29 September

B-grade Hollywood scripts replace most thought and knowledge of history today I think. Like the claims America is being taken over by authoritarian Nazis. Pretty much everybody who says that never knew or studied any Nazis. To me America is just entering another Gilded Age. It had one at the end of the 19th century, after its Civil War. That war like all great catastrophes broke the existing status quo, leaving the field wide open for new individuals to come storming through and dominate American status hierarchies. And storm through they did. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. Sometimes called ‘the robber barons’. One man saw that this was just an old historical pattern repeating itself. Thorstein Veblen. He saw this was really about battles for status, to restore a feudal model of society, humanity’s stable form throughout all of history. Democracy never was about the people. All the checks and balances we call democracy today were a truce between the King and his robber barons, via the Magna Carta, a document where they carved up the spoils of society. Trump is restoring the King and court model to the US, with his own robber barons, the owners of social media.