"It's Time For The Elites To Rise Up Against The Ignorant Masses"
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 27, 2024 04:56
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I was born in 1954, and until now I would have said that the late 1960s was the greatest period of political convulsion I have lived through. Yet for all that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle changed American culture and reshaped political parties, in retrospect those wild storms look like the normal oscillations of a relatively stable political system. The present moment is different. Today’s citizen revolt — in the United States, Britain, and Europe — may upend politics as nothing else has in my lifetime.
In the late 1960s, elites were in disarray, as they are now — but back then they were fleeing from kids rebelling against their parents’ world; now the elites are fleeing from the parents. Extremism has gone mainstream. One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. British Prime Minister David Cameron thought that voters would defer to the near-universal opinion of experts; that only shows how utterly he misjudged his own people.
Both the Conservative and the Labour parties in Britain are now in crisis. The British have had their day of reckoning; the American one looms. If Donald Trump loses, and loses badly (forgive me my reckless optimism, but I believe he will) the Republican Party may endure a historic split between its know-nothing base and its K Street/Chamber of Commerce leadership class. The Socialist government of France may face a similar fiasco in national elections next spring: Polls indicate that President François Hollande would not even make it to the final round of voting. Right-wing parties all over Europe are clamoring for an exit vote of their own.
Yes, it’s possible that all the political pieces will fly up into the air and settle down more or less where they were before, but the Brexit vote shows that shocking change isn’t very shocking anymore. Where, then, could those pieces end up? Europe is already pointing in one direction. In much of Europe, far-right nativist parties lead in the polls. So far, none has mustered a majority, though last month Norbert Hofer, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, which traffics in Nazi symbolism, came within a hair of winning election as president. Mainstream parties of the left and right may increasingly combine forces to keep out the nationalists. This has already happened in Sweden, where a right-of-center party serves as the minority partner to the left-of-center government. If the Socialists in France do in fact lose the first round, they will almost certainly support the conservative Republicans against the far-right National Front.
Perhaps these informal coalitions can survive until the fever breaks. But the imperative of cohabitation could also lead to genuine realignment. That is, chunks of parties from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only alternative to irrelevance.
The issue, at bottom, is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces and thus the demand that someone, somehow, restore the status quo ante. It may seem strange that the reaction has come today rather than immediately after the economic crisis of 2008, but the ebbing of the crisis has led to a new sense of stagnation. With prospects of flat growth in Europe and minimal income growth in the United States, voters are rebelling agaiNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Hey SIG, you forgot to source where you got the title of this thread and who's work you cut and pasted here.
You Have Angered Your Ethical & Intellectual Superiors....
Discussion in 'The Pavilion' started by il ragno, Yesterday at 10:44 AM.
il ragno
When you have to shoot, shoot! - don't talk.
Member Since:May 28, 2010 Message Count:4,468 Reputation: 81,951,678 Ratings Received:+7,038 / 29 / -84
.....and now you must pay. No - no pleading!.....it's far too late for that, you crucifix-clutching human garbage.
It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses
The Brexit has laid bare the political schism of our time. It’s not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry.
BY JAMES TRAUB
JUNE 28, 2016
http://thebeerbarrel.net/threads/you-have-angered-your-ethical-intelle
ctual-superiors.36391/
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Oh dear.
Quite an interesting site, though. I didn't know there were so many racist sites.
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Originally posted by G:
I notice you dropped your Trump signature - et tu Siggy?
Good lord. I noticed, as you apparently didn't, that the signature is dropped from the first post. It's just something Haken's software does.
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Hey SIG, you forgot to source where you got the title of this thread and who's work you cut and pasted here.- THUGR
Is THAT all you both can do is follow me from thread to thread just to troll me?
The article is from Foreign Policy magazine. I had a link posted, but when I tried following it I noticed that it comes up with its "you have to subscribe to read the rest of the article" notice after the first three lines. I have a subscription, you probably don't, so it was just a pointless, frustrating link. If you want to see the original, you'll just have to to to FP and subscribe. The secondary link was to ZeroHedge. Here it is. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-29/elites-called-arms-its-time-r
ise-against-ignorant-masses You'll just have to put up with the ZH commentary.
