Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

[marmar]

Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

Monday, 20 January 2014 10:37
By Joseph Natoli, Truthout | Op-Ed

Each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which have to remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a "social unconscious."
- Eric Fromm

Newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio's "tale of two cities," referring to the wealth divide in New York, sounds nicely Dickensian, but the "boots on the ground" reality is not divided so clearly. Roughly speaking, the bottom 40 percent of Americans are what Dickens' Noddy Boffin called "scrunched" while a top 20 percent, if we follow the counsel here of "Scrunch or be scrunched," are doing the scrunching. A middle 40 percent, are, as Gradgrind facts show, decidedly more of the scrunched class than the scrunching class, although their confusions, misrecognitions and dreams of former well-being render them as liable to identify with the scrunchers as with their fellow scrunched.

So, we have some 80 percent of the American population in need of legislative action that 20 percent of the population either does not require or requires precisely the opposite. The numbers are on the side of Have Less Each Day and Have Nothing at All and not on the side of the Have Mores. However, the top 20 percent are holding positions of power, while the 80 percent are fractured, disillusioned, disinterested, confused and pliable. So our expectations of victory by overwhelming numbers fade.

The situation is yet darker and more complex as to why we cannot right an upside-down ship of state. I want to introduce what I call a "melding" on the level of the American social unconscious of Left and Right that also must be considered when we wonder why our democracy has turned to plutocracy, why that fact is not recognized and why the Many cannot put a stop to an aggrandizement of the Few at the expense of the Many. Only when we delve into affinities between Liberal and Neoliberal on this level of social unconscious can we comprehend the puzzling, inexplicable American politics since Reagan.

Legislatively, we are close to a flat tax or a "fair" tax, the former a tax where $50,000 is taxed at the same rate as $400,000, and the latter a sales tax replacing any income tax. We are closer to undermining entitlements than bolstering them. We are closer to eliminating unemployment compensation and the Earned Income Tax credit than to holding on to them. Obviously rational attempts to constrain the Wild West free play of the American financial sector such as the the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act including the Volcker Rule section of that act somehow get entwined in American paranoia regarding governmental forces taking away "personal freedom." Clear scientific evidence that humans are disastrously mucking up the environment do not produce real anxieties and appropriate defensive action, but rather are waylaid by dark anxieties regarding the effect the national debt will have on future generations. Although the Affordable Care Act aids some of those on the majority side, the majority of the country takes the stand of the minority. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21139-dark-affinities-liberal-and-neo-liberal