Liberal democratic legitimacy ending

[scourge]

Whitmire is a story of Muncie, and Muncie is the story of America. In this place—dubbed “Middletown” by early 20th-century sociologists—people have lost faith in their institutions. Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing. It’s not just that the institutions are corrupt or broken; those clichés oversimplify an existential problem: With few notable exceptions, the nation’s onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change.

Knock around Muncie for proof: City Hall, like Washington, is petty and polarized, driving down voter engagement. Stodgy mainline churches are losing worshipers in droves. Low-tech and unruly public schools are prompting parents to pull their children out. The city’s once-beloved business class shuttered its factories, leaving a legacy of double-digit unemployment and helplessness. Labor unions once credited with creating the middle class are now often blamed for the demise of industry. Even The Star Press, Muncie’s daily newspaper once venerated for holding locals to account, was gutted after a job-killing merger in 1996 and the sale, a few years later, to media giant Gannett.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/features/restoration-calls/in-nothing-we-trust-20120419?page=1

I'm not seeing in all cases juvenile layabouts blaming the successful for not giving free handouts. That's limited to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. I'm seeing and hearing about regular folks who work competently with the system just to have their efforts consistently backfire. These are the actual Americans.

Liberal democratic political capital is drying up everywhere. People are now looking for alternate forms of belief, living, and leadership because those they were given were all lies.

We need diligence to be rewarded not to be incorrectly viewed as a pragmatic source of input for the public trough. We need the best to rise but to qualify their winning by the virtues required for the victory attained. Thieving, whining, or lying one's way into power is not working out after all for the liberal left.

[Conservationist]

In 1937, America went leftist in the mistaken belief that capitalism -- not reckless, diverse growth -- had crushed the economy.

In 2012, America is shifting back and Europe is coming with it.

Since 1789, no event of this magnitude has occurred.

We live in exciting times. But even better, we live when the beginning of the fix begins.

No more ecocide.

No more cultureless, soulless, whorelike modern existence.

No more hollow men.

The return of spirit and values.

It is up to us to guide this revolution as it happens.

Get good at something, seize power, and guide your species.

Glory awaits.

[scourge]

The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over into the Western hemisphere. Already the dogma of human rights is coming under fire by the proponents of peoples’ rights, and the yearning for historical community is making headway into atomized societies deserted by ideologies.

http://www.amerika.org/texts/a-global-village-and-the-rights-of-the-peoples-tomislav-sunic/

[Conservationist]

Right-wing: ends over means.

Left-wing: means (humans) over ends.

[lafindumonde]

In the quiet and ordered periods of history, this wisdom is accessible only to a few chosen ones, since there are too many occasions to surrender and to sink, to consider the ephemeral to be the important, to forget the instability and contingency of what is irremediably such by nature. It is on this basis that what can be called in the broader sense the mentality of bourgeois life is organised : it is a life which does not know either heights or depths, and develops interests, affections, desires, and passions which, however important they may be from the merely earthly point of view, become petty and relative from the supra-individual and spiritual point of view, which must always be regarded as proper to any human existence worthy of the name.

[scourge]

Liberty, equality and fraternity results:

The Department of Education and the Department of Justice say that 1,183,700 violent crimes were committed at American public schools during the 2009-2010 school year, but that only 303,900 of these violent crimes were reported to the police.

By this government estimate, 879,800 violent crimes committed at U.S. public schools in the 2009-2010 school year were not reported to police.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/1183700-violent-crimes-committed-public-schools-only-303900-reported-police

Our kids would be safer, healthier and brighter growing up in an agrarian tribal clan in some wooded hills. Progress is more liberal bullshit where when the image of living gets radically transformed, because $25 trillion and a geological age of oil was blown modernizing, we are expected to believe life's substance follows suit.

[Conservationist]

I think I'd just settle for smaller cities, more local government, and no pandering to idiots through equality. We don't need to go radical. Rural living is awesome but cities serve a purpose too; it just must be carefully regulated.

[tardocaust]

Mr. Robinson is black and his victim was white — a fact that was pointed out in closing arguments by prosecutors, who described Mr. Robinson as racially biased for a violently anti-white statement he made before the murder.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/north-carolina-law-used-to-set-aside-a-death-sentence.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

[scourge]

Seven in 10 Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track; eight in 10 are dissatisfied with the way the nation is being governed. Only 23 percent have confidence in banks, and just 19 percent have confidence in big business. Less than half the population expresses “a great deal” of confidence in the public-school system or organized religion. “We have lost our gods,” says Laura Hansen, an assistant professor of sociology at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass. “We lost [faith] in the media: Remember Walter Cronkite? We lost it in our culture: You can’t point to a movie star who might inspire us, because we know too much about them. We lost it in politics, because we know too much about politicