[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by detbuch

You're blaming de Tocqueville for the last 40 years? So it took 150 years for de Tocqueville's concerns to kick in?

So the "national character" of Americans that he spoke of had nothing to do with that first 150 years which led to the creation of the American middle class? But, in the last 40 years, our national character finally kicked in to start the destruction of the middle class (the nation of shopkeepers de Tocqueville referred to) that had somehow supposedly been created in spite of 150 years of an entrenched and revered American national character?

Actually, what followed the first century of growth through domination by the American national character was the rise and ultimate dominance of American Progressivism. It is that Progressivism, with its required growth of the federal government's size and scope of power--the centralization of American governmental power--resulting (over the last 40 years) in our present administrative state with its highest and most powerful than ever regulatory grip on the American economy accompanied by its inevitable marriage to the larger centralized corporations that have resulted from the failure of the many, more diversified, smaller businesses due to excessive regulatory burdens.

And thus the shrinking of the American middle class. De Tocqueville's notion of an original American national character had less to do with it than the shrinking of the American constitutional character that has been reinterpreted and squashed by the necessities of Progressive authoritarianism.

With the Citizen united decision corporations acquired the ability to own politicians, Russia did also
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