/lit/ - Literature

>>19695481
I think one of the secondary causes is the weakening of political parties (which are not really proper parties like in parliamentary systems) in a political system designed to mitigate against parties. You see fewer people identifying with parties. Instead, they have become hollowed-out shells that exist as conduits to move money from donors to candidates, and the candidates' job is to deliver their voters to the donors.

Where the Marxism comes in is that this is because the capitalist class won a historic victory with the neoliberal counter-revolution and there is no threat to them, so they have no need to engage in class-wide action to save their asses in the long term. Instead, they can focus on their short-term, superficial, practical, and particular interests in different business sectors. So, political divisions in this bourgeois sham are primarily divisions between different capitalists representing different sectors (such as globally-integrated services vs. traditional industries including resource extraction). That is basically the "Democrat vs. Republican" divide and the politicians in both "parties" hustle to deliver the voters to their donors by appealing to the self-regard, fears and prejudices of their respective constituencies.

Francis' job is to make banal, gnomic observations anyways. What he doesn't want to do, and what he thinks is a Very Bad thing, is for the U.S. to give up its empire and pull back its military from overseas because Russia/Russia/Russia/China/China/China. But I think that's one of the main reasons for the rot, and while I'm blogging, think that historians one day in the future will pinpoint the JFK assassination as a pivot point here (the collapse of the USSR and 9/11 being two others).

See, JFK was operating from a liberal hypothesis (pretty Catholic seeming) that communism was part of a crisis of technological advance, a reaction to culture shock in backwards countries. The idea was that the communists were an opportunistic conspiracy in these places so his plan was to assist governments with popular mandates to resist while they still could, but explicitly felt that if a country's people were in favor of the communists or anything else, then that should be respected because the U.S. had no chance of beating an entire population anyways.

The issue here is that this liberal foreign policy vision really would've been a disaster for U.S. hegemony. He thought otherwise, I think, but the military and CIA knew the score. So, not really "JFK = no intervention" vs. "CIA = intervention," rather there were different strategies that were extremely incompatible, so JFK got his brains blown out.

Then this happened:

https://youtu.be/ZMAP9Ccg2-0