09-12-2017, 09:08 PM
I have my neo-Marxist theory. We Americans have the original elite of big rural landowners, basically planters without the slaves; the financiers and industrialists that Marx saw as the arch-fiends of capitalism; the managerial elite that Milovan Djilas saw in his The New Class; big urban landlords (Donald Trump is the archetype), and organized crime. A few people make the money, much of it as economic rent, and the rest of us are expected to put on theatrical smiles as we sweat.
With the possible exception of the mobsters, whose politics are murky, the other elites are reactiona4ry in their political and economic agendas. They want as productive system in which they exact every bit of profit possible. We have been collecting elites devoid of responsibility but demanding of us all. In no way are they in competition; they are in concert. But the concert isn't something like Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Brahms' Fourth Symphony. It is a cacophony of cruelty.
With the possible exception of the mobsters, whose politics are murky, the other elites are reactiona4ry in their political and economic agendas. They want as productive system in which they exact every bit of profit possible. We have been collecting elites devoid of responsibility but demanding of us all. In no way are they in competition; they are in concert. But the concert isn't something like Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Brahms' Fourth Symphony. It is a cacophony of cruelty.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.