Elites and the value of fear

By Fester:
I'm sharping the tines on my pitchfork. I have no policy or political problem against sharply punitive taxes on companies that are effectively but not de jure nationalized. They fucked up, so they should not be rewarded for fucking up.

I am not alone in doing that. And I am one of the luckier ones; I have a good education, an affordable house and I have had plenty of opportunities and option space to run with. My family has not been hit hard by the real estate bust, nor are my parents and in-laws critically exposed by the 401(K) bust. They still have the ability to retire without eating cat-food or move to their children’s household(s).

So if I'm one of the luckier ones of my generation and I am sharpening my pitchfork and looking on eBAY for a good deal on tar and feathers, what is happening to the people who had their knees taken out despite buying into the American Dream?

Felix Salmon speculates a bit on this:

In the other corner are the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.
Now, of course, that dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits. While the talking heads in New York and Washington throw around their millions and billions and trillions before commuting home to their comfortable middle-class-and-better lifestyles, the rest of the country is mad as hell, and ain't gonna take it any more. They're not interested in constructive solutions or in leveraging private capital or in the sanctity of contracts: fuck that shit. Those days are over. They want to see jail time, confiscatory policies, and worse.

The most dangerous revolutionary groups are not the desperately poor --- just surviving till next week is enough of a challenge, but the class of people whose toes were through the door to ‘success’ and elite membership when that door slams shut on them , dislocating a couple of toes, and breaking a few bones in the foot. They are the ones who have something to lose, the resources to organize themselves and the capacity to sustain an effort. Right now there are quite a few people who thought that they had a chance to get ahead and that door is being slammed in their face.

Nothing radical will happen this year, but if there is a continued belief that the American elites are hyper-insulated and are still able to manipulate the political system to loot, then radicalism will emerge. I don’t know if that radicalism will be popular support for 90% marginal tax rates on incomes of more than a million dollars or systems disruptions attempts to destroy the wealthy’s sources of wealth. But that radicalism will emerge unless their is some re-alignment of interests, incentives and public communication between the American elites, and at least the middle-middle and upper middle classes.

This is where the value of fear should come into play, as fear is a wonderful motivator of change.

Comments

[Curmudgeon]

The US scores scarily high on several of the quantitative indexes used by NGOs and the international relations research community (the academics, not the think-tank ideologues) used to predict state failure. There's definite potential for an explosion--to the extent that borderline crackpots like Orlov might be right about a few things.

HOWEVER, revolts and successful revolutions only happen if the aggrieved middle class and lower elites are enmeshed in a reasonably strong civil society framework that is able to challenge individual rage into collective action. Think of Solidarity in the Polish case. When civil society is weak, the most that can be expected is a few riots followed by a return to business as usual; see for example the failed color revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia.

In addition to scoring scarily high on failed state indexes, the US scores very, very low on civil society indexes. The American population below the overclass level is extremely atomized and lacks the connectivity to put up an organized front against the overclass itself. Without civil society, the most likely outcome of mass discontent is isolated disorder and acts of resistance that ultimately amount to nothing and a continuation of business as usual by the overclass.

The real danger is the risk of the rise of a fanatic ideologue able to channel mass discontent into an organized force for evil. Think Germany, 1930s.