11-05-2018, 09:37 AM
More -- I see Obama not getting the full effects of a Regeneracy that would have required significant reforms of the political system and the economic order. The elites of ownership and management wanted none of that; they want a paradise for themselves that implies a Hell for everyone else. It is hardly surprising that Vladimir Putin can wine and dine a reactionary like Trump and show him the glorious world (for an elite) of Imperial Russia and impress him. An ex-KGB man, he could show to a leftist what a leftist might admire in the Soviet Union while glossing over the horrors of a police state, Stalin's purges, and the Gulag system, too.
The economic elites of America sought a Regeneracy of their choosing, and that is one in which the common man learns to accept his place on One Big Happy Plantation. Intellectuals who dislike that? Heck, they can emigrate. People who refuse the terms of working to exhaustion for near-starvation pay? They can starve or rot in prison. For people not in the elites, one must suffer with a smile, as I see of people who work in convenience stores. As the old Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
It may take a full-blown second Great Depression to compel Americans to feel a similar shared danger that they must meet with give-and-take instead of with demands to get everything that they want. It may take an apocalyptic war that implies the potential for dissolution of the Union or subjection of America to enemy regimes hostile to the essence of the American political order.
The economic elites of America sought a Regeneracy of their choosing, and that is one in which the common man learns to accept his place on One Big Happy Plantation. Intellectuals who dislike that? Heck, they can emigrate. People who refuse the terms of working to exhaustion for near-starvation pay? They can starve or rot in prison. For people not in the elites, one must suffer with a smile, as I see of people who work in convenience stores. As the old Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
It may take a full-blown second Great Depression to compel Americans to feel a similar shared danger that they must meet with give-and-take instead of with demands to get everything that they want. It may take an apocalyptic war that implies the potential for dissolution of the Union or subjection of America to enemy regimes hostile to the essence of the American political order.
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.