Thank you for sharing that perspective, Miriam. That hadn't occurred to me.
I've copied the full text of the piece below for anyone who is interested,
it is quite long. Looking more at this website, I see the publication is
faith-based. From their about page: " *Commonweal*'s mission is to provide
a forum for civil, reasoned debate on the interaction of faith with
contemporary politics and culture." Anyway, here's the essay.
Three Cheers for Socialism
Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous
strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of
course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can
be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to
speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice,
simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These
are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in
moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble
the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American
political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of
live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is
not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive,
unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.
Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
Not long ago, in an op-ed column for the New York Times, I observed that it
is foolish to equate (as certain American political commentators frequently
do) the sort of “democratic socialism” currently becoming fashionable in
some quarters of this country with the totalitarian state ideologies of the
twentieth century, whose chief accomplishments were ruined societies and
mountains of corpses. For one thing, “socialism” is far from a univocal
term, and much further from a uniform philosophy. I, for instance, have a
deep affection for the tradition of British Christian socialism, which was
shaped by such figures as F. D. Maurice (1805–1872), John Ruskin
(1819–1900), Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), Thomas Hughes (1822–1896), F. J.
Furnivall (1825–1910), William Morris (1834–1896), and R. H. Tawney
(1880–1962), though I have also been influenced by such non-British social
thinkers as Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), Dorothy Day (1897–1980), and E. F.
Schumacher (1911–1977). None of these espoused any kind of statist,
technocratic, secular, authoritarian version of socialist economics, and
none of them was what we today think of as “liberal.” And yet their
“socialist” leanings were unmistakable.
Moreover, just because a totalitarian regime happens to call itself
socialist—or, for that matter, a republic, or a union of republics, or a
people’s republic, or a people’s democratic republic—we are under no
obligation to take it at its word. What we call “democratic socialism” in
the United States is difficult to distinguish from the social-democratic
traditions of post-war Western Europe, and there we find little evidence
that a democracy becomes a dictatorship simply by providing such staples of
basic social welfare as universal health care. At least, it is hard not to
notice that the social-democratic governments of Europe have always gained
power only by being voted into office, and have always relinquished it
peacefully when voted out again. None of them has ever made war on free
markets, even in attempting (often all too hesitantly) to impose prudent
and ethically salutary regulations on business. Rather than gulags, death
camps, secret police, arrests without warrant, summary executions, enormous
propaganda machines, killing fields, and the like, their political
achievements have been more in the line of the milk-allowances given to
British children in the post-war years, various national health services,
free eyeglasses and orthodonture for children, school lunches, public
pensions for the elderly and the disabled, humane public housing, adequate
unemployment insurance, sane labor protections, and so forth, all of which
have been accomplished without irreparable harm to economies or treasuries.
I suppose a social-democratic state could begin to gravitate toward true
authoritarianism, in the way that any political arrangement can lead to
just about any other. The Third Reich, after all, was born out of a
functioning parliamentary democracy. The 2016 U.S. election proved that,
even in a long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or
anything, no matter how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if
enough citizens are sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious. In just
the past few years, we have seen bland American neoconservatism rapidly
evolving into populist, racist, openly fascist, mystical nationalism.
Anything is possible. But to this point, it seems fair to say, the Western
European democracies—as well as the Oceanian states and Canada—have all
acquitted themselves fairly well on the civil liberties and “rule of law”
fronts. And surely no one would deny that, approve of them or not,
eyeglasses and milk are not gulags and summary executions.
Or so you would think. Judging from some of the negative reactions to my
Times column, there are a good many persons to whom this is not at all
obvious. The most lunatic response I read came from some fellow whom some
jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church has injudiciously consecrated as a
priest. His attack on my column was published in a forum associated with
the Acton Institute (a sort of toxic-waste site for the disposal of
emotionally arrested and intellectually abridged reactionaries). For this
fellow, there are no differences here worth noting: children’s milk
subsidies, concentration camps, modern Denmark and Canada, the USSR, the
New Deal, the Cultural Revolution, public subsidies for healthcare or
railroads, the execution of dissidents, Victorian Christian socialism,
twentieth-century Soviet communism, present-day Venezuela, present-day
Britain, industry partly governed by labor, industry wholly seized by the
state—somehow, in his mind, it is all one and the same thing, a single
historical phenomenon inexorably leading to the same mass graves. Any day
now in Sweden, it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret
state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.
