02-11-2020, 09:56 PM
(02-10-2020, 03:03 PM)David Horn Wrote:(02-10-2020, 11:43 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: I'd be wary of making Constitutional changes through a Constitutional convention while the hard Right still has great power. The Hard Right would love to commit us to a Christian and Corporate state that represents economic and bureaucratic power at the expense of all else, and uses a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian ethics as a mechanism of enforcing a plutocratic order.
That would merely be a replay of the Gilded Age, when the company clerics spoon-fed religiosity to the working class to benefit the owners. It worked then and may again.
Such would be a nightmarish world, basically a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. It would require a populace barely literate as was so in America during the Gilded Age. Say what you want about the intellectual mediocrities that flock to Trump -- many other Americans do not.
I would expect the economic elites to be as evil as ever, making hypocritical displays of fraudulent simulations of piety only to return to their indulgence and cruelty. So how does the Establishment cut the norm of education to the elementary level? One would have to replace PBS with pro wrestling on TV... there are limits to dumbing-down of public life.
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.