In a short and to the point essay, NYT columnist Bob Hebert says what I’ve been thinking for a long time. Since 1980 the USA has been leaning to the right for so long we have now fallen over.
Update: His conservative colleague David Brooks chimes in:
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone. …
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment. …
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
I saw both of those columns and was similarly impressed with how they were able to get right to the heart of the matter so succinctly and clearly … I guess that’s why they are popular columnists.
Yep, I’m envious. Would love to be able to write that well.
Oh, I think you write just fine.
Welcome back, trinifar.
First, the New Yorker Magazine produced a cover story in which Obama was characterized as a flag-burning Muslim. Next, a television advertorial from the McCain camp itself tried to warn the general voting public of the stated fact that Obama was the Antichrist himself. And here I am, a stupid European, wondering what to make of the political landscapes of the United States of America. I’m not kidding here. I can only hope that American readers can remember what was going on in their domestic media world no more than a couple of months ago. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but me, well, for refusing to be caught swearing, let’s say I’m appalled.
Magne, a lot of Americans are also appalled. Right now the media attention span is about two days … feels like we’re in a time warp.
The New Yorker cover was intended to be satire and tried to expose the idiotic Obama-is-a-terrorist meme as so false that it was silly. Unfortunately, satire like that is lost on many Americans.
Please consider that which could be a product of arrogance and also shameful behavior.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a sub prime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ’ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people {ie, more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth} do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
I suppose the exodus of most other thinkers from the Republican Party means Rush Limbaugh is now by default the towering intellectual of the Right.