Originally posted by jk
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At the start of 2016, John Michael Greer posted an essay, "Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment." JMG looks at the United States electorate in terms of four groups: those whose income is based on investment returns, monthly salary, hourly wages, or a government welfare check. "It’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class," he writes.
After a couple of paragraphs on economic history, he says "and the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage class has been destroyed....The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it’s also one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or even admit that it happened."
He continues: "attempts by people in the wage class to mount any kind of effective challenge to the changes that have gutted their economic prospects and consigned them to a third-rate future have done very little so far. To some extent, that’s a function of the GOP’s sustained effort to lure wage class voters into backing Republican candidates on religious and moral grounds."
Then he adds Donald Trump to this picture:
"The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. He’s figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class."
Greer’s conclusion:
"It’s by no means certain that Trump will ride that resentment straight to the White House, though at this moment it does seem like the most likely outcome. Still, I trust none of my readers are naive enough to think that a Trump defeat will mean the end of the phenomenon that’s lifted him to front runner status in the teeth of everything the political establishment can throw at him. I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American voters, please note—has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class."
That’s how I see it also.
The complete essay is available here: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.c...esentment.html
At the start of the year Greer said it was likely Trump would be elected. I don’t know whether he still thinks that. For myself, I thought this was a competitive race until the first debate. During the week after that debate, Trump voluntarily acted in ways that made his election much less likely. Since he’s a smart person, and he did this consistently, now I think he probably doesn’t really want to be president.
I’ve been reading John Michael Greer regularly since 2009. (All of his blog posts since 2006 are available on his website.) I don’t agree with everything he says, but he has certainly shaped my view of where we are now and what might happen over the next 50 years.
There’s an experience we’ve all had, when you read someone and you suddenly understand something for the first time. You say to yourself "how did come I never noticed that before?" I have that experience more often when reading John Michael Greer then anyone else.
He covers a lot of subjects. He likes to generalize, and I suspect he sometimes gets details wrong, or puts an emphasis wrong. He predicts a dark future, so I often read him and hope he’s mistaken! But if those quotes interest you, you might want to browse around his website and see what else he has to say.
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