And is it not what Plato described (in highly abstracted & idealized form) in the _Republic_? Carrol
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Yes, of course. Reduced to abstraction, the current battle of ideas, does come down as always---as Spock would say, to the needs of the many against the needs of the few.
What I find fascinating is how the greatly articulated nonsense that passes as the politics of the neoconservative elite that has been turned into the material of policy, can be so easily stripped of its finery and decoded as pure racist horse shit---if you have the nose for it.
After all the la-dee-da and high flown rhetoric, it's just white supremacy done as polite parlor talk. I think this is the racist core affinity between the East Coast elites and the Southern Bible belt fundamentalism---Bush's great coalition.
So I think that rotten core which is at once elitist and racist is the weak spot for rhetorical and political purposes. In large measure the US is now a relativist, multicultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual society in concrete fact. It is exactly that multi-faceted heterogeneity that makes democracy of means, relativity of values a necessity of public life---and not just a rhetorical fog to be manipulated by the elite. So the one thing we can not tolerate is this exclusionary high bourgeois bullshit about the inherent goodness and rightness of the privileged few to rule over the low and questionable proletariat many.
``Why do you find the parallel unlikely...?''
Because I was eighteen when Kennedy was elected president and just coming into a political awareness. I was fooled into believing that his cultural affluence, particularly his minor cultural exchanges with France were a kind of fundamental recognition of the underlying revolution of the Enlightenment. Not that I could have put it that way at the time. But I was just beginning to explore French literature and history and had just discovered it as the more radical wing of American political history. I was not sophisticated enough to understand Kennedy was US elitism attempting to wear the trappings of culture and history and decorate its back street business thug politics with a few flowers. I could almost see it, but not quite.
So I am re-visiting that period and re-thinking what I thought then.
More important I didn't understand the fundamental difference between those of privilage who use history and its cultural accouterments to disguise their own power moves specifically to give their order the semblance of legitimacy---as an historical stand-in for the old divine right of kings. And, in contrast to those privilaged or not who learned and explored these realms of history and culture with the understanding that these topics were composed of the actions of people who fought against similarly preposterous established orders and powers.
All of this reflection leads to a terrible sort of conclusion. That if the official academy is allowed to re-write history along the lines of the neoconservative twist---which is already at least two decades along anyway---then very likely any semblance to the history and culture I learned will most likely vanish. What I learned will simply not be the accepted view, but some kind of radical, suspect, and ideologically skewed interpretation.
I suppose in fidelity to accuracy, I should recall that technically I was reading and learning outside the accepted norm, in reaction to the particular twisted managerial norm at the time---but that twist seems in retrospect to have been a far less egregious deformity. It seemed mainly censorship by omission rather than pro-active reconstruction.
I do dimly remember Jim Farmelant (thanks for the urls), Justin and others going on about Strauss and others, but I didn't understand the significance at the time. I am not sure I really want to add that sort of crap to an already impossible reading list, which I slog along with. There is something nausating about having to read these people just to figure out how they arrived at such despicable ideas.
Chuck Grimes