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lunadelcorvo) wrote2025-03-05 11:39 am
lunadelcorvo) wrote2025-03-05 11:39 am
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I love the Middle Aes, but I don't want to live there
I have been reeling in the wake of the constant barrage of insanity from the White House, as I am sure most of us have. I remain convinced, now more than ever, that the Christo-fascists want to create a neo-feudal society, and everything being done now seems to indicate that is not hyperbole.
Forcing farmers out of business while Vance's firm enables wealthy oligarchs here and abroad to buy up that land for pennies on the dollar, while he has deported the large part of the workers who work that land. How will these 'investors' see a return on their new 'manor farms?' By getting peasant serfs to work them, of course. And where will they get a massive workforce who will accept such conditions? All the veterans, low-income workers, unemployed, and the other poor, hungry, and vulnerable whose protections, safety, and education he has been gutting.
When there is nowhere else to go, no other place to work, no other way to eat, those of us who survive that long will be the new peasant class. It's funny, I just taught the Three Orders of Medieval society: Those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. Those who fight are the monied aristocrats, owners of the land, the wealth, and the power. The notion that they actually fight is now obsolete, of course, but they will, as the gluttonous nobles did, lord over their little kingdoms with all the smug superiority of a fat, 9th C duke.
Those who pray, the clergy, the Joel Otseens and the Pat Hagees of this new feudalism will also hold land, wealth, and power. If the excesses of the medieval clerical class in the Middle Ages have shown us nothing else, it is that 'men of god' like to eat fine food and sleep in silk sheets just as much as any noble. Those who are the luminaries of the new Christian Nationalist Regime will stand at ease beside the oligarchs whose rule they endorse.
And those who work. All the rest of us. I have said many times that the wealth inequality in the US today is most closely mirrored by that of the feudal Middle Ages, before the 12th C Renaissance recreated the lost 'skilled, craftsman, or middle class. That inequality has been growing, and under the new regime being crafted before our dumbfounded eyes, it will continue to grow. With healthcare made inaccessible, birth control a distant memory, food insecurity the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans, and education reduced to the bare minimum needed to ensure compliance with basic directives, the new peasant class will be created. Call them proles, serfs, or whatever pseudo-patriotic and paternalistic moniker the oligarchs will craft, a peasant is still a peasant.
If you think this all sounds a bit too much like some tawdry Russian novel, well, I think the recent White House debacle makes clear why that is. Russia has always struggled with democracy, and even at those rare moments when some regime or other had the chance to elevate the peasant class, they have demurred (sometimes in fear for their lives, yes, but still.) If Russia has readily absorbed American Evangelical misogyny and bigotry (as evidenced by their oppression of LGBTQ folks, and the recent decriminalization of wife beating for example), then the US, or a certain red-hatted segment of it, has just as readily embraced the oppressive totalitarianism that would sacrifice its own wellbeing and that of everyone around them in the name of being able to shit on someone they hate more than the ruling class whose favor nd approval they crave.
The time to resist is now, but it is, I think, a window that will close far sooner than most of us think. The damage is being done now, there is no 'waiting it out for four years.' Barring extraordinary upheaval or some meaningful pushback, I genuinely think this reshaping of the American experiment will be fait accomplis by the time spring turns to summer. I know that Godwin's Law exists, as does its corollary, but it would be wise to recall that it took Hitler less than two months to dismantle German democracy. While the true effects of that may not have been evident until a year or two later, the core work was done in only 53 days. Fifty-three days, or one month and three-quarters, or seven weeks; however you phrase it, it is a mind-numbingly short time. 53 days. We are on day 45.
Forcing farmers out of business while Vance's firm enables wealthy oligarchs here and abroad to buy up that land for pennies on the dollar, while he has deported the large part of the workers who work that land. How will these 'investors' see a return on their new 'manor farms?' By getting peasant serfs to work them, of course. And where will they get a massive workforce who will accept such conditions? All the veterans, low-income workers, unemployed, and the other poor, hungry, and vulnerable whose protections, safety, and education he has been gutting.
When there is nowhere else to go, no other place to work, no other way to eat, those of us who survive that long will be the new peasant class. It's funny, I just taught the Three Orders of Medieval society: Those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. Those who fight are the monied aristocrats, owners of the land, the wealth, and the power. The notion that they actually fight is now obsolete, of course, but they will, as the gluttonous nobles did, lord over their little kingdoms with all the smug superiority of a fat, 9th C duke.
