You've Plunged a Dagger in My Chest, Yet I Live

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now."

Thirdly, this makes Hillary Clinton an oligarch by nature; a member of an entitled elite who thinks they are better than the rest of us because they have convinced us that our becoming poorer is not due to laws that have taken 22% of the wealth and 15% of the income from the rest of us since 1973 (see Robert Reich's book Aftershock for more on this subject), and given it to the top one percent of the population.

Aristotle in his Politics described an oligarchy as the worst form of government possible, worse even than a tyranny (dictatorship) or what he called democracy (really anarchy or mob rule), because of its instability and avaricious nature. All oligarchies degenerate into tyrannies sooner rather than later, and Donald Trump represents the most immediate possibility of that occurring. Oligarchies are easier to overthrow than dictatorships, because they depend upon maintaining the semblance of their former republican ideals, i.e., a constitutionally-limited government, answerable to We the People, while a dictatorship has no such limitation. This is the only reason I would vote for Clinton in this election: to prevent the establishment of a Trump dictatorship.

I support Bernie Sanders because I am an FDR Democrat. I support Bernie Sanders because I am a disciple of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. Madison and Jefferson both knew slavery was evil, and morally wrong. They also knew when it returned almost twenty dollars annually for every dollar spent (this in the days before King Cotton rose like a gluttonous demon to command the Deep South and capitalize the North), even Jefferson and Madison's moral shame could not overcome their desire for a comfortable life. Jefferson thought slavery would die a natural death--as it did in Great Britain and France--but King Cotton gave it a life in this country that required the Civil War to expunge it. I support Bernie Sanders because of the anger and despair I have noted in so many of my fellow Americans, an anger and despair for which neither Hillary nor Trump offer any real honest or practical solutions, only platitudes, or what they have stolen from the Senator from Vermont.

Back in 2013, James K. Galbraith addressed an audience in Greece, on what was really needed to fight the continuing decline of society and civilization in both Europe and North America. He proposed a way to stabilize the Western Democracies long enough that they can be saved, rather than fall into a long, dark night of petty, squabbling dictatorships fighting over resources, which is what the ultimate result of proposals like "Brexit" in the United Kingdom and Trump's wall between the U.S. and Mexico will lead to:

"Stabilization, therefore, of society, and stabilization of the human condition have a very important role to play in what me must do. That means stabilizing people's pensions. Stabilizing unemployment insurance. Stabilizing the basic services--education and healthcare. Adequately insuring bank deposits so as to prevent the cataclysm of an uncontrollable run and shutdown of the payment system. These are things we do for each other, mainly with a device that's called insurance: social insurance, deposit insurance, health insurance, unemployment insurance. And when we extend that to the whole community--and by this I mean the European community or the American community--we bring our populations together and stop processes that are driving us apart.

It's seems to me that the objective to articulate is really a very simple one for the time being: It is to stop the path of destruction, to stabilize, to quell panic, to defeat violence, to buy time, frankly--not to solve all problems at once--but to buy time so as to effectively open up the possibility for a new politics based on principles that are not foreign in Europe (or the United States for that matter--RJG), but that have been forgotten and submerged in recent years: the principles of solidarity and the spirit of true and effective democracy.

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