I usually don’t read DailyKos, mostly because I’m annoyed by the self-congratulation and pretentiousness found routinely at it and other “netroots” headquarters. The sight of its members patting themselves on the back for being at the helm of a glorious revolution toward “people powered politics” usually has me wondering how anyone can stomach such bullshit. But every once in a while, you find an interesting and telling post amongst all the noise. On exhibit today is this post reviewing the latest treatise on American income inequality and its political effects, summarizing several “surprising” statistics from the tome. It’s telling because, if pwogs are genuinely surprised by any of them, it goes a long way in explaining their persistent political failure. Along the way we see that Americans are incurably atomistic, base much of their political opinion on fantasies of future wealth and status, hold contradictory opinions and, also, that the affluent generally have disproportionate influence on political dynamics and tend to elevate the importance of “social issues” over “economic” ones. Oh yeah, and “politics matters” is the apparent capstone of the whole piece. Freaky.
As the corollary to the latter observation, the often ignored reality on the part of most of the pwogs is that systematics matters. America has inherited it’s basic political machinery from its roots as a genocidal slave republic, a system that, if we are to believe its chief architects from the revolutionary period, was designed specifically to edify an oligarchic power structure. A few things have changed, such as the fact that we are now allowed to “choose” which of two upper-class individuals, almost invariably of the dominant ethnic group (white) and sex (male), get to serve a term in our higher federal legislative chamber. Generally, we live in what can only be described as a partially reformed caste system. It is why few things in this country make you more a pariah than being a genuine leftist of any sort, much like being a classical liberal would have you on the outs in the former Soviet Union (though in far more savage ways, no doubt).
We are not on the cusp of any kind of revolution, the basic character of the American system will persist due to the sheer inertia of its attendant power centers. Yes, the excessive system is cumulatively reaching critical mass, but most sectors of the American lobbocracy could care less about long term disaster. This election is not about who is going to seize the reigns of power and turn everything around, it’s more about who is going to be head of the executive branch when the whole thing finally comes crashing down on top of us. The only reason I support Obama over McCain is that I would rather have Mikhail Gorbachev there than Leonid Brezhnev, not that such matters for shit.
