Sunday, October 17, 2010

Do Republicans Want a Fedual Society?

I remember the William Blake class I took in pursuit of my Master's Degree. I took it for purely nostalgic purposes. As an undergraduate, I did most of my course work in British Literature. So, returning back to the Romantic Era was like going back to my intellectual home.
Well, Blake, at first, was extremely difficult to understand. And the professor assigned this one book, Reflection on a Revolution in France by an Edmund Burke. Reading it was like watching paint dry, and my eyes began to fill with tears of sheer boredom. Besides, I thought, we live in America, why in the Hell are we reading something a British Whig Party member wrote about the French Revolution?
Over the years, as American politics have gotten crazier and dumber, I've come to appreciate that boring book. I've come to see it, the very long letter to a colleague, as the foundation for conservative thought.
Harshly critical of Populist political movements and anti-intellectual in tone, this long letter seemingly, advocates a two-class society: the very rich who Lord over the very poor. And ironically, this long letter has everything to do with modern American conservative thought. There are many allusions to Burke's original philosophical thought. If Republicans accuse Obama of secretly conspiring to turn America into a Socialist society, all we have to do is listen very carefully to John Boehner and conclude that Republicans are secretly conspiring to turn America into a feudal society: a society in which the richest two percent control both wealth and political power.
I don't have to waste time here quoting the grim economic statistics that would support my theory. As a nation, we've been looking at and experiencing this for the past eight years. For people in lower economic classes, the American Dream seems further and further out of reach, even with extensive education. We know, as actually finishing graduate school looms closer and closer, that we will be faced with massive student loan debt, and will have to delay home-ownership, retirement savings, and childbirth for several years, yet. Thus, the birthrate continues to decline, and the average age for first-time mothers keeps rising.
As Republicans continue to cloak their secret agendas in the rhetoric of "small-business" talk, how long will we shut our eyes to their truth. They want a modern-day feudal society, whatever that may look like. I wonder if they'll want to practice Enclosure in a few years?
Reader pick up Burke, and get back to me with your thoughts.

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