A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas--too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks:
A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four or five regions, with the Northeast kind of drifting toward Canada because of shared interests. The idea of an empire collapsing under its own weight, is any version of that a plausible scenario to you?
Lapham answers:
To me that is an entirely plausible scenario. Actually, Kevin Phillips, the historian mentioned earlier by Tom, published an article in Harper’s Magazine in the ’70s called “The Balkanization of America.” He actually had the map and he had the way it would divide and why, and I see that as entirely possible. I do. Because Washington can’t govern the United States. They’re trapped inside the Beltway. They’re dysfunctional. Again, to answer the question, there’s a wonderful book that I just read which is influencing me because I’m very impressionable and I’m apt to parrot the last thing I read. This book is called “Immoderate Greatness.” And it’s short. It’s a hundred pages but it’s extremely persuasive as to what happens to civilizations when they become so big that they in fact must fail. The author goes into the laws of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and the exponential growth and the environment. It brings all the angles to bear.
One more excerpt. Lapham says:
No, capitalism is a machinery. It’s neutral. It’s not an idea. It’s a mechanism.
Audience question: So we are up against an idea?
Well, no. We’re up against heavily entrenched interests.
Audience question: Which is the idea…
Well, I don’t think they even put it to themselves that way. The only idea that I can ever see in the minds of the moneyed interests is that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people. That’s about the beginning and end of their idea, I think.
Yes, and the long and the short of it. All the b.s. on Fox or being spouted by Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers is a smokescreen to obscure this central truth. It just shouldn't be that hard to build consensus around something that is this simple to understand.