There is a phrase I used to use all the time, “most revert to form.” Sadly, we’ve learned how to live with that corrosive reality. Recent responses to various controversial events and some not so contentious have been disconcerting. The adoration of gaslighting billionaires, inevitable candidates, and more illustrate how we have learned to “revert to form” in our thinking. It has become conformance to a status quo that ensures the eventual decline economically for most even as a select few guard the gates that keep most out.
The puppeteers are good. Their planning document, the one very few have heard about, let alone read, laid out the path. And, man, is the Powell Memo working! (You know, the memo written in 1971 by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell calling out corporate America.)
When extraction and free labor were needed from just a few to keep the economy going, a brutal form of slavery on “the other,” primarily Africans, was functional at a minimal cost. But the beast needs to be continually fed exponentially. That means the pool must increase. Guess what, most of you were force-welcomed.
External chains and brutality would not work now on the majority. After all, in the primordial stages of this economic system, the pecking order was clear: slavery and the remnants thereof left the majority population with a semblance of having access to success.
Unfortunately, the masses have always been widgets to the plutocracy. Remember, all our laws value capital over humanity. I was on a panel with another businessman on a show. When I brought up social programs, the first thing he asked was how it affected business. Our ruling class never create social policy first and then adapt the business sector to it. Capital reigns supreme.
The plutocracy will do whatever is necessary to maintain a particular order. Economist and Professor Dr. Richard Wolff tweeted a note that hit the nail on the head.
Right-wing nationalism in the United States is serving the same purpose. It could not have occurred without laying the groundwork. It required creating an alternate state of reality that enough would believe. The Powell Manifesto gave the directions for the plutocracy to infect every institution and aspect of our lives. And with that, it created a new form of indentured servitude. The brutality of slavery was no longer needed. Instead, the chains are now mental, and people absorb them at different ideological levels, from the extreme to the mild.
The difficulty is keeping the different poles that comprise the masses balanced. They must be preoccupied with one another and not with that which is inflicting pain on them, that which is bleeding them.
The plutocracy depends on the polarization, and so far they have been successful. Trump is not the genius of the plutocracy. He just magnified the hate at the appropriate time. He is but the puppet of the system which chooses its protagonists not only in America but throughout the world.
How can likely the most corrupt president continue to hold on to near-unanimous Republican Party support and maintain a Democratic Establishment at bay? Could it be that until it is clear that an acceptable Democrat is on a glide path he is kept whole?
The plutocracy does not seem to realize how profound the manufactured hate is between the poles. And they are well armed. A caller to my show Politics Done Right recently illustrated the level of seeded irrationality as he pointed out that Trump could do no wrong that would worry them.
A civil war?
How close are we to a civil war? I think we are closer than many think. So how do we avert it?
Averting any form of a civil war requires breaking those mental chains. We must step out of our comfort zones. Many continue to revert to form even as they start to see the con because it is more comfortable mentally, and to some economically as well. But the big picture down the road for most will be dire.
Those doing the kind of work we are doing, progressive activists, must stay the course and do the work of not allowing the forces we know are working to undermine to go unchallenged. It is existential. Never give up. The spears hurt less when you know ultimately you are doing the right thing. All systems that hurt their masses ultimately fail eventually.
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Interesting that you quote Richard Wolff. Saw him speak a couple years ago on the history of FDR’s “New Deal”. FDR was never a “social democrat” as some wish him to be. He was always true to his patrician class. The depression spawned a widespread interest in socialism and communism among the working class. FDR recognized it as the potential threat that it was to the existing capitalist order.
The “New Deal” was a series of programs, paid for by the wealthy with their consent, to put the proletarian beast back to sleep. It worked, for about 40 years until Reagan, with the backing of the 1% was embraced to put a stop to it.
We are approaching a similar tipping point once again, with half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, unable to keep pace with rising costs.. This time, it appears that the 1% will be quite willing to use unbridled force to keep us in our place rather than economic appeasement.
Coach Bill