Plutocracy in America, liminality in the world

Two opinion pieces in the NYTimes caught my attention. One is about the paradox of plutocracy in America the other is about the future.

Krugman on plutocrats

He opens:

The rich are different from you and me: They have immensely more power. But when they try to exercise that power they can trap themselves — supporting politicians who will, if they can, create a society the rich themselves wouldn’t want to live in.

This, I’d argue, is the common theme running through four major stories that have been playing out over the past few months. They are: the relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and the billionaire Harlan Crow; the rise and seeming decline of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign; the trials (literally) of Fox News; and the Muskopalypse at Twitter.

Whoops!

... however, there’s only so much you can achieve in America, imperfect and gerrymandered as our democracy may be, unless you can win over large numbers of voters who don’t support a pro-billionaire economic agenda.

It’s a simplification, but I think fundamentally true, to say that the U.S. right has won many elections, despite an inherently unpopular economic agenda, by appealing to intolerance — racism, homophobia and these days anti-“wokeness.” Yet there’s a risk in that strategy: Plutocrats who imagine that the forces of intolerance are working for them can wake up and discover that it’s the other way around.

Endgame:

I still believe that the concentration of wealth at the top is undermining democracy. But it isn’t a simple story of plutocratic rule. It is, instead, a story in which the attempts of the superrich to get what they want have unleashed forces that may destroy America as we know it. And it’s terrifying.

And the future?

Jerome Roos begins by observing, “Humanity now faces a confluence of challenges unlike any other in its history.” In consequence

we are presented with two familiar but very different visions of the future: a doomsday narrative, which sees apocalypse everywhere, and a progress narrative, which maintains that this is the best of all possible worlds. Both views are equally forceful in their claims — and equally misleading in their analysis. The truth is that none of us can really know where things are headed. The crisis of our times has blown the future right open.

After sketching the two views he says “No!”

To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.

Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality. It sounds technical, but it captures an essential aspect of the human condition. Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between, neither here nor there. Ask any teenager: Such a state of suspension can be a very disconcerting time to live through.

We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger. Yet for all their destructive potential, they are also full of possibility.

Roos suggests that, rather than “conceive of history as a straight line tending either up toward gradual improvement or down toward an inevitable collapse” we should see it as an alternation of period of calm and upheaval.

Progress and catastrophe, those binary opposites, are really joined at the hip. Together, they engage in an endless dance of creative destruction, forever breaking new ground and spiraling out into the unknown.

Somehow I’m not reassured by this. Not, mind you, that I’m looking for either a progress or a catastrophe narrative. But this proposal seems to me mostly superficial window dressing, rather like the film I noted the other day, Charlie Wilson’s War.

Meanwhile I’m thinking about Krugman’s plutocrats busy undermining the high ground on which they build their castles.