TPTB have been suppressing class based arguments for a hundred years. With the demise of communism, the efforts of the corporate media to throw "class" into the "dustbin of history" have been unopposed, despite massive and ever growing class inequality. Economics has been twisted into a Manichean fight between laissez faire globalists and the demonized other, communists/socialists/New Dealers. This black and white narrative means that alternative worldviews are almost unknown. One of those disappeared worldviews that I favor, institutionalism, argues that economic behavior is controlled by institutions.

Institutional economics emphasizes a broader study of institutions and views markets as a result of the complex interaction of these various institutions (e.g. individuals, firms, states, social norms). The earlier tradition continues today as a leading heterodox approach to economics.

- Wikipedia, Institutional Economics

Identity Politics has proven most useful in hiding the institutional (political) roots of inequality and in breaking economic solidarity along bogus lines of race, ethnic origin, religion or lack thereof, or age group (e.g., boomers vs Millenials), as the smear campaign against Bernie Sanders the "racist" demonstrated.

Scapegoating a group is a psychological tactic that elites and their institutions (i.e., laws) have used since time immemorial to divide and conquer the masses. The Catholic church scapegoated witches. Stalin scapegoated kulaks. Hitler scapegoated Jews. The American rightwing has scapegoated, among others, blacks, hispanics, feminists, hippies, immigrants, and Moslems. Lately, the American fake Democrats have scapegoated the "deplorable" white ethnics.

In the rest of the essay, I'm going to recite a lot of twentieth century history, emphasizing the role elite institutions and their propaganda have played, and the complete inability of rational individuals and democratic means to counter that propaganda. My bottom line is that the only legitimate group to blame for our current inequality, violence, and ecological collapse is the elite 1% or 0.01% or the 20 billioniares who control more money than half the planet.

Institutions and coups

Historians often remark that World War 1 was started by the decisions of no more than fifty high officials, primarily nobles, in half a dozen European countries. We Americans just lived through the 2003-09 Iraq War based on nothing more than the lies of 25 neocon high officials (including war criminals Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) spread by the corporate media. Way too late to do anything about it, we learned that the Tonkin Gulf "affair" that started our major deployment to Viet Nam was another fraud dreamed up by a few high officials. (Before that, the CIA planted the ex-patriate, Catholic, Diem, as President of the illegal-under-the-Geneva-Convention South Viet Nam.) Ditto the first Gulf War, complete with incubator babies, against the dictator to whom the Zelig-like mass murderer, Rumsfeld, had inconveniently sold poison gas. Ditto our destruction of Libya, the richest country in Africa. In all these cases, jingoistic politics and propaganda caricatures of evil others overwhelmed rational thought and led to mass support, or at least acquiescence, for ruinious wars.

Throughout 20th century history, cabals and plots and coup d'etats, pioneered by fascists and communists and taken up with gusto by the CIA, have overthrown governments before the public was even aware that the target of the plots was under attack. The only upside is that the public at large is finally aware that terms like "destabilization", "false flag", and "front organization" apply to America too.

The bottom line of this essay is that major decisions to start wars or coups or vicious economic policies (like outsourcing, austerity, and Mechanical Turk piecework) are made by a handful of people, usually secretly; these decisions are not made by the public or by the voters or by nebulous, IP-caricatured groups. Those non-institutional actors are compelled, after the fact, to "salute the flag". (See the infamous Herman Goering quote on that topic.) That lesson has yet to be absorbed by the people who thought Obama or Trump was going to wind down our wars or save our economy.

The empire

To understand the political/economic situation, we must begin from the fact that the elite institutions of the US have been waging war for empire somewhere in the world ever since 1945. It was after WW2 that the US inherited the old, crumbling European empires of Britain and France. The British were intelligent enough (and bankrupt enough) to gracefully hand their client states to the US, and its Anglophile elites. The French were stupid enough to try to hang on. The result for them and for us was Viet Nam, a 30 year debacle for both countries.

