A parallel with history: Trump's "base" and Europe in the Middle Ages.

[grumpyduck]

I've been noticing a pattern from reading the news for the past few months, and I'm not sure if it's sad or tragic.

Part of his base, as we have seen, is made up of corporate entities, rich executives, and others who are more about making money and having power than anything else. Energy companies, banks, pharma companies, big businesses who are slowly decimating small businesses and the middle class.

The other part -- and this is really hard to swallow -- seems to be made up of what we usually refer to as "blue collar" workers: the people who are doing the real day-to-day work that helps big businesses and already-rich executives make money. These are the people who are being encouraged into staying where they are and not making any effort to go farther and rise higher in their jobs.

I was raised Catholic, and I see a parallel here with what the Church did during the Middle Ages: they maintained power and wealth by convincing the working class that that was their lot in life and that they would go to heaven if they did what the Church told them to do and supported it. Part of the message was induced ignorance: learning to read was discouraged so the Church could always be in a position to to tell the working class what to do and what to think. Meanwhile, the Church and the landowners were making money and acquiring power like crazy.

Sure there universities later on in the Middle Ages, but they originated from cathedral schools for educating the clergy. Again, the Church led the message and determined who could be educated and how. And, at the same time, they were delivering fire-and-brimstone warnings about the devil and the threat of burning in hell forever. So the message was simple: praise God (and support the Church) and fear and hate the devil.

Nowadays, with Fox and similar outlets, you have to wonder if the system has resurfaced. Is Fox delivering the message that its viewers can get everything they need to know from its own reporting and don't need to go anywhere else -- IOW, that they don't need to be educated beyond what Fox says? The network is certainly delivering the message that Democrats are evil and should be feared. So it seems that, yeah, Fox and company are the new medieval Church: praise and support donnie (and watch the commercials) and fear and hate the Democrats. Meanwhile, they and their messengers are making money hand over fist.

Sad and tragic, but hey, it worked back in the Middle Ages.

[kurtcagle]

1. The Rise (and fall) of Neo-Feudalism

This has been an unstated tenet of the Republicans for decades. The primary difference is that the Church in this case is largely protestant fundamentalists, funded primarily by wealthy Republicans who bought up seminaries, rural radio stations and eventually television stations for the purpose of indoctrinating a new kind of peasant.

Income inequality plays into that, as does control of technology. The problem that the conservatives are running into now is that educational control is very difficult to manage when people are well educated (and have the means to communicate with one another), and you need to have a highly educated workforce in order to be able to compete in the modern global business-place. The Renaissance throughout Europe happened not because everyone suddenly decided to stop being Mediaeval, but because the changes introduced by the printing press, muskets, shipbuilding, and a new accounting system made the masters of that technology wealthier and more powerful than the existing feudal lords, which in turn kicked off a systematic migration to the cities by enserfed peasants.

One thing that Covid-19 has done is to break the last barriers in the old corporate feudal structure where everyone was either in the C-Suite, white collar, blue collar, or unemployed. So long as you aggregate workers, you have the ability to enforce hierarchies, and with them feudalism. Remove this by moving towards a work from home environment, and a lot of "corporate" structures begin to fall apart. Not surprisingly, Republicans are more heavily invested (as the latest neo-Feudalists) in the existing status quo, and the consequences that will come from this will have a MAJOR impact on breaking down increasingly irrelevant hierarchies.

There are battles on the horizon that look ugly because of it, but for now, it's interesting to watch this play out.