Why Liberals Lose

[rrneck]

63. Because the population in general

and liberals in particular aren't hungry enough yet.

Do you think only conservatives were flipping houses and investing in questionable securities during the last bubble? How many leading liberal thinkers have spent more time ensconced in university chairs pontificating than actually interacting with the people they are ostensibly trying to help? How much liberal political capital has been squandered on the culture wars instead of the class wars?

People didn't get nothing since 1980, they just didn't get as much as they deserved for their efforts. So, for example, women expanded their role in the workforce and now it takes two people to afford a middle class lifestyle. Wage stagnation is only half the reason. The other half is that a middle class lifestyle has become a hopelessly inflated orgy of consumerism. Both of these causes profit corporations and the 1% that controls them.

The United States is just another empire in a long line of empires, and we are in decline. Over consumption of resources, an economy based on finance rather than manufacturing, the conversion to a service economy (a thousand years ago it would have been a slave economy), and dependence on a bloated military to defend the profits of a greedy oligarchy are all part of the same pattern. Between the greed of a few here and a shortage of resources caused by actual depletion and competition for same around the world our population is being squeezed into the corner of a contracting lifestyle. Get ready for it, it's on the way.

No matter who you are or what you have, your lifestyle will contract. For those who are blessed with a surfeit of resources, that contraction will be unpleasant. For those just getting by, it will be painful. It will be disastrous for the rest simply because they have nowhere to contract to.

The terms liberal and conservative refer to rates of cultural change. Most people think they refer to certain issues of the day, but that just turns them into products that enrich the wealthy. That's how they get people to vote against their economics interest. Ideology has become little more than social plumage. Sooner or later liberals will have to get down to the business of actually changing a culture that simply doesn't work any more. To do that, they will have to be hungry enough to want to make those changes rather than simply pontificate about them and living off the royalties. The sad truth is that generally speaking, people don't climb into the trenches willingly. They generally fall into them. Or get pushed.