I would have thought .... since they are talking about you and me in such derogatory terms .... you would have had more to say than about my citations and signature. Doods, this is what the elite's intellectual butlers think of you and me.
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I'll tell you what I DON'T like about Trump: I think that he has never confronted either the international banking cartel, nor the CIA-State Dept multi-headed hydra, nor the military-industrial complex. The last person to confront them was JFK (BTW, ALL immigration was illegal under JFK) and look what happened to him.
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Speaking in Canada, Obama defends his economic vision against Trump, Ryan, and Bernie
www.vox.com/2016/6/30/12064918/obama-canadian-parliament-speech-text
Barack Obama delivered a massive dose of redistribution in the form of the Affordable Care Act, paired later with some important changes to the tax code.
But those ideas have only very partially reversed the generation-long rise in inequality that preceded them, and there’s little sign that they’ve broken the trend. What would be needed to get the job done is not one more legislative initiative but a consistently engaged governing majority committed to making it happen. Obama doesn’t have that. And even though his designated successor Hillary Clinton has plenty of policy ideas that would contribute to this vision, there’s little chance she’ll have the votes in Congress to make it happen.
The risk for Obama-style politics in the United States is that people will see that and blame Democrats for failing to deliver on their egalitarian promises rather than blame Republicans for blocking their egalitarian initiatives. This is where a country like Canada, whose more majoritarian institutions have already allowed Trudeau to enact a big progressive tax shift plus a generous new cash benefit for parents and children comes into play.
Progressive internationalists in America are going to need examples to point to of places that have put their governing agenda into practice to sustain faith that the kind of vision Obama points to is more than a mirage. Previous generations of American liberals often looked to European welfare states for inspiration, but European social democracy is in a state of semi-permanent chaos induced by its inability to offer an EU-level governing agenda. Canada in this sense, though a small country, becomes a potent example — just as Sweden and Denmark have been in the past — for politicians in bigger countries looking for inspiration.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I would have thought .... since they are talking about you and me in such derogatory terms .... you would have had more to say than about my citations and signature. Doods, this is what the elite's intellectual butlers think of you and me.
No SIG I don't respond the way you want me to when you are posting things because you are trolling. I would never even consider such shit as news worthy and worth posting in these threads. But then again I'm not a troll.
An internet 'troll' is an abusive or obnoxious user who lives to get a rise out of others online. Trolls use shock value to promote arguments in web like photos SIG and by creating threads like this.
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OK, since I've been pretty busy ... I didn't post the original article because it was a one-off commentary but because there's been a relative uproar from think-tanks and pundits making the same point: we suffer from "too much democracy".
Instead of me hunting down and linking every article I've seen so far, this particular one by Matt Taibbi manages to cite a few of them.
In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears
The "too much democracy" train rolls on.
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Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.
In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.
He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.
"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:
"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."
Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.
It's a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists. It's a piece that praises Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall (it was good for the Irish!), the smoke-filled room (good for "brokering complex compromises"), and pork (it helps "glue Congress together" by giving members "a kind of currency to trade").
Rauch even chokes multiple times on the word "corruption," seeming reluctant to even mention the concept without shrouding it in flurries of caveats. When he talks about the "ever-present potential for corruption" that political middlemen pose, he's quick to note the converse also applies (emphasis mine):
"Overreacting to the threat of corruption… is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents."
The basic thrust is that shadowy back-room mechanisms, which Rauch absurdly describes as being relics of a lost era, have a positive role and must be brought back. He argues back-room relationships and payoffs at least committed the actors involved to action. Meanwhile, all the transparency and sunshine and access the public is always begging for leads mainly to gridlock and frustration.
... Rauch compares "outsiders" and "amateurs" to viruses that get into the body, and describes the institutions that failed to prevent the likes of Trump from being nominated as being like the national immune system. Revolt against party insiders is therefore comparable to "abusing and attacking your own immune system."
This lurid metaphor is going to be compelling to a lot of people when Donald Trump is still moving in the direction of the nuclear football. But these "too much democracy" critics all leave out a key part of the story: It's all bull.
