[WS:] I have a strange sense of deja vu. Reminds me of the final days of communism in Eastern Europe when everything was going to hell in a handbasket and everyone knew that, yet the airwaves were filled with pious declarations that there is no alternative to the status quo.
While we are at that, there was genre of "convergence" theories popular in the 1960s and the 1970s claiming that Soviet style communism and American style capitalism are converging to some middle ground. These theories lost any currency after the fall of the Berlin Wall - but prematurely in my view. In reality, these two systems indeed converged after all, albeit on somewhat different terms that the proponents of these theories hoped for. Instead of adopting the best traits of each system and abandoning the worst, the opposite had happened - the US adopted the worst traits of the Soviet system, especially the corporate welfare state and authoritarian controls, while Russia adopted the worst traits if the US system, especially laissez faire gangster capitalism. So at the end, instead of living in the best possible worlds, we ended up living in the worst.
What keeps me wonder, though, is whether this is merely a sign of imperial decline or a sign of a "new brave world" to come.
Wojtek
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:18 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 10, 2011, at 9:06 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
>> RE: "becoming the longest serving conservative premier"
>>
>> [WS:] I cannot help but notice how far to the right this country is.
>> Our liberal Democrats are to the right of Sweden's conservatives.
>> Depressing.
>
> E.g.:
>
>>> “A good society does not have huge differences,” Reinfeldt said. “If you build trust among people, and I think you need that, then they shouldn’t get far apart from each other.”
>
> It's hard to imagine just about anyone in public life here saying something like this.
>
> Funny, though - their banks are in great shape and so is their budget.
>
> Doug
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