Just as absurd in its way, though perhaps more morally distasteful, was a
column by Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner repeating certain
fashionable neoliberal lies about European, Canadian, and Oceanian health
care—long delays in triage, shortages, lack of choice among physicians, and
so forth. I have received medical attention in any number of countries over
the years and, while no nation’s system is perfect, I can assure anyone
curious on the matter that, if you are in real need of medical attention,
in almost all cases you would be far better off in France, Canada, Germany,
or Italy than you are here. Certainly we Americans—routinely running the
gauntlet of finding an “in-network” primary-care physician, securing an
“establish-care” appointment (usually months away), waiting upon referrals
and insurance approvals, choosing among expensive tests, and so on—endure
“triage” processes of an especially byzantine complexity. Choice of
health-care provision is far freer in most other countries, in fact, simply
because insurance companies cannot limit one’s decisions, while costs are
either minimal or nonexistent, even though the care is as good or better.
As it happens, the only economically advanced nation in the world today
where someone is likely to be denied access to necessary care or affordable
pharmaceuticals is the United States. Only here, for instance, can a poor
person die for want of the money needed to buy insulin or undergo dialysis.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated
people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own
history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various
social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly
know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised
within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have
been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy
far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state,
than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic
institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the
excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can
elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded
to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes
precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are
far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to
receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable
insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more
subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more
in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and
then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as
almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a
people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the
principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept
taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have
become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in
the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that
taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return,
solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial
complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
Our cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system makes this
obvious. Nations that provide either single-payer healthcare (like the UK)
or a well-administered public option (like Germany) do indeed tax their
populations for the purpose. But this is hardly a gross imposition on their
citizens. For one thing, they distribute tax liability far more equally
across income brackets than we do. For another, they strictly regulate the
prices providers may charge. The result is that the cost of health care in
these countries is roughly half what it is here per capita, and the actual
cost for individuals (especially those who are not extravagantly rich) is
only a fraction of what we are expected to pay for the same services. The
relative pittance most of us would be taxed to sustain a real public option
or national health service would be—so long as our legislators were willing
simultaneously to regulate pharmaceutical and other medical providers
humanely and sensibly—as nothing compared to what we actually pay right now
for the privilege of discovering, when the next shockingly unexpected
medical bill arrives, that we still have far more to pay.
Consider: our insurance premiums already cost most of us more than we would
be taxed for a health system like the one in Canada or in Sweden. Even if
our employers pay most of the putative bill, this results in considerably
lower real wages for us than our European counterparts receive. If we are
so unlucky as to have to buy our coverage directly, the cost is invariably
exorbitant while the benefits are meager and grudging. And at that point
our financial liabilities have only just begun. Quite often, deductibles
alone far exceed any debts the average European or Canadian or Australian
need ever discharge for medical care. Then there are, for no particular
reason, the copays we have to add to what we have already paid our
insurers. Then there are the absurd prices our bought-and-sold political
class permits pharmaceutical firms to charge and insurance companies only
partly to cover. The price of insulin alone, for example, here as nowhere
else in the civilized world, is a crime against humanity—one, in fact, that
actually kills a substantial number of American diabetics each year. If we
need to use the emergency room, and especially if we must call for an
ambulance, the costs are almost unimaginably multiplied. Then, of course,
when truly serious illnesses arrive, insurance companies deploy battalions
of adjusters to deny us the very coverage we thought we were purchasing
with our atrociously excessive premiums. These vigilant souls will do all
they can to abbreviate our treatments, curtail our hospital stays, deny us
as many therapies as possible, refuse approval of the newest therapies or
drugs, or at least delay approval until (ideally) we have died. If we fall
terminally ill, we will spend our last days fighting for every penny of
coverage at each discrete stage of our illness. And then, in all
likelihood, our families will go deeply into debt anyway. Of course, even
all of this is true only if we are among those fortunate enough to have any
coverage at all.
