Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Not sure what's so different about capitalism in the last fifty years. Earlier you were fingering Newt Gingrich. It's not like he's the product of capitalism.
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Gingrich made total war politics acceptable.
Capitalism since the Powell Memo and Milton Friedman has pretty much been focused solely on shareholder returns. Labor doesn’t work for a company that reinvests in itself, grows, and value them. It serves to provide maximum productivity for the participants in the casino betting on companies.
Capitalism is now a mix of crony capitalism and late capitalism. In this environment, total war politics finds a fertile breeding ground. Candor like that offered in Trump’s campaign (and Bernie’s and Liz’s) gets a guy like Trump elected — an extreme but not entirely unpredictable event. He behaves extremely and his opponents match his extreme behavior. And when he does something amazingly dumb, they impeach him.
It’s a ratcheting up of the crazy. Now, of course, sooner or later, populism would emerge. So many people can’t be lied to and fucked over for so long without a hiccup. But Gingrich was the first guy to make the extreme commonplace on the political strategy side.
