Manufactured Dissent

While Frank Rich shows himself hopelessly out of his depth--economic arguments that include as their central tenets the necessity of Presidents inspiring confidence, as the saying goes, may be dismissed out of hand--he does manage to prove himself something better than the partisan sycophant he often appeared to be during the campaign, noting that the Obama administration's self-proclaimed commitment to ethical renovation in government is all sound, not much fury, and nothing signified.

Now Wilkinson has some thoughts on whether or not we are now socialists, or (tee-hee) participatory fascists, or, more particularly, why we are neither one nor the other. I still like the term State Capital, although it seems to me to be redundant. The idea that "capitalism" is a catch-all for any relatively "free" economy or mode of exchange is as deficient as the idea that any centralized or planned economy is communism. Capitalism as practiced, always and everywhere, seems to me to mean inherently a cooperative (collusive?) system of private enterprise subsidized and regulated by a state whose main actors are in turn subsidized by private enterprise. Here is a more flexible system than a direct command economy, less susceptible to shocks, more robust in general, but ultimately no less integrated across the realms of business, production, service, and government.

I both agree and disagree with Will on his assessment of the decreasing reach and effectiveness of manufactured consent. While I agree that disparate and dissenting voices now more effectively find audiences beyond their fellow-traveling compeers, I also suspect that such dissident nattering around the margins of popular opinion and consensus is, and will continue to be, easily coopted into a social narrative of divergent voices and free expression even as any thoughts we may have about alternative modes of being remain just as marginal and popularly discredited as before. The self-named blogosphere seems to me to be the country's latest free speech zone, with the unusual feature being the large portion of internees willing to hand money through the chain links to the guards beyond (cf. Progressives).

This is what indignant bloggers endlessly complaining about the funded media's scoffing dismissals of their manners and accuracy fails to understand, that they (we) aren't outsiders seeking entrance to the informational economy, but are fully part of the staged drama, a motley and strident gang whose motliness and stridency are characteristics that are adopted and amplified in description in order to bolster the reasonableness of so-called mainstream debate. We flatter national pretensions to diversity of opinion and the rhetorical commitment of a society to free speech, even as we effectively declare that the fenced- and barriered-in zone miles from the actual parade grounds is in fact the new locus of political activism.