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First, this year will be full of yawns, boring, predictable stuff that will waste everyone's time iordinately. These include the destracting rhetoric of an election year as politicians in the duopoly try to blame each other for the ills of the world, now mostly the effects of a poorly run economy, and of much less impact the doomsday predictions associated with this year in particular which the adherents of that theory will blame each and every misfortune that happens to occur this year in selective attention.
TopApropos both these huge destrictions of this year, I do not believe in conspiracies or single causes, hence I do not believe in God, or grand overarching conspiracies or even the Great Man theory of leadership. Leaders are not born but happen to respond to the situation in a timely fashion. This is not to say that leaders don't bring good ideas with them from time to time, but they are mostly actors against the backdrop of history, more often reacting to it than shaping it.
I do not place too much worth in collective wisdom, especially the kind that is said to drive markets or democracy. It isn't that I am elitist, I resist that tendancy now more than ever because I can clearly see that most of the evil in the world comes from the illusion that one group of people have when they see themselves as better and more virtuous than another. There are differences between what individuals do with their lives but the potental to accoumplish is universal, not linked to the group. Nonetheless different cultures may restrict of promote this potential in different ways, but that is different from the potential of individuals. Raw abilities, intelligence, seems to not be restricted by locale, although individuals in some places have better access to resources to use those abilities.
So, this year we are going to go through the charade of an election year, which starts at the first of the year and continues nonstop until Novemeber and then into next year as the transfer of power is suposed to take place. Most people have this down pat and most probably think that this year will see the process as orderly as it has been in the past, but because there is real doubt about its relevancy, even in the institutions it is supposed to perpetuate, it all may turn out differently.
First, there is the illusion that electing a new President and members of Congress will have a one-to-one relaton to the ultimate outcome, that the political rehtoric translates into direct action, or that the people running really cotrol the destiny of the country. Most best laid plans of incomming administations are upset by the unknowns of history or of forces really beyond their control and foresight. At best they may be able to react to events from a set of convictions in a consistant way, but convincing sounding platforms have a way of being twarted by the sheer inertia of historical processes.
Secondly, the political rhetoric in the contest may be entirely illusory. The important issues of the day may not be addressed in it. This is supported by the idea of duopoly itself, whose main clue is the fuding lists of both major parties election over election having a large intersection of the same set of plutocrats, suporting the cotention that the real sacred cows are not in the feast. This lends to the myth of grand conspiracy, but that would over estimate the intellegence of people, even very rich people who may simply be hedging their bets, playing both ends aginst the middle. This possiblity is very worrisome.The illusion of Grand Conspiracies is that like-minded people have to meet to explicitly discuss what they believe in common. I have no doubt that this happens, but that most such agreements are tacit and don't need to be discussed. So every plutocrat in the land is going to share with every other the tacit desire to maximise profit and play lower taxes on it, and to pass the risk of doing business onto the best found patsy, whether it is the consumer or the poor or the competition. Does this mean that all these people are Republicans? Probbly not, but that many such people are and fincinally influience politicians on the Right and probably quite a few Democrats as well. The important thing to remember is that the influince has already happened and the rhetoric we must endure for the rest of the year is cover, meant to play on emotion and prejudices.
The big issue of this year is likely to be the economy, why it cannot create jobs and income for the Middle Class majority and why the poverty rate has jumped. The extant of the discussion will be full of destraction and misinformation and that may play on the short memory of a public whose whose knowledge of history and economics is awful at best. This will happen against the backdrop of a Class War that few have recognized but is evidanced by the accmulation of wealth at the top 1%, the contention of Occupy and other critics of the past quarter century of economic history. The Republican candidates do not want the public to realize that it was the political economy of the GOP that is largely responsible for the changes, but as worrisome is the buy-in of many Democrats into the same theories. This is why the duopoly matters and why an outside source of ideas is needed. It is not clear that the current Democratic President is aware of the damage done to those economic theoires by the crash of 2008, and who will effectively answer the misinformaton that Republican candidates are still spreading about how the economy really works, even after their pet theories have failed.
Two other things are clear, the reputation of Congress is at an all time low, recalling that most condidates for high office are either state governors or members of Congress, and that the role of social media in making boycotts happen is a new reality of politics which can have some impact. Occupy, is not Arab Spring, but maybe it can have an effect at the national conventions in the summer by calling attention to the economic and social issues that are off the table inside those conventions. The best that could be hoped for is a disruption such as took place in 1968, which the GOP deserves this time.
TopWidely dismissed as a Marxist doctrine, economic determinism is the view that it is really economic power of individuals that drives their poitical views, that "voting your pocket book" is the major force in politics. That may be the clear case for culturally homogenious political entities, but where their is cultural conflict as in ethnic divisions in the Middle East or moral divisions as in Social Conservatism, it is less clear.
This view could be generalized as "Politics is Economics", but that might be an illusion because the society have no other contention than the distribution of wealth. Politics is the differential advantage given to one group competing with another. It may be represented as the shifting of proirities of the society to favor one set of values as opposed to others. That definition would include the divisions based on ethnicity or religion as well as those that depend on economic theories. It could be said that the GOP's politics favors unregulated business and the rights of the wealthy to invest as they see fit as opposed to a more regulated Capitalism in which those people pay higher taxes and face more regualation.
On a related issue jobs are not created in the economy by the demand for them by workers, but are created by investors putting money into businesses so they can grow and hire more employees to do so. On the other hand the crash of 2008 was caused by bad investiment decisions made on a huge scale so that in excess of $15 trillion of equity vanished quickly, so to claim, as does the GOP, that to cater to the same group of people who squandered all that wealth to manage, often without accountability, the economy out of the problem they helped to create, is dubious.
One could also argue that the business community had the backing of every Administration since 1981 to work in an envronent of reduced scrutany and to create investment mechanisms that were new, and the net result was a vigorous business cycle in which the fortunes of most Americns declined while those of a tiny minority at the top incomes apreciated whie jobs and capital were sent overseas. This calls into question the belief which heald sway from Ronald Regan on that an unregulated market economy works better than public policy to set the priorities of the nation. It also calls into question whether such an international Capitalism is truely in the Nation's interest, wheather a maority of citizens are benefitted by it.
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