"A significant chunk of the elite turned against the American system post-1965 Voting Rights Act. You go through the South and you can see it very clearly-- the decline of spending or interest in common infrastructure such as schools, public pools etc. Basically, when the white settler elite (the former slaveholders) realized they would have to share the commons with African Americans they decided to withdraw from the commons. But this is true throughout the United States, not just the South. It is only most obvious in the South, and since Southern politicians have succeeded in dominating the federal system, they have also been able to cripple the central government as well. Look at the huge fight over federal funding for high speed rail in California, which is embarrassing. Even Japan's right-wing one party government could see the benefits of high speed rail-- during the 1950s.
Withdrawing from the commons has worked fine for the top of the income bracket. But their less well off foot soldiers didn't realize, however, is that we all live side-by side, and that systematically destroying the nation-state would also hurt them. Eventually the predator state prison complex gun would point at the white working class too-- and this has happened, they've found out that no one gives a shit about them either. You may go to church every Sunday, profess your undying belief in America, and work ass off at your construction gig, never accept welfare and look down on non-whites as shifty dope using profligate embracers of promiscuity,but ultimately the people whose economic program you supported for 30 years don't care about you and now they are going to destroy your life by privatizing what is left of the commons and leaving you to race to the bottom.
On the left, people decided that the idea of the nation-state was déclassé, and that patriotism was embarrassing, and they retreated, into the self-referential intellectual masturbation of post-modernism, where everybody is right and nobody is wrong. Of course, that's nonsense. They don't actually believe that, it's just a convenient cover for people who lack the courage of their convictions. Ironically, these people often embrace the Che cult, and the cult of ''third world liberation" generally, while never realizing that what drove those movements was not some embrace of an international ideal, but of localized, nationalistic sentiment. Carefully ensconced in academia, they have cushy jobs, retirement plans and insurance benefits, and enjoy regular international travel to mostly irrelevant conferences where other people just like them deliver talks on the post-Lacanian cultural analysis of the cultural identity of transnational non-traditional shamanistic sexuality participants (aka furries), followed by cliched calls to solidarity with striking workers in Greece. You can sneer at the nation state all you want, but you exist in a bubble of academic privilege that is paid for by federal student loans and defense department grants, and the multicultural diversity that you so prize exists only because there is still, just barely, a common American identity holding it all together. If the United States ever fell apart, no one is going to protect your precious, diverse, non-traditional gender role-loving community, as the US will look more like the Balkans after the end of Communism.
There is a way out of this situation, but the answers most certainly will not be found among an elite that long ago turned its back on America." ...a 'tim302' commenting on
When Elites Depart..
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