Politics of resentment and moral corruption

It was 2004 when I realized how rotten the once robust system had gotten: moral decadence in the money infested late empire politics. Facts did not matter, short sighted resentments and utterly ruthless propaganda mattered: the pendulum was stuck. The deep structures of historical and economic change brought forward globalization and ever increasing power of capital in relation to work - and the relatively liberalistic economic policies even by the moderate centre "left" did not give much to large sections of the middle and working classes who had to run harder to stand merely still. Then the corrupt media, cynical conservative elites, deranged billionaire donors combined with a history of nasty racialist sentiments and grievances co-operated and manipulated these temporary - one hopes - seizures of power.

There was no activist, self-confident, Keynesian compromize offered, only some half-hearted, much vilified attempts that did not form a coherent "new deal", even feebler in the dysfunctional and Brüningian EU than in the US. And now we have a charlatan, a xenophobe rabble rouser in the White House possibly leading an isolationist administration that might not support the post-war security arrangements, so painstakingly built by a more confident, more open republic. Who knows to what catastrophes this will lead, to what further collapses.