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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTo Stop an Endless Cycle of Corruption, History Says Fix the System, Not the Politician
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A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is not more rage, but a new political perspective. Around 1900, after years of anger at vulgar politicians, a young journalist pushed voters to resist the impulse to go out with the crowd and smash something.
It was too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe that bad politicians were just immoral people. Instead he asked his massive readership to look at the structure rather than the individual, to think about the warped systems that enabled political corruption, and to consider the ways angry voters inadvertently encouraged behavior they condemned.
Steffens was the perfect man for the job. The young writer had bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan, driven by wanderlust, contrarianism and a preference for the sleazy over the respectable. He honed his scorching prose, and learned about New Yorks low-life, as a crime reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. There was something feisty about Steffens. Over his long career, he was often wrong, sometimes a sucker, but rarely a coward. One politico called him a born crook thats gone straight.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/what-early-20th-century-muckraker-lincoln-steffens-might-offer-21st-century-voter-180957052/?utm_source=facebook.com&no-ist
Warpy
(111,255 posts)you see ordinary people forced into debt peonage by a tiny wealth aristocracy (see: educated people under 40 in the US) rising up and smashing that aristocracy to smithereens again and again. The aristocracy were often slaughtered but occasionally allowed to flee, the people closest to them becoming the seeds of the next aristocracy since they knew how the scams all worked. The people got a few years, sometimes decades, of breathing room before the cycle started again. The Byzantines went through several of these cycles and never really caught on.
Things can't go on as they are, we all know that. What most of us know (myself, especially) is that revolution is now impossible to avoid. The best we can hope for is a crash that beggars rich and poor alike and a mostly peaceful revolution of new laws and restrictions against the excesses of capitalism to try to avoid another one.
Sadly, another slick snake oil salesman will come along eventually and oversee the dismantling of those laws, but for a few years, we the people will be free.
MerryBlooms
(11,769 posts)I think that's as close to a revolution as I'll ever see in my lifetime.
Poiuyt
(18,123 posts)As long as the billionaires and the big lobbyists keep paying the campaign coffers of politicians, they won't listen to anyone else. Politicians want to maintain their power and it takes donations (bribes) to do it. They will gladly do what they've been instructed to do by the plutocrats. The status quo won't change as long as the ruling class is making money.
Even if I did have a good solution, no one would listen to me because I'm not a billionaire.