Americans are getting crazier. As the country unravels, the rhetoric we hear every day is becoming more and more detached from reality. That's good for Stephen Colbert (and for me) because he'll never run of things to ridicule on The Colbert Report. Crazy statements make for harmless good fun now, but one day that may not be true. One day those who have suffered a psychotic break with reality may be running the country, one day the joke may be on us. And then Heaven Help Us.
There are no rich, there are no poor... Those are the words of Rand Paul, Kentucky's newest Republican Senator. I'll make my main comments after the video.
I have said that American politics is dysfunctional and corrupt, but I've hardly touched on how crazy our politics has become. And when I say crazy, I mean completely out of touch with reality. The connection between our national politics and the public interest has all but disappeared.
Many of the views we get from politicians are merely corn pone opinions
You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."
— Mark Twain
as I described yesterday in Spencer Bachus, Corruption Incarnate.
But Rand Paul and others like him truly believe the dissociated nonsense they spout. These people are ideologues, which means that they are effectively insane. They've got an ideological hammer, and every problem looks like a nail. Rand Paul is a libertarian, which basically means "anything goes" in our society. There are no rich, there are no poor. There's just one big savage Social Darwinist jungle and if you should fall by the wayside in the struggle for survival, or end up being somebody's slave, so be it.
Marxism, libertarianism, pure capitalism and the rest—they're all the same in the sense that adherents of each "ism" are absolutists who can never be wrong. History tells us that rigid ideologies often morph into some form of Fascism, and that's where America appears to be headed. Think of Hitler in the early 1930s. What appears to be an "anti-government" movement here in America could easily become the very opposite.
As social conditions deteriorate over time here in the United States, and there's little doubt they will, many citizens will crave a strong leader to set things right, someone who sees the world in black & white terms, someone who provides simple answers to complex questions, someone who satisfies their need for an authoritarian father figure.
It seems obvious that the goal of many politicians, most of whom are Republicans, is to dismantle the federal government, which would increase social chaos in the United States—where would millions of Americans be without food stamps and unemployment insurance? These ideologues are unabashed in their advocacy but have few real solutions to offer. Don't tax the rich? (I'm assuming they exist here.) Is that supposed to be the solution to all our problems? Jesus wept.
Our Imperial federal goverment is an unqualified disaster in many respects, as I have written about time and time again, but redressing that situation should not mean swinging to some other extreme. There is a dangerous dialectic at work here. More social chaos strengthens the impulse toward authoritarian rule.
I am not saying Rand Paul will become Big Brother, but he and others I could name certainly satisfy all the psychological requirements of such a leader. If we place our trust in rigid ideologues who are disconnected from reality, and reject the public interest in principle, as a plurality of the people in Kentucky recently did, we may ultimately end up with Fascist political arrangements comparable to those we saw in Spain, Italy, Russia, Cuba, Germany and elsewhere during the 20th century. That's the lesson of history, but we live in the United States of Amnesia.
The only way to avoid Fascism is constant vigilance, and even that may not work considering how far gone we are. But we hope it does work. As a decaying Empire, America already has a strong authoritarian political tradition, if not an Emperor per se. The "War on Terror" created a state apparatus for spying on and detaining American citizens without habeas corpus and other basic rights. We would not want our already authoritarian tradition to be reborn as something much, much worse.
If anything goes, then what is real and what is not can be redefined to suit somebody's whim. Political expediency rules. If "there are no rich and there are no poor" in Rand Paul's words, there are no rights and there is no freedom.
I have to say you spout some serious BS sometimes. You can go after Rand Paul for saying some crazy stuff, or being an ideologue, and likely not going to play ball with our BS heirarchy, but to mention Libertarianism with Marxism and as somehow Libertarians would morph into Fascism is total garbage. Something that is a more overt form of social Darwinism, rather than the smoking mirrors social Darwinism-lite that we have now--where the peasants get a pittance at least, mostly for the sake of social stability, rather than kind hearted Plutocrats.
You often come across as an ideologue yourself in some of this rants. The mixture of technology allowing increased power to pool in the hands of fewer and fewer people globally and control dogma's be they Republican--top down moralism/control or Democrat--top down/control you for your own good--either way freedom is lost.
Libertarianism is no panacea, thats the rub, there IS NOT UTOPIA. Government is in bed with the monied/power brokers and both parties are owned, and thus decade after decade people rail against this false duopoly to no avail. Don't listen to what politicians say, watch what they do. Dem's were in bed with Wallstreet as much as the Repub's.
Why don't you wake up down their in the Burg', we've had fascism-lite for a long time now. Both parties support warmongering, patriot act, reduced freedoms, and both ultimately support the extreme wealthy--many whom are multinational in scope. The US has lots of headquarters, with most of the work being outsourced. Its amazing to me that someone who can be so discerning, falls back into political dogma--and believe in the smoking mirrors. Rand Paul, Sarah Palin et al. are just chewy toys for the leftist minded folks. Its well established that you get people to react limbically, and the neocortex and critical thinking go out the window--thats why all this propoganda works so well--divide and conquer. I read many blogs and find that ultimately the despite occasional rants against the power structure in this country, the Liberal/Conservative bullshit comes forth form time to time. It's a joke to even suggest Rand Paul could lead to fascist leadership do to reality gap, people don't function in reality in this country very often--we are trained/manipulated to function from Knee-Jerk emotional reasoning. Naomi's Shock Doctrine touches on this.
Posted by: Mitch | 11/09/2010 at 10:59 AM