#Plutocracy meme software#
After all, one reason the right has gone so berserk is that the Obama years have in fact been marked by significant if incomplete progressive victories, on health policy, taxes, financial reform and the environment.Summary: We’re meant to think that Pluton is nothing to worry about because it hasn’t yet been turned on by default (or the ability to turn it off hasn’t been obstructed yet) this is another massive attack by Microsoft on software freedom, contrary to what Microsoft apologists try to tell us Is this an unacceptably downbeat vision? Not to my eyes. Instead, it’s going to be a hard slog at best. Look, for example, at how quickly opposition to gay marriage has gone from a reliable vote-getter for the right to a Republican liability.īut there’s still a lot of real prejudice out there, and probably enough so that political revolution from the left is off the table. That doesn’t say that movement toward progressive goals is impossible - America is becoming both more diverse and more tolerant over time. On the other hand, if the divisions in American politics aren’t just about money, if they reflect deep-seated prejudices that progressives simply can’t appease, such visions of radical change are naïve. Some activists go further and call on Democrats to stop talking about social issues other than income inequality, although Mr. And it might - might - be possible for a candidate preaching economic populism to break through this false consciousness, thereby achieving a revolutionary restructuring of the political landscape, by making a sufficiently strong case that he’s on their side. If the ugliness in American politics is all, or almost all, about the influence of big money, then working-class voters who support the right are victims of false consciousness. In any case, however, the question for progressives is what all of this says about political strategy. Racial dog whistles, demagogy on abortion and so on would be rolled out during election years, then put back into storage while the Republican Party focused on its real business of enabling shadow banking and cutting top tax rates. Until recently you could argue that whatever the motivations of conservative voters, the oligarchs remained firmly in control. That’s not conspiracy theorizing it’s just history, documented at length in Jane Mayer’s eye-opening new book “ Dark Money.” But that effort wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it has without the political aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, and the resulting flip of Southern white voters to the G.O.P. Yes, there was a concerted, successful effort by billionaires to push America to the right. Crucially, the rise of the American hard right was the rise of a coalition, an alliance between an elite seeking low taxes and deregulation and a base of voters motivated by fears of social change and, above all, by hostility toward you-know-who.
But it’s important to understand how America’s oligarchs got so powerful.įor they didn’t get there just by buying influence (which is not to deny that there’s a lot of influence-buying out there). Oligarchy is a very real issue, and I was writing about the damaging rise of the 1 percent back when many of today’s Sanders supporters were in elementary school.
As you might guess, I’m on the many-evils side of this debate.
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