The Socialist Specter in America
America's other favorite national pastime.
Let me assure you in the plainest terms that there is no person of consequence in the United States government that is interested in seeing this become a socialist country. It is mandatory for success in our current system that one already be successful as a capitalist, before one gains success as a politician. The most indispensable prerequisite to power in this nation is wealth.
You will see that this was true of our Founding Fathers just as it is of our present-day hierarchy: they were all well-to-do landowners, primarily interested in the concerns of their own privileged class. Even today, our finest political voices - the President included - are incessantly calling for the "restoration of the middle class." The fact is, however, that the middle class has usually been a minority in America, when compared to the number of citizens comprising the lower class.
They and the wealthy have been disproportionately represented in the media, and in the country's self-characterizations, however, because they possess the purchasing power that is coveted by the manufacturers, retailers, advertisers, etc. In other words, the lower classes occupy a place in America not unlike the serfdom suffered by the tenant farmers of Czarist Russia: they are used up, thrown away, and ignored. But they receive so much of the indoctrination that is intended for the higher classes, that they cannot help but to identify with those bourgeoisie luxuries, for which they form a crude ambition, and distress themselves further in pursuing.
This malady suffuses not only the lower classes, of course, but indeed, all classes. The middle class seeks to be wealthy, and the wealthy, in order to be assured that their position in society is not impinged upon by any subversive notions of real egalitarianism, go forthwith into politics, where they buy up government positions by flattering the poor with chimeras of advancement.
I am not so idealistic as to suppose that very large societies such as ours can exist without some possessing more than others. If anything, I wish that the boundaries between the rich and the poor (even though I am poor myself) were more impenetrable, so that those born naturally poor were not taunted and enticed by the corrupting desire for riches and superficial prestige.
I have endured much acrimony for consistently saying that, if humanity is not morally capable of sustaining a socialist state, then we should revert to an autocratic, dictatorial, or monarchist one. As a member of the poor, it is the poor that I love, and I am agonized when I see us dissatisfied and abased. We ought to be allowed to live modestly and piously, and to find our joy in our friends and our families, and in our humble work, and not wither and waste from envy at the upper classes, mistaking idleness and vanity for happiness.
There is nothing shameful in owing our wages to the rich, as long as the rich - like the nobility of Old Europe - regard themselves as our protectors, and find blessedness in our modesty, as we find blessedness in their grandeur. Let the spheres remain exclusive, and let us all find the wisdom to see the inherent dignity of our natural stations.
There are two things that are by no means tolerable in human existence, and those are warlike cruelty and preventable poverty. No citizen should suffer for a cause he has not chosen, and no person should starve as a result of another person's greed. Under the present globalized Capitalist system, both of these unallowable travesties are sickeningly commonplace.
For this, Glenn Beck can provide no answer. As a representative of the same mass-media forces that have made us all slaves to the insatiable consumerist impulse, he is speaking to a population that remains almost miraculously ignorant of its own underlying condition. He is speaking to people who do not think of themselves as poor, but as heirs to an inheritance that a dysfunctional and self-relevant government has unjustly denied them. "If only we had never been taxed", they say, "we all would have been rich by now. If our money had not been taken from us to help others, we would be living lavishly, and they would have learned to help themselves."
Mr. Beck and others of his kind have won prestigious popularity by defending and embodying this fairly scurrilous philosophy, which is a mutant form of that which led to the Revolution against the English motherland, and the grievous persecution of her Loyalists. The reader will recall that enemies of the Crown fomented not because they were enslaved, not because they were abused, not because they were hungry, but because they were taxed, and had no Parliamentary representative to argue against their taxation.
Let us consider what the Rebellion of 1776 won for us, and for the beleaguered of this and all nations. Under a simplified system, it is the Monarchy that exacts taxes for the maintenance of order, the Nobles that pay taxes from the surplus of what is produced on their land, and the Commoners who subsist daily on the labors they perform on behalf of the Nobles, who themselves act as political and civil functionaries of the Monarchy. With the vital inclusion of the the Clergy, who are the moral and cultural adhesive bonding all of these spheres together, one arrives at the system of estates typical of feudal Europe, and, I think, the most natural and harmonious form of government attainable by a society that is too large to be divided into tribes, which are essentially socialist in character.
My complaint with the capitalist democracy modeled in its least distilled form by the United States, is that it values Ownership above all other rights, and makes a small-scale imperialist out of every person with a modicum of ambition. Where acquisitiveness is the ultimate virtue, diametrically speaking, generosity or charity must be the ultimate bane, and so everything is marked with a price, because nothing is good that is given away. The poor and the meek, whom Jesus called blessed, are accursed by the American system, which cannot help but estimate persons according to their eagerness for wealth, which is the final standard of goodness.
Therefore Mr. Beck's declamations against taxation and government are owed not to a fear that the unfortunate, needy, helpless, and forsaken are not being adequately looked after, but to a sanctimonious sense of horror that they should be looked after at all. The rich feel no duty toward or mercy for the poor, because the poor have shown themselves unworthy of regard, by disobeying the only relevant prerogative, which is to become rich.
America will not become socialist, because the only way to gain influence over the population of America - even the very poorest components thereof - is to establish one's moral and functional value by becoming wealthy. To earn regard as an entertainer, an entertainer must flaunt his cheaply-gained noblesse. To succeed as a minister, a preacher must become an entrepreneur, and promise his flock that their faith will earn them riches on earth as well as in Heaven.
And, most crucially, to win in politics, one must establish one's value - one's superiority to the common toiler - by already possessing the wealth that the toiler covets and admires above all else. As long as we reward the rich with our votes, we will never be in danger of voting for anyone who finds his reward in anything but riches.
Still, Beck goes on squawking, and flapping, and invoking with tears the mercies of Moloch, for no other reason than that he has found it lucrative to do so. Why else would Americans love him?
