The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Today,
the Supreme
Court took another step toward giving the wealthy more freedom to influence
federal elections:

Have you ever
heard of managed
democracy? No? Well, you are living in one:

In a
nutshell, our government has learned to control elections so that the people
can exercise their rights without truly changing public policy.

One major
outcome is the Roberts Supreme Court.

The
concept of managed democracy evolved from the term “guided democracy”,
which was developed in the 1920’s by Walter
Lippmann in his seminal work “Public Opinion” (1922).

So,
here we are. We have elections, but nothing changes. We have elections, and the
incumbents usually win. We vote for hope and change, and nothing changes. We vote
and today, we get an expansion of Citizens
United, while yesterday, we got the Ryan
Budget. We live in a culture of narcissism. As such, social and
political movements are unlikely to get any traction. We live for ourselves and
for those close to us.

We treat the political sphere like
the weather: We endure the persistent economic hard times and try to snag
whatever we can for ourselves. There is limited interest anywhere in improving civic
virtue. People are content to let their “betters” rule and hope for the
best for themselves. If our neighbors suffer, well, that’s too bad.

As
Ian Welsh points
out, we are:

Welsh adds
an important point: Creating the candidates, taking over an existing party, or
creating a new party are all possible. All of them can be done, both in theory and in
practice, if enough people wanted to, or, wanted it enough to do it. But they
don’t.

Welsh
concludes:

We can speculate that
this is because we are a consumer society. Consumers choose from the options presented to us, we
do not make our own options. Whoever controls the menu, controls the
consumer society.

From time
to time, one person or another will bleat something along the lines of: “You are
just nasty; it isn’t conducive to a dialogue”. That is another cop-out, like “I’m
not political”.  There’s no reason why we
should be even remotely interested in dialogue with people who willingly shirk
all political responsibility. They’ve chosen to be impotent; to be little
better than slaves – why should anybody waste their time in a dialogue with
them? The great Stirling
Newberry wrote this week:

Newberry
points out that only 9% of the population believes Congress is doing a good
job, but it doesn’t matter. It won’t change, because only 10% of the population
does the choosing on primary day, and they are the ones who prefer reactionary candidates.

A takeaway
from Howard Zinn’s 2005 “A
Peoples History of the United States“, is that our history has been
one largely of the elites playing various demographic slices of the non-elites
off against one another. Whenever we have made progress, it has been when the
non-elites set aside these artificial divisions and focus their ire at the
elites (often at great personal risk). Usually this only happens after the
elites over-reach in some way. We’re going through that phase again, now.

We aren’t
in danger of a new gilded age, we are in one.

We aren’t
in danger of losing our democracy. In any reasonable sense, we have lost it already.

We have
choices, and could make them. If we as a group fail to do so, then as a
group, we are responsible for our fate.

We were
given this republic and we should keep it. We either will work hard to change
the course and keep it; or, we will let it stay under the control of the oligarchs. In either
case, we have decided. And we are responsible for that decision, to ourselves,
our children, to our society.

But we are a nation of enablers. Are we too
comfortable to change?