(Part I)
The whole election cycle is a carnival act, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It caters to the most venal instincts of the public. It is an example of the deep cynicism among elites who, like all other con artists, privately mock us for our gullibility and naiveté.
We are treated like malleable children. DeMott called out this infantilization, this “babying of the electorate, spoiling of voter-age ‘children’ with year-round upbeat Christmas tales, the creation of a swelled-head citizenry, morally vain and irremediably sentimental.”
In the world of junk politics, he wrote, “distinctions vanish between foundational democratic principles and decorative pleasurable tropes.”
“The familiar apparatus of constitutional government and party organizations survives seemingly untouched,” he wrote. “In time, though, the language of justice and injustice comes to strike ordinary ears as Latinate and archaic—due for interment—and attachment to old forms weakens.”
None of those elected to the White House, the Congress or statehouses have the power, and they know it, to challenge the corporate disemboweling of the country.
The popular rage and frustration that have been rising against the established power elites during this election campaign will mount further as Americans, especially with a new president in the White House, realize that their voice and their vote are meaningless.
The white nativists and bigots who flock to Donald Trump, along with those who sell out the most basic liberal tenets to support Hillary Clinton, are about to get taught a harsh lesson about the nature of our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
They are about to discover that we do have a class of “superpredators.” These superpredators are not poor people of color walking the streets of marginal communities.
They inhabit the exclusive corporate enclaves of the privileged and the powerful.
“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” Wolin wrote, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-based judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”
Corporations control the three branches of government.
Corporations write the laws.
Corporations determine the media narrative and public debate.
Corporations are turning public education into a system of indoctrination.
Corporations profit from permanent war, mass incarceration, suppressed wages and poor health care.
Corporations have organized a tax boycott.
Corporations demand “austerity.”
Corporate power is unassailable, and it rolls forward like a stream of lava.
The seeds of destruction of corporate power, however, are embedded within its own structure.
The elites have no internal or external constraints.
They will exploit, manipulate, lie and oppress until they create an ideological vacuum.
No one but the most obtuse, including the courtiers who have severed themselves from reality, will sputter out the inanities of neoliberal ideology.
And at that point the system will implode.
The revolt may be right-wing.
It may have heavy overtones of fascism.
It may cement into place a frightening police state.
But that a revolt is coming is incontrovertible.
The absurdity of the election proves it.
(Part II)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_graveyard_of_the_elites_20160228
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig