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Lost Eden: The world of Robert A. Heinlein
Very long. Here's an excerptWatching the recent furor over the Senate immigration bill, I found myself wondering if this was perhaps a first in U.S. history: a sort of Peasants Revolt against the now-enormous and massively entrenched (and increasingly endogamous) elites. It has long been a commonplace, confirmed over and over again by polls, that the elite-commoner gap on the immigration issue is wider than on any other. It may be that this is only the first of many such issues. As the elites pull away from the rest of us, and the rest of us become more atomized and disorganized a heap of loose sand in Sun Yat-sens memorable phrase about the late-Imperial Chinese we may be headed for the kind of intractable elite-commoner hostility predicted by Michael Young in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy. I dont think it is fanciful to see an element of this in the current widespread anger towards the political class the presidents approval ratings down in the 30s, and Congresss even lower. Some of that is anger at particular policies Iraq, the immigration bill. Much, though a rising proportion, I believe is systemic: a feeling that the elites are now running the show for their own interests, Latin-America-style, with not much regard for ours. As my reader X (see above) correctly observed: The low paid politician has vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by government service. Posted by: gromgoru 2007-07-12 |
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