Is this freedom? From what, exactly? Certainly not from the state. The
heavy hand of centralized government is no lighter—its proprietary power
over its citizens is no smaller—here than anywhere else in the developed
world. Quite the reverse. Certainly, where taxes are concerned, no
government in the developed world is any more rapacious and no legal
authority any more draconian. Here, moreover, no less than anywhere else,
the state governs trade, makes war, passes laws, delivers mail, does all
the most basic things the modern state does; but here also, to a greater
degree than in any other advanced economy, the government raises its
revenues for the express purpose of transferring as much wealth as possible
from the working and middle classes to corporations and plutocrats. It
really would be hard to imagine a democracy whose state wields greater
power over the lives of average persons. To me, at least, it seems obvious
that, where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves
thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for
the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive
only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance
companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid.
All this being true, the classical social democrat or democratic socialist
might be forgiven for thinking that Americans are curiously deluded
regarding their own supposed inalienable liberties. He or she might
contend, at any rate, that a state that uses its power chiefly to dilute
consumer and environmental protections in the interests of large
corporations and private investors, while withholding even the most basic
civil goods that taxpayers have a right to expect (such as a
well-maintained infrastructure or decent public transport), is no
smaller—and certainly no less invasive and dictatorial—than one that is
actually obliged by the popular will and the social contract to deliver
services in exchange for the taxes it collects. He or she might think that
a government whose engorged military budget is squandered on wasteful
(because profitable) redundancy, but whose public services are minimal at
best, presides over a far more controlled economy—and a far more coercive
redistribution of wealth—than does a government forced to return public
funds to its citizens in the forms of substantial civic benefits. He or she
might even have the temerity to see social democracy, properly practiced,
not as an enlargement of the state’s prerogatives, but quite the opposite:
a democratic seizure of power from both state and corporate entities, as
well as a greater democratic control over public policy, taxation,
production, and trade.
After all, though we often speak as if the centralized state and corporate
“free” enterprise were antagonists, they are in fact mutually sustaining.
Global capital depends upon the state’s power, its diplomatic access to
other nations and markets, the trade treaties it negotiates, and (if
needed) its judicious deployments of terror. States depend upon capital for
revenues, material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of
an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global
corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern
state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over
every sphere of life. Over against the twin colossi of state and capital, a
truly functioning form of social democracy might well be viewed as an
incomplete but still benign devolution of sovereignty, away from capital to
labor, away from the state to the public. It might even be seen as a feeble
gesture toward a society based on some kind of real subsidiarity. At least,
this scarcely seems an implausible view of the matter.
Whether that is achievable, however—or as achievable as it should be—I am
not prepared to opine. In America, even democratic socialists often have
only a very hazy notion of what the full spectrum of socialist thought has
been in the past, and what it might be in the future. There is always the
likelihood that much of the mainstream of American democratic socialism
will ultimately turn into just another form of classically liberal social
philosophy. I have, in an inconstant and largely flirtatious way, been a
member of the Democratic Socialists of America over the years. I admit,
however, that certain recent tendencies of the DSA make me suspect that, as
time passes, it will look less and less like the kind of pro-labor,
anti-capitalist organization it purports to be, and more and more like
simply another incarnation of sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist,
pro-choice American liberalism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid
psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated neuroses), which I like
no better than sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, libertarian American
conservatism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological
fragilities, and lovingly cultivated resentments). Just as we Americans
have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a system of
values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every
confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another
name for late-modern liberal individualism. I still support most of the
genuinely communitarian aims of the democratic-socialist movement. But, in
the end, it is that tradition of Christian socialism mentioned above to
which I remain loyal. And I do not know if it could now flourish here.
