The following link is to an old FR thread, about an even older conservative booklet called “The Revolution Was”, written in 1938 about FDR and the New Deal. I post excerpts once in awhile. It is ALL happening again - amazingly, chillingly so. Only worse.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2185147/posts
An Excerpt:
There was a prodigious literature of revolutionary thought concealed only by the respectability of its dress....
To the revolutionary this same dreary stuff was the most exciting reading in the world. It was knowledge that gave him a sense of power. One who mastered the subject to the point of excellence could be fairly sure of a livelihood by teaching and writing, that is, by imparting it to others, and meanwhile dream of passing at a single leap from this mean obscurity to the prestige of one who assists in the manipulation of great happenings; while one who mastered it to the point of genius — that one might dream of becoming himself the next Lenin....
Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.
But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base.
The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake......
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse.
The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.
The end held constantly in view was power.
Bread and circuses brother.
Bread and circuses.
See the bearded lady!
The tourtoise boy!
Old as the hills itself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNb6SxXcD7g
Divide and Conquer
Thank you for posting that.
As a completely irrelevant aside, I was amused by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observation that revolutions are not made by people wearing spectacles. Evidently the Great Justice was unacquainted between the date of the Russian Revolution, 1917, and Holmes' death in 1935 with photographs of Trotsky.