Institutional propaganda plays a large role in the 60 year run-up to the police state we now find ourselves living in. The American people were told they were fighting for freedom. Too bad the freedom they were fighting for was freedom for billionaires and corporations to destroy democracy. Hatred of the Russians, who lost 30 million people as they did 80% of the work of fighting Hitler, was easy to sell with a sociopath like Stalin leading the country. Churchill's "naughty document" was rarely mentioned.

World War 2 began the conversion of America from a Weberian democracy [NOTE] to a garrison state. Stephen Kinzer's book, The Brothers, shows how the Dulles Brothers, two fascist-loving assholes, drove American foreign policy for two critical decades. They took a complete pass on normalizing relations with the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. The Dulles-led CIA sabotaged Eisenhower's peace efforts with the ill-fated Powers U-2 flight. Their many plots to get rid of Castro (again not revealed for 15 years) almost blew up the planet and led directly to the JFK assassination. Basically, by creating the CIA and staffing it with Ivy Leaguers, the Dulleses formalized the power that Wall St. lawyers had to run our foreign policy. The unaccountable, self-funding (via drugs and crooked banks) CIA has grown ever larger and forms the major player in our $100 B/year black budget - whose operations are not under any voter control at all. Military secrecy has been the go-to tool for subverting our democracy.

This drive for war is at odds with our domestic economy and our democracy. The MIC sucks increasing resources from the civilian economy. Today, we spend more on the military (not counting intelligence, not counting nuclear weapons research, not counting the VA) than the next ten countries combined, while Trump (at the behest of TPTB) is slashing the civilian side of the government and planning Public Private partnerships (can you say Carillion) to give away the remainder of government assets. We spend more on prisons than schools, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We also lead the First World in murders and out of wedlock births.

The tilt towards militarism and away from domestic investment has been led by a propaganda offensive funded, at first in the 1970s, by reactionary billionaires of the pre-baby boom generations.

In the wake of the twin political earthquakes of the post-LBJ McGovern insurgency and Watergate, that propaganda used the economic slowdown caused by the Oil Crisis and the resurgence of German and Japanese industry to scapegoat New Deal Democrats and to install the Thatcherite/Friedmanite GOP. The Democratic Party was quickly hijacked into the junior neoliberal party of the duopoly, although this was relatively unclear/incomplete until midway through Bill Clinton's presidency.

I have often quipped that America was destroyed by television, suburbia, and corn syrup. Well, television (and radio before it) was the first vehicle of non-print mass media; and suburbia enforced a destruction of genuine community (dismissed as non-existent in a self-fulfilling prophecy by Thatcher) that reduced the immunity to propaganda. Today, the internet has subsummed all other propaganda outlets, and is the process of instituting (Google and Facebook are institutions of the new corporate government) censorship in the name of "protecting" the public from "fake news". The scapegoat du jour is Russia, who has replaced the previous scapegoat, "terrorism". Terrorism could no longer justify our massive military budgets, or our increasingly obvious sponsorship of the very terrorist we pretend to fight.

IN SUMMARY

It is the institutional factors just recited, not bogus IP invitations to generational warfare, that have caused the economic hollowing out of America and the militarization of our society. Blaming any IP group is exactly what TPTB want you to do. It's classic "Let's you and him fight."

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NOTE:

The basis of democratization is everywhere purely military in character...Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the community wished and was compelled to secure the cooperation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power into their hands.

- Max Weber, General Economic History

Basically, Weber argued that to get the citizenry to accept the mass armies that were necessary to win wars in the period 1800 to 1945, the elites had to give the masses some stake in the game, via democracy. The argument goes on to say that when the military means change, other forms of government will be favored. As examples, he uses medieval knights and Byzantine cataphracts (heavy cavalry) - small, elite forces with very powerful weapons - as examples where political oligarchy grew from military oligarchy.

Atomic weapons marked an extremely sudden turning point in military means from mass armies to a handful of scientists and engineers. It has taken seventy years for the domination of the new weapons, including computers, to destroy democracy and replace it with a globalized, computerized, financialized, laissez faire capitalist oligarchy.