Democracy Again

I'm reading Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of his trilogy The Age of Roosevelt. It's OK--a bit of a reader's digest version of the great men of history. Still, it recounts the 1920s, another age dominated by business that careened into a catastrophe. Government run by business, he writes, "In time it would appear that even the leaders of business could not decipher the intricate financial structures they were erecting" (68), a sentence that could have been written today. Joseph Stiglitz, in a review in the London Review of Books, says that in the past thirty years there have been 100 economic crises--this after about 50 years of relative economic stability through a regulated economy. So we are incapable of learning from the past: or should I say the financial world is incapable of learning from the past and we, like sheep, believe whatever they say. Of course, there are those who profit from each financial catastrophe: something that tossed 10 percent of the population out of work becomes part of a business strategy.

Schlesinger later discusses H.L. Mencken, no lover of democracy he: "Mencken's typical congressman? 'A knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Kulx Klan and a grand worthy of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin that make the laws of the United States.' The civil service? 'A mere refuge for prehesile morons.' Public opinion? The immemorial fears of the mob, 'piped to central factories . . . flavoured and coloured and put into cans.' Democratic morality? 'When one has written off crutelty, envy and cowardice, one had accounted for nine-tenths of it.' Bryan, the 'Fundamentalist Pope'; T.R., the 'national Barbarossa'; Wilson, 'the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad.' Democracy as a theory? 'All known facts lie flatly against it.'" (148-149). Update this 90 years and this, too, could have been written yesterday. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumfelds and their hatchetmen are the reincarnated clowns of the recent past--the Hoovers, Mellons, and other stone deaf fools who, in the face of human suffering, can suggest that prosperity is just around the corner.

Can we say that the same bureaucratic fools now run our world--an endless supply of fool managers who operate even in the very institution I have the privilege of working at.