Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Right Wing Kleptomania

Essentially, Movement Republicanism (which has taken climate-science denialism right into the heart of its public identity at this point) has devolved into an expression of organized kleptomania (for me not thee, of course) in every aspect of public life: loot (privatize and defund) public infrastructure to feast on the goodies yourself while still expecting infrastructure to work -- deregulate enterprises to cut corners and pad accounts yourself while still expecting practices to be well-regulated in general -- dismantle oversight to get away with cheating yourself while still expecting to be protected by accountable authorities -- undermine the institutions that maintain social stability, legitimacy, and trust in order to lie, cheat, and steal yourself while still expecting a stable, legitimate, law-abiding social order to prevail in which to enjoy the comforts of your deception, fraud, recklessness, theft -- profit not through production, innovation, excellence but through the externalization of social and environmental costs and risks onto the backs of the people of the next continent or the next generation while still expecting to live in a world that is not convulsed in catastrophic war or climate catastrophe.

It is not without irony that we discern so clearly now in the full-on crazytown crystallization consummating thirty years of Movement Republican prevalence that the essential spirit of that corporate-militarist Republicanism is essentially and pervasively kleptomaniacal, since it was of course one of the pet accusations of Movement Republicans, and the libertopians who enabled them, to declare not only the social democratic governments of Europe but any advocates of good government and general welfare here to be "kleptocrats" advocating "kleptocracy." Of course, the sleight of hand animating this notion was one that simply took for granted that those who happen to have more than others who happen to have less have more not because they have benefited more from their inhabitation of a stable equitable diverse secular law-abiding knowledgeable responsible consensual society than others -- and hence should be expected to pay a fair share in its maintenance -- but have more because they are simply superior in some fundamental way than those who happen to have less -- and hence to demand they pay more to maintain a stable equitable diverse secular law-abiding knowledgeable responsible consensual society from which those who happen to have less are likely to benefit is declared to constitute a violation of those who happen to have more.

Just as: one might wish that more people had more effectively pointed out that all those Republicans who for decades were endlessly declaiming about how inherently corrupt and incompetent government is and yet who still unaccountably were striving to enter government might actually mean what they say with the consequence that they would govern in the most corrupt and incompetent ways imaginable if they were elected… So too: one might wish that more people had more effectively pointed out that all those Republicans who were endlessly declaiming about how government was an organized theft-ring might actually mean what they say with the consequence that they would either use it to rob us blind themselves or strive to shut it down altogether and so steal from all of us government of, by, and for the people if they were elected.

A "Movement of Ideas" originating in Heinleinian declarations that "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" has been eating the cake of civilization (which depends for its flourishing on good governance) while still expecting to have it too, a "Movement of Ideas" driven by Ayn Randian declarations that good government and social democracy were values only for "Looters" "Moochers" and would-be "Tyrants" have bequeathed us a world looted into outright dysfunction at every layer of governance, a sinister progression of ever-more unitary and tyrannical Executives, and a population mobbed with self-declared "individualists" who consume what everybody else does in the most uncritical and conformist ways imaginable, without a thought to the impact of their conduct on the lives of vulnerable miserable people who share their world, on the hopes of their children who inherit a world remade by their irresponsible practices, or even on their own health and sanity over the course of a life more than half of which will likely be spent in a body that is no longer young and sure, with history as well as hope suffusing their souls.

No comments: