Did You Make America More Unequal?

 I believe that American conservatives have wanted an authoritarian country for a long time. I see it starting with Nixon's Southern Strategy, which it stole from George Wallace, a segregationist. This picked up steam with Reagan joining hands with the Moral Majority.

The Moral Majority was neither moral nor the majority. They did want to impose their morals on the majority. 

The rich wanted to be even richer. They wanted wealth inequality that the New Deal and its following ideologies had kept at bay.

To get to these goals, a dictator was needed to defeat democratic equality. Now, we face its fruition in Donald J. Trump.

Did you vote for Republicans? Then you are responsible for the end of American democracy.

Do you call yourself a conservative and want a dictator? Then you are not a conservative. You oppose what has made America great - the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and all that has made this nation of the free. What you are is an anti-democratic American. You are a heretic.

Read The Guardian's ‘Socialism for the rich’: the evils of bad economics.

Yet in fact, the poor (the bottom 20%) work roughly the same total annual hours in the US and Europe. And economic opportunity and intergenerational mobility is more limited in the US than in Europe. The US intergenerational mobility statistics bear a striking resemblance to those for height: US children born to poor parents are as likely to be poor as those born to tall parents are likely to be tall. And research has repeatedly shown that many people in the US don’t know this: perceptions of social mobility are consistently over-optimistic.

European countries have, on average, more redistributive tax systems and more welfare benefits for the poor than the US, and therefore less inequality, after taxes and benefits. Many people see this outcome as a reflection of the different values that shape US and European societies. But cause-and-effect may run the other way: you-deserve-what-you-get beliefs are strengthened by inequality.

Then check out The First Stone Has Already Been Cast:

Quite in the spirit of postmodern irony, Fr. Chryssavgis characterizes heresy as a kind of an eccentric vision (“weird beyond belief”). Historical heresies, however, were far from such self-understanding and rather identified themselves with the fullness of truth, fiercely persecuting the dissenters. It is enough to recall the iconoclastic persecutions of the eighth century, Dioscorus’ repression of the Diophysites in fifth-century Alexandria, or the imposing of Arianism in the 4th century, when Chrysostom complained that the Orthodox had never issued such tyrannical decrees against heretics as did those against them (De Babila, 3: PG 50, 537).

Perhaps not all “pious” emperors followed Chrysostom’s teaching that “Christians should overcome delusion not by coercion and violence” (ibid); but still, in my subjective opinion, the hallmark of true heresy is self-absorption. Whilst Orthodox teaching is spacious enough for various approaches and therefore can be expressed in completely different conceptual languages, heresy creates a totalitarian atmosphere. A clear example of this is the new version of “Russian Orthodoxy” from Patriarch Kirill, which does not tolerate the slightest shadow of dissent (cf. his ban on clerics for changing just one word in the prayer for victory) and deals with opponents with the help of arrests and bulldozers. The notion of the “Russian world” itself betrays the universal claims of this teaching.

If you want your freedom, then you have to let others be free. When you say that so-and-so should be less free, then you have given away your own freedom - someone will come along and say you should not have the same freedoms as they, and you will have given them the power to take away your freedom.

sch 7/13