“America”: Consumerism and the End of Citizenship -- Social Europe Journal (SEJ)

[stockholmer]

http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/04/america-consumerism-and-the-end-of-citizenship/

snip

"...............A short list of the US dysfunctions would include: close to a majority of the population without health care to a level of minimum adequacy; a nation-wide degeneration of public schooling due to under-funding; millions of harassed and exploited illegal immigrants; de facto and de jure denial of workers’ rights; politics 99.9 percent dominated by the rich; and (as a result of the last) a powerful reactionary right that is the envy of neo- and proto-fascists everywhere.

We saw these obvious social and political maladies on previous trips, and this time we obtained an insight into the ideology that justifies a society in decline and decay. The revolutions of the second half of the eighteenth century established the principle that democracy is based on the consent of governed. This consent is achieved through participation in the political process, one form of which are elections. With this participation people assert themselves as citizens of the democracy. To state the relationship simply, democratic government is based on citizenship, the active participation of people in their governance.


In the United States the interests of capital have successfully re-defined the nature of political and social existence. In place of “citizens”, people are defined as “consumers” and “taxpayers”. While these categories may seem blandly descriptive, they are profoundly ideological. A democratic society is sustained by the interaction of people and the institutions of their governance. As citizens, people participate in the formulation of laws and regulations that protect them against the Hobbesian “state of nature” in which there is no legitimate authority to prevent anti-social behavior (such as currently in Somalia and, increasingly, Mexico). Participation creates rights and also obligations, the most obvious being to obey the laws that participatory citizenship endorses.

This triad, participation-rights-obligations, is continuously threatened by social divisions based on class, ethnicity and forms of organized superstition (religion being only the most obvious). Democratic societies have sought to contain these threats through legislative constrains on the power of capital, anti-discrimination laws, and enforcement of secularism in the political sphere. From the end of the Second World War into the late 1970s, what might be called the social democratic period, political debate and conflict in democratic countries focused on these issues: the extent to which economic power would be regulated, protecting minorities consistent with majority rule, and rationality versus faith. In general, reactionary forces sought to erode laws limiting the power of capital, opposed egalitarian measures (especially when they implied private economic costs), and encouraged superstition rather than rationality in political debate........................................." snip

[Skip_In_Boulder]

1. Yep, this is what has happened to America

We have slid so far into the abyss of irrationality that it will literally be decades before the country can recover, long after I am gone. As far as I am concerned it is time to take that European vacation I have been wanting to do and just kind of make it never ending.

[Sherman A1]

2. Interesting

Thanks for posting.

[provis99]

3. well, yes, America sucks.

But the American voters are getting what they want: an America that sucks.

[starroute]

5. Why would you believe that for a moment?

I think the real problem is that we have low-information voters who vote on the basis of campaign slogans and 30-second ads instead of educating themselves.

But if you look at those slogans, what you come away with is that Americans want government that is efficient yet caring, that supplies help when people need it without getting in the way of them going about their daily business, and that sets an example of positive, can-do optimism for the nation and the world. They also want safe streets and schools that educate their children and jobs that pay a wage you can raise a family on.

The first problem is that the GOP has been very good at framing their message to make it seem as though that is what they'll deliver -- even when they have no intention of actually doing so. The second is that these campaign slogans tend to amount to a promise of doing more for less, and the Democrats are honest enough to recognize that when the GOP isn't. And the third is that dealing with the really hard problems, like pollution and decaying infrastructure, is going to force people out of their comfort zone no matter how you go about it.

So at bottom, it isn't that voters want an America that sucks. It's that they want to get an America that doesn't suck without having to pay for it or do the hard work themselves. And that's a different kind of problem that demands a different kind of solution.

[mmonk]

4. That nails it very well.

[Romulox]

6. I disagree with the OP; our government is dysfunctional such that it does not reflect the will

of the people.

For example, large majorities opposed the bankster bailouts. The President and the Congress proceeded without our consent.

[jobendorfer]

9. I hear you -- but for me

the political system has gone far beyond "dysfunctional".

For me, goverment is "dysfunctional" when it doesn't work very well, problems aren't being solved, and the politicians are intractably locked into their various positions, but the conflicts are about real issues, grounded in reality.

I would describe the process in Washington today as "delusional".
We're bankrupting ourselves with wars, but nobody talks about that.
We're consuming oil in the way that heroin addicts go through dope, but nobody talks about that.
We're destroying civil liberties in the name of the war on drugs, but nobody ever asks why half of America wants to be stoned out of its gourd.
Unemployment is officially at 10 or 11 percent, in real terms probably half again that or more, nobody talks about that.
Wall Street paid in bonuses -- bonuses! -- enough money to balance the all of the state budgets. Nobody talks about that.

Instead, we're having conversations about whether or not the President is a non-native American closet muslim,
and whether or not we can solve our fiscal problems by electing a guy who ran a ***casino*** into bankruptcy.

Molly Ivins called it correctly before she passed away. The fundamental divide in the United States is no longer
about left versus right, liberal versus conservative, democrats versus republicans, etc. It's about sane versus insane.

J.

[indepat]

7. Let us count all the joys of living in a rabidly RW society where rampant

corporatism burgeons daily. :patriot:

[WinkyDink]

8. This is not a "Eureka!" moment, if I could think of it decades ago.

[sudopod]

10. kick

[WatsonT]

11. "degeneration of public schooling due to under-funding"

We spend more than almost every other country on a per student basis.

They aren't underfunded, the money just isn't ideally used.