The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, September 18, 2021

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1. Pogo says

   September 18, 2021 at 9:52 am

   @Thanks FlaglerLive

   @If you (reader) have come this far and found this sip agreeable:

   “What looks to political scientists like voter apathy may represent a healthy skepticism about a political system in which public lying has become endemic and routine. A distrust of experts may help to diminish the dependence on experts that has crippled the capacity for self-help.”

   –Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissism”

   Get the bottle:

   “…The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy

   In his last months, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1994, in which he “excoriated the new meritocratic class, a group that had achieved success through the upward-mobility of education and career and that increasingly came to be defined by rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, a thin sense of obligation, and diminishing reservoirs of patriotism,” and “argued that this new class ‘retained many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues’, lacking the sense of ‘reciprocal obligation’ that had been a feature of the old order.”[31]

   Christopher Lasch analyzes[32] the widening gap between the top and bottom of the social composition in the United States. For him, our epoch is determined by a social phenomenon: the revolt of the elites, in reference to The Revolt of the Masses (1929) of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. According to Lasch, the new elites, i.e. those who are in the top 20 percent in terms of income, through globalization which allows total mobility of capital, no longer live in the same world as their fellow-citizens. In this, they oppose the old bourgeoisie of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was constrained by its spatial stability to a minimum of rooting and civic obligations.

   Globalization, according to the historian, has turned elites into tourists in their own countries. The de-nationalization of society tends to produce a class who see themselves as “world citizens, but without accepting… any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies”. Their ties to an international culture of work, leisure, information – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, new elites are investing their money in improving their voluntary ghettos: private schools in their residential neighborhoods, private police, garbage collection systems. They have “withdrawn from common life”.

   Composed of those who control the international flows of capital and information, who preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus fix the terms of public debate. So, the political debate is limited mainly to the dominant classes and political ideologies lose all contact with the concerns of the ordinary citizen. The result of this is that no one has a likely solution to these problems and that there are furious ideological battles on related issues. However, they remain protected from the problems affecting the working classes: the decline of industrial activity, the resulting loss of employment, the decline of the middle class, increasing the number of the poor, the rising crime rate, growing drug trafficking, the urban crisis…”
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch

   Hope is a good thing
   

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   • Ray W. says

     September 18, 2021 at 11:14 pm

     Thank you, Pogo.

     One question that can be asked is whether the members of the new meritocratic class detailed in Pogo’s post hold any “allegiance” to their country, their community, their peers.

     The root word for allegiance is an old French word: aligeaunce. In its original meaning, when a vassal pledged allegiance to his liege, it was expected that the liege would hold a reciprocal obligation to protect the vassal. In this way, our pledge of allegiance derives from the idea that we do not just offer our commitment to serve our country, there is a reciprocal expectation that our country will protect us.

     This is the heart of the language inserted into our Declaration of Independence. The American colonists sent delegate after delegate to King George, III, to seek royal protection from unjust laws passed by Parliament, without success. Those who sought independence argued that when a king refuses to respond to valid entreaties from his subjects, he is no longer a king; he is a tyrant, and the colonists had a God-given right to rebel. This idea is contained in the Acts of Abjuration, which was a 1589 declaration of independence by the Dutch from the King of Spain. The Dutch did not adopt a Constitution, however; they pledged allegiance to the Duke of Anjou. The Dutch argued that a king existed to protect his citizens and not the other way around. A king who did not protect his citizens was a tyrant and the citizens held a God-given right to rebel. To the Dutch leaders of that time, allegiance to royalty was a two-way street.

     By this reasoning, those who participated in the January 6th insurrection cannot be called patriots, because they hold no allegiance to our liberal democratic constitutional form of government. An election is a constitutional act, with specific requirements spelled out. When each requirement is met in its proper turn, our Constitution is ultimately satisfied. For this reason, each of Trump’s sixty-some-odd lawsuits was tossed. Nothing alleged in those lawsuits came close to satisfying the Constitutional criteria necessary to reverse the lawful outcome of a state’s election. After all, claiming a thing is far different from proving a thing.

     One possible interesting demographic effect of the rise of this new meritocratic class is the delay in the age at which Americans women first marry. For most of the 20th century, the age at which women first married hovered around year 21 or 22. Starting in the late ’90’s, the average age at time of first marriage began to rise. As of 2019, the average age of a woman at first marriage stands at 28.

     I recall a magazine article (possibly the Atlantic Magazine) from about five years ago detailing the rapid growth of a small class of well-educated high-earning males who will never marry. This class of men expect to engage in a series of three to five year relationships with well-educated high-earning women, with neither person entertaining the idea of marriage and children. The relationships revolve around intense adventures and travels. When the relationship eventually cools, each expects to move on to a new relationship that will offer additional intense adventures and travels.

     I mentioned the article to my oldest daughter, who responded that she was familiar with the concept, having studied it as part of a sociology class in college. She and her husband are the aberration. They met at age 14. My oldest daughter was injured during cheerleading practice and went to middle school the next day wearing a neck brace. He offered to carry her books. Neither ever dated anyone else and they both are now highly educated and high wage earners, with a relationship history spanning 23 years. Each seems devoted to the responsibility of making the other’s life better.

     The “reciprocal obligation” phrased in the first paragraph of the Lasch Wikipedia entry may be equated with with the term “noblesse oblige”, a concept that the old European meritocratic class held as a duty to the masses. I suppose it can be argued that noblesse oblige derives from a biblical phrase, set forth in Luke 12:48: “To whom much is given, much will be required.” JFK modified this to say: “To those whom much is given, much is expected.” Both quotes encompass the idea that those who lead have an obligation to those who follow. The new meritocratic class limits its obligations to itself.

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