Socially how the next 20 odd years will play out

I think there are two dynamics at work. On one level, there are the elites, who have decided that they have no further use for a functioning middle class. On the other level, there is an intergenerational problem in that the elderly demographic bubble hates and fears its own (generational) children. It’s very easy for the elites to keep the masses busy by prompting the teabagger generation–a generation which already hates its own kids to the point of working to deny them access to healthcare or any government investment–channel teabagger resentment into even greater hatred for the uncertainties created by youth.

It’ll only get worse as the population ages. The elderly are deeply conservative and demand stability above all else. When the majority of voters are 65+, riots or political activism by younger people (under 40s) simply will not be tolerated. This is the current situation in the US.

The most probable result from a demographic crackdown by the aging baby boomer bubble against the subsequent generations will be a reversion to stable authoritarianism. Failed states and revolutions don’t happen without fractures within the elites around which competing centers of power, in alternative to state power, can coalesce. Mass protests in absence of sectional elite support end only in massacres and further repression. Political events of over the past 30 years, of course, can be largely defined by the creation of a unified elite with very high levels of class solidarity. No one of consequence will break ranks from their class peers on account of repression against the public. There will be riots, but the only consequence will be further repression in an endless spiral into authoritarianism.

I do not see a any probability of positive reform until the aging population demographic is reversed (i.e. after the baby boomer generation dies) and missteps by supreme elites fracture elite class consensus and lead to the use by disaffected elites of popular anger to alter the balance of power within the elite class. It is highly likely that no one currently alive to read this post will live to the day to see it happen.

I think one thing that doesn’t exactly bode well, but is perhaps a path to a better future (albeit one that goes through a very bad decade or two) is that most of the steps of repression you’ve outlined push people out of the system. There has been a nascent movement in this country to simply create new systems outside the old. We’ve even seen local currencies in some areas. From what little I’ve seen, some of the more simple ways have grown more popular in recent years (for example, I believe there’s some stats showing an increase in home gardening). Now, there will be attempts to crack down on this, too, but it’s harder to do than to simply crack skulls or turn off internet connections.

On a related note, anyone interested in building these alternative systems – or in simply escaping corporatism – should cheer the 11th Circuit ruling yesterday striking down the mandate for health insurance. That people on the alleged left actually defend the right of the Government to force you to buy an expensive, defective product that won’t actually protect you or the Government from financial ruin just shows how far we have to go, IMO.

Reading your post I was wondering what you thought of the direction that canada’s heading in. It seems the situation there is a little different from the rest of the wester world. Yes it has a conservative government but the switch to the NDP as the opposition party of choice also seems to indicate that at least in quebec the population really is heading in a more leftwing direction.

Also considering the fact that my country is unwilling to solve any of it’s problems, and you mentioned before that canada’s economy is tied to the U.S. what do you think will be the effects of the coming renewed downturn on canada. To what extent will policy up north be able to ameliorate it.

Stewart

the conservative old have nothing to gain and everything to loose.

the liberal young have everything to gain and nothing to loose,

Yes, there are conservative young, ones with everything to loose, and liberal old, ones with nothing to loose.

Any some outliers. These are rare.

I don’t agree that the elderly hate their children, or that intergenerational conflict is a major force. It’s more a trumped-up talking point. The neither the elders nor the young are trying to take Social Security away from the other — the rich are trying to take it away from everybody else.

The tea partiers are a media creation, a short flash in the pan, a fad of lazy political analysis that Fox worked up into some poorly attended demonstrations. It’s about fanning the flames of the politics of resentment.

The elderly ripping off the young has been the elite’s preferred explanation for why the social welfare programs are evil and have to be dismantled. Is there any evidence that it’s true? My experience has been that the people who learned political framing with Reagan (e.g., people now in their thirties and forties, especially white males) are more conservative and anti-government than either the younger or older cohorts. In any case, unless there’s evidence of this much touted intergenerational conflict, I’d be reluctant to spread the let’s-all-fight-among-ourselves-over-crumbs propaganda.

