Lapham at lithub on plutocracy and politics in the USA:
"Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. His smug and self-satisfied face is the face of the way things are and have been in Washington and Wall Street for the last quarter of a century."
"Trump was there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. The big money cares for nothing other than itself, always has and always will. "
"A fair enough share of his fellow citizens screamed, stamped and voted in agreement because what he was saying they knew to be true, knew it not as precept borrowed from the collected works of V.I. Lenin or Ralph Lauren but from their own downwardly mobile experience on the losing side of a class war waged over the past 40 years by America’s increasingly frightened and selfish rich against its increasingly angry and debtbound poor."
"Trump is president of the United States, and what in 1988 was a weakened but still operational democracy has become a dysfunctional, stupefied plutocracy. "
"The nation’s political discourse meanwhile has dwindled into the staging of election campaigns with candidates prized for the gift of saying nothing. Forbidden the use of words apt to disturb a Gallup poll or offend a bagman, they stand and serve as product placements for concentrated wealth, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. "
“The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other. The forces of democracy on the one side . . . and the forces of property on the other side.”
"At no moment in its history has the country not been nailed to a cross of gold. "
“those who own the country ought to govern it.”
"Faith in democracy survived the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; it didn’t survive the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. "
"The visual order of print sustains a sequence of cause and effect, tells a story with a beginning, middle and end. The speed of light spreads stories that run around in circles, eliminate the dimensions of space and time, construct a world in which nothing follows from anything else. Sequence becomes additive instead of causative, “Graphic Man” replaces “Typographic Man,” and the images of government become a government of images."
"the amassment of wealth and the acquisition of power follows from the naming of things rather than from the making of them. The future is a product to be sold, not a story to be told."
"Advertising is the voice of money talking to money"
"Typographic Man wrote the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address; Graphic Man elects the president of the United States. "
"The comic book hero won the comic book election."
"The excellence of Mark Zuckerberg is the excellence of Donald Trump, product placements of concentrated wealth but also embodiments of the spirit of an age ... "
"What can be said about the big money can also be said about technology: it cares for nothing other than itself, collects and stores the dots but connects them only to other dots ... Siri, Watson and Alexa can access the Library of Congress, but they don’t read the books. "
" ... if left to its own devices, the Dionysian god in the machine of creatively annihilating capitalism must devour and destroy the earth. Not with malice aforethought, but because it is a machine, and like all machines knows not what else to do."
Read the whole thing:
https://lithub.com/lewis-lapham-of-america-and-the-rise-of-the-stupefied-plutocrat/2/?single=truesidd