As I have already noted, that tradition was never, especially in the
Anglophone world, a centralizing philosophy. It was friendly neither to the
absolute state nor to ungoverned business. Neither was it even a form of
political “leftism” (however one might define that term). It emanates from
a time when the political leanings we think of as right or left,
conservative or progressive, had not yet coalesced into anything like the
present arrangement of ideological or class allegiances. At times, its
tacit social vision could be positively quaint. Thomas Hughes seemed
convinced that social amelioration could be achieved only by new
generations of Christian gentlemen devoted to the common good out of, in
part, a sense of noblesse oblige. The single most influential figure in the
British tradition of Christian socialism (though he himself never settled
on a single official term for his political and economic philosophy) was
John Ruskin, who was a convinced Tory monarchist. As far as he was
concerned, a principled Christian “communism”—by which he meant not state
ownership of property, but a prior communal claim upon the goods of the
earth and upon excess resources by those in need—was the only possible
civilized and truly charitable alternative to modern liberalism, whether
fiscal or social. He opposed classical liberalism for the simple reason
that he thought it created social injustices of a kind clearly contrary to
the explicit dictates of Christian conscience.
Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal”
in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John
Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like
his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of
Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such
views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken
deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness;
in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of
personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
Even so, anyone familiar with the oldest and richest stream of real
socialism in the Anglophone world understands that it was in large part a
Romantic rebellion against modernity, a longing for a truly Christian
understanding of community, an essentially nostalgic belief in the
hierarchy of those subsidiary estates and institutions that naturally
evolve out of religious, communal, and social life. At times, it proved
susceptible to a mistily idealized view of the past—the Middle Ages
especially—but it was essentially a Christian-humanist protest against the
inhuman scale of both government and industry in the late modern age. It
was not a rejection of free enterprise, but rather a critique of a system
of enterprise that had destroyed the free guilds of late medieval Europe,
disenfranchised individual craftsmen, produced a system of wage slavery,
allowed the large-scale division of labor to disenfranchise workers, turned
labor into a commodity to be traded or a natural resource to be exploited,
accepted the gross superstition of the “iron law of wages,” eliminated the
common lands and goods once recognized as the universal patrimony of free
citizens so as to make state and capital the sole proprietors of civic
wealth, radically reduced legally recognized community usufructs, removed
both the means and the profits of production from the possession of
laborers and yielded them over to an investment class of owners, enlarged
the central state and its power of taxation, displaced the center of
society from the realm of the sacred to that of commercial consumption, and
created a rapacious debt-and-credit system that is little more than the
chronic legal spoilation of the poor by private lenders.
This kind of socialism proposed a use of civic wealth for common human ends
precisely in order to restore the Christian order of values—the Christian
law of love of neighbor and faith in God’s charity—that modernity has
displaced by its reliance instead on the forces of self-interest. In fact,
it presumed the radical notion that charity is a more original and fertile
impulse of the human soul than greed is. It was an attempt to preserve the
best of the moral inheritance of Christian ethical beliefs in an age when
Christian civilization had been—so the proponents of the movement
believed—eclipsed by an ethos that prizes personal acquisition over
communal love. It was, in short, a deeply Christian revolt against those
tendencies of post-Christian modern liberal economics and social philosophy
that tend toward the destruction of landscapes and cityscapes and inscapes,
by reducing or subordinating everything to the impersonal mechanisms of
production and consumption.
What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some
extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by
fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however
well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance,
or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth
preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form. But I
honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes the teachings of Christ
seriously, and who is willing to listen to those teachings with a good will
and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late modern world something
like such socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in
concrete political practices. I have heard American Christians claim (based
on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that Christ calls his
followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for public
policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ was
doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practice of his
day I cannot guess. But it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be
accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of
governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot
command. We, as individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by
acting through collective social and political structures. I admit that the
New Testament makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew
5:42; 6:3; 6:19–20; Luke 6:24–25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43–46; 4:32;
4:35), and I would certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all
one’s moral responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that
do not oblige human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know
that Christ in the Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of
“politics” altogether—for want of a better term, the politics of the
Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest, most compassionate, and most provident
form of democratic socialism could never be anything more than a faint
premonitory shadow.
