2. There has been some question as to whether I am an elistist or not. I am a failed elitist. I would like to have had a background like Keynes' but instead I got to pick butts out of urinals and sundry such. Had I been allowed the indulgence of being raised like Keynes, I would be much more insufferable than I am. (That is possible). I cannot self-righteously claim to be self-made since too many of the resources that were put at my disposal were public. I'm the son of a high school teacher with no access to inherited wealth of any kind. All things considered, we have to admit the possibility that I'm just a crank.
3. With regard to the revolutionary potential of the working class, I don't know. It is true that you can have interesting conversations with many and that the instinctive "the rich are screwing us" or "the rich get all the breaks" goes a long way to explaining what is put in more abstract theoretical terms of various vocabularies (Marxist, Keynesian, left-wing pluralist). But I am reminded of a seminar with W.D. Burnham, when he was at MIT: "You can work for a revolution in the United States, you can wait for a revolution in the United States, you can grow old and die waiting for a revolution in the United States: a lot of people already have." Let's face it. The US political system was knowingly constructed to have the appearance but not the substance of a democracy. And it works as it was intended to. It is perhaps the most brilliant political construct of all time, although the Roman Empire was pretty astonishing.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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