Well, We're Here

So now for the first time the public has a chance to make a choice that is usually made only by a ruling class, a king, or an emperor. Republic or empire? Never mind the stakes. What is the real issue?

The skull is grinning in at the banquet. Most people opt to sphincter up their cognitive systems (what the Discordians called a "reality grid") along with every other component of our neuroglandular selves. Do we adopt restrictive economic policies and guarantee devolution into yet another one of those terminal political consolidations that end a civilization in the form of an empire doomed to fall? Or loosen the purse strings and invest in a new status quo? Austerity is certainly a restrictive policy. Its effect is to prohibit investment in the real economy. This creates a zero-sum situation which creates the personalities that joined the Brownshirts in the previous century and ICE today. The last couple of times Western civilization faced such a crisis, the majority of people were peasants who had to slog on best they could or get swept up as soldiers in a hundred years' war in which the vested interests fought over the scraps of the failing economic institution.

What is especially ironic is neoliberalism's eviler twin: supply-side economics, adopted at the very juncture where elites absolutely will not invest in better organizations or methods of mobilizing real resources to obtain increasing returns rather than the diminishing returns our plateauing s-curve is offering now. Consider carefully, because a terminal consolidation can generate a bogus prosperity AT THE EXPENSE OF ITS POLITICAL NEIGHBORS. This is the basis for our current gilded age. It's fake. Athens and Rome left good-looking corpses, too, but not because they had increased any real productive capacity. They stole it and maintained an imitation trickle-down that could not last. The watering hole is drying up and we're fighting sumthin' fierce. This is another one of those episodic bouts of class conflict that Marx had mistaken for the norm.

I get the sense that America's second civil war is really over. Oil is slave to financial markets. The weapons-makers will aim their guns wherever the rentier elite tells them to. The factions in the GOP continue their jockeying for optimal positions, but the Dems are the party of finance. It has factions, too. Our obsession with winner-take-all elections prevents any more parties than these two parties, but the big tent has made room for the Progressives in the Democratic party. They're the only reformers in a reactionary, regressive historical stage. It is almost classic textbook Spengler. The fact that his preliminary analysis is coming true with hardly any nuance shows how far things have gone. His chronological sequence is Money Power to Caesar. Nothing subtle about it now; it's clear as a cartoon. Or we can have a revolution, the one thing the Yankees had trained their whole lives to avoid.

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