreaded commies. Then Walmart found a way to use them and the rules fell down. American technology was kept from China until our corps found out they could make money. Have you forgotten they were supposed to be our mortal enemies?
They now have the technology for first rate computers. They will soon be surpassing ours. Computer chips are not made here anymore. Computers are not made here anymore. I worked for companies a couple decades ago that had to be extremely careful about what they sent to China in technology. Now is different. The technology that made us the front runners, ,that we spent many decades developing and refining, is now in China. They are not stupid. They do the manufacturing now. They are making the patents. They are refining and improving manufacturing processes. They will be the power of the future.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

Some Americans are pissed because we are going downhill but their personal philosophy doesn’t allow them to acknowledge the reasons for that, so they get frustrated and angry. That and we have a black President.

[Grey]

@gonzomax

Are you guys living in a vacuum? The US government had laws against us selling computers to China. They were after all ,our communist foes.

You do remember that they were the communist foes that the “we” liked since they didn’t get along with the real communist foes (USSR)? Right? The whole “only Nixon could got to China” thing?

[BrainGlutton]

@Grey

You do remember that they were the communist foes that the “we” liked since they didn’t get along with the real communist foes (USSR)? Right? The whole “only Nixon could got to China” thing?

“There is an ancient Vulcan proverb . . .”