Day: April 22, 2020

Caste in the U.S.A.

benfell

Class

David Atkins is arrogant, but there’s a key word “persuadable” that I think those who respond to him fail to consider. Atkins is really talking about political ramifications, how the shots of Nancy Pelosi’s refrigerators, filled with an exclusive brand of ice cream, will affect the election.

His respondents are talking, importantly, about class. And there is a real problem in that the poor lack a substantive—except through its absence—voice in politics, in a system, we should note, that is designed to exclude their voices.[1]

So the question arises as to whether the Democrats, more properly called neoliberals, can in fact win without the poor and the progressives. It didn’t work in 2016 and there’s reason to suspect it won’t in 2020:

There is a new blog post entitled, “A constitutional oligarchy: Deconstructing Federalist No. 10.”

Kanishk Tharoor, “The Exclusivity Economy,” review of The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz, New Republic, April 21, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157153/velvet-rope-economy-book-review-rich-exclusivity-hides-inequality

Pandemic

  1. [1]David Benfell, “A constitutional oligarchy: Deconstructing Federalist No. 10,” Not Housebroken, April 22, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/04/22/a-constitutional-oligarchy-deconstructing-federalist-no-10/↩