[Marxism] Kevin Phillips on the global crisis of US capitalism -

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

clip -
 
Let me stipulate: despite the obvious salience of predicaments like oil,  
climate, the volatile dollar, run-amok debt and credit, the housing bubble, and 
 
imperial overinvolvement in the Middle East, I would be the last to say that 
any  more than 5 to 10 percent of the electorate would favor a 2008 debate over 
 American decline. Average voters do not.
 
As an aspiring theorist four decades ago, I developed a belief that the  
realignments seen in U.S. presidential politics every generation or so had an  
(idealized) cleaning-up component. The victors, with a mandate of sorts from an 
 
annoyed electorate rearranged in new party coalitions, came to the capital 
city  and purged it of the used-up elites of the crowd that had just been voted 
out.  Some of that occurred after Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800, Andrew  
Jackson's in 1828, Abraham Lincoln's in 1860, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's in  
1932. 
At any rate, it didn't happen after the 1968 election, although Republicans  
held the White House for twenty of the next twenty-four years. And it 
certainly  hasn't happened since. Congress and the White House have been in the 
hands 
of  different parties two-thirds of the time since 1968, so the United States 
has  progressed to a new kind of interest-group influence: the simultaneous  
entrenchment in Washington of the used-up, don't-want-to-go-back-to-Peoria  
elites of both major parties. This electoral duopoly is in turn protected by  
various state and federal election and campaign-finance laws that make it hard  
for new parties to take hold or flourish. It's not that there aren't 
differences  between the parties; it's just that they are limited differences 
and ones 
often  reflecting cultural polarization. 
In the early 1980s, an American sociologist by the name of Mancur Olson  
published a book called The Rise and Decline and Nations. Its thesis was that  
decline comes because after many years of success, a nation's political and  
economic arteries get so clogged with special-interest groups that its  
life-giving circulation of ideas and elites is impaired. Countries that are  
beaten in 
wars and occupied receive a new lease on life because their old  interest-group 
structures get uprooted. He dwelled on Britain, the United  States, 
Australia, and New Zealand, none successfully invaded or occupied over  the 
last few 
centuries, as examples of impaired political and economic  circulation. Olson 
misjudged the links between inflation and political failure,  but his 
interest-group focus may have a partial utility in explaining political  and 
governmental entrenchment and decline. 
full article  - _http://www.alternet.org/stories/81652/?page=entire_ 
(http://www.alternet.org/stories/81652/?page=entire) 




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