@stewart m

I think a lot of the change has to do with the economy. Put simply a lot of americans are convinced that some group is going to have to pay for this recession through a reduction in living standards and the older generation doesn’t want it to be them. As for why this is happening i think theres been a notable decline in mass solidarity among the american left.

Most leftwing groups these days operate much closer to corporate lobbying groups than mass political movements, with a narrowly defined single issue focus. Animal rights, gay rights, environmentalists, feminists, antiwar these groups tend to operate wholely seperate from each other and are willing to sell each other out for small victories. It’s bitterly ironic but the old phrase “I’ve got mine where’s yours.” might be a better description for the american left today than right. Corporate interests have shown a surprisingly good united front, and even the evangelical bigots have been willing to ally themselves with right wing catholics and mormons to get what they want.

In a situation where the right is strong and the left is fractured it’s no wonder right wing policies are getting passed. But this brings up a more fundamental question. Why is the left fractured? We could talk about the split over liberal interventionism, or the tensions between white workers and racial minorities, or even the liberal contempt for religious movements but i think that’s ignoring the elephant in the room. The reason why the left is so fractured in the U.S. is that major left leaders abandoned class.

Unions embraced business unionism which frowned on struggle and prioritized compromise and deal making, liberals focused on issues of sexual and racial opression while ignoring social inequity and abandoning the politics of redistribution. In short without class the basis for the earlier alliances between these disparate groups that made up the left dissapeared. And without class as an organizing principle people fell back on identity politics as a means of creating networks of support. Which brings us back to why the elderly are selling out their kids. It’s simple, almost all politics in the U.S. today are now identity politics, special interest politics. And if politics even among so called progressives now amount to “i’ve got mine where’s yours” why should the elderly act any different. There just another group looking out for their best interests, and if they don’t take care of themselves no one else will.

And, oddly enough, I’m witnessing more older people trending left as they age. It’s not just SS or Medicare or personal issues, at least with those more politically active there’s also the question of “What kind of world do you want to leave as your legacy?” And they don’t like what they’re seeing.

In my weekly visits to my Mom’s community, I’m seeing that as well. It has accelerated in the last couple of years.

Michael

The reason why the left is so fractured in the U.S. is that major left leaders abandoned class.

Wholeheartedly agreed. The great tragedy of the American left and recent history was the battle between the hardhats and the hippies, in the late 60s, that gave Nixon and the conservatives their chance. Both sides were right, and both were wrong. More importantly for the future was that the New Left then was largely made up of the young from educated and privileged backgrounds, for whom the American labor movement must have seemed like a bunch of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.

(I’ll now offer apologies to any Neanderthals who happen to be reading this thread in advance, given some of the flame wars of late).

It would have taken a leader of great skill and personal charisma to bridge the chasm back then between the Old 1930s Left and the new 1960s Left until–to put it bluntly–both sides learned better. Maybe RFK could have been that leader, or maybe one didn’t exist. But that battle created the first cracks in the New Deal. Labor was the first to suffer for it; now if Ian is right in the outlook for the next 20 years the hippies (who value personal freedom and diversity) will be the next.

StewartM

So there will be a renewed, and successful push towards what might be called the biometric surveillance state. You will carry ID, your biometric data will be centrally located as well as stored on ID, and this data will be used to control what privileges you have access to (you have no rights.)

Already happening. And already being sold as some kind of advancement by the DHS, TSA, and that criminal John Pistole, abetted by the craptastic press, who eagerly sucks up the shit that’s being spewed and spits it back out at us. The so-called Trusted Traveler program, another scenario ripe for abuse, another profit-making boondoggle for “security” corporations, is the authoritarian program du jour.

Also, agree with Michael’s assessment of the fracturing of the left. As Chris Hedges, among others, has repeatedly pointed out, too many on the left abandoned social justice in favor of identity politics.

