12-30-2019, 08:36 AM
(12-09-2019, 10:08 PM)city Wrote: Living in a police state can make you sympathetic. Why shouldn't black people be able to buy guns, billionaires be allowed to cheat on their taxes, and Christians be able to feed the homeless?
If the government is arresting others, why wouldn't the government jail you?
The government doesn't obey the law, why should Americans?
Police state? Wait until you see the second Trump Administration, or the first Pence Administration (aside from a caretaker administration in case the Good Lord takes you-know-who away).
Police states exist to preserve nasty social orders, and our society is going that way in the direction of monopoly and economic inequality. A social order more adept at meeting the nightmares of most people than at bringing happiness needs fear when life is all work and pay -- and no play. Maybe there has been some erosion of plutocracy -- but we will see if the trend toward an order in which the rich do whatever they want and the rest of us exist solely to make them even more rich that has been going two steps forward and one step back since 1981 gets to take its right-wing equivalent of a (I hate to use Maoist terminology) "Great Leap Forward".
The difference between monopoly capitalists and Marxist-Leninists is not so much in how they see the world; it is that one excoriates what the other embraces. We have headed toward the class structure that fits a Marxist critique. We do not yet have the fascist police state to enforce it. Most of us simply are overworked, underpaid, and heavily in debt -- and under pressure to endorse such through theatrical smiles and endorsement of bad political figures.
OK, Marx is obsolete whenever the elites of ownership and management decide that people need a stake in the system to feel happy enough to not be a fifth column. When capitalism works solely for supporting the sybaritic indulgence of elites, it is sick and in need of major reforms.
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.