The video is a segment of an interview of Jimmy Carter by Thom Hartmann. There's some annoying music on the end of it but Carter gets his position out there quickly. It's the same thing I've been saying about SuperPACs corrupting Washington but that's not surprising as he is one of the sources from whom I learned the truth of it.
If you want a step more cynical and, in my view, more realistic, the country has always been an oligarchy as it's the nature of governments to form such structures but the difference the SuperPACs made was to turn it into a plutocracy. America can be bought and sold like ham hocks on a Chicago meat market. That's great for the dealers but not so good for the ham hocks.
Carter worries it may come to a violent confrontation. He doesn't say that explicitly but his meaning is clear.
That's such a questionable call as the French knew what to do with the rich and they really did come out of wasting them with a real democracy ... which is now just as corrupt as any other. The Bolsheviks knew what to do with the rich as well ... and they ended up with a corrupt government as well.
However, what's consistently left out of that story is Lenin who was one of the great leaders of the modern era. The general conservative premise is Russia is Stalin is death to us all. If you mention Lenin to conservatives, they will stare at you like goldfish but he was a revolutionary whereas Stalin was a vicious bureaucrat.
Given the reasonably good success of revolution in France and the same, prior to Stalin, in the Soviet Union, the revolution Carter fears doesn't seem such a terrible thing. The turnover of power is what failed in the Soviet Union as Lenin died in 1924, only two years after the Soviet Union was founded. Stalin took over after Lenin's death and held the position for thirty years until 1953. Because of his long tenure, Stalin came to characterize the Soviet Union but Lenin and Marx were the real theorists.
(Ed: after a revolution in the U.S. the same thing would happen as it would become like the Middle East with another power grab every time someone births a new camel.)
Cadillac Man may have a better run on this but my thinking is your revolutionaries need a Constitution in-hand or a solid idea of what it needs to be or their revolution will only replace one crew of blackguards with another.
1 comment:
I agree. The American Revolution was a success because the Constitution called for a balance of power. Though that balance may tip in favor from one branch to the other, there is always some spread of power. This was not the case in France under Napoleon, Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler.
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