The civil rights movement was both identity politics and social justice politics. It was also the kind of populist movement politics that the 1948 intellectuals wanted to avoid, and Democrats ignored it as long as they could. After 1968 the civil rights movement was transformed into an interest group, one identity group among others competing for federal goodies. This was the preferred model of politics for the 1948 intellectuals, basically derived from urban boss largesse. Often enough the goodies were purely symbolic. I’m not black, but in my opinion, MLK Day, MLK Avenue, Black Studies Departments, and Black History month all put together don’t do the black co0mmunity as much good as a 1% reduction in employment or a $2 rise in the minimum wage would.

StewartM

Many of the New Left were David Horowitz dawks—doves on Vietnam become hawks when Mideast trends demanded dual loyalty-ish shifts from the latent covert to the overt.

Horowitz switched teams for other reasons, as I remember. He totally rejected his whole political past, and not on account of Israel, as I remember.

I realized that destabilization serves the interests of people like the Koch brothers. You could just keep throwing people in for-profit prisons and turn the whole country into a gulag archipelago of Koch brothers for profit labor camps. It really would be like China.

As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on.

You analysis sounds spot on to me, especially the stuff about a growing biometric surveillance state.

For those of us who don’t have the means to leave the country (or simply want to stay and fight on principle), what I’d like to hear are some ideas of how we can collectively fight against this. Going to jail one by one as individual conscientious objectors doesn’t seem very effective.

On NPR just during this week there was a story about how police departments all over the U.S. were getting brand new $3000 toys. Link:
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/138769662/new-police-scanner-raises-facial-profiling-concerns

Biometric scanners. The NPR piece’s radio tone was jokey, as in how this ‘nonlethal’ device will hurt/maim/kill way less people than the taser. For balance against the pure awesome of catching criminals w/ fake IDs getting away, they had an ACLU lawyer and a Univ Prof, who respectively gave a bland cautionary warning, and a more specific fear of stalkers using the same tech to track ex-lovers.

Of course, as Ian and comments noted, the incompetents who are in charge still have no quick n cheap way to get us all registered into this national retinal scan system. I say this, b/c no cops, upon being given such a harmless device, wouldn’t just go around scanning everyone. Of course not! Or, perhaps, doing even more of that harmless racial profiling every single person darker than themselves – why, I’ve never heard any cases where they did such things w/ tasers, and they’re much less happy police state time for its victims! And besides, where’s the harm in it? What, do you have something to hide, hippie?

(this being the internet, sarcasm tag was on that last graf. gotta make sure)

Throughout the U.S., family members (and some friends I think, unsure) of cops get a ‘Fraternal Order of Police’ sticker for their car. As far as I can tell it’s how well off white kids avoid DUIs, busting big parties, and drug busts. I wonder how fast such a tech filter, compared to the speed of this biometric stuff coming online, will appear? And, of course, how quickly some of those disenchanted hackers at Anonymous and LulzSec will find it out? I give it maybe a week, unless Anon wants to give em more rope to hang themselves with.

This is an interesting slice that partially describes what is already happening and has been for at least 50 years and especially more since 2001. The article’s title, however, belies the message. It might be better titled “Big Mistakes in the Current Police State.” More than an observation in future social trends it is a statement of our present loss of civil rights. I find it rather dull, however, since there is no new information and the predictions, if you can call them that, simply reflect what we already know and what is currently taking place. It does not address the root cause of these already occurring events nor does it tell us where these may lead, except to note that there may be more resistance. To say that British prisoners are hardened bunch and to keep repeating that brutal treatment of people is a big mistake s rather banal. Historically these conditions are the norm. It was only for a short period in the entire known history of human civilizations that there has been a middle class and any significant civil rights. The rest of the story of civilization is the story of a few powerful and rich dictatng to the bewildered mobs how to live, what to eat, where to work, and what they can and cannot do. Where is the historical context in this blog? In fact, where are any references to facts, statistics etc. Seems more like the rambling of someone who is beginnng to wake up to what has already been happening to our civil rights for the past 50 years. Anyway its a good to know that others are beginnng to understand our plight and I do not want to discourage even these latecomers from writing about the sad state of moderen civil rights. In a few years hopefully this writer’s content and style will also improve. Keep trying!! Also suggest reading Zinn’s history books. He was a great writer on these and related topics.

