In hard times such as we have now, we find a widening gulf between the Have-a-lots and the have-barely-enufs.
In our already Great American experiment, we have two political parties that represent the interests of their respective halves of this econo-politico pie.
Bleeding hearts who want to construct an egalitarian society advocate taxing the rich so the poor can have more to live on.
Capitalizing hearts want to construct a society that maximizes the capacity of each person/family to make their own way in the world without .gov interference.
Through the history of our already Great American nation, this dualistic system has taken various forms. The most obvious one is the political divide: Democrats v. Republicans.
During the hard times such as we have now, our public discussions extend multiple branches with multiple iterations of the haves v. have-nots scenario:
rich or poor, slave or free, capital or labor, white collar or blue collar, red state or blue, republican or democrat, elite or working, coastal or heartland, rural or urban, snooty or downhome, college or high school, privileged or taken-advantage-of, welfared or well-heeled, cool or square, labor or management, snarky or goodoleboy, stockholder or stakeholder, believer or atheist, episcopalian or evangelical, high or low, to or fro, shutup or don’tchaknow, come or go, ho chi minh or hohoho .
But in these hard times, as pandemic and economic conditions divide us, further separating our Left from our Right, the terminology becomes more intense, and potentially more vitriolic, as players in the public games fling forth a term such as:
Communist v. Capitalist,
which pertains to an economic system in which any particular citizen’s stake lies in their access and profiteering from the “means of production.” Which was, almost two centuries ago, the term by which Karl Marx referred to what we would call today our business-industrial infrastructure.
Over these last two centuries, that Communist v. Capitalist dichotomy has played out in many iterations, the most notable one being: United States v. Soviet Union, which later morphed to Cold War or Glasnost, East v. West.
In my lifetime, which began in 1951, I have observed with dread and curiosity as our World War alliance with the Soviet Union degenerated, incrementally into a worldwide Us v Them contest that initially pitted Capitalism v. Communism.
But by 1989, the big question got settled when the Soviet Union fell apart, yielding Russia and all those previously-satellite Socialist Republics, which were now sovereign countries.
In my humble opinion, that was progress. I think most of the world would agree with me.
Since that time, rhetoric surrounding these ideological issues and political divisions has been applied to our domestic politics at home.
When I was a kid growing up in the Deep South, calling someone a Communist was, without a doubt, an insult.
As the years rolled by, we generally fat ’n happy Americans divided ourselves quite peaceably into Democratic and Republican identities.
As we had so much prosperity during this lifetime, and most folks were pretty well taken-care of by the system, our terms for political insult went through some changes. In recent years, the term “Socialist” has replaced “Communist” because everybody knows that the Stalinist Communists screwed up terribly when they whipped up an oppressive gulag system, every bit as as destructive as the Nazi one with which Hitler and his crew of third reich thugs attempted to enslave the Europeans.
So now, in 2020 approaching 2021, amidst the debilitating covid pandemic and its consequent economic hard times, we find that the “socialist” insult is copiously applied by sore-loser Republicans who have been striving all year to slap what they consider to be a severely negative label on the Bidenesque Democrats.
Which is ridiculous because Joe Biden rescued the Democratic party from the “Socialist” path that Bernie and Lizzy might have taken. Haha! Just kidding, all ye progressives out there.
Furthermore, “Social” is not such a bad idea anyway. We’ve had enough of Republicans throwing tax-cut money at privileged folks in the upper half.
Let the Democrats see if they can even up the antes a little bit in this great grand experiment we call Free Market Capitalist Democracy.
Let ‘em throw money at poor people for awhile, like the New Deal did 90 years ago, at least so everybody can have a vaccination, a meal ticket, maybe even a place to lay their head on a cold winter’s night that is so deep, and maybe even have a job in our great 21st-century Re-tooling.
That’s better than giving the booty to the non-productive flash-cash AI-driven day-traders. We need to twist the arms of those day-traders . . . redirect the Treas-Fed-Market infrastructure so that Corporate coffers can get back to where we once belonged, capitalizing and enabling a new 21-st century industrial infrastructure of appropriate technology, sustainability and Earth-friendly Enterprise, enabling appropriate profits along the way.
A lot of this future distribution—be it capitalist or socialist—depends on what the big corporations do: whether they just direct their big profits into their shareholders, or can they find it in their hearts to cut a generous share of those profits into their other stakeholders. . . the workers.
So that .gov doesn’t have to do all the doling.
Glass half-Full
