More from the party of the working class:
There is only 1 way to make it fair. 100% estate tax on everyone.
Who is with me?
This is just trying to gin up some ammo for the next elections. Something they can say Democrats vetoed.
Party of the working class!
Billionaires are workers too!!
That’s why we have to kill off the “death tax” for good! It’s not fair that the descendants of billionaires would have to ever consider working to maintain their lifestyle.
And even under the current estate tax they never would have to consider that fate.
The last thing the GOP senators want is a Democratic policy that would heavily and immediately benefit their constituents. Otherwise their constituents might start liking Democrats a bit more.
Interesting offering from John Ganz comparing our current situation with that of the French Third Republic.
The Third Republic spanned the period following the Franco-Prussian war through to the collapse of France during the Nazi invasion. Basically, it was an era of mostly centrist and leftish government constantly being threatened by attempts to subvert the legitimate government by those on the right.
I struggled with what thread to put this in put sadly this seemed most appropriate.’
There is a great twist at the end.
Since when do they have a problem with eating flesh?
I’m guessing the lion paintings are there to ward off the zombie-demons?
Thanks, Scott, a thought-provoking read.
For me, though, this is the paragraph that stuck out:
But then alongside these familiarities there is the stronger shock of difference. The scale of poverty and degradation on display, even before the Great Depression hits, is a reminder that the world in which the Nazis rose was extraordinarily poorer than our own, with a fundamental fragility even for the middle class that neither the Great Recession nor the coronavirus have yet delivered to Americans. The violent legacy of World War I, its brutalization of an entire generation, is palpable in both the violence in Berlin’s streets and the literal shell shock afflicting multiple male characters: No recent American trauma can compare.
Especially combined with Ganz’s observation that the hard right has made little progress getting a foothold in the cities.
As many have observed, the pandemic has sped up societal change enormously. And the conventional wisdom at present is that major cities will have a heck of a time recovering. (I have no opinion of my own on the latter, from my vantage point as an elderly rural person.) But if these two things are true… American cities like NY will contain a whole lot of individuals who lose a great deal, who lose status, wealth, and power.
That’s excellent potting soil for a Hard Right. And the Trumpists have already laid the groundwork for a mythology where COVID was always a liberal plot to undermine real America.
Obviously, I am glad that so far urban America has not been friendly to the Hard Right. But I think Ganz might be overly confident that that will continue into the future. The poverty of Weimar times is probably less the point than the perception of fragility, and it seems quite plausible that we are headed into a period of fragility for urban people who were previously quite secure.
It has been years since I read Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic, but I’ve been working in that area for some time (my first novel is set in 1890s Paris) and I’ve been buried in other source material for the era. Paris of the late 19th century was a literal battle ground between adherents on the left and the right. On more than one occasion the forces of the right nearly toppled not just the reigning democratic regime, but the actual institutions and constitution of the country — during the Boulanger affair, for example, or during the Dreyfus affair — and street action by the popular right was a big part of it. So this observation, that in America the cities have not been fertile ground for the right in recent years, really struck me.
In recent years, we have been a country where the militant right emerges from the suburbs and the rural areas. The right of Republican France was peopled not by the poor, but by the wealthy, the middle class, the Church. The poor were solidly socialist and progressive and anti-church; or at least opposed to the excessive Church influence on the state that had prevailed for generations.
Maybe that division isn’t so different than our world. But cities like Paris were where the wealthy and the middle class wanted to live, so the battles took place in those cities. I suppose today, in the aftermath of white and middle-class flight, our cities are far more representative of the working poor than the middle class or the wealthy, and that accounts for the stranglehold that the politics of the left hold on urban districts.
I suspect given their tendency to blame the right for their ills, it’s more likely they turn to the hard left- aka the folks who think AOC is a dirty centrist (been seeing a good bit of those takes lately)
Dude, who is saying THAT?
A small handful of idiots.
The folks who think AOC isn’t liberal enough have websites.
The folks who think Trump wasn’t fascist enough are in Congress.
The actual far left folks (who are nutters)
Yeah they sound like the Tea Party type of idiot. You swim in strange waters, friend.