Why they are better for worse (2)

(continuation from the previous issue)

In search of a solution, one could go in countless directions, we will do so in this place. It seems that in the last decades - and which has a distant root in the countercultural revolution of '68 - politicians received a kind of public permission to behave, reason and speak like drips. Previously, such an "attitude" was appropriate ideology they would immediately and permanently nail you to the margin. The consensus that included the entire center and a large part of the left and right, populists, noisemakers and overly open demagogues kept it low, with very little opportunity for growth. And the ideological struggles within the societies were nevertheless very fierce, often bloody.

Why, however, could not one Trump become president of the USA half a century ago, and probably even if only Republicans voted in the elections? It is not strictly true that the politician was not allowed to be a fool and a slob, but at least he had to know how to hide it very well. Now, as foolishness is harder to hide than infatuation and coughing combined, it very rarely worked.

Did the first radical cultural change come with '68, with the sexual, rock and roll and various lifestyle revolutions, with the general relaxation social relations and communication between generations, races, sexes, classes...? It is hardly possible to doubt that. Well, isn't that good and progressive? Should we really mourn the rigid and fundamentally bigoted world of yesteryear? Not even in madness. Watch it a third time if necessary. Mad Men - the most important series of all time - because it follows and shows that evolution perfectly.

Well, isn't that all in the end? double? Yes, but we know that even the best drugs can cause bad side effects. Pharmacology can quite well fight against them and keep them under control, but first it has to be aware of them, to "recognize" them... However, this has remained a taboo for the non-left, just as the right has stubbornly defended some nonsense. of the old regime".

The typical eclectically schizophrenic consequence of that confusion is again perfectly reflected in Trump: he represents and defends "traditional values" in a so-called "punk", completely wild and unconventional way, claiming that America, and perhaps the world, will once again become a good place to live. most - I emphasize this word - only when we go back to the time when someone who behaves like Trump could not even be elected as the sheriff of a small town of 16 inhabitants in the unexplored depths of Texas.

The left-newer-than-the-new-left (all those redesigned kids whose great-grandfathers are still active, Chomsky, Sanders...) is angry with the new left and left liberals that they are in their post-'68 war for new life paradigms and for the freedom of all possible lifestyles and identities have become a kind of progressive bourgeoisie and that they have completely neglected the interests of the working class, the fundamental ones, without which nothing else matters: a job, a salary, an affordable apartment, normal food prices... And that that's why that "despised" layer first protested, then permanently offended, turned to guys like Trump or European populists, xenophobes, demagogues. There is a lot of truth in that, but the big question is whether it could not have gone that way? Dialectic, my friend...

And what about Eastern Europe, the countries that, back then, before the capitalist present was not so bad, lived in a better future without anyone asking them? And then they slipped into the past without anyone informing them where they were going.

Let's look at Yugoslavia. The state fell apart, the system fell apart; could at least one of them survive, even at the expense of the other? Or were they bound by the same barbed wire? The country fell apart in a bloody war that was so terrible that we have not yet seen all its consequences, and the system, called "socialism", seemed to have quietly expired one night, and we woke up in a new system, without even knowing that we were voted for him - although we did, only the majority did not know that it was called that. Unlike the first, the second one passed without any conflict: you never even heard of two drunken dilbers arguing in a bar about whether socialism or capitalism is better. It was not a topic for anyone. Rather: whose is Kosovo, is Tito a Serb-eater or a Croat traitor, is it okay without a king, are atheists normal and why not...

In such circumstances, who wins elections the easiest? Proponents of social conservatism: nationalism, tradition, the church, a woman in the kitchen, children in aprons, young men in uniforms... The right, then? Yes, but in an economy that behaves somehow to the left... No one would mind if the prices of more or less everything were maintained at a certain level by administrative coercion, if workers did not lose their jobs even if their companies completely failed, if as much as possible was free regardless of Milton Friedman's wisdom...

Of course, I can promise all that, but not fulfill it, only drips. That's why scumbags, from Belgrade to Washington, explain to you that those who are too polite to lie to you so much actually represent the "alienated elite" who completely ruined you, and in the meantime, they, scumbags, leave you without underwear. And you would be happy to listen to them, you would eat out of their hand, if you had anything.