JD, I am ever so glad I do not belong in your book club! Oh of course i would love to be there to see you and and just have a good time and all, but the book club selection? Yow! That stuff is totally boring! It sounds like books I had to read in college and hoped I'd never see again! And then to have to read it for what is supposed to be an enjoyable book club selection? Never!
Maybe I am just ignorant and want to stay that way. Or maybe I'm too stupid to understand the stuff if I did read it. I don't know. But my hats off to all those club members! Personally I'd sooner read the things my club read: Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, White Oleander,Bridgettt Jones Diary, Carrying Adam, Memoirs of A Geisha, Together In One Place... well you get the picture I'm sure! :)Easy reading stuff!

mmm hmmm.

You are SO in trouble.

I don't agree. I think that power itself does tend to corrupt, though perhaps not always. And how many people believe that whatever power they might possess is illegal? Doesn't everyone in power believe that they deserve their power, have earned the right to be in their position? His point regarding obedience makes more sense.

Is it really power that tends to corrupt, or do corrupt indivduals tend to deceive and exploit others to attain power?

Just another nugget for y'all to cogitate on.

I think power itself does the corrupting. It's a heady thing. It takes an individual with lots of character to not fall prey to it's evil clutch.

I think you have to view Tocqueville's comments in the context of the time, not now. Most of our forefathers/founding fathers were powerful men who understood the responsibility of that power. The power they wielded was a chore and a burden, not a delight. There were no career politicians. These men also had strong, structured, homgeneous ethics. Right was more defined and wrong was easier to ascertain.

Consider, too, that the person who collects the power isn't always the person who is corrupted by it.

For example, it's quite possible for an honorable person to attain a position of authority, and gain or be granted power based on his own qualifications. Even if no corruption happens, a successor may or may not have the same level of character -- the power may be misused, attracting those who will deceive and exploit in order to attain it.

Power corrupting? Bah! I'll crush anyone who says so! With my massive destructo-fists!

Jenefer said: Most of our forefathers/founding fathers were powerful men who understood the responsibility of that power. The power they wielded was a chore and a burden, not a delight. There were no career politicians.

I beg to disagree. Strongly.

Having recently read Henry Adams' autobiography, I can assure you there most certainly were career politicians from the very beginning of this country. I believe they were more entrenched than they are today, in fact. Entire families passed on generation after generation of political power; grandfathers, fathers, and sons spent their lives in government office. For example, Henry Adams came from a family with two Presidents to its name. His relatives were governors and minor officials. The family made its living in government. The Adamses were the Kennedys or Bushes of their day.

The class system at the dawn of our country was more pronounced than at present. Yes, there are still families that operate in an elite sphere, but the stratification of wealth is not nearly as pronounced as it was two hundred years ago. We live in a time of great levelling, as Tocqueville might have predicted as a natural outcome to a democratic society. The great mass of the population has been mollified by relative comfort and ease. Whether this is good or bad is a point that can be debated (and will be debated, I'm sure, at book group).

But to claim that our Founding Fathers were somehow morally superior to us flies in the face of the facts. They were human, had human foibles, had strengths and weaknesses, just as every man and woman in the United States does today. It's only the myth of our Founding Fathers that is without weakness. It's an attractive lie.

I think that I disagree that we live in any time of great levelling, unless you classify the great impoverishing of the middle class as something of a levelling factor. I suppose it is in a way, everyone sinking further down except a few specific elites.

IMHO the main difference between the Founding Fathers and our current situation is not that we have more or less career politicians, but rather that the Founding Fathers risked their lives to change what they viewed as a tyrannical system of exploitation into a republican form of government. As such at least some of them understood how valuable self governance was. Many of the Founding Fathers wanted to make George Washington into the King, something which he refused. Similarly, Washington established the precident that Presidents only serve for two terms by VOLUNTARILY stepping away from that power. That tradition continued until FDR broke with it. Following that we passed a constitutional amendment to ensure a two term limit.

To my mind that voluntary step away from overt power is the hallmark of what is valuable about the American democratic experience. It's self-tempered and self controlled. Equally importantly, we as American citizens have the expectation that there will be controlled change in government. At the time there was talk of Nixon barricading himself in the White House and using the military to hold onto power. Does anyone have the most remote thought that such a strategy would have worked? Unlikely.

I read recently that the middle class really emerged during the 1920s-50s, largely, according to this otherwise forgotten source, due to the emergence of labor unions and the GI Bill.
Are labor unions and publicly funded education for soldiers dependent on democratic institutions?

Silly, Joel.

You know very well that labor unions require mass production (which, in turn, requires automobile and the corporation) and guerilla warfare (communism, tactics). Also remember that labor unions are required for mechanized infantry.

As for publicly funding education of soldiers: that's not an option. But if you build lots of libraries and universities, and increase your science spending, it actually will pay dividends on the military end of things.

I'm talking about Civ2, not Civ3. I don't actually know the dependencies for Civ3.

