The year 2010 gives us a politics totally created by ad men and financed by corporate America. Those two mainstays of American finance essentially fund it: big banking and big insurance. It is so illogical and so dishonest that I can reduce the descriptive burden to one phrase: conceptual deception. Indeed, it can be adequately summarized in one word: cynicism.
There is a linguistic economy here that only a well-tanned investment banker can admire. For the rest of us, history suggests that we just have to experience it to appreciate its destructive power.
In the short run we are going to take a painful caning right across our backs. I know of no democratic defense against organized corporate lying, backed literally by unlimited corporate financing of said lies.
However, a measure of poise reveals that, even in politics, conceptual deception eventually contains self-destructive elements. The 2010 version of GOP sloganeering is so demeaning and even insulting to the sense of self of run-of-the-mill voters that it will generate at least a slight measure of backlash even in the course of a single electoral season. I do not immediately see how it can be sustained for two seasons for it leaves no workable politics for its advocates to advocate — as incoming Republican beneficiaries will learn in their own good time.
The enormous political power behind Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal resided in the overwhelming electoral weight of mass unemployment. Classic Republican cliches simply cannot support the weight of such large-scale human agony. It will force thoughtful Americans to discover what the original Populist advocates of the 19th century discovered and which I wrote about so long ago — namely, the profoundly exploitative impact unregulated banking has upon all the sundry millions who are not bankers.
"— Lawrence Goodwyn (via azspot)
Friday, November 05, 2010
Conceptual Deception In Politics
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