Perfection
We'll start with a quote that stands by itself.
...the authority of the nation state itself depended on the economic dependence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that the servants are in the pay, not of the state but of the owning classes. At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."
What can I possibly say to illuminate that more than the quote does on its own?
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Who is the bourgeois?
Let's keep going on Arendt's mob...
"A rioting mob is not composed of any particular class but from 'the refuse of all classes. ... What they failed to understand is that the mob is not only the refuse but the byproduct of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it...
The implication here is that the bourgeois produces a mob by pursuing bad policies.
So this definition depends on who the bourgeois actually is. Fortunately there's a lot of blame to go around.
If the bourgeois is the millionaire class, then the explanation is pretty obvious. By letting the economy grow so unequal, by slashing taxes to the 1% to so low a rate, by cutting government spending on welfare programs, education, job training, and social services, the government flattened social mobility, ended the growth of working class income, and created a dissatisfied mass of over 150 million people. The reason then that the mob would have formed against the left rather than the right that slashed the programs is because the millionaire class funded a vast network of right-wing propaganda that distracted the masses with cultural issues of little consequence designed to create resentment against precisely those forces who mean to alleviate their frustration.
On the other hand, if the American bourgeois means the progressive 'creative class' we spoke about in the third talk, then the mob was created by precisely those cultural issues that the rightwing media speaks of: liberal hypocrisy in pretending to care for the poor while enriching themselves, claiming that poor whites are oppressors rather than victims, policing language about minorities while often holding white people to ridicule, tying disproportionate college acceptance and employment opportunity to race rather than income, and putting the concerns of relatively affluent minorities like certain parts of the queer community over straight poor whites (gay men earn 10% more than straight men). By this definition, many of the cultural complaints of the right wing are not without merit.
I'd ask which is the more likely explanation, but every liberal will take one side, every conservative will stand on the other.
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Fascination vs. Interest (double meaning)
",..notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. '
By either definition, this creates a right-wing mob that the American 'elite' grows fascinated by. There are two explanations for this, and I think both have much true about them.
The first that the 'aristocratic elite' (meaning 'particularly affluent Americans') seeks to have ever more lack of accountability to consequence, and perpetually increase their money, power and influence. The viability of this explanation should be pretty obvious.
The other is that the 'elite' has a cheap, even pornographic fascination with a force so déclassé as a mob. The lure of the forbidden draws them to it. Being part of a 'mob' is usually the one thing you can't accuse an aristocrat of being. The 'mob' is the ultimate force that has no care for accountability to consequence. And so the elite uses all kinds of means at their disposal to egg the mob onward--both to advance their interests and excite themselves.
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Once Again, Self-explanatory
"Racism is a necessary tool if the powerful wish to make the powerless do their bidding."
Well duh.
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Ends vs. Beginnings
'...no matter what learned scientists say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.'
We could leave this as a truism, but there's an essay's worth of meanings here.
There's too much book to make an essay out of this, but just consider it for a moment; think of the Spanish Empire: discovering the New World was a death sentence for 95% of the Native American population, and even if the Spanish flourished from its flush of gold into a golden age, it was the moral, spiritual death of Spain, not just in the new world but in the old world where suspected heretics were burned after confessions obtained under torture, and an eighty-year war because of their colonization of the Low Countries (Holland & Belgium). Sometimes, virulent racism signified the actual end of a country's dominance: obviously the Nazis severely depleted Germany's international standing until quite recently.
The ways decline manifests itself through racial thinking are many and varied, but what can't be argued is that, to our modern thinking, no country ever seemed like a more attractive place to live because of their racism.
Here's a question for you:
1. What do you think is the percentage chance that countries maltreating races will eventually backfire? 2. Are countries setting up their own fall by instituting such inhumane, demeaning policies?
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