Who’s next to enter stage right, Cagney, Bogart, Robinson, McClane? This show is like a 1930’s Prohibition gangster flick. But why does 30% of the population support these thugs? Is the American mass culture really corrupt, or merely gullible?
If the former, then Marx was correct in predicting the collapse of capitalism. If the latter, then we have Freud’s Mass Society and the Analysis of the Ego. The former confirms Montesquieu’s and Jaspers’ theory of civilizational cycles of growth and inevitable decay. The latter, as suggested by Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, provides an avenue of recovery, in the form of education, both scientific and theoretical.
Reading today’s polls, it appears evident that 70% of Americans are sufficiently restless that they are energized to quickly 86 the tiresome paradigms of amateur snake-oil salesmen. A return to basic economic-interest horse-trading appears to be preferable to obedience to “daddy”. Excepting, of course, those who continue to need their “daddy”, their symbolic attire, their messaging sophists and their eroticized AR-15s. The rest of us stand naked with only our individual selves.