What makes this so powerful is how ABSOLUTELY ACCURATE it is!!!😳🔥👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/hSHLgUn7Qk
— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) July 6, 2023
“Cult leaders [demagogues] arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age.
The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.
Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.”
Chris Hedges, Cult of Trump
“Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation.”
Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion
“We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.
Franklin Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address
“The problem of the last three decades is not the ‘vicissitudes of the marketplace,’ but rather deliberate actions by the [corporatist] government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent.”
Dean Baker
Guest Post by The Zman
An occasional topic on the dissident right is how the popular measures of the economy have no relevance to the daily lives of people. Andrew Yang has picked up on this and talks about the need for new measures. For example, the Gross Domestic Product has its uses, but it says very little about the life of the typical person. What most of these popular measures tell us is how much activity there is in the economy, but they tell us very little about the prosperity of the people, which is really what matters.
Why are there boundaries?
Boundaries serve to delineate a difference – over here is Germany, over there is Poland. They serve to separate incompatible functions – on this side of the wall is Sales, on that side is Production (and dangerous equipment, pressurized gases, concentrated chemicals, high voltage electricity). And they serve to provide guidance / provide protection – if you go past the fence, the bull / deep ravine / toxic waste might get you. Valid boundaries are vital to your happiness / health / survival.
We went through, a generation back or two, a widespread rejection of boundaries – “tune in, turn on, drop out” in Leary’s phrase. Boundaries were seen as limiting, arbitrary, restrictive – as obstacles rather than protections. Boundaries kept people apart rather than kept people safe. Boundaries prevented free association instead of limiting contact between incompatible groups. Boundaries were bad.