From America to Zimbabwe, the coming anarchy

[Seahorse]

Yes, it surely could fade away into insignificance. What better example than the Swine Flu vaccine imbroglio. If swine flu is a national public health emergency they must compel the vaccination. No choice  among employees  anywhere along the line.  I posted about this in the huge Swine Flu thread.   Public health issues are compulsions of the state.  Right now the state loses either way because in point of fact the Federal government is very weak. It must be with as ideological a Congress as we have had since at least Nixon. Pure weakness no different than the French Third Republic as I see it.   A fizzle out after five days of attack by the German's when the French Army was cracked up to be the best in the world by the pundits.   No staying power even months after mobilization and months of Phoney War.

Another clue is Home Schooling.  There the weakness is most glaring. The children are compelled to public education with a rigid control over parochial schools if the state is not weak.   Home schooling is a most glaring evidence of a weak state. 

Another clue is the absolute inability of state elites to control economic elites .   

Yes, the states could and should reassert themselves.  The heart of our political system is the county level political organization and it is disconnected too much from the professional elites at the federal level. 

 One could do a massive book and not exhaust the subject.   Any mass break down of Federalism will cause a break up and   creation of new associations. That means the end of international primacies that drive the success of the state at the local level.  There is a cancel out problem too. We are far too technological now for a break up of the state into  adversarial statelets or groups of states.   Thus,  we are forced into a stronger state unless other states break up too!   We break up and there is massive break up elsewhere too.   In the consummation of that mess on a global scale is where we wind up with Caesar first.   

Obama makes it or we are in a world of hurt!    You can only suffer ideological damage so long without the republic falling and the need for a DeGaulle   to set up a new arrangement.      Can we live through a generation of a Fourth Republic?    I think not.

[Jeromie]

I just discovered this thread.  I very much suggest that people read all of Kaplan's travel books.   The most complete book is The Ends of the Earth. I have read virtually all of Kaplan's books. I  particularly love Warrior Politics. It is always on my  night stand.

Few people have traveled the entire world in a  third class manner for most of their adult life.    A  Jew who stays with a member of The Brotherhood in Egypt, for example.   But  I bet Kaplan has never stayed with a Black  Gangsta group in LA or NY.


For me, the best comparative of the US political situation for study is the Third French Republic and it's fall.   The very best book about this is  The  Collapse of the Third Republic   by William L Shirer.  Shirer has been a favorite of mine since teenage days when I read Berlin Diary.

[Jeromie]

Here is some fuel for the fire.  This piece written in 2003 is by Curtis White , the author of The Middle Mind:Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves .  Concerning Sotoligarchy


http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-12-02/concerning-sotoligarchy/1

[steelmoon]

Massachusetts is feeling it too.   Wither the Commonwealth?

Governor Warns of 2000 State Job cuts

Mass. Unemployment at 33-year high; fund nearly exhausted


Seahorse, you should sticky this thread!  (Right after you get that avatar thing squared away  )

[Seahorse]

Jeromie,

I tried to read the article you linked, but no words are on the web page.

Advice taken Steelmoon, I put a sticky on this thread.

[Jeromie]

Verdamdt,  I  entered " Concerning Sotoligarchy" in the website search box and it came up as a  first choice.

I printed this article off years ago and saved it. When I  Googled  " Concerning Sotoligarchy", Curtis White, Village Voice, the article came up  directly in the top choices. So I linked the the URL to bring it up directly .   

 

[Seahorse]

Found it Jeromie.  Excellent read.

He says that the most common thing about humans is not common sense but human kindness. Unhappily, he goes on, our natural disposition to kindness is always defeated by self-interest.(usually rationalized as "collateral damage" or "incidental take"), but in the long run it will be understood as self-defeat.

National self-interest is indistinguishable from global legalized violence aimed at humans, the natural world, and ultimately being itself, before which our captains of state stand with all the wonder of a gourmand before a steak. They're going to eat it up. What if our kindness-defeating self-interest is only, from the perspective of the future, the repeated application of a rapacious and self-defeating logic?

http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-12-02/news/concerning-sotoligarchy/2

[Jeromie]

Here is another choke hold on the problem of self interest.  The Crash of Western Civilization: the Limits of the Market and Democracy By Jacques Attali.  This piece ran in Foreign Policy  Summer 1997. Here is a very high level state minion of French policy circles, particularly banking.  He too echos Marcel Proust.

