Mike Lofgren spent twenty-eight years working in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees, which gave him ringside seats on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, debates on the Pentagon budget and the amazing antics of various deficit-reduction commissions. His "coming out" article as a citizen, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," garnered over a million views on Truthout. Lofgren has expanded on the insights of that article in his just-issued book, "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted." Lofgren talked about the current situation with Truthout's Leslie Thatcher in a recent email exchangeRead it at Truthout
An Interview With Mike Lofgren, Author of "The Party Is Over"
Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism
"The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted"
ReplyDeleteHe should add, "while the current electorate sat on their duff."
Roger: He should add, "while the current electorate sat on their duff."
ReplyDeleteWhile it is a truism that the electorate is ultimately responsible for the govt it elects, and it is a law of social science that social systems are limited by the level of collective consciousness they exhibit through the use groups make of the groups' knowledge-base, there are also institutional factors to take into account. Elites use institutions to capture social systems for their own advantage, and there are tremendous incentives for doing so but few disincentives.
Modern state governed by so-called liberal democracy have been captured by their elites through the social, political and economic institutions that the elites have imposed through crony capitalism and corruption to extract rents in excess of contribution, and then using wealth to gain not only power and influence but to capture the state.
This is done very cleverly, as it has in the past, through sophistry, now described in terms of cognitive-affective biases that lead the masses to accept false conclusions on the basis of specious logic and manufactured premises, which Stephen Colbert has aptly termed as "truthiness."
The technique is deploying celebrities and experts to distract through propaganda disguised as news on the one hand and masquerading as the common sense accepted view on the other. Most disturbing, however, is that this is all based in institutional or "soft" fascism that appeals to nationalism under the rubric of patriotism, motivates chiefly through fear and emphasis of difference, and falsely equates neoliberalism with democracy and freedom.
So while the electorate is surely to be faulted, their are also good reasons for this that go beyond the electorate in aggregate. The relationships in a social system do matter, and the major institutions determine those relationships.
Well old C .Wright Mills wrote about it allready in 1956 in classic The Power Elite -in Chapter "The Higher Immorality" but it been much worse since then,
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/HigherImmorality_PE.html
C.Wright Mills-The Power Elite:
ReplyDelete"The American elite is not composed of representative men whose conduct and character constitute models for American imitation and aspiration. There is no set of men with whom members of the mass public can rightfully and gladly identify. In this fundamental sense, America is indeed without leaders... That this is so, after the men and events of the last thirty years, is further proof of the extreme difficulty of finding and of using in America today the political means of sanity for morally sane objectives.
America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology-appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html