To which I responded:
I agree that the Dems are not MAGNIFICENT. As I wrote some months ago, heroes are rare in every realm, and they are plenty scarce enough among the Dems as well.More important, I agree with you about "the way power systems are developed in class societies." Except I would take the problem and extend it more universally: because the tendencies toward corruption (the undermining of justice by the play of power) characterize ALL civilized societies with which I am familiar.
So those societies that trumpted their Marxist ideologies also functioned as "class societies," for all their talk of being "classless."
And the State did not, of course, "wither away." (Robert Tucker wrote a great article about the Stalinist state, entitled "Fat State, Lean Society.") The people living in Marxist states like the Soviet Union, and Mao's China, did not escape the corrupt workings of power. They just had to suffer them without the benefit of the kinds of protections that are enjoyed by the citizens of liberal democracies.
You "accused" me the other day of being a conservative who thinks he's a progressive. But I doubt my goals and values are any less progressive than yours. For example, I want a society in which every citizen has EQUAL SAY IN THE POLITICAL REALM, a society in which there is not a division between one class of people who get a strong voice and another class of people who get a weak voice. One of the phrases I use most frequently to epitomize what I OPPOSE is that from the Athenians quoted by Thucydides: "the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must."
Where you and I differ is in our understanding of what kinds of solutions are possible to the perennial downhill tendencies of societies to be corrupted.
It seems to me that you make vague gestures toward "the people," as if they can somehow be counted on to create an uncorrupted society --dispensing with our current structures, and acting without leaders, as I recall-- while I think that is an absolutely baseless and insubstantial notion of a solution, the equivalent of waving a feather to stop the wind.
Power's corrupting influence can be controlled only by a combination of good structures (like the US Constitution) along with a vigilant and aware citizenry.
In my lifetime --more particularly, since the 1970s-- the distribution of power in America has become increasingly skewed in a corrupt direction. To some extent, that is because of the imperfections of the structure: the campaign finance system, for example, has provided a large entry way for money to buy the political system.
But had the American people not been so fat and complacent and ignorant while the theft of our democracy was going on, the better aspects of our system's structure would have been plenty sufficient to defeat the corrupting forces.
Think about how the American public reacted when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. They thought his strength was admirable. They rewarded him politically for that. BUt it was one more step in the reactionary forces' warring on the power of labor generally, and labor unions in particular. Earlier generations understood the need for union power, but the affluent America of the post-war era forgot about all that, and gradually allowed the reactionary forces of American capitalism to dismantle the protections and the power so hard-won by American workers over the course of nearly a century.
Before the wave of reaction set in, the American political system had imposed on the broadcast media a "Fairness Doctrine" that protected points of view that did not command huge financial resources. It helped level the playing field in terms of the access of competing ideas to shape the public consciousness. The Reaganites got rid of that one, too, and the American people did not object.
Again and again, the American people have slept through the tilting of the playing field at their expense. They have never rewarded the people who have tried to clean up the political finance system, nor punished those who foster "highest bidder" government.
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