Something worth noting that I think a lot of readers don't realize. In fifteen years of covering Europe between the wars, George Orwell rarely wrote about Hitler, fascism, Mussolini. He obviously wrote about Franco, but Franco was different than the rest of them. He took it as a given that what was evil about fascism was so obvious that it needed no comment - fascists were every person you ever met who is lazy, mean, incompetent, they deserve no comment. Karl Kraus only said of Hitler that about him no thoughts occurred at all. The same holds true of Trump and Putin and Bolsonaro - what's there to say about them? They're evil, they lust for power and they like it when lots of people in their countries die because it makes them feel more powerful.
Orwell wrote so much about Communism and Socialism as it was practiced by everyone but him because what was wrong with it was not obvious to millions of people who claimed to know better, who claimed to be enlightened, who claimed that a better world was just around the bend so long as we curtail this or that, and had all the pathologies of everybody they claimed to hate.
The elderly that were adults during the 1930s are not even cold in the ground yet, but like clockwork, dogmatic leftism has made its presence known and clearly announced it's intention to stick around for the rest of our lifetimes. Let's make no mistake here: you may be my friends, but on an intellectual level, you've announced over and over again that we're opponents, and I'm not sure I trust your friendship anymore, and I'm certainly not sure you ever trusted mine.
The response to that letter proves everything the letter alleged is right on the money. People like you will only get more powerful as the decades wear on. We are now potentially at the beginning of a depression as extreme as The Great Depression and potentially as long lasting as The Long Depression of 1873-1896. Unemployment may go back to normal levels soon, it may also be at 30% for a generation. The temptation to believe people like Jeremy Corbyn and others well to the left of Bernie Sanders will probably only grow as we get closer and closer to the Global Warming rubicon. The deliberate incompetence of the Right will only make the undoable more and more and more likely. In a quarter-century, I expect that the children of those who say that we need safe spaces from ideas will convince themselves that we need safe spaces from certain people just as the people do whom they so strenuously oppose. The exact opposite ideas, the exact same pathologies.
It was not a system which brought us to this point, and every time some movement comes along promising systemic changes, the only change is that the system changes for the worse, and the true believers inevitably say 'it didn't have to be this way' 'the leaders betrayed the movement.'
And that's exactly the point. Leaders ALWAYS betray the movement. The very ideals of every movement makes it all the easier for demagogues to rise to the top. 'The System' never changes. The problem is never the system, the problem is if the people running the system are greedy and evil. We got to this point in history because of greedy, lazy, evil Republicans and moderates who cared more about their profit margins than about the future. Somebody, some group, will always be in power, and we're dependent on the checks and balances of regulation to keep their power from expanding exponentially. Republicans and moderate democrats took the regulations off American life, and now the system is spinning out of control. We will probably not see the system operating efficiently again in our lifetimes.
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