Voters in America not only aren't over-empowered, they've for decades now been almost totally disenfranchised, subjects of one of the more brilliant change-suppressing systems ever invented.
We have periodic elections, which leave citizens with the feeling of self-rule. But in reality people are only allowed to choose between candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Originally posted by SECOND in the STARVATION thread
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60628&p=4
Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism
http://qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dange
rous-age-of-political-nihilism/
Written by Lisandro Claudio
July 01, 2016
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On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global illiberalism. The movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen like Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher education in favor of railing against common enemies like outsiders and globalization.
The movements powering Brexit and Trump do NOT reject higher education. They DO reject globalism.
Quote:That's because their bread is buttered by the neoliberal establishment.
And you’ll find few Trump supporters among the largely left-wing American professoriate.
Yet intellectuals are accountable for the rise of these movements—albeit indirectly. Professors have offered stringent criticisms of neoliberal society. But they have failed to offer the public viable alternatives.
Quote:So far, the only "change" that has been going on in the west has been a change towards further and further globalism. The Obama administration, for example, has not reversed globalism in the least.
In this way, they have promoted a political nihilism that has set the stage for new movements that reject liberal democratic principles of tolerance and institutional reform.
Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a “philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets.” Beginning in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet, left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus “that modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made them indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred.”
For most of the 20th century, anti-liberal intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended the Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French, American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.
The collapse of Communism changed all this. Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas in the Third World, like Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure critique.
Academics are now mostly gadflies who rarely offer strategies for political change. Those who do forward alternatives propose ones so vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing nothing. (The Duke University professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of modern globalization are so pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.)
Such thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change as cosmetic, while patronizing those who think otherwise.
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This nihilism easily spreads from the classroom and academic journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and eventually to the public at large.
For academic nihilists, the shorthand for the world’s evils is “neoliberalism.” The term is used to refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for all global drudgery.
Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, is “something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required.” They argue that our belief that we can use laws and constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of “fetishism” that is ultimately “chimerical.”
For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, theNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You got that right about people flailing about: When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Panic
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh my god, where to begin???
The reality is that people are flailing about because their prospects are getting meaner, smaller, and less empowered - not because intellectuals are yammering at them from the sidelines.
www.alternet.org/story/141260/taking_shorter_showers_doesn't_cut_i
t%3A_why_personal_change_does_not_equal_political_change
You are also right about people thinking too small, the small kind of thinking that they can fix their lives by recycling and vegetarianism and high efficiency light bulbs.
How did the world get into this mess? It is easy to describe what is wrong in four paragraphs. Easy to imagine a fix, too, but difficult to imagine millions of citizens actually stop “flailing about”.
They desire a Superman (Trump perhaps?) to fly in and fix their government for them. They don’t want to expend any effort greater than voting for Superman once every 4 years. And while he is at it, could Superman please build them a new car, a new house, and pay them a salary in gold Superman discovered in the asteroid belt?
I’ll use the USA as my example for what is wrong.
1)
Voters have no incentive to be informed or to process information in a rational way, so they vote their “feelings”. Feelings are so much quicker than reasons. An individual vote makes a difference only when it changes the outcome of an election, that is, only if it breaks a tie. The chances that an individual voter will break a tie in a major national election, such as the US presidential election or the Brexit vote, are about the same as her chances of winning Powerball or EuroMillions. No one has a stake in her own individual vote. No voter, old or young, has an incentive to use her vote wisely.
2)
Everybody wants to pay less taxes. Politicians play upon that feeling. When the time comes to actually lower the taxes, the rich who are paying attention to the details are always pushing for a change to their advantage. The poor who don’t pay attention to the details are always completely obvious to changes in the tax code. You think the poor would band together against the rich? Doesn’t happen. So what to do? The poor pick a rich person to champion their cause. Sometimes they pick an FDR who will magnanimously help the poor. Sometimes they pick a Trump, who won’t even publicize any of his income tax returns for any year, no matter how far in the past.
