(09-30-2018, 05:54 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Aren't we under a society of intellectuals now? Media, the academia, the NGOs, pop culture. Everything is led by boomer intellectuals.
Acquisitors had their big time in the Victorian age and early 20th century, but later they started to be more and more despised. Perhaps the last time they were really dominant was the era of Reagan and Thatcher.
Economic inequality is unusually high in America by world standards. This is with mass education even to college, without a legacy of groups being denied opportunities in education and work, without having a ruling family who controls the economy, despite the loosening of regional distinctions between 'poor' areas and 'rich' regions, despite a recovery from a serious meltdown of the economy, and despite free elections. Such is consistent with Acquisitors buying the political process as they did, with such front organizations for the economic elites as FreedomWorks!, Citizens United, Americans for Prosperity, the National Chamber of Commerce, and ALEC (all non-government organizations) doing much of the unofficial work of the Economic Right.
The intellectuals include business executives, corporate attorneys, 'trustworthy' academics at right-wing think-tanks, journalists at right-wing but influential news sources (FoX News, Breitbart, NewsMax), and corporate lobbyists. These are mostly dependent upon the Acquisitors. But intellectuals also include potential dissidents such as physicians, scientists, accountants, creative people, academics, and engineers. A software engineer who seems to be getting high pay is typically being gouged severely by a landlord who grabs a huge chunk of his disposable income for the privilege of living near his work. Class privilege is the cornerstone of American economic life.
The creative people are not in line with the ideology -- sure. The Acquisitors who own such entities as Disney, NewsCorp/Fox Television, Warner, Sony/Columbia, CBS/Paramount/Viacom, Disney, NBC/Comcast/Universal, and the many publishing houses recognize that people not so beholden to Corporate America are still a good market. Sacrificing sales volume for propaganda is unprofitable.
Donald Trump is an Acquisitor, and about as pure as one could be as an Acquisitor -- and he is nothing more than a landlord and a purveyor of schlock entertainment. As such he demonstrates the vulgarity of Acquisitors at their worst. Americans trust the Armed Forces, the FBI, and the CIA more than they trust this Presidency. Obama was in line with them and they found each other useful. America has never been more vulnerable to a military coup or at the least military interference in politics or decisions of foreign policy as during the Trump Presidency.
Yes, the Acquisitor class has been corrupt, cruel, devious, and rapacious for some time. I look at Enron and the dot.com boom that imploded about as the George W. Bush took over and the putrid real-estate bubble and predatory lending that went very bad by 2008. I remember seeing an article in Business Week that related the fraudulence of the rating of packages of under-performing loans back in 2005, and I saw portents of another 1929-style crash and another Great Depression. Sure, Obama rescued the banks, but that was all that the Acquisitor class would let him do before they turned huge resources against him and his political allies. The Acquisitors cultivated populism in the form of the Tea Party, a cause that stopped at no vulgarity to attack a moderately-liberal President. Now we have (at least for the next three months) a government operating much like a single-Party dictatorship that treats non-constituents badly as punishment for not supporting it from the start.
Sarkar suggests that in Acquisitor societies toward the end, the proletariat bloats (Acquisitors need a great mass of proles to do the work and bid up costs of living, especially in rent; remember, Donald Trump is little more than a rent-collector) and gets angry as it is under-paid and gouged. Sarkar tells us that the proletariat never has the qualities (the stamina of warriors, the wisdom and creativity of the intellectuals at their best, or the canniness of Acquisitors). Proles want easy money (which explains the proliferation of lotteries and gambling casinos) without hard work, low-brow entertainment (enough said), and no risk of their consumerist objectives (thus they do not start businesses that might make Acquisitors, and probably better Acquisitors than what we now have) of them. As their numbers swell, they will be increasingly disappointed because the Acquisitors still rule because they will reshape the political order to disenfranchise them.
To seek hard or dangerous work as a means of getting out of poverty is not proletarian. Even if one is sympathetic to working people, becoming a creative person who expresses sympathies toward workers makes one an intellectual. Starting a small business is not proletarian. A proletarian revolution usually leads to chaos that the Acquisitor elites choose to suppress, and for that they need the soldiers and police. To maintain survival as persons, the Acquisitor elites find themselves paying ruinous taxes and finding that the Warriors get control of economic activity to keep it from creating more problems with a rebellious proletariat. As in Russia in 1917, the Warriors may simply dispossess, expel, or exterminate the previous elite. The intellectuals who depend upon the Acquistors to bankroll their activity as flunkies get much the same treatment as the Acquisitors, and those that are more independent find themselves having to answer to the Warriors -- or else.
But in the Warrior era, life becomes more regimented... but more equal in results.
The United States of America is the purest plutocracy on Earth except for overt kleptocracies like Russia and Syria, and some countries whose royal family owns the oil wealth whose revenues go largely to that family. This Crisis might put that at an end.
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.