Some of the answers are more readily dealt with in separate sections: on media and entertainment, on education, on ideology and religion, on crime, on the developing autocracy. In all of these sectors there have been major changes within the last several decades, and in nearly all of them the intrusive hand of corporate money has been crucial. In other words, they have been strongly influenced, if not taken over, by large corporations or their owners. At the same time there has been the aggressive development and promotion of ideas and policies favorable to corporations, the wealthy, and their allies, religious fundamentalists.
There is, however, a major political component. How did Republicans not only become the dominant party, but become to be perceived as the party speaking for the white middle class, despite policies which favor the selfish class, the very wealthy and the large corporations? Even in liberal, or "blue" states, there are Republican governors, even a Republican mayor of most liberal New York! Republicans have been able to project populism, while advocating the opposite. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan have both been successful exemplars of this skill, as have Republican governors like Pataki and Schwartznegger. The primary exemplar of conservative populism was Ronald Reagan, another film star, who successfully played the role of just plain Aw Shucks folks.
Republicans have also successfully taken over what I call "the politics of diversion." For several centuries, white aristocrats in the South were able to maintain power (even as they changed political labels) by scaring white have-nots that blacks would take over unless whites were united against them. While blacks have now gained legal civil rights, there are still ways to keep them marginalized, and still ways to use their numbers as rallying points, but now diversionary politics has been expanded.
Large portions of the population can be galvanized against their own interests, Republicans have learned, by pressing the social/religious issues: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, immigration and crime (the latter has a racial undertone). Fear, which was used by the selfish class in the Roman Empire, is an important component in all these issues: fear of out of control sexuality, fear of loss of control and fear of the other. You can keep people down if you scare them enough. The most important issue which is governed by fear, and has been successfully manipulated by the Republicans, is national security and terrorism, which worked for the Republicans in 2002 and 2004.
The Roman Senators, as the functionaries of the autocratic state put into place by Diocletian, were the beneficiaries of the widespread fear of chaos in the Empire, and of the barbarian incursions coming from without. People did what they were told, because when they didn't, things had fallen apart--at least that's what the selfish class persuaded everyone to believe.
Things aren't falling apart in the United States, yet, but if you are passively saturated by TV and talk radio you may think that they are. Is that an intention of the selfish class? Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine that one of the differences between the US and Canada, which has as many guns per capita, is the relative absence of fear in Canada and its pervasiveness in the US. And that was before 9/11. Since 9/11 the Republicans have learned to use terrorism to their advantage, as well. The shilling of fear may have much more to do with the way the media market works, than it does with any selfish class intent to condition people to keep their heads down. But whether there is a conspiracy or not, the omnipresence of fear does make diversionary politics that much more effective. Because of what we see on TV, we can have so many more things to be afraid of.
Therefore, we leave politics to the "big boys," and respond positively to people who talk tough, and reject those who sound reasonable, or who play it safe. As Clinton said of US politics, it is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. Unless, of course, events prove just how wrong those strong talkers prove to be.
Perhaps the peace movement will force the Bush administration to slowly disengage from Iraq. Perhaps the corporate profiteering that has marked our occupation there will be reversed, as well, but the dominance of the selfish class will hardly be shaken by such temporary detours. Think of what the elite have already accomplished. They now have laws and programs and a government in place in the US that will protect their interests, and even with the peace movement gaining in strength there is little political will among the "opposition" (whether political, such as the Democratic Party, or institutional, such as labor unions) to oppose them.
The timidity of the known political leaders opposing the radical conservatives is remarkable. Hillary Clinton, for example, has proposed sending more troops to Iraq. Senator Durbin, who spoke out about the torture of detainees, has apologized and lapsed into chastened silence. Senators Schumer and Kerry said they would ask "tough" questions of the President's Supreme Court nominees, but enough opposition leaders had signed onto a compromise in the Senate, that there were no effective filibusters, which might have blocked the radical conservative takeover of the Supreme Court.
The selfish class can be stopped, but only if people are awakened to the losses they have already sustained in addition to the losses of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan: losses of wages and secure jobs, losses of protection from large corporations, losses to the environment and what that will mean for the very future of the Earth, losses of civil protections from a domineering government and losses of democratic control.
Remember how Octavian/Augustus took over the people's office of Tribune? (He did so to gain veto power over the Senate, but the people didn't rise up, did they?) Something similar is happening now, which will be covered in another section. . If people can recognize that the current disposition of power and wealth is not inevitable, and that the overwhelming majority, both in the US and around the world, are being driven into the 21st century equivalent of the class of humiliores, then perhaps real political change can happen.
A modest (but potentially revolutionary) start would be to take money out of politics by public funding of campaigns, and free media access to the candidates of recognized political parties. The problem, of course, for even such a modest procedural reform, is that with the Supreme Court Buckley v Valeo ruling, there is no constitutional way to remove all private money from politics. And those in power are indebted to those with money. Further, the large media companies would use all the capital at their disposal to oppose any free access proposal, or would shunt it off to some kind of public access agreement modeled on the ones local cable companies have agreed to with states: setting up public access channels, which few people ever watch.
Probably, the only way to stop the selfish class, and the disasters that will surely follow their continued dominance, will be to mobilize people without relying on access to the media, without depending, in other words, on institutions already controlled by the selfish class. Probably that their mobilization would have to be nearly revolutionary in its appeal. A peace movement might provide the impetus for that, in the face of a disaster like Iraq, which is really much worse than Vietnam, because it was so willfully entered into, and because it has unleashed much greater danger to all of us than existed before the US takeover. The positive effect of the peace movement could be to finally persuade people that the security they thought they had purchased at great price, by supporting the selfish class, is no security at all.
Then perhaps they will begin to question the dominance of the selfish class, itself.
For more on this: see my book, available at click here
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