JackRiddler wrote:Sweejak wrote:I think it was Scott Horton, or someone he interviewed who made the following observation: the right blame the government; the left blame the corporations.
Well that might simplify things since the big corporations are the government. They run the lawmakers through campaign finance and lobbying, and they run the agencies through regulatory capture and the revolving door. This has never been more evident than today, after the banksters destroyed the economy and were promptly given the maximum in bailouts and guarantees, and after BP turned the Gulf of Mexico into an oily desert and still is being allowed to manage the non-rescue operation. Corporations run the spooks, since the spooks are a privatized riot of corporations. The federal budget is a collection of corporate welfare measures, starting with the biggest and most important item by far, the military and war budgets.
The statement is, however, untrue. As we have seen in the last 20 years the right never blame the government, no matter how outrageously the government imposes on the supposedly god-given rights of man, as long as the government is headed by someone named Bush. "The government" only becomes a problem to the right when the executive is named Clinton or Obama, and then only insofar as "the government" seeks to impose (or merely pretends to impose) any form of order or limits on the crimes of the corporations and the rich. As long as the government is deporting Mexicans and blowing up Pakistanis, it's a great thing. Don't you find it strange that the supposed anti-government people are always first to salute magical pieces of cloth and men in uniform, and to call for full prisons and lots of executions?
I think it was me who said, though I wasn't the first, that left/right equivalence slogans are a tool that serves the right and that disguises the right/right reality of American politics. If there's a problem with the left, insofar as there is an organized left at all, it's in the lack of energy and cojones in comparison to the nutso foot soldiers of the right.
Right, big corporations are the government. I think Horton's or whomever's point it was does simplify things and points directly at the futility of the current parameters that are called left and right. That's why it feels like everybody is swatting thin air or talking past each other. Sure, the right blames the government, at least they say so, and the left blames the corporations. Increasing the power of either in the current situation is a fools game. Up there in the corporatocricy it's mostly posing and it's not to be taken seriously, with a few exceptions. I guess the funniest indicator would be to go back and look at Republican outrage at Clinton's Sebia wars. They sound just like peaceniks. Oh dear, no declaration of war, no withdrawal plans, and on and on, but raw hypocrisy can be found everywhere up there.
No anti-gov people I know get all hot about uniforms, in fact, there is a long litany that lists police abuse and ridicules their paramilitary garb. You'll find it even at Cato which has a map that tracks the latest police outrage. You're talking about the faction that Ian pointed out, the faction that was too embarrassed to be of the Republican Party when not so long ago they looked like toast, not the grassroots constitutionalists or populist patriots which whatever disagreements one may have with them are the ones making the biggest noise about the Patriot Act, surveillance cameras, fusion centers, tasers and unconstitutional wars. That the left won't support them is the result of the R/L mindset. The opposite applies of course. You're focusing at those who morphed into crypto-libertarians, the Palin faction of the Tea Party. As for magical thinking, well, everybody has some of that baggage, and in my current line of thinking the idea that the government is a force of good and not, at best, a necessary evil is a bit magical, certainly in my life's experience. It's why the founders, bless their hearts, put restrictions and limits on government, separation of powers and the like, to limit government and it ought to be noted that an attempt was also made to limit corporations and the Supreme Court. I think this is a good rule of thumb: any restriction on individual liberty equally restricts personal responsibility. The devil, most assuredly, is in the details, for instance, atomization is not the same as individual liberty.
In looking around at other ideologies and alternatives I came across this rather dense lecture. I don't know this guy or his associations, but I think he brings up a lot of interesting points if you get past the opening intro.
Snip:
"Of course it seems bizarre, to claim that liberalism ends in state authoritarianism... it seems a very peculiar claim... after all is it not the case that the foundation of liberalism, the very idea from which it springs is the pursuit of liberty and freedom. The paradox is not singular however, for one might equally note that one political ideology also derived from Marx (if you don't believe this read the early Marx), namely Marxist socialism is also destructive of the very society that it should cherish. For at the heart of contemporary liberal and socialist political models lies a revolutionary liberalism distended from Rousseau that at bottom cares a lot less for society than it does for the individual.
... You can't distribute equality without hierarchy because what good do you decide we should be equal about. Do you decide we should be equal about hair color, the clothes one wears, the food one eats, where one lives, or do you decide what we should be equal about is income, or assets, or sexual access. Which good do you decide? In order to have a politics of equality you must make a decision of what equity you must privilege and enforce, that itself requires something unequal [and] you must privilege one good above other goods. If your going to have distributive justice you have to know what justice you're going to distribute. But according to Rawls there is no grounds for making that very assertion itself. So, all that's done by Rawlsian and liberal ontology is the complete destruction of all the values you do have. So, in the name of value all the values you do have are wiped out, obliterated, washed clean, precisely because to privilege a value in order to distribute a value is fascism, or tradition, or illegitimate, or a quirk, or just a materialism that doesn't matter. In that way a formal liberal equality cannot only never begin, because it has to sort a good which it then must distribute, but whilst it never begins it also must eliminate all other inequalities that it sees as 'out there'. It's like... it's even worse... it's like the year zero that never gets to one, perpetually enacting it's erasure.
Well, that's just one interesting way to think about Rawls, OK."
Of course, I have only a vague idea who John Rawls is and am unschooled in political science, but I think this guy makes some very thought provoking points.
http://www.youtube.com/user/villanovaun ... 2LWc5DIQrc
