We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, May 1, 2017

The US Political Scene: Whiteness and the Legitimacy Crisis of Global Capitalism

Click here to access article by Salvador Rangel and Jeb Sprague-Silgado from TeleSur.

The two professors of sociology from University of California (Santa Barbara) offer their interpretation of ruling class policies regardless of who occupies the White House, and the continuing efforts by their media to manage the people's consent to their self-serving policies in spite of the deteriorating effects on the lives of ordinary people.
It is important to understand how the forces behind Trump (and their ideological mechanisms) are now operating through the U.S. political scene. ....

We wish to argue that the reason for which Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” and rhetoric resonated with so many white workers and middle strata is because the ideological terrain had in part already been prepared for it. The field in which Trump planted the seed of xenophobia and hatred among white people had been tilled by neoliberalism and fertilized with money from the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch– and other ruling elites. In fact, it has roots also in the nation’s formative history, through the violence against negatively racialized populations, most notably against Native and African Americans. ....

The Trumpian-right also mixes into this sentiment a rightist populist critique of globalization. Yet, Trump’s election has not come to represent a rupture but rather a continuation of strategies deployed by the transnational capitalist class (TCC), with a different guise.

Beneath the surface of the U.S. political system, one can see how power is entrenched.