The ruling class
Posted on | January 16, 2010 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf
In an engaging piece about the lack of ideological diversity in American theater Harry Stein makes the following perceptive observation:
Like liberals everywhere, its creators imagine they’re speaking truth to power—when, in fact, they are the power, and guard it as jealously as any of the right-wing, American-allied dictators of yore they grew up protesting against.
One of the most fascinating questions about contemporary political culture is how long progressives can keep imagining they are fighting the status quo before recognizing that they are the status quo. 20th century America has seen an almost uninterrupted victory of those who want to use the power of the state to alter the unequal and “prejudiced” outcome of individual choice and free markets. This ideology has become so widely accepted among those who seek power that even Republican candidates like Sarah Palin feel they need to play the “sexism” card to win a debate.
There are those on the Hard Left (labor unions, for example) who never had problems recognizing that egalitarian politics requires the heavy hand of coercion. But this identification with power is not comfortable for those whose political ideals where shaped in the 1960s. The history of how the libertarian socialists and radicals of the protest generation became the kind of authoritarian politicians who advocate “individual mandates” remains to be written.
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