I Consider this Occupy Wall Street Video a Personal Smear

Maybe America never had a real aristocracy, but it seems many of us badly want to grovel in front of one.

                        --Me

I still think that is fundamentally correct.  I think there is a large percentage of people in any population who are what Professor Bob Altemeyer refers to as “Right-Wing Authoritarians,” which means they demonstrate the following traits:  (i) a high degree of submission to the established authorities in their society; (ii) high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities; and (iii) a high level of conventionalism. 

(Note:  “right-wing” - in this case - merely means supportive of the established authority; a right-wing authoritarian in the old USSR would have been a Communist.  As used by Altemeyer, “right-wing” has nothing to do with the political spectrum, and everything to do with supporting the existing power structure.  Professor Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians is available to read on-line, and for free, here.  I really cannot recommend it enough.)

Yep. This is Very Weird. By Design

A few years ago I got into an online conversation with my former Constitutional Law professor. He is a good guy and I probably was too harsh in our conversation, but that is because he believes in our system of government and is almost incapable of recognizing that -- sometimes -- it breaks down. But even now that I am no longer his student and he is not required to put up with my kvetching, the man still took the time out to talk with me and argue me out of my default "Let's burn it down!" mindset. Like I said, a good man.

One of the things he recommended to me to help me make sense of what I was witnessing in the dark days of the Bush II administration is a book titled "Our Undemocratic Constitution," written by another constitutional law professor named Sanford Levinson. (My prof called him "Sandy," but I think that is only because my prof knows him; I won't take such liberties.)

I read the book and it did a good deal to show me how conservative is our system of governance. Not "conservative" in a system of values, but "conservative" in that our system was consciously designed not to let a lot of change happen. There are a lot of veto points in our system that allow a relatively small number of people to stop whatever is going on at the moment.

And I am sure that when the Founding Fathers crafted this document in the late 18th Century, that probably seemed like a good thing. I'm pretty sure I could not have come up with a better idea myself, and I've the advantage of two centuries of additional history to help me.

But now it looks as if a small group of people have seized one of our two political parties, which is bad. But that political party controls one of the two houses of Congress, which is worse. And even though the Congress is only one-third of our federal system, it is a necessary one-third.

Which means that our federal system of government depends on Congress, and the Congess depends on the House, and the House depends on its majority party, and right now that majority party is controlled by the Manson Family.

Can you spell "disaster"?

GOP: Gang Of (adolescent) Punks

Back in my college days I read a line by P.J. O'Rourke that stuck with me ever since. P.J. was explaining the allure of being a 3rd World freedom fighter and observed (paraphrasing from memory): "It will always be more fun to run around in the mountains with a Kalashnikov and sleep with ideology-addled college girls than it will be to spend your life in a rice paddy staring at the ass-end of a water buffalo." Of course, what is implied but not stated is that "staring at the ass-end of a water buffalo" is what actually keeps people from starving to death.

Generally speaking, it is the sober, plodding work that people do that produces more overall benefit, and does so more reliably and routinely, than does the rousing, romantic, exciting confrontation that we all tend to find so viscerally appealing. This is why - in the Real World - most people end up in jobs that do not provide much in the way of excitement but do pay better than any reasonable alternative: boring, routine work produces the most benefit to society. This is also why they don't make movies that are only about people doing boring, routine work: we may all of us be stuck doing that sort of stuff, but we don't enjoy it much and our dreams are always of things a lot more fun.

One of the marks of being an adult is recognizing a univeral truth: if you really want to accomplish something worthwhile, doing so will involve a great deal of hard, mostly boring work. On the other hand, if you care more about "striking a blow" or "making a statement" for whatever cause you've decided to make your own, then you are still pretty much an adolescent who really just wants to star in a movie.

Sometimes it seems to me that America is becoming more and more a nation of adolescents. Even scarier, there seems to be an increasing likelihood that these adolescents have actually seized control of the country.

One More Thought re: Debt Limit Negotiations

Over at Balloon Juice TimF has a post up about the debt limit negotiations and he raises an interesting point:

It looks like [the GOP] has arrived at a truly existential moment -- it has to decide who is in charge, and halfway measures won't do. Does the party serve wealthy people, who mostly want low taxes and stability, or does it serve tea party anarchists? The issue here is quite similar to the GOP dilemma on immigration in that the party utterly depends on two factions whose demands are not just misaligned but diametrically opposed. The Chamber of Commerce not only wants but in fact depends on undocumented immigrants for more jobs than most people realize, while redneck racists will do almost anything to clean the brown people out of their towns and states.

[snip]

As recently as the mid-Bush administration Republican initiatives still served the CoC at least as much as they catered to racist Bubbas. Can you imagine that now? Of course you can't. Leading edge GOP policies like Arizona's SB1070 and the Georgia law that left their unpicked fruit harvest to rot make it look an awful lot like angry, stupid Bubbas have a solid grip on the steering wheel.

Boehner and his business lobby could still rally and put armageddon back in snooze mode for a few more months. If they do it would count as one hell of an upset against a raging 'roided-up faction that has won every intra-party battle so far.

I wonder if the debt ceiling impasse might not lead the financial Powers That Be to start backing Obama and the Dems again. Despite all of the Wall Street whining about Obama once referring to them as "Fat Cats" the banksters have done very, very well under Obama's watch. The markets are up and bankster compensation is through the roof. Sure Obama and the Dems want to raise their taxes, but at least the Democratic party is still capable of acting rationally to prevent a complete financial meltdown. If the Republicans have been as thoroughly captured by their insane Teabagging base as it now appears, then the Republicans pose a much more fundamental threat to business-as-usual in this country than do the Dems -- and therefore a much more fundamental threat to the CoC and the Wall Street banksters.