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Bush's Own Goal

A new Bush campaign ad pushes the theme of an "ownership society," and concludes with President Bush declaring, "I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America."

Call me naïve, but I thought all Americans have a vital stake in the nation's future, regardless of how much property they own. (Should we go back to the days when states, arguing that only men of sufficient substance could be trusted, imposed property qualifications for voting?) Even if Mr. Bush is talking only about the economic future, don't workers have as much stake as property owners in the economy's success?

But there's a political imperative behind the "ownership society" theme: the need to provide pseudopopulist cover to policies that are, in reality, highly elitist.

Michael Lind (writing in 1995), takes this stealth elitist neo-feudalist "ownership society" ploy to an ultimate conclusion. Essentially calling it out for what it really is.

THE NEW FEUDALISM:

The new feudalism reverses the trend of the past thousand years toward the assumption by the government of basic public amenities like policing, public roads and transport networks, and public schools. In the United States - to a degree unmatched in any other industrial democracy - these things are once again becoming private luxuries, accessible only to the affluent few.

[...]

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, the replacement of the American republic with a decentralized and privatized society would create something like a high-tech Holy Roman Empire on American soil. Conservatives, libertarians and left anarchists like to imagine the harmonious coexistence of flourishing Jeffersonian hamlets. In the absence of a strong central government financed by adequate taxation, however, the more likely result would be a wasteland of crime-ravaged slums between the fortified private neighborhoods of the white overclass, compounds connected, no doubt, by private toll roads. Protected like medieval barons by their private police forces, the affluent classes could transact worldwide business or seek diversion at their computer workstations, while only a few miles away the poor lived and died in conditions of Third World squalor. Not a Jeffersonian utopia, but a high- tech feudal anarchy, featuring an archipelago of privileged whites in an ocean of white, black, and brown poverty, would be the likely outcome of the conservative antistatist program, if it were seriously pursued. (Lind, The Next American Nation, published 1995, pages 211-213)

This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have mores. - George W. Bush

Now watch this drive.

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