Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

Vote, and remember

Off-year elections are generally dominated by the passionate and the aggrieved. The folks whose anger has been festering for the past two years show up, others don't. That sort of explains why, since 1934, the president's party has averaged a loss of 28 House seats and four Senate seats. It's sorrowful, in part because the anger is cynically stoked by intentional misinformation designed to keep the fires of grievance burning. That's not new - read Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) with its denunciation of immigrants whose ethnic lobby groups, criminal syndicates, and political machines were driving the white race to extinction - but it has become unremitting. The algorithms of the day pretty much guarantee that once you're spotted at the margins, you'll be fed a steady diet of paranoid fantasies until you finally lose track of reality entirely.

Sadly, the people most put off by the situation - younger people - are the ones with the most to lose, if only because they have the greater part of their lives yet ahead of them. The polling says that something like 70% of older Americans are following the election closely (a predictor of voting) while only 50% of younger Americans are.

Remembrance Day is nigh - this Friday - and the British, especially, will recall the sacrifices of their young to the follies of the old. King Chuck (I think of him as KC-3) will lay a (redesigned with his racing colors) wreath as someone recites Laurence Binyon's poem, "For the Fallen," which reads, in part:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
That same era produced William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming,"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
"The worst are full of passionate intensity." Apparently he'd been following things on social media.

People celebrated the coming of the First World War. Did you know? There was a sense that it would be a cleansing, rejuvenating experience that would free the world of the dead hand of the past that lay so heavily upon it. They were, in a sense, right: the flames that swept the continent did collapse, or terminally weaken, centuries of ruling dynasties and ushered an end, at last, to "The Long Nineteenth Century."

I've read some comparable reflections lately. That we'll finally be freed of "The Long Twentieth Century" and its outmoded structures and assumptions. (There's a long Foreign Policy essay from October 2022; if you want to skip the history, search for the phrase "four developments" which introduces the section on the end of the long 20th.) As indeed we might. I wonder, though, if we might not be surprised at the cost as our forebears a century past were?

Which is to say, vote. Vote for hope, rather than fear. Vote for the reasonable, not the passionate. And tell the young that the nation can be no better than their efforts make it.

All of which is, needless to say, quite off-topic.

David

Comments

  • "All of which is, needless to say, quite off-topic."

    It may be off-topic, but it's terribly important.
  • edited November 2022
    Off-topic, has a particular electronic home here; but off-topic in the human race resides in the minds of those so inclined.
    And as OJ stated, "terribly important", the vote.
    I've not missed a vote since I was first eligible, in 1968.
    Lastly, the Michigan political tv ads now amount to slander.
    Beyond me why they couldn't be taken to trial for a lawsuit.
  • no network or cable tv in our apartment. i am missing the slanderous lies in the political ads on tv. voting is all by mail in our 50th state. i took the time to even track our ballots. they both have been received and signatures validated and are ready to be counted, nov. 8th. ... i missed the 2000 election. i was in canada. back then, the joke, north of the border, was: can't those Americans COUNT?

    obama has used the phrase, "silly season." after Jan 6th, we are way beyond silly. One of the two major parties has become an insurgency. To my mind, the other barely deserves my attention anymore. Hairstyle anti-discrimination Bills? Jayzuz. To say nothing of the fact that the Demublican Machine screwed Bernie, twice.

    Yes, we voted. I voted with regret that there isn't a serious alternative. The Repugnants and Demublicans have made sure of that, between themselves. And since Hawaii is so very deep Blue, that "tent" includes all manner of extraneous, foreign stuff--- including Tulsi Gabbard, you will remember--- until the State Demublican Party canceled her membership. Ya.

    We must find a way around the Electoral College. Or eliminate it. But that's not going to happen. Here's one option, which I never hear discussed, ever. But many States have already acted upon it:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

  • In a nutshell: A short excerpt from David's link:

    The Long 20th Century Comes to a Shuddering End
    But mere rapid growth did not satisfy those of a right-wing temperament, who felt that a prosperity that was shared too equally was unfair and degrading. And mere rapid growth did not satisfy those of a left-wing temperament, either, for they felt that the problems that the market, even tweaked and managed by social democrats, solved did not produce even a partial version of the utopia they sought.
    That's about as accurate and succinct summary of America today as you'll ever find.
  • edited November 2022
    One should absolutely vote on perhaps the only day of the year when one is a public instead of a private citizen having an impact on a world superpower. Yet the linked article is a bit of revisionist history, of the false moral equivalency and "bad people on both sides" sort, at least as far as U.S. economics are concerned. It's almost as if the multiple red scares, the HUAC trials, and the Reagan revolution that decimated the residue of "the extreme left" never occurred. And Hayek is posited as some sort of level headed unbiased theorist when he has always been a libertarian champion of the right-wing. By way of one example, you could look at union membership which in 2021 was 10.3% in the United States, compared to 20.1% in 1983. What power do leftwing utopian visions have with zero labor power? Perhaps AOC and Sanders are what is left of that old vision of the redistributionist left, two among many hundreds of politicians, but beloved bugaboos. Today both parties have deep-pocketed corporate backers and this ties one hand behind the backs of any "utopian" extreme visions of the left.

    Interestingly, the author, DeLong, was one of the deregulate everything architects of the current situation we're in. From Wikipedia:
    In 1990 and 1991, DeLong and Lawrence Summers co-wrote two theoretical papers that became critical theoretical underpinnings for the financial deregulation put in place when Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

    In 2019, DeLong said that he and other neoliberals had been "certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics" of economic policies. While he continued to believe that "good incremental policies" might be superior, he concluded that they were politically unattainable because of the lack of Republicans willing to work toward such goals. Instead, DeLong said, he favored "Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of Universal Basic Income rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies." He concluded, "The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years."[7]
  • edited November 2022
    I found the following unsettling:
    Some Federal Agencies Aren't Fulfilling Biden's Promise to Give Time Off to Vote

    Federal employees are not given "off" time to vote as a general rule. Apparently, the President asked the agencies to give them off time to vote. I'm not sure that the President can do more than suggest; I don't think he can order paid leave to vote, but liberal leave has always been given if possible. The non-compliance for non-essential election day personnel surprised me, however. I wouldn't like to be in the supervisor's shoes about this.

    I do think election day should be a day off for as many voters as possible.
  • Election Day is a State holiday in HI. It could be made so nationally. Will it happen? Nope. By the way, with all-mail voting here, I wonder why we still need that State holiday? No one is complaining, though.
  • @LewisBraham I am reading DeLong's "Slouching Toward Utopia" right now. More on that, later. Watch this spot.
  • With all the available ways to vote one should not have to take time off to vote. You can vote early; you can vote absentee; heck; Trump even thinks it's OK to vote AFTER the election.
  • @Rossby- Yes, I agree also... was thinking the same thing. If time (with pay) is taken off, a receipt from the polling station should be required.
  • Filled out our ballots several days ahead and dropped them off early in the morning when there were very few people in voting area.
  • Same here... received email confirmation that vote had been received and counted.
  • One of our kid became eligible to vote this year. With little help from us, she voted like her siblings.
  • it occurs to me that in the 21st century, we should by now know which party controls what and by how much. Just a general observation, apart from partisan politics.
Sign In or Register to comment.