Even so, a shadow is not nothing.
On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 2:30 PM Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
It's a really good passage. My one response to it is that the Americans
who originally revolted against taxation without representation, were
businessmen and landowners and they were revolting against a monarchy
located across an ocean. The common folk wouldn't have revolted if not
persuaded by the wealthy because they owned nothing and weren't being
taxed. The wealthy are still rebelling against paying taxes and the
Republican administration and senators are doing their bidding.
Miriam
*From:* blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <
blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *On Behalf Of *Erica R
*Sent:* Tuesday, August 11, 2020 2:18 PM
*To:* blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps?
Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post
Office, Plots Election Fraud
This is reminiscent to me of an opinion piece I saw a few months ago in
The Commonweal titled "Three Cheers for Socialism" by David Bentley Hart. I
don't know much about the writer or the publication, I just happened across
this particular piece. I've shared a passage from it below that reflects my
feelings on the issue.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated
people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own
history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various
social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly
know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised
within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have
been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy
far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state,
than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic
institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the
excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can
elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded
to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes
precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are
far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to
receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable
insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more
subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more
in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and
then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as
almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a
people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the
principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept
taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have
become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in
the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that
taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return,
solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial
complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 12:23 PM Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Yes, but whatever union movement we had, has been co-opted. We have
nothing that resembles the peace movement of the 1960's. Our whole society
has been corrupted by the worship of material success and if you compare
what we have now to the 40's and 50's, everything has been privatized and
the profit motive is the rule. Certainly, there are people fighting back.
But I'm afraid that Chris Hedges' view of our reality is closer to the
truth than we'd like to admit.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <
blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 11:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps?
Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post
Office, Plots Election Fraud
Interesting. my spin is that there is a greater, and a growing, level of
protest.
And this protest is not reserved to just one issue. The signs, to me, is
that the American Empire is following the path of all Empires. As the
Empire spirals downward the Ruling Class is being confronted on all sides,
forcing it to wildly charge its former supporters of treasonous
activities. Donald Trump has conducted an ever more vicious attack on
Journalists and the Media in general. He has stepped up his attack on Joe
Biden and the "Leftist Democrat Party".
He has robbed the National Treasury, giving huge piles of taxpayer's money
to his billionaire supporters. He has fought against creating work
programs such as those created by the Roosevelt administration during the
Great Depression. He has failed the Working Class Americans by not
providing any positive leadership. He has doubled up in his efforts to
trash public education and the Post Office. He has caused Americans to not
trust their own government by trashing high government officials(many of
whom he originally appointed). Through all of this negativity he is
turning a once mighty Empire into Trash...just as he did with his fabulous
Taj Mahal.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens ofMSNBC have at least brought it up.
Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election
Fraud JUAN COLE
08/10/2020
2KSHARES
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at
the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are
staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the
coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last
quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.
Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on
Trump's say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the
destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office,
on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is
after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental
regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off
poisoning us. I don't think the neutering of the EPA has even been
reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on
broke.
Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a
satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo "Rugged
individualism works best when we obey."
In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and
powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege.
We have become wimps. The word wimp may come from "whimper." It was
used in a newspaper in 1920, and then not again until 1960. Since then
it may have been influenced by the character of "Wimpy" in the Popeye
cartoons, who did not have much gumption. He was only good at mooching
off people in search of a hamburger.
I always thought Americans were the plucky Popeye, who knew how to get
iron in their diets and show some spunk.
Turns out we have been reduced to begging for our meals.
The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over
substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like
Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In
1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white
Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn't vote for Mondale
because he was a "panty-waist." Reagan took away their right to strike
and took away government services by running up the deficit and
cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government
couldn't provide the services the people had paid for because it is
interrupted.
Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people
don't realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and
they often won't actually get any golden years.
What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.
Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine
themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to
raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can't understand why. France
has persistently high unemployment as it is.
In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and
they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was
Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But
one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on
for months, and were very inconvenient.