C99% readers, I don't know if you caught Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's piece "Seven Theses on American Politics" over at NLR. But it's important. It's important because Riley and Brenner are willing to admit what others don't, which ends up with a revelation of how pathetic the current situation is.
In my previous diary, Wally wanted to discuss (among other authors) Robin DiAngelo, or so it was briefly hinted in the comments. So, toward that end, here's a review of DiAngelo's (2018) book "White Fragility: Why it's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism."
Faced with Trump's populist seizure of the Republican Party, establishment conservatives and libertarians are trying to redefine republicanism to exclude anything other than market capitalism.
I decided to name this "economic equality" instead of just economics because it is a more specific and accurate label for what I shall consider here.
This was first posted July 31, 2014 at Real Economics as The Higgs boson and the purpose of a republic.
This is probably the most painful and the most controversial point about a republic.
At some point in 2009 or 2010, as I watched the political and economic catastrophes of Barack Obama interposing himself between the banksters and "the pitchforks" unfold, I was reading a book on the history of American industrial technology. The Introduction included a discussion of the republican political thought of the Founders. Those two or three paragraphs launched me into researching American history, to answer two questions:
What is a republic?
Ever since I found that they had no interest in learning about, let alone organizing against, the dirty money behind Wall Street and leveraged buyout in the 1980s, I have not had much respect for Marxists and communists.
Cross-posted from Real Economics.
