Science advances one funeral at a time – Max Planck
For years it has been clear that real change wouldn’t come until the current generation of politicians and apparatchniks died off or were forced to retire in large numbers due to age.
One of Machiavelli’s maxims was that people don’t change. They learn whatever lessons they’re going to learn, become who they are, and then act much the same no matter what happens.
What we’re seeing with Sanders’ numbers makes this clear. He’s winning 90 percent+ of the under 30 brigade. In the Scottish independence referendum, we saw that minus the pensioner brigade, Scotland would have left Great Britain. Corbyn’s supporters tilt young.
And so on.
Now, these are very young people, being led by the very old: Sanders is a true civil rights baby, someone who actually walked the walk in the early 60s. Corbyn is a largely unreconstructed British social Labour politician from the sixties.
The left is being led by the remains of the last actually socialist generation. (Hilary’s close to that age, but was a conservative “Goldwater girl,” and she acts like it.)
But the people who are flocking to those oldsters are young, young, young.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And the people who are blocking left-wing change are generally old. Remember the Reagan Democrats? The Boomers, Silents, and GIs who gave their middle finger to the Great Society so long as they could have their nice suburban homes free of of “icky” black people?
As they die, change becomes possible.
They aren’t going to change their minds at this stage in their lives, the status quo is what they know and what they want.
What goes around, comes around. There is no end to history till we go extinct. The conservative era was never going to last forever.
What it has done is last too long–long enough to lock us into a rather nasty future. And because the conservatives have resisted any reasonable change from the left at all costs, there is a good chance some form of fascism will come to control many core countries.
This was expected. I’ve been warning for years that economic failure was setting up the conditions for fascism: You are more likely to get a Hitler or Mussolini instead of an FDR.
But, those on the inside, who are successful, don’t listen to those on the outside (like myself). They see no reason to do so, because they are “the winners” and the people on the outside are “the losers,” and why would you listen to losers?
And so, here we are. Good riddance to those who refused to deal with climate change and who presided over nearly 40 years of economic stagnation and decline.
The only problem is they have died too slowly. All humanity will pay the price.
(Caveat: You may be, and probably are, of the same age, and you’re probably a nice, good person who did not support these horrible policies. There are always some “Good Germans.”
The Hippies were great people who were right about almost everything. They also were a small minority who lost the culture wars.
So don’t take this post personally, though I know many of you will. (For the record, I think Gen-X, my generation, is pretty awful.)