It is really interesting how American commoners can support a political party that obviously serves the interests of the top money earners and wealthy elites in this country. Perhaps they are waiting for some scraps to fall off the supply-side table? Or some of that lucre to tumble down their way in the form of a fabulous $9.00/hr retail job? But, “commoners”? What does that mean?
Since the country seems bent on heading in the direction of a 19th Century-style society of stratified income classes, we may as well dust off the Victorian terminology and talk about how life is going to be.
Power is in the ability to allocate resources. What conservative republicans have been doing is a kind of social reconstruction. They have been allocating resources to campaigns that seek to promulgate their plan to reform American culture in the image of white, protestant, conservative, orderly suburbia. Only they do not call it reconstruction.
Republicans are as scared as Glenn Beck's alligator tears might suggest. They see a country that is increasingly ethnic in non-European races. They see expansion in non-traditional values and norms. They fear the consequences of the expiration of our post-WWII supremacy.
With the election of the recent congressional class, it is very clear that wealthy corporations and individuals are getting what they paid for- statutory and policy favors and influence in the deconstruction of the federal system of government. It is no coincidence that influence rests with politicians from southern states, where an upswing in antebellum sentiment is afoot, masked as Tea Party indignation. These folks have resurrected old anger with the federal government in the form of repackaged "concerns" with states rights and other confederate sympathies. Old antipathy is being dusted off and tried on for size.
Since SCOTUS has affirmed that money equals speech in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, and that corporate funding of broadcasts cannot be limited under the First Amendment, anonymous streams of cash from conservative donors flooded the 2010 election. Such is the power of persuasion made by big money that a class of de/re-constructionists was just elected to the congress.
Americans commoners have a fetish about the ways of the megawealthy. Dial up CNBC sometime when Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are interviewed at one of the Ivy League B-Schools. Watch all of the gaga-eyed MBA students as they hang on every utterance proffered by these two American Plutocrats. It is a form of rapture. The students and faculty are under a kind of enchantment. But this is no different from the country at large. Watch how we commoners behave around Donald Trump, or Oprah for that matter.
One of the things that will have to occur in the near future is a rewrite of the local zoning codes pertaining to shanty towns and squatting. As the population grows, as raw material scarcity increases, and as wealth continues to shift toward the wealthy side of the skewed population curve, more and more people will find themselves unable to find housing. Increasingly we see a housing system heavily relying on credit and background checks, high rents, and the need to commute in America’s now balky system of suburbs. The suburb system places a great distance between work centers and living centers, making transportation problematic for our up-and-coming dirt poor class.
As the population of the dirt poor and the destitute rises due to deindustrialization and dissolution of social safety nets (say, by 2030), all flexibility in the system will have played out and people will find themselves living in shanties and refrigerator boxes. They’ll become squatters. The local constables will have to deal with them because municipalities will refuse to compromise property values and will shun the homeless.
Let’s see. What will the growing class of homeless do with their time? Write poems about the joys of laissez faire orthodoxy? Somebody will put together an appealing manifesto for an insurrection.
Maybe Glenn Beck is right. Maybe there will be a revolution. But I don’t think it will be the one he is expecting.
