Divining the Future
let's get crazy
Let us analyze three current issues in the hope of illuminating the future. I suggest the following:
The rise of MAGA and independent media means the end of the educated class’s over-under political formula.
Settling the Ukraine war means the end of the US running European politics.
Taiwan is part of China.
End of the Educated Class Political Formula
Victor David Hanson addresses the Democrats’ problem when he wonders “Is There a Democrat Blueprint to Regain Power?”
As I have written for years, the Democratic Party operates on an over/under political formula where the party maintains power by “representing” the oppressed peoples. In other words, it makes privileged white people the enemy and fights fot the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. And after the win it hands out bennies to the oppressed peoples.
I assume that part of the strategy of Trump’s DOGE is to show that it’s all a sham. In reality, the educated class is in the business of dishing out benefits to the educated class through grants, NGOs, whatever.
Perhaps the George Floyd riots of the summer of 2020 were the last gasp of the old political formula. And perhaps the transgenders in women’s bathrooms and womens’ prisons was the final exposure of the utter fraud of helpless victims and peaceful protest.
In his “Blueprint” piece Hanson fails to detect a new vision in the Democratic Party. So probably the Democrats will be in the position of Republicans in the decades after World War II when ordinary Americans had a picture of FDR on the wall. It took LBJ’s Great Society and Carter’s stagflation to change the rules.
But we shall see. With the end of the monopoly of Mass Media it is now possible for independent ideas to get a word in edgewise.
End of Ukraine War
In my view the Ukraine war signals the end of US hegemony in Europe that started with President Wilson joining the fun on the Western Front in 1917. The fact is that we don’t really care about Europe any more, and we don’t care about Ukraine. It’s pretty clear that the whole Ukraine thing was an intelligence community setup — with 10 percent for the Big Guy. I get it; we set up the defense system and the intelligence agencies to help fight the Cold War against Stalin. Today it is obvious that the rulers of western Europe are mindless robots and need to experience a dose of reality, free from the hegemony of the United States and with a US-less NATO.
I suspect that the Russians are probably ready to spend a few years licking their wounds, especially after demonstrating that they don’t have the means to beat Ukraine outright in the way that Stalin overran eastern Europe in 1943-45, funded wholly or in part by US Lend-Lease. Hey, so maybe the Euros can defend themselves against the Russian bear.
China and the Taiwan Question
Or is it Taiwan and the China Question? Either way, Taiwan as an independent state is a consequence of the Century of Humiliation followed by the Japanese invasion, followed by the further humiliation of China adopting a European political model with the regime of Mao Zedong. I’d say that the resolution of the Taiwan question would help China revert to its traditional self-understanding as the center of the world with everyone else no more than barbarians. Could China take over the Pacific? Maybe, but traditionally China has allowed the peoples outside China to be semi-independent as long as they showed the proper respect for China. There is also the fact, I believe, that the Belt and Road Initiative is not such a roaring success as people think, and there is the additional problem of China’s real-estate nightmare.
Point is that if China does not have an external enemy then it might weaken the regime and force it to change its domestic political arrangements. Remember, a Trump MAGA movement of the Chinese middle class would be “inconceivable” given the totalitarian rule of the CCP that allows no input from the Chinese people. Unless. You do know that there are thousands of peaceful protests in China every year.
My Agenda for America
Milton Friedman opined:
As history shows, over a long period of time, government will spend whatever the tax system raises, plus as much more as they can get away with.
Ok, so here is the history of federal tax collection in the US since 1900.
You can see that, since World War II, the Feds have been collecting between 15 and 17 percent of GDP, with federal income tax about 10 percent of GDP and FICA taxes about 6 percent GDP.
Could we get it down to, say 12 percent? Maybe by privatizing Social Security and Medicare? Right now, it would be politically impossible, because seniors. But suppose that the MAGAs do a march through the institutions and demand a universal IRA account for every worker, because jusrice, and allow wage-earners to put a little of their FICA tax in their IRA? The harder thing would be to privatize Medicare. I just don’t see how American women would buy that in 2025.
But I Have a Dream, that one day Americans will say: you can take your gubmint pension, your gubmint health care and your gubmint education and put ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
But that day is not yet.