Those who pray, the clergy, the Joel Otseens and the Pat Hagees of this new feudalism will also hold land, wealth, and power. If the excesses of the medieval clerical class in the Middle Ages have shown us nothing else, it is that 'men of god' like to eat fine food and sleep in silk sheets just as much as any noble. Those who are the luminaries of the new Christian Nationalist Regime will stand at ease beside the oligarchs whose rule they endorse.
And those who work. All the rest of us. I have said many times that the wealth inequality in the US today is most closely mirrored by that of the feudal Middle Ages, before the 12th C Renaissance recreated the lost 'skilled, craftsman, or middle class. That inequality has been growing, and under the new regime being crafted before our dumbfounded eyes, it will continue to grow. With healthcare made inaccessible, birth control a distant memory, food insecurity the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans, and education reduced to the bare minimum needed to ensure compliance with basic directives, the new peasant class will be created. Call them proles, serfs, or whatever pseudo-patriotic and paternalistic moniker the oligarchs will craft, a peasant is still a peasant.
If you think this all sounds a bit too much like some tawdry Russian novel, well, I think the recent White House debacle makes clear why that is. Russia has always struggled with democracy, and even at those rare moments when some regime or other had the chance to elevate the peasant class, they have demurred (sometimes in fear for their lives, yes, but still.) If Russia has readily absorbed American Evangelical misogyny and bigotry (as evidenced by their oppression of LGBTQ folks, and the recent decriminalization of wife beating for example), then the US, or a certain red-hatted segment of it, has just as readily embraced the oppressive totalitarianism that would sacrifice its own wellbeing and that of everyone around them in the name of being able to shit on someone they hate more than the ruling class whose favor nd approval they crave.
The time to resist is now, but it is, I think, a window that will close far sooner than most of us think. The damage is being done now, there is no 'waiting it out for four years.' Barring extraordinary upheaval or some meaningful pushback, I genuinely think this reshaping of the American experiment will be fait accomplis by the time spring turns to summer. I know that Godwin's Law exists, as does its corollary, but it would be wise to recall that it took Hitler less than two months to dismantle German democracy. While the true effects of that may not have been evident until a year or two later, the core work was done in only 53 days. Fifty-three days, or one month and three-quarters, or seven weeks; however you phrase it, it is a mind-numbingly short time. 53 days. We are on day 45.
no subject
I do know one thing: a modern technological society with advanced manufacturing and services is complicated. And it takes a lot of skilled people to operate, and it takes some amount of openness and honest in government and society. Most people in the United States take things like this for granted. When we get on an airplane, we assume that is has been fueled and someone didn't skim the fuel off the top to sell. So the question for me is---what happens when that stops being true? What happens when those weather technicians don't graph the plot of a Category 5 hurricane?
And we can be cynical and say "oh, no one will care and people in Alabama will keep supporting Trump even if their homes are destroyed", but what happens when oil capacity goes offline for a month?
I am not saying this will all happen at once, but there are certain realities that are going to start playing out, no matter how much people deny them.
And of course, these things don't affect all countries---there are plenty of "kleptocracies", but one thing is, those kleptocracies need someone to steal from--- but what happens when the world's most productive country turns into a kleptocracy?
no subject
As to the world's most productive country, I'm not sure that is the US, not anymore. The America of the early 1950s, with production and manufacturing booming, is a long-lost vision, and it simply isn't coming back. That's part of why we are here; nostalgia for a 'golden age past' (which more than likely never existed in actuality) is a huge component of fascism.
Fascism relies on an idea of the strong, noble, glowingly healthy working class, and the myth of unbridled productivity, while in reality keeping things at a subsistence level. Look at propaganda from the Nazis, fascist Italy, or from Russia. How many Americans might give up many of the trappings of the modern age if you promised them a sun-bronzed, apple-cheeked, mythical, agrarian 1950s Middle America, where every day is a glowing 4th of July parade with happy children in work clothes waving flags (and where the subjugation of others is the decent, upright thing to do; never forget the appeal to the poor white man of giving him someone to look down upon...)?
I also think the kleptocracy is only an interim stage; the final goal is an insular, isolated, mostly agrarian, self-sustaining oligarchy, along the lines of North Korea. There, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four's Oceania, reports of abundance and overproduction cause endless bursts of praise for the Dear Leader, while in reality, everyone is just barely scraping by, still muddled by the nostalgic vision of the happy golden age, and unable to put their finger on exactly what is missing. (Did the Commandments of Animal Farm always read that way? Perhaps they had misremembered...)
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my years of immersion in medieval history are coloring my perceptions. I really do hope so, though I'm not sure any other scenario is much brighter.
no subject