Quote:
Originally Posted by Tagger
Does anybody here believe ugly, poor Honest Abe could make it today ? Most cases the big money will control everything and everyone .
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Tagger, you touch upon an age-old problem--the multitude being subservient to a ruling class. Money and power have always slept together and bred into the historical record offsprings evolving in different forms of ruling politics, but always with the essential chain of DNA--power=wealth/wealth=power/power=wealth/etc., etc.
Every now and then, there is a mutation in the code, a revolution; a religious movement; or a philosophical or political "enlightenment." For a time, usually relatively short, a society forms from a break in the chain and flourishes, or seems to, as an egalitarian one. There is prosperity among the people, or seems to be. But the ruling class remains, either wealthier at the start, or getting there in time.
So what is the difference that enables the new societies to provide the masses with a "fairer" portion of the wealth? In a word, virtue. Optimistic belief fosters faith and adherence. So long as the people and the rulers continue to "believe" and virtuously abide by their principles, all is well.
What destroys the more equitable balance? In a word, corruption.
Either the "people" are so eager to finally be able to assert power that they create a chaotic despotism which is so brutal that the ruling class must quell it quickly and revert back to an old tyranny, as in the French Revolution, or over time, as in the Russian Revolution.
Or, the ruling class becomes filled with cynics, or despotic ideologues, who once again seize the opportunity to transform power into wealth. Quickly, or, as in our American case, over time.
Our American system has lasted longer than other nation states as an egalitarian, or relatively so, society. "Ugly, poor, honest Abe" was electable because "Four score and seven years" into the American experiment there was still a large remnant of the original ruling and societal virtue inherent in the political process. There was still a strong belief in founding principles mostly unsullied by noticeable degradation in a cherished constitution. The people were still, in the main, politically innocent and optimistic about being free to build their own lives. The societal virtue based on inherent personal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and a still prevailing ruling class virtue of not usurping the constitutional bounds which prevented stepping on those inherent rights, combined with an exceptional American spirit not only of freedom, but a spirit that was moved by high principles and lofty, beautiful rhetoric speaking those principles, a spirit that valued those principles and one who represented them over some good-looking slickster who promised them the moon if they would overlook some little sacrifice of freedom was the spirit that made Honest Abe electable then.
And if he were not electable today, you're right. The old, seemingly inevitable DNA chain of intertwined wealth and power has resurfaced from its latent rest. Our system, from politics to personal life has been corrupted. Virtue is definitely not rampant among the ruling class. The politicians have all but destroyed our constitutional foundation and abandoned the protection of the principals which created it. And the American spirit has been corrupted in half or more of the people. You're right, good looks and slick words, promises of transferring wealth to the people rather than letting them making their own--basically just pretty lies seem to be the ticket to victory. And wealth can pay for that, as well as winning can lead to the enrichment of the political class.
The politicians debunk the old notions of virtue in our founding principles by saying that the founders were hypocrites. They were wealthy slave owners. How could they believe in their high-minded notions of inherent equality and liberty?
Thus, they unwittingly debunk their own notion of democracy. The original creators of democracy, (Golden age of Greece?) were also slave owners, were a small ruling class of wealthy elites who truly lived off the backs of the masses under them, masses who had no right, inherent or otherwise, to make a life on their own. So if this notion of some slave owners, even in cooperation with those who did not own slaves, could not possibly philosophically consider that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, how could it have been possible for even more oppressive tyrants to create the notion of democracy?
It was so for our founders because humans can rise above their own failing. There is this beauty in our nature that enables even the most depraved among us to recognize something better than themselves. And in the less depraved, that they can recognize that there are fundamental, inalienable rights which each must respect and protect for the rest or lose their own. The trick is to reach for it.
Of course, they can also conspire with others to deprive the rest in order to enrich their own. That is half of the problem in our country, or may be a result of the other half. That being the ideological belief in top-down all-powerful government rather than bottom up consent of the governed. Together it all becomes the corruption of our ruling class. And it leads to the destruction of the legal foundation which was created to prevent that, and which depended on the virtue of the people, including and especially the ruling class. It has opened the gate, created the breech, through which and by which our present corrupted, lie infested, ruling class control us.
And the beauty of it, for the ruling class, is that the basic moral corruption of society makes it easy to dupe it and manipulate it with incessant and attractive little (or big) lies such as the Gruber obfuscation about the ACA, or Obama pretending to be against gay marriage in order to get elected, or Bush manipulations for war and Patriot act, by Clinton lies, and Nixon lies, and LBJ great society lies, and the massive FDR lies not only to get into war but to shred the Constitution, and the hypocrite elitist Woodrow Wilson machinations, and on and on.
So, anyone aspiring to political office as one who wants to revert to founding principles has been demonized as an "extremist." Obviously, that demonization is necessary because founding principles combined with the virtue to adhere to and protect them, would send this ruling class packing.