While The Other is one of the salients of the moment used to distract and deceive the too busy and the too overwhelmed, the plutocrats have always built their arguments on the now ancient fundamental U.S. cultural norm of hatred of government. This hatred is common not only on the right, but also on the left. In short, there is in the U.S. an overwhelmingly common belief that government is always, and must always be, a frack-up and the only thing that can really be done about it is to find good, decent, human saviors who will enter government and guide it to justice and so rescue us from something that is, as if by some physical law, immutably unimprovable. Churchill summarized and reinforced this defeatist sentiment with his oft repeated quip that goes something like, "Democracy [meaning the set of institutions typical of today's so-called Western liberal democracies] is the worst possible form of government except for all the rest." Bingo! Government is bad, cannot be improved beyond what it is today, so trust to the Great Man to save us from iniquity.
While The Other is one of the salients of the moment used to distract and deceive the too busy and the too overwhelmed, the plutocrats have always built their arguments on the now ancient fundamental U.S. cultural norm of hatred of government. This hatred is common not only on the right, but also on the left. In short, there is in the U.S. an overwhelmingly common belief that government is always, and must always be, a frack-up and the only thing that can really be done about it is to find good, decent, human saviors who will enter government and guide it to justice and so rescue us from something that is, as if by some physical law, immutably unimprovable. Churchill summarized and reinforced this defeatist sentiment with his oft repeated quip that goes something like, "Democracy [meaning the set of institutions typical of today's so-called Western liberal democracies] is the worst possible form of government except for all the rest." Bingo! Government is bad, cannot be improved beyond what it is today, so trust to the Great Man to save us from iniquity.