King Louie Hussein Obama: "The peasants are revolting"
Queen Michelle Highpockets: "They certainly are!"
Posted on 01/12/2012 10:30:48 AM PST by betty boop
Class Warfare, Obama-style
by Jean F. Drew
For Aristotle, to be a “mature man,” a spoudaios, implies the state of existence of a public-spirited man — a man who understands that the well-being of individuals in a society ultimately depends on the justness and truthfulness of the order of the society itself. And this order is not something that can ever be left on automatic pilot; rather it is something that the people must constantly strive to defend and preserve.
In Aristotle, we find the distinction between the mass of the people, the plethos — who basically function at the level of “slaves by nature” — and the spoudaioi — the prudent, virtuous, public-minded “mature men” who Aristotle recognizes as the societal class that actually maintains the common civilization over time, for the benefit of all its members.
In the American experience, the spoudaioi would include the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, and all public-spirited Americans who, in the following generations, have continued to uphold the compact of governance they created: individual liberty and equal justice under a strictly limited national government.
The Framers were very clear about this: Individual liberty (the person’s power over himself) vs. State power is truly a zero-sum game, in which one side can increase its power only by decreasing the power of the other. The plethos demand an increase in government benefits (i.e., expansion of the State) of one kind or another. They seem blissfully unaware of these dynamics. They do not seem to realize they are “on the road to serfdom.” Or if they do, to much care about it, just so long as they get their “free stuff.”
Nowadays progressive educrats, like Barack Obama’s old friend Bill Ayers, are giving them a push down that road. Ayers constructs public education curricula that actively delegitimize these spoudaios characters as really nothing but a reactionary, usually male, usually white gang of fascist thugs who are selfishly trying to preserve their own “class interests” by working actively against the satisfaction of the just claims of “disadvantaged people,” who it turns out are usually the “poor,” gay or “transgendered” people, women, and “people of color.” In the view of deculturated, progressive, ideological educrats like Ayers, the spoudaioi are an excessively privileged class that, in their eyes, “oppress” everyone else in order to defend and protect their own class interests. In short, their success is necessarily based on the suffering of others less “privileged” than themselves. Moreover, delegitimizing the spoudaioi has, from the ideological point of view, the side benefit of falsifying inconvenient history.
Thus the modern-day progressivist political entrepreneur has transformed the zero-sum game. No longer does it deal with power relations between the individual and the state. Now it deals with the power relations among identified — targeted — classes, on the basis of which the progressivist entrepreneur proceeds to foment class struggle.
After more than three years of President Obama, we are familiar with this dreary ideology; we see it daily put into practice. In this presidential election year, I believe we will see “class struggle” raised to a fever pitch: Get ready for the sheer ugliness that’s going to erupt in the public square this year.
We are off our constitutional moorings. The President loathes the federal Constitution on the grounds that it is a document that stipulates only “negative liberties.” Practically speaking, this is to say that the government is too constrained by it; its power is too limited. So basically, Obama chooses to ignore the Constitution when it suits him — thereby breaching his own Oath of Office repeatedly, literally on a daily basis.
Meanwhile he’s going after those nasty one-percenters, those rich robber barons like (say) Mitt Romney — who though not the candidate I favor at this time still qualifies as a spoudaios in my book.
As Eric Voegelin has presciently observed:
If the establishment of the spoudaioi is disrupted by external events, then the civilization breaks down very rapidly within a generation. And that is the problem we have to deal with….When certain disruptive events occur, civilization breaks down, and the plethos in the classical sense — the mass of passionately directed people who are more or less illiterate and who do not know what they are doing — come to predominate.1
As Lord Macauley, the great 19th-Century English historian of American democracy, warned an American friend back in 1857:
It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come, when in the State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom have had more than half a breakfast, or expect to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by the working man?
I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning: that you will act as people would in a year of scarcity, devour all the seedcorn and thus make the next year, a year not of scarcity but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stay you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was by barbarians who came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.2
It appears that Macauley’s crystal ball was highly accurate: For that last paragraph especially well describes the American situation today.
And sheds light on what the next presidential election is about: Obama says he is the champion of the American middle class. This is a Lie and needs to be exposed as such. Obama isn’t interested in “raising” the middle class; he’s interested in “reducing” the middle class to the level of the plethos, the slaves by nature. Forget about equal opportunity. Obama’s game is all about equal results. And that means the spoudaioi must be “leveled,” too. It’s only “fair.”
But of course, the dilemma remains: If one destroys the most productive human capital in the society — the spoudaioi — then where is the money to come from to pay for all the promises Obama has made to the plethos, the least productive human capital in the society? (“Where’s my refrigerator?”)
Finally, the next election is about the soul of historic American society: Does it still live? Or is it dead already?
