@Lash,
Quote:I agree —- those factors with the added horror of Citizens United and other intentional changes made by our lawmakers that opened wider the floodgates of corruption and unaccountability of those in power.
There are so many unraveled threads which tempt us to follow them back to their source, which we might imagine to be from some single tear in the fabric of liberal democracy. But I think that's wishful thinking, as if we could find it, isolate it, and repair it. I doubt there's a single cause and I suspect the now-tattered fabric looks more like something that's been dragged through a briar patch. And I hate to say this but, "it's complicated". Marx alerted us to the material causes of poverty and exploitation under capitalism but I think there's more to it. I know you're a fan of Hedges, and while I'm often turned off by his aura of Christianity, and tend to dispel appeals to "spiritual" values applied to politics, there
are reasons to suspect some deformation of human psychology which underlies our inability to balance individual freedom with concern for our collective welfare.
Quote:And, we are in real trouble right now.
Right. And existentially, not just politically. We can't deal with climate change, for instance. Political leaders who attempt to address the problem are forced to institute measures which are unpopular — higher gasoline prices, for example. It's relatively easy for populists to rally voters to oppose the measures, such as the "Yellow Vest" protests in France. And obviously the pandemic is another example. Individual "rights" are deemed more foundational than concern over public health. Right-wing populists can easily exploit this issue — the people who make you pay taxes are the same ones telling you to get a vaccination! Pretty suspicious, eh? And measures which might be applied by political leaders to overcome public frustration are easily subverted by any opposing party, leading to more frustration and cynicism. Censoring covid disinformation is labeled "fascism" while "patriots" have no qualms about book-banning, and probably book-burning, as well.
Historian, and "christian socialist", R.H.Tawney differentiated between the "functional society" and the "acquisitive society" and I think he was definitely onto something.
in 1920, Tawney wrote:
"So wealth becomes the foundation of public esteem, and the mass of men who labor, but who do not acquire wealth, are thought to be vulgar and meaningless and insignificant compared with the few who acquire wealth by good fortune, or by the skilful use of economic opportunities. They come to be regarded, not as the ends for which alone it is worth while to produce wealth at all, but as the instruments of its acquisition by a world that declines to be soiled by contact with what is thought to be the dull and sordid business of labor."
His short book on the subject is available for free online and, Lash, as an anglophile, you might enjoy reading it:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33741/33741-h/33741-h.htm
This quote is from his
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:
Quote:"While the political significance of this development [science of statecraft] has often been described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less attention. They were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The emergence of an objective and passionless economic science took place more slowly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the State, because the issues were less absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the self-contained department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world of business relations, and even in the England of the early seventeenth century, to discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism."