John Emerson:

There are layers and layers of reasons why this doesn’t happen. Many educated, somewhat aware Americans think that politics is dirty, and that “ideology” is all lies, and that the left is discredited, and that activists are a joke.

What struck me when I read this is was how:

a) Republican sex scandals, which seem to outnumber Dems;

b) Republican “dirty tricks” and like sending out leaflets with the wrong date for last-chance voter registration. Also transparently partisan things like redistricting and vote suppression;

c) “Ideology” like the Tea Partiers which is quite frankly flat-earth.

d) Coupled with this–the idea that government is incompetent, aka the debt ceiling fiasco.

Notice I focused on the sins of the “other side”. I did because even when the conservative/Republicans screw up, they win. They create the impression that public servants are a sordid and immoral lot (many are, but not for moral trifles like who fucked whom). They create the impression that politics is “dirty” and all about partisan “dirty tricks”. They create the impression that intellectual frameworks by which to interpret events is what loons do. They create the impression that government is inherently incompetent when it is in fact not.

In short, it’s in conservatives’ interest to get the public to think that “all” politicians are scoundrels, that all politics is dirty and partisan, (what? businessmen are moral??? Sheesh.) that political ideology is only for the insane. that government is incompetent. They of course are aided mightily in all the above by the he said/she said mainstream media that’s been intimidated (or bought) into describing politics using the framework of “balanced” at the expense of “accurate”.

Many have a sort of above-the-battle attitude and only want to supervise and police what the activists are doing.

Which ties into what I said above. Ian says we yearn for a Robespierre. I differ, because a Robespierre or a Lenin acquiring power requires a particular set of circumstances I don’t think we will see. But many do yearn for a non-partisan, “above politics” technocrat.

The danger is that fascists of the 1920s and 1930s presented themselves as rising “above” partisan politics.

StewartM

Hmm, I have no positive ideas; my ideas revolve around bringing the system down! Once and for all!
Then I want to hear the creative, the positive, the pragmatic, the benevolent, the generous, the; oh, wait, that’s all an impossible dream………….

Extended families (where the people are truly related) are hard to pull off these days because so many people live so far from their cousins, uncles, etc. What we’ve basically done is harvested rural and small town America of its “best and brightest” (e.g., people who could afford a decent education, not necessarily the best people there) and sent them off to work for corporations via universities, law firms, etc., in bigger cities. We’ve also forced those who do blue collar work (and I don’t strictly mean manual labor, I’d include adjunct professors, temp workers, etc.) to become itinerant, moving from one hot labor market to the next looking for jobs. At least those who can. The rest are forced to stay and work for minimum wage at some crappy clerical or retail job or are unemployed.

I have pockets of my family where they still all live in the same area and from a family perspective, it seems like a really great thing. They have a huge support system, despite everyone being in everyone else’s business and all the little petty dramas. Having said that, I also know recent college graduates there who are having to decide whether to stick in the area where the family lives where all they can get is a Walmart job or try moving to some place where they’ll have a “better” life. Not an easy decision.

I live further away and have had to build an extended family of close friends, etc. It works, but you have to stay in one place a long time (most of them I’ve known for 20 or so years now), which a lot of people cannot do in terms of jobs, and even if you can do it, the friends may not be able to.

I don’t think it’s fetishism but economic reality that has forced so many to focus on the nuclear family. It’s the only family near them.

Child-rearing and education. Whew.