###
Notes:
1 Eric Voegelin, “Autobiographical Statement at Age 82,” in “The Drama of Humanity,” Vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, p. 437.
2 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letter to Henry S. Randall dated May 23, 1857, quoted in Edgar R Fiedler’s article, “The Roots of Stagflation” (Conference Board, 1984).
©2012 by Jean F. Drew
January 12, 2012
“Make a profit,” a laughing Romney is shown saying in the 28-minute film, obtained by Bloomberg News. “That’s what it’s all about, right?”
Gingrich-Allied Attack Film Shows Romney as ‘Ruthless’ Rich (bloomberg.com)
“Finally, the next election is about the soul of historic American society: Does it still live? Or is it dead already?”
It’s clearly on life support.
(1) a : the act of plundering; b : the state of having been plundered especially in war
(2) the act of injuring especially beyond reclaim
Also in the legal sense, e.g., spoliation of evidence: defined as the willful destruction of evidence or the failure to preserve potential evidence for another's use in pending or future litigation.
Obama is the master of both kinds of spoliation.
Thought you guys might be interested in this discussion.
LOL!!! You are not going to believe what I just posted here:
Mr.B: "Socialism is based on covetousness. Socialists gain power by exploiting people’s covetousness of others’ property. Ironically, they are more successful not in promising to give the covetors what the others have, but by promising to simply take it away from those who have."
You got that right!
"One of the most important but little known concepts in psychoanalysis is that of envy. It is a term of art, not to be confused with the dictionary definition. ....
"If we could somehow eliminate envy from the human genome, there would be almost no reason for the left to exist. They would instantly lose that which animates them, for example, envy masquerading as justice or economic theory. ....
"In order to be happy, we must all keep our envy in check, because envy is the opposite of gratitude. Envy does not appreciate what one has, only what one doesn’t have. And our capacity to imagine what we do not have--and that someone else is enjoying it--is literally infinite, as is envy. ...
"Envy ..is a key that unlocks many mysteries, particularly in politics. So strong and pervasive is envy, that you cannot have a political system that doesn't accommodate or find some way to manage envy.
"You might say that one party will generally represent the envied, the other the envious.
"Guess which ones.
"More generally, the international left does not attack the United States because they hate us. Rather, they hate the United States because they envy us. Precisely because they cannot tolerate our unparalleled goodness and success, they attack it and turn America into a uniquely bad, greedy and envious object. It is pure projection. In engaging in this projection of their own greed and envy, they damage what is good and conflate good and evil, but at least it helps to temporarily diminish the pain of their own envy. They do the same thing with Israel. .... when it comes to the projection of envy and greed, "the one who smelt it, dealt it." ...."
<>
"..In both the premodern and postmodern worlds, we are bound by what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the "tyranny of cousins." This is obvious in the former, as everything we think and do is defined and constrained by our place in the clan: "That is, your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life."
"And in our opinion, one of the key psychic mechanisms that held this system together was and is envy. Envy was evolved to solve a serious problem, i.e., group unity and harmony, for human beings cannot survive outside the group. All primitive groups are characterized by the "evil eye" of envy, which makes its target feel uncomfortable and persecuted by these envious projections.
"But in order to evolve out of tribalism toward universality, we had to first break through the envy barrier,
hence the 10th Commandment of spiritual evolution:
you __shall not covet__ your neighbor's whatever.
"In short, envy is natural; transcendence of envy is supranatural.
"Thus, the leftist hardly needs to invent envy. He must only provoke, legitimize and exploit it in order to gain power over the envious, and eventually over all of us. Like the cravemen they are, they just want to be fair, and spread the poverty around.
HERE: Envious Cravemen and Liberal Proglodytes
46posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 1:47:34 PMby Matchett-PI http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2832001/posts?page=46#46
I am simply disgusted to see this kind of stuff being fomented inside the GOP field.
They seem to be supporting the sick idea of "profit" as somehow equivalent to "ill-gotten gains."
When all profit is, is tomorrow's "seedcorn."
I'm disgusted with Gingrich for associating himself with such a baseless attack on Romney. He should be explaining and upholding our capitalist system, not suggesting that it is somehow inherently evil.
And I'm very disappointed with Gov. Perry for allowing himself to get sucked into such a baseless attack. A this rate, I'm running out of candidates to vote for....
Lord Macauley was still getting over the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. Prior to that year, seats in Parliament were assigned according to acreage/property/wealth, instead of to the number of citizens in a given district.