3)
Along with voting and nonvoting citizens’ burning desire to pay less taxes comes another desire: feeling the need to balance the budget. It is not odd that the balance is always shifting in favor of the people who pay attention to where the budget is spent. Those who don’t pay attention get less spent on programs they feel they deserve. Then they run to the rich, a Trump or a Bush, to rebalance in their favor. I’m not surprised when government spending decisions are unbalanced. George Bush’s tax plan was terrible, before he was elected. Trump’s will be terrible. www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-tax-plan Do the poor even understand what Trump has planned? No. There are no poor people reading taxes plans. There are many rich people who do read the plans and do understand.
4)
The USA is always at war because most US citizens won’t ever be wounded or killed in those wars. They won’t even be asked to fight in a war. Today there are very few US citizens who publicly protest war, unlike back during in the Vietnam War, because there are no burdens on them from wars, except for taxes. The extra tax burden is easily finessed. Citizens feel “defense” spending is good for their safety and the economy. Citizens never need proof validating their “feelings”. They “know” war makes them safe. There is an article about how the USA went from being extremely reluctant to declare war to eternally belligerent: www.dissentmagazine.org/article/war-without-poli
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Quote:Alas, yes. Oh, btw- my comparison to ants was an insult to ants everywhere. Ants work individually AND they help each other, but although each action is small they work with a common purpose. We, on the other hand, are like emergency-confronted ants where SOME of us are busy carrying off eggs ... in different direction, some of us are busy eating manically, some of us are frantically building more nest, some of us are looking for invaders to fight, some of us are fighting each other, some of us are running away, and some of us go on as usual. Lack of common purpose is out problem.
You are also right about people thinking too small, the small kind of thinking that they can fix their lives by recycling and vegetarianism and high efficiency light bulbs.- SECOND
Quote:As a sideways thought: Focus on a hero seems to be embedded in western culture since the Greeks. I believe the word "hero" is of Greek origin, no? But altho the concept does trace back thousands of years, I'm not sure its universal. Do heroes figure prominently in ancient Asian, African, or American stories? Point being, I'm not sure if this is a "human" trait or a cultural one.
How did the world get into this mess? It is easy to describe what is wrong in four paragraphs. Easy to imagine a fix, too, but difficult to imagine millions of citizens actually stop “flailing about”.
They desire a Superman (Trump perhaps?) to fly in and fix their government for them. They don’t want to expend any effort greater than voting for Superman once every 4 years. And while he is at it, could Superman please build them a new car, a new house, and pay them a salary in gold Superman discovered in the asteroid belt?
Quote:You make two arguments here. One is that people feel that their vote doesn't make any difference, and the other is that (as a result?) people feel free to vote their irrational feelings.
I’ll use the USA as my example for what is wrong.
1) Voters have no incentive to be informed or to process information in a rational way, so they vote their “feelings”. Feelings are so much quicker than reasons. An individual vote makes a difference only when it changes the outcome of an election, that is, only if it breaks a tie. The chances that an individual voter will break a tie in a major national election, such as the US presidential election or the Brexit vote, are about the same as her chances of winning Powerball or EuroMillions. No one has a stake in her own individual vote. No voter, old or young, has an incentive to use her vote wisely.
The first problem (My vote doesn't count) results from TWO processes:
1) No matter what people want, whether it is universal healthcare/ public option or torpedoing NAFTA (which was a big decision in 1996) or jobs, no matter how people vote, they often don't get what the vast majority want. Like the EU, decisions are made otherwise and elsewhere. They have a true perception: THEIR VOTE DOESN'T COUNT.
2) There is a fairly impersonal problem of the decision-making process: single person such as the President or corporate CEO, will make much faster and more extreme decisions, and carry them out more thoroughly, than any deliberative body or electorate. That is why so many people focus on the President and not on their Congresspeople.
The second problem - voting irrational emotions- is a result of people being deliberately dumbed down by the system. ALL systems do that, whether it was the Mayan empire or the Chinese Middle Kingdom or the British empire or the Catholic Church or any other belief system. People need to be educated into thinking about things rationally, but now - in the days of endless media stream with people plugged in 24/7- people are more brainwashed than ever. It's a result of not facing either positive results or negative consequences as a result of their vote. Since their vote is usually disconnected from decision-making, it becomes impossible to learn from experience.
Direct
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