Dave sez:I think that I disagree that we live in any time of great levelling, unless you classify the great impoverishing of the middle class as something of a levelling factor. I suppose it is in a way, everyone sinking further down except a few specific elites.

Amen.

The L Curve

December Job numbers: Canada: 53100, USA: 1000, despite the fact that the US economy is
ten times the size of the Canadian economy.

The simple fact is that globalization and increased communications technology means that the US worker is competing with the (equally educated and skilled, but lower cost of living) worker in every other country. Free Trade Zones remove governmentally imposed protections for these sorts of differentials in cost of labor. Unionized Labor organizations also help to mitigate the treatment of the worker at the hands of the employer and the government. All of this applies to ANY job that doesn't have to be localized -- anybody whose job can be done over with the phone, fax, and/or internet could potentially be shipped off to (insert country where wages are $10 a week, or whatever). Not a long term stable situation. But also not a trend I'm looking forward being on the low-end of.

It doesn't help that we have been increasingly taxing income and giving tax breaks to wealth -- this leads to a kind of modern-day 'landed gentry' of wealthy oligarchs. Fun fun fun.

We're heading towards a nation of poor low-skilled menial workers (possibly shipped in from Mexico, for example) and wealthy owners. No middle class to speak of.

Nobody will be able to find a job in the US that pays well enough to permit them a middle class standard of living if this trend continues. The US has largely succeeded in shipping the manufacturing portion of our industry to other countries, leaving largely service and white-collar jobs left here. Now we're starting to ship white-collar jobs off shore, leaving mostly a service-economy that simply doesn't support a sizeable and vibrant middle class.

We have a five day work-week and child labor laws because of Labor Unions, not because government and corporations Did The Right Thing. And we're heading back to the same kinds of labor practices, mostly in countries with no unions and different (or no) laws, where the exact kinds of dreadful Victorian-era labor conditions are alive and well.

Divine Right of Kings and the Chain of Being replaced with the Titans of Industry and Unrestricted Free Trade. Bah. The current Supreme Court seems to be of the opinion that Money equals Speach, so therefore the First Ammendment means that restricting the spending of money in (say) politics is a restriction of free speech.

This is accurate, as far as it goes. But the sad fact is that this means those with wealth automatically have more speech available to them than those without wealth. Which allows them to have a bigger voice in government. And they are dealing with Career Politicians, as Dave said, as opposed to the Mythic American Statesman, whom we now largely see in characters like Mr. Smith of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the title character of Dave. Fictional entities with little in common with the current reality.

A healthy democracy requires checks and balances, to limit abuses of power and corruption, an involved and informed citizenry, to direct the course of policy and insure against corruption, and transparency, so that corruption and abuses of power have little or no place to hide, and so that the citizenry has accurate information. Plus, we need a free and independent press and unrestricted free speech. I think the US still has all of these things in some measure, but I'm concerned that the current mix may not be a very good one for long term health. I still have hope that someone will come into the kitchen and provide a dash of those ingredients which have gotten a bit diluted. I fear that won't happen, at least not particularly soon, although I do have my hopes.

Sorry for the rant...

If this is class warfare, my class is winning. - Warren Buffet

These are exactly the kind of discussions that I had hoped would be generated with the selection of Tocqueville. Sure, I like reading a nice juicy novel with the rest of 'em, but a bit of meaty non-fiction in the mix can bring the group to some interesting places. I think it's worth the effort.

Dana says "We're heading towards a nation of poor low-skilled menial workers (possibly shipped in from Mexico, for example) and wealthy owners. No middle class to speak of."

I would add that in many senses we are returning to this state on a global level, rather than merely heading there. Even the poorest of the poor in the US today have an availability of resources of food, education, housing, and medical care that simply did not exist on most of the planet, including the U.S., in 1830 and doesn't exist in many places even today. Looking forward to the book group gathering-- K

This is tangently related to the conversation at hand. I'm reading a recently published book entitled The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida, which chronicles what he describes as an economic shift based on the work of folks that make up what he refers to as the Creative Class. I'm not too far into the book so I'm not sure if it a load crap or not, but it is at least an interesting interpretation of a sector of our modern economy. When it comes to things economic (and political) I tend to glaze over or become agitated or depressed, but Florida's work came across my desk when I was working at an academic geography journal and it caught my eye because of its spatial component. He also has a website related to this: http://www.creativeclass.org/.

Kris sez: I would add that in many senses we are returning to this state on a global level, rather than merely heading there.

I agree. We are seeing the 'rebirth' of the kind of oligarchic systems which dominated everywhere a century or more ago, and which were supplanted by a (somewhat) more equitable system for a period of time. That time may be ending, and the US may be returning to what most of the rest of the world has been experiencing in an unending stretch for, well, in many cases longer than our nation has existed.

I expect that there are other blips in history where wealth and power were more evenly distributed than the late 20th Century US, and there will undoubtedly be more in the future. Preferably the collapse will come after my lifetime =)