It was a very complicated system, but this is the Wiki summary:
“.......Statutes passed in 1430 and 1432, during the reign of Henry VI, standardised property qualifications for county voters. Under these acts, all (male) owners of freehold property or land worth at least forty shillings in a particular county were entitled to vote in that county. This requirement, known as the forty shilling freehold, was never adjusted for inflation; thus, the amount of land that it was necessary for one to own in order to vote was gradually diminished over time. Nevertheless, the vast majority of individuals were unable to vote; the size of the English county electorate in 1831 has been estimated at only 200,000. Furthermore, the sizes of the individual county constituencies varied significantly. The smallest counties, Rutland and Anglesey, had fewer than a thousand voters each, while the largest county, Yorkshire, had more than twenty thousand. Those who owned property in multiple constituencies could vote multiple times; there was normally no requirement for an individual to actually inhabit a constituency in order to vote there.
In boroughs the franchise was far more varied. There were broadly six types of parliamentary boroughs as defined by their franchise:
boroughs in which freemen were electors;
boroughs in which the franchise was restricted to those paying scot and lot, a form of municipal taxation;
boroughs in which only the ownership of a burgage property qualified a person to vote;
boroughs in which only members of the corporation were electors (such boroughs were perhaps in every case “pocket boroughs,” because council members were usually “in the pocket” of a wealthy patron);
boroughs in which male householders were electors (these were usually known as “potwalloper boroughs,” as the usual definition of a householder was a person able to boil a pot on their own hearth);
boroughs in which freeholders of land had the right to vote.
Some boroughs had a combination of these varying types of franchise and all usually had special rules and exceptions, so many boroughs had a form of franchise that was unique to themselves.
The largest borough, Westminster, had approximately 12,000 voters, while the smallest, usually known as “rotten boroughs” had, in most cases, fewer than a hundred each. The most famous rotten borough was Old Sarum, which had 13 burgage plots that could be used to “manufacture” electors if necessary—usually around half a dozen was thought sufficient. Other examples include Dunwich (32 voters), Camelford (25), and Gatton (seven).....”
If I recall, the number of seats in Parliament assigned to the City of London was FOUR. One of the smaller jurisdictions.
How hard would it be to restore a version of this system to our own Congressional Representation?
Washington DC, of course, would continue to have no votes....
I think Wisconsin may be looking at a variation of this, since some recent re-districting assigned some wards and precincts to “Africa.”
No word, yet, on how much had to be paid, to whom, for what sort of redistricting results.
As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “”Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
Love your commentary, by the way! Great piece! bttt
You got that right! It’s getting really embarrassing!
Oh Matchett-PI, I'm so grateful to you for inviting Gagdad Bob to the table! I just loved this:
If you have an “ear” for envy, you will detect it everywhere in the liberal world. In psychoanalytic parlance, it is also called “spoiling,” or devaluing.Thank you so very much for writing! (And what a coincidence that we both are working on this issue today.)
That is why only a moral people can preserve their freedom. Only a moral people can resist the temptation to use government to seize what is not theirs.
when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish.
In this context, "civilization" is a fancy way to say, a critical mass of moral people.
If our constitution is "all sail and no anchor" the fact is that our anchor is God or there is none. As we distance ourselves from God we watch our liberty drift further and further away. There is a direct connection between obedience to God, faith in God, and liberty. To the untrained mind this looks like a paradox but it is a foundational principle. It is bedrock.
I think that conservatives can question Romney's results at Bain since he is running on his private sector experience; just not use the Marxist arguments that some like Newt are that appear to be written by the libs at MSNBC.
How about, TARP ? Stimuluses ? obviously Romney-care.
There seems to be plenty in Romney's background to go after without the Marxist arguments.
I KNOW! I couldn't believe it when I saw your thread! :)
As for “envy is the opposite of gratitude”,
that is the wisdom of the ages speaking -
Prov 27:20 ...the eyes of a man are never satisfied.
We are to be thankful and grateful for what we have, because that attitude protects us from the sin of coveting.
As Junior Asparagus sang: “Because a thankful heart is a happy heart! I’m glad for what I have, Thats an easy way to start!”
King Louie Hussein Obama: "The peasants are revolting"
Queen Michelle Highpockets: "They certainly are!"
It is not baseless, Sister Betty.
If you were to try to separate assets prior to a bankruptcy, you would be cited for contempt of court.
However, to do so in a vulture capitalist bankruptcy is a matter of smoke and mirrors.
Just ask yourself this: How does Bain Capital take all the money out of a company it owns, have the company file bankruptcy, yet not have to pay out of its assets the creditors owed by the now bankrupt company?
Pure legal manipulation via corporate, appraisal, and bankruptcy laws.
You as an individual could not get away with that.
So Newt is right. Something unethical is taking place. And as P-Marlowe has pointed out. If a transaction like that had tried being pulled in the Founder era, the "entrepreneurs" would have been imprisoned or hung.
Those pictures would make great campaign signs.
Your poster of Michelle, lacks the muscled bare arm, though.
Yep! bttt
If you have an “ear” for envy, you will detect it everywhere in the liberal world.
In psychoanalytic parlance, it is also called “spoiling,” or devaluing.
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