I want to preemptively state that, in the interests of simplification, some of what follows may sound like strawman-building. Yes, that would be true if I were arguing with any of the previous commenters, and I most decidedly am not. Especially not this crowd, whom I hold in the highest esteem. I am “purifying” some concepts in the interest of exploring some points. I beg your indulgence.

As pointed out here, the extended and nominally “dysfunctional” family is the natural state, warts and all.

The “nuclear family” as defined by the current culture is the sharp edge of a wedge designed to strike insecurity into the hearts of real families, a prelude to getting one’s “marching orders” on proper family structure and behavior.

And so the Corporate State plays on this, ultimately asking us to deliver our children to the propaganda version of the “extended family” – create a sharp division between family life and public life.

The Corporate State pulls off a nasty trick of breaking and re-forming the concept of “family” for its own ends. (It is us, of course, because we are all caught up in the messaging.)

The liberal version of this is “it takes a village.” But this is only good if “the village” is healthy. It is not. So we slog along trying to “improve” our schools, which are in the grip of a sick producer/consumer paradigm of human nature, and these “round” children will be crammed into that “square” model, so help them Invisible Hand.

Conservatives react with homeschooling, private schools, etc. Liberals see this as subversive, and it is a great point (Jesus rode a dinosaur, WTF?) But this is simply reactionary behavior gone wild, because the village is broken, and the two sides struggle with this. (I will note, strongly, that the xenophobia and reactionary attitudes against “multiculturalism” – a ridiculous issue that I cannot go into here – by the right, do indeed make cloistered education toxic, and the left is very correct on this.)

The conservative ridicule of “it takes a village” has a real basis, albeit frequently for the wrong reasons. Ditto liberals’ horror at homeschooling. Regarding children and family, both sides are right and both sides are wrong.

Such is the sorry result of a public sphere that has been commandeered by sick interests.

It is tragic that this drama is being played out on our children, along with the other arenas. Would that we could at least leave *them* out of it, but the truth is, kids is prime-pickin’s when it comes to propaganda.

This is not a black and white issue that can be laid at the feet of children and family choices, but what is black and white is that there is “something” wrong with the zeitgeist, en toto.

/Concern troll off. 🙂

…I end up going through my extended family (~23 people) figuring out who’s in good shape, who will need help, who will give help and who probably won’t.

You, sir, have a beautiful heart.

Back around 1970-75 everyone I knew was into alternatives to the nuclear family, but a high proportion of them were not into childraising at all and were looking for more freedom, not really for a larger extended family.

FWIW: as I said, I have witnessed a good many nuclear family failures. Extended families are to be preferred because the more people the more chance (as a kid) of finding someone to be with who’s sane. I grew up in something like an extended family situation (moreso than the norm today) and I can now look back and see the advantages of it: mom and dad had more sources of financial backing, as well as people to set them straight when one or both were going to do something stupid plus the kids get their own “advocate” when need arises (these are usually called “grandparents”).

But one of the paradoxes I have witnessed of late is that the very people who are materially best fitted to create a successful nuclear family–the well off–often make the worst parents. The same “me first” self-absorption that drove them to doing whatever it took to land that high income means that they have no time for their kids, who they almost let go feral. I have met a number of these type kids online as college-aged young adults, and their parents have no time at all for them. They don’t go to their graduation, they can’t be bothered when they get awards, they don’t help them move to college, it’s amazing.

And those are the good examples. The bad ones are when they leave them alone on weekends off on some personal or career junket and the kids, unsupervised, throw hellacious house-wrecking parties complete with alcohol and drugs. You’d think the parents would then get a clue, but after cleaning up the mess, such scene repeats again and again and again. Some of these kids have then went on to develop either substance abuse problems and/or mental problems because of this.

