"Let’s see if we can think outside the box a bit here and bring some seemingly disparate concepts together. We’ve got an immigration policy designed to divide us. We’ve got an entrenched two-party political system whose economic policies of the last several decades have produced massively increased inequality. Looks to me like “the great common task” American elites is to divide us and facilitate a society of extremes of wealth and poverty. Now, what do we call a country that has extremes of wealth and poverty? We call it a third-world country, or on our side of the Atlantic, a banana republic.
"“Trump and the Republicans are dismantling what was left of the Progressive era and the New Deal and paving the way for new and even greater inequality...Immigration restrictions loosened again in 1965 and immigration has again changed the character of the United States--but the great common task that might bring us together is lacking.”
"I certainly do see a great common task here by people who would wish to establish a plutocracy: Let’s change the character of the United States into one that accepts greater inequality as a natural and good thing, something that should be as accepted and as unnoticed as a sunrise. It certainly helps our cause if can we import massive numbers of people from places where long-term entrenched poverty is an accepted way of life and where democracy is not respected." G X
What Glaucon X calls, how shall I put it, American Banana Republicanism, I call global average income convergence, with a miniscule top .1% icing.
We had accepted natural and good inequality, from the very beginning, here, although that was not at all how the documents had seemed to read at that time, or later, especially with Lincoln's radical reinterpretation; the commonwealth man, country gentleman, proud slave owning, weltanchauung of the founding fathers, both before and after 1776. Get used to it. They still mean what they originally meant, regardless of Lincoln.
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