01-22-2019, 01:57 PM
It's ironic, isn't it? As our technologies of production become so wondrous that they can meet all middle-class desires of the 1950s (except for real estate) for all, the right-wingers take over and make their wealth and power the sole concerns of society as they define it. I saw predictions of a world more like The Jetsons than of The Hunger Games.
America's economic elites are no longer entrepreneurial innovators; they have mostly become money-grabbing, exclusive, self-indulgent creeps. A hundred years ago the innovative capitalists had the wisdom to give workers as stake in the system through a broad-based education and a consumer society. Donald Trump represents almost everything wrong with America: racial and religious bigotry, economic elitism, crass vulgarity, cruelty, and contempt for the intellect. Trump is not an entrepreneur; he is simply a profiteer who would sell out everything so long as he gets his cut. He has a morality closer to that of John Gotti than to Bill Gates.
If there is any reliable lesson in history, it is that bad leaders get bad results, whether with a cult leader like Charles Manson with a tiny clique or a syphilis-ravaged national leader like Lenin or Hitler.
America's economic elites are no longer entrepreneurial innovators; they have mostly become money-grabbing, exclusive, self-indulgent creeps. A hundred years ago the innovative capitalists had the wisdom to give workers as stake in the system through a broad-based education and a consumer society. Donald Trump represents almost everything wrong with America: racial and religious bigotry, economic elitism, crass vulgarity, cruelty, and contempt for the intellect. Trump is not an entrepreneur; he is simply a profiteer who would sell out everything so long as he gets his cut. He has a morality closer to that of John Gotti than to Bill Gates.
If there is any reliable lesson in history, it is that bad leaders get bad results, whether with a cult leader like Charles Manson with a tiny clique or a syphilis-ravaged national leader like Lenin or Hitler.
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.