Republicans have become Social Darwinist dystopians!

The best sentence I read today:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. 

Well, this might be an insult to the British Empire, of which I am no fan either!  Even if it was from their own selfish interests, the British at least did a few good things--even something like this "anicut" in a remote small town in Tamil Nadu.

Anyway, that sentence is from this essay in The American Conservative (ht) that makes a wonderful point that "our financial elites are the new secessionists."

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained.

Keep in mind that this is a criticism not coming from The Nation or Harper's, but from a conservative publication.  But then, this is a truly intellectually conservative publication, which has become a minority among the atrocious likes of the Weekly Standard.

The essay is only warming up.  The author, Mike Lofgren, "served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees" and yet the following sentences of his might easily be mistaken as something that was authored by the late Alexander Cockburn:

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse.

The kind of true conservatism echoes Ralph Nader's characterization of the two parties as tweedledum-and-tweedledee:

After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the nominee for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him will be the incumbent president, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge-fund managers, merger-and-acquisition specialists, and leveraged-buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion. ...
the rich, rather than having the modesty to temper their demands, this time have made the calculated bet that they are politically invulnerable—Wall Street moguls angrily and successfully rejected executive-compensation limits even for banks that had been bailed out by taxpayer funds. And what I saw in Congress after the 2008 crash confirms what economist Simon Johnson has said: that Wall Street, and behind it the commanding heights of power that control Wall Street, has seized the policy-making apparatus in Washington. Both parties are in thrall to what our great-grandparents would have called the Money Power. One party is furtive and hypocritical in its money chase; the other enthusiastically embraces it as the embodiment of the American Way.

I am getting way more depressed and way more pissed off the more I think about all these.  What an awful state of affairs :(

Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

But then, can Lofgren get, for instance, Grover "bathtub"  Norquist to read this essay in the first place, and then make Norquist think about all these?

What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists—were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.
Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.

For a few years now, I have been remarking in appropriate contexts in my classes something I picked up from Joseph Stiglitz (I think it was him.)  And that is: the rich--I mean the real people and not the "corporations people"--live transnational lives, sometimes literally with more than one passport.  On the other hand, the middle and lower income classes are geographically tied down and their sense of nationalism has no effect on the transnationalism of the rich.  To some extent, Mike Lofgren is a tad late to this bottom-line.  That can only mean only one thing: we are way screwed than how much I thought we were!

The situation is so Category-5 that perhaps Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, would have fled from the GOP!