4 thoughts on “Cheer Up. Things Aren’t Uniquely Bad

  1. Authoritarianism is driven by fear. Either fear of a threat from outside, or a fear of a disruption to the social hierarchy from within.

    Which is why the Trump campaign are always so eager to fan the flames of fear and paranoia, that things are falling apart and only a Strong Man can make things right.

    Adam Mastroianni published a paper recently called “The Illusion Of Moral Decline” and talks about it on his Substack-
    https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-illusion-of-moral-decline?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

    Basically saying that the idea that we live in a lapsed era, as people fallen from grace is a myth and moreover, that the percentage of people who feel this way remains constant no matter what.
    And even more intriguing, most people who feel this way, identify the inflection point of the lapse as occurring right around the time when they were born.

    Most of the time, the “Decline” myth is harmless when it just results in old cots grumping about the yoots of today.

    But occasionally, it can lead to the end of liberal democracy.Report

  2. What you find, if you look past union hagiography and dig into the actual history of these supposed massacres, is that the unions were almost always the aggressors.

    The reason for this is not the moral superiority of management, but a simple matter of incentives. Workers were not paid much in those days, but they were generally paid fair market wages, and as a result, striking workers often found that there was a ready supply of workers lining up to replace them. As a result, they were unable to put any real pressure on their employers to pay above-market wages without resorting to sabotage and violence against (often black) replacement workers.

    Management, on the other hand, had no real incentive to initiate violence. They weren’t going to get strikers to go back to work by shooting or beating them. But they did have an incentive to use violence to protect their equipment and replacement workers from attacks by strikers.

    Also, the whole point of a union is to cartelize the labor market. It’s not really clear why you think use of antitrust law to resist this is inappropriate. If you take a look at the text of the major provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act quoted in its Wikipedia article, it looks pretty clear to me that it accurately describes unions. It’s anti-trust, not anti-business.Report

    1. I mean, I do get why you think that it was inappropriate to enforce antitrust laws against unions: You’re thinking of law in terms of who/whom instead of what. But that’s how you get a government of men instead of a government of laws.Report

    2. Looking at the Pullman Strike’s wiki, it’s clear the strikers were morally (and by today’s standards legally) correct in the “why is this happening”.

      And then I read the gov’s reaction and it makes me question whether the wiki is biased. The gov didn’t want the mail stopped so they ordered strikers to stop blocking trains and then used law enforcement to force the matter. Blocking trains isn’t mentioned in the “what was happening” part.

      For that matter there’s a section where the army steps in and the strikers were expecting them to be “neutral” but the army was supposed to prevent trains from being blocked.Report

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