American Feudalism - 7

Wee The People

In the fourth post of this series, American Feudalism - 4, we focused on the "slave" class, the lowest class of the feudal construct, and its dynamics.

That class was and is the "Peasant" or "Serf."

In today's post, then, let's discuss the Modern American "Peasant" or "Serf."

Our culture tells us "we are the richest nation" of all of the nations in modern civilization, which, in traditional American conversation has meant "we the people", "Americans", or the general citizenry.

Yes, that "we are the richest nation" has traditionally meant that our system of government, with its economic tides, floated all boats, because it was designed to increasingly sustain the common good over time.

That is no longer working out for us because the worst of history is repeating itself:

... the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal.

(Our Invisible Revolution, Truth Out, emphasis added). The popular nomenclature used to describe this revulsion is the "99% vs the 1%" in recent public conversation (Richest 1% In 2 Families, Everyone In America Is Even More Broke Than You Think).

Several Dredd Blog series, in addition to the post in the current series you are now reading, have focused on the reality (see e.g. The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy, The Graphs of Wrath) with the following general flavor:

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 2, quoting Who Rules America). But what can Peasants and Serfs, who are under attack, do about it?

The author of Our Invisible Revolution, quoted above, says this:

This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible.

(Our Invisible Revolution, Chris Hedges, emphasis added). Regular readers of Dredd Blog know that we have seen the 1% plan to "resort to force" reaction coming for a long time (see e.g. Will The Military Become The Police - 4 and Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity? - 2).

Will those "bureaucrats, civil servants and police" who took the oath to protect and defend the Constitution do so by supporting the people, the common good.

Or will they instead support the lord king "who can do no wrong"?

In other words, will they help the people rescue our fading America, that is, will the Americans in our government reject the Epigovernment?

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Imagine This and imagine That ...

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Those of you in government, please Help out.

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