[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West, Bit 6 - Odds and Ends

[jprussell]

Well, I am late in posting this, as things got a bit hectic this weekend and I failed to ready myself for that by getting this done sooner. This brings me to 2 late posts for the year, I think, out of the five I'll allow myself and still say I've met my boast. At any rate, here's what I think will be the last in my series of posts on Spengler, which pulls together a grab bag of sayings, thoughts, and links to other things I've read. You can read it here.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for the link to Star Wars as a Norse myth. I always wondered how Star Wars could feel so superficial and so deep at the same time. It looks like the superficial technological fantasy is masked by the deep family drama.

"I think he's a bit too sweeping in claiming there's no value in applying abstract thinking to politics." From 1990 to 2010 I followed politics. Talk shows, party events, newspaper analysis, mainstream and alternative. There is nothing useful there. I think Spengler is on to something.

The quote about the "Blues" and the "Greens" of Byzantium is great. I read about that before, and it seems many functioning societies split in two political groups. The center of the groups is the will of the people. This works for current US politics as well. Democrats and Republicans both go for the voter that will get them a majority, and so they end up exactly in the middle. This also explains why a change in governing party does not result in a change in policy. It does periodically replace the rulers without violence, which is a great thing about democracy.

[jprussell]

1. Glad you enjoyed it! I think the "family drama angle" has been played up to fit the saga genre, but I agree, it makes much of it better, especially the prequels!

2. Oh, sure, I largely agree most, maybe even darn-near-all abstract thinking is not helpful to getting things done politically, but I read Spengler as making the far stronger claim that academics, philosophers, or other "thinkers" have never, and can never, say anything that can or will have any relevance in the conduct of politics. This seems transparently false. One example: along with all of the practical, historical examples used, the US Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by John Locke, and to a lesser degree, Adam Smith, in how they set up the government.

3. I agree that under most circumstances, a democracy or representative republic will tend to shake out into two parties (you get a bit more variation in parliamentary systems, with coalition-forming, but usually there's fairly stable "sides"), and that the push and pull between those usually has a centralizing effect. You can get some problems, though, when the two sides become different enough, and/or when there is a sizable enough minority within each party that is harder-lined and insists on not compromising and going toward the middle. These folks are often the most likely to vote, the most likely to vote in primaries (in systems with those), and the most likely to contribute money to campaigns, so they can end up pulling the party more toward them. The whole "playing to the base" trope, basically. If both parties get far enough toward this, it can make finding, much less enacting, the actual "center" of opinion much harder.

Oh, and all of the above assumes that the elected officials are actually running the show, and not unelected bureaucratic or administrative entities.

[thinking_turtle]

For point 3, think about the elections of Reagan, Clinton, Obama or Trump: how much really changed?

Looking forward to your next subject!

[jprussell]

Not much, certainly, for which I point back to my caveat about the assumption that the elected officials matter all that much.

And thank you!