Plato described the makeup of the ideal polis, with its division of labor broadly into rulers, protectors, and workers, and said it could never exist on the earth, but was instead a study of the individual. Regardless of the form of government, the nation would only be as good as its citizens. No form of government, contrary to today’s believers in the religion of democracy, will lead a corrupt people to a just society and prosperity.
What does this type of analysis tell us about modern America? Our earlier rulers have been displaced to a large extent by a new ruling caste with a different world view. Noblesse oblige, once common among American elites who considered themselves custodians of something larger than themselves, is less common today. This may also have something to do with the change in the occupations of the elite; largely in manufacturing in the past, and hence connected more closely with the people of all social classes through contact with their managers and workers, the old elite were actual custodians and guardians of large numbers of people, abuses notwithstanding.
Today’s elites are often to be found in finance, a field which is conducive to short term profit making and allows its participants to be disconnected and aloof from the population at large. One does not feel oneself a custodian of something larger than oneself when structuring an interest rate hedge for a client or engaging in statistical arbitrage between the yen and euro.
The dominance of finance has led to a government designed to cater to its needs, and in so doing has looted the middle class, the class necessary for its ability to put checks on the power of government, of much of its wealth and earning power through currency debasement regulation. Ideally, from the government’s point of view, the middle class would be transformed into a middle management technocracy wholly employed by large corporations and thus politically neutered, their work siphoned off by their employers into political donations to favored politicians.
The military, the guardians of American liberty, now largely consist of semi-employable enlisted men, and now women, drawn to the military because it’s a steady job, led by a fairly talented officer class, with a large number of Southern men whose ancestors were the victims of the organization they now so proudly serve and who visit upon the current political enemies of their politicians or the possessors of resources coveted by their oligarchs and “geostrategists” the crimes which were once visited upon their forebears. They are economic hit men to a degree that even Smedley Butler would not believe. The nationalistic symbols, slogans, and myths have replaced the old patriotism to an extent that debate can no longer take place in the mainstream.
The ruling class, disdainful of a self-sufficient middle class, is using the poor, both working and not working, and both native born and imported, against them, a tactic as old as societies and an inversion of the principles of the Magna Carta.
The political and economic system is now more fragile than ever as the partnership of finance, industry, and government bails each other out with looted money. This leads to an unsustainable and volatile situation both dangerous and potentially profitable to those who understand the game as the debt incurred in the name of the people, to give the people undeliverable promises, cannot be paid and leads to a reordering of society.