As someone who couldn’t step out of my yard without permission until high school, and whose family would have read me the riot act for doing anything close to that–I am astounded. I mean, when this repeats over and over and over again, and finances are not any problem–I mean, wouldn’t you arrange adult supervision even if you HAD to be out-of-town? (Moreover, my impression from one story I’m thinking of is the parents were out of town on personal outings, not business). It seems that with rich parents they think their responsibility is taken care of by writing a check that cleans up the mess, and that finishes it. No investment of time or companionship need be involved.

Keep all this in mind when someone will write an article, and I’m sure someone will, about the “failure” of the black parenting of London which created those rioting “beasts”. Poor nuclear families suffer a lot of material problems, and they’re hardly placed in a good environment, but they don’t fail for reasons like the examples I gave above.

-StewartM

Other people are picking up this topic:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/guest-post-austerity-and-runaway-inequality-lead-to-violence-and-instability.html

There’s a lot to read there, with lots of links and a nice trio of pictures at the end.

Great thread. I am going to read it again tomorrow. I am so glad I found you, Ian. Again.

There will also be continued removal of the right to travel, with no-fly lists moving to trains, and later to bus stations and eventually there will be a ramp up of stops of automobiles.

With or without the excuse of Muslim terrorism?

If without, that would represent an uptick of overt class war.

Decades of Murdochized media have done their work, then.

The masses come down on the side of their own class enemies.

I’m going to put in with Ian and Celsius233 about the “supervision” side of things. Had to let the parents know what I was doing, had to be back for meals (or make sure I told them before if I wasn’t), but otherwise largely unsupervised.

As for the extended family thing in general, I saw lots of the Cambridge/Somerville crowd in MA looking for “intentional communities” and sharing child raising, etc. The problem I always had is that these communities always felt very closed off and in each others’ business all the time.

Maybe I missed it in the text, but I think the article about why young people don’t fight back is missing one very important point – background checks for jobs. Add that to educational debt and it’s a great recipe for control and compliance. You owe tens of thousands of dollars, which can never be forgiven, when you graduate = you need a job. If a background check shows some sort of protest, labor organization, etc., activity (or misdemeanor for same), will you ever get a decent job? Hell, is Walmart going to hire someone who worked to organize unions, much less someone who got arrested protesting?

The rest of the list may all be true, but except for the drugging (which is another important point), most of those factors existed previously. Television and education has long been about conformity, for example. Maybe it’s moreso now, but it’s not new.

And put me down as one of the many and lucky who could simply go out to “play” when I was a kid so long as I was back when I was told to be back and didn’t go where I was told not to go (e.g., no crossing certain busy rural highways).

Great post and comments. I agree that the London riots are an important event. I would say its more of a continuance of past events but with an important political twist. It’s really remarkable how these incidents from London, to Watts to Newark, to Harlem to Detroit to Overton (Miami) and so on always seem to have the same common ingredients – a long oppressed and neglected minority community, a suspicious police action, a protest then riot. Also, “austerity” is the norm for those areas but what I think is the twist I mentioned above is the multiracial and in some cases multiclass, makeup of the rioters. Apprently, they were not just the “usual suspects in the usual areas”.

In my terms it would be if a similar riot erupted in Bed Stuy and white kids in Bensonhurt or Park Slope rioted as well. I think one of the articles Lisa posted from the NY Times in of one the older threads mentions the multiracial and multiclass aspect. Of course they missed the point which is that there seemed to be a loose cross racial and class solidarity that started to coalesce that TPTB would be wise to note and pay attention to instead of doing what they are currently doing which is the usual moralistic finger wagging about “bad parenting”, “gangsta rap” et. al and further security clampdowns.

Oh, I forgot; that was in the 5th grade.

There has been a radical increase in the supervision of children over the past several decades. On average, children used to have a mile and a half radius from home where they could play spontaneously. Now, it’s more like the block where they live as long as someone is watching them. There are issues about the child’s ability to act independently today.

This is not to dismiss the problem of parents who are too busy to pay adequate attention to their children, but a lot of it may be emotional exhaustion in a high stress economy rather than lack of attention to micromanaging children’s lives.