I have been fascinated by the politically stupid class for a very long time. Invariably, they manifest as people whose only possible utterances are about what they oppose. Those that never forget and never learn.  All this then feeds into commentators on politics like the incomparable Richard Hofstadter and my favorite H L Mencken.


http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/attali.html

I have linked Attali quite a few times.

[Jeromie]

Robert D Kaplan had a nifty piece on Was Democracy Just a Moment December 1997  The Atlantic


http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97dec/democ.htm

[Seahorse]

Thanks Jeromie, all good reads.  I hope people will take the time to read the linked articles.  They are very enlightening.

[Jeromie]

Kaplan also has a very short piece Conrad's Nostromo and the Third World

Here are the opening lines. 

" The problem with bourgeois societies is a lack of imagination. A person raised in a middle-or upper-middle class suburban environment,a place ruled by rationalism in the service of material progress,has difficulty imagining the psychological state of affairs in a society where there is little or no memory of hard work achieving its just reward,and where a gang or a  drafty army barracks constitutes an improvement in material and emotional security."


 In the event of a cessation of the expected and accepted middle class life, the loser of that life will do anything to preserve the former life and at the expense of those not required to be in alliance to retain their advantages. Those that cannot form working alliances of considerable duration in a new polity will be put aside by the new political alliance.  The aggrieved lower classes are just such people that have already gone through the process of being shut out because they cannot compromise to create durable alliances to protect their interests.

I personally find the utter lack of imagination of aggrieved Americans very stunning. 

[Seahorse]

From the LATOC news page:

Foreclosure and its Aftereffects
The wave of foreclosures affecting East Oakland and other low-income neighborhoods has been accompanied by a related wave of blight, decay, and crime.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/foreclosure_and_its_aftereffects/Content?oid=1026834

[guitarbuddy]

Here is some fuel for the fire.  This piece written in 2003 is by Curtis White , the author of The Middle Mind:Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves .  Concerning Sotoligarchy


http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-12-02/concerning-sotoligarchy/1

I read the article, but don't get what it is this person is supposed to be contributing. It's well-known round the world that Americans are incredibly naive when it comes to their government's actions. I'm willing to bet that 90% of Americans don't even know there's now a concrete and steel wall running across the bottom of Texas separating us from Mexico. I showed some very smart, liberal friends of mine in Austin pictures of it a couple of months ago, and they were puzzled as much as anything else. One even said "I thought Obama would have stopped it." And plenty of people have this attitude about our foreign occupations that goes something like this: "well, I don't think we should have gone into Iraq/Afghanistan (even though they may have thought so initially) but we have to stay there now until it's stabilized. I mean, you don't want a power vacuum there!" We've got a major league economic and social crisis going on in our own country, but it's reasonable to spend trillions of dollars in another country to supposedly fix it up after we've fucked it up? Who comes up with this idiocy?

[Jeromie]

Who comes up with this stuff......? The American elites knowing how to manage the politically stupid  Hoi Polloi. And in the Village Voice the apex paper of the gentrified areas of Manhattan.

[ralfy]

In that case, you probably missed Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which talks about one of those "Spartan" states that you imagine will solve problems for the U.S.

I just discovered this thread.  I very much suggest that people read all of Kaplan's travel books.   The most complete book is The Ends of the Earth. I have read virtually all of Kaplan's books. I  particularly love Warrior Politics. It is always on my  night stand.

Few people have traveled the entire world in a  third class manner for most of their adult life.    A  Jew who stays with a member of The Brotherhood in Egypt, for example.   But  I bet Kaplan has never stayed with a Black  Gangsta group in LA or NY.


For me, the best comparative of the US political situation for study is the Third French Republic and it's fall.   The very best book about this is  The  Collapse of the Third Republic   by William L Shirer.  Shirer has been a favorite of mine since teenage days when I read Berlin Diary.