The plutocrats have always believed they own the country. They think that by birthright or general superiority they deserve wealth and power. And they think that all the inferior Americans who risk their lives for the country and do all the hard work should simply submit.
When things go wrong, the plutocrats blame the public for getting the government they deserve. But when things go right, the plutocrats take all the credit.
Aristocrats like Washington won the American Revolution, really? Bullshit. There would have been no American Revolution, if the dirty masses hadn’t forced the issue and been fighting a class war for decades. The plutocrats only joined in because they wanted to co-opt the revolution that had become inevitable.
You want to know the real American Founders. You won’t hear much about them from mainstream historians nor did you probably learn much about them in public education. The rabble-rousers and revolutionaries were mostly poor working class folk. The lowly small farmers were protesting and fighting injustice long before the plantation owners even knew a revolution had begun.
The only way to know how change might be possible now is to understand what made it possible in the past. The people have to be their own leaders. And the ruling elite have to be forced to accept change once it is already happening and can’t be stopped.
* * *
American Power Under Challenge
By Noam Chomsky, Nation of Change
The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”
In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the American insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.” Indeed, he “might have actually done so” had France not massively intervened and “saved the Revolution,” which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call “terrorists” — while Washington’s British-style army “was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”
A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.
Marmalade 