Sunday Read: Chris Hayes on The Village
by digby
If you read no other article on this lazy Sunday afternoon, read this one by Chris Hayes in The Nation about why Washington doesn’t care about jobs. It validates something someone pointed out to me long ago about one of the reasons the Europeans have had a welfare state and the US doesn’t: their parliamentary form of government and strict campaign laws make it so they draw more from the middle classes for their leadership.
There are lot’s of possibilities for why this is so, and I would imagine it’s a combination of the things Hayes sets forth and maybe a few more. Perhaps there’s something in certain people’s psyches that desire royalty and if you don’t have some sort of figure heads playing those roles, people will naturally start treating those with real power as monarchs — and they’ll start acting that way in return. Or maybe it’s just that American politics costs so much that only the rich or the corrupt can usually afford to participate. Certainly, our extreme income inequality is taking those who have money further and further away from the concerns of the ordinary American and since our political leaders and media stars are among them, that naturally makes them less able to relate to ordinary Americans.
Whatever the reasons, we have a ruling elite that is more and more out of touch as we can see with the fatuous blather from the celebrity Village pundits who drone on and on about “shared sacrifice” while extolling the virtues of tax cuts for themselves and cuts in Social Security for the rest of us. The dissonance is downright disorienting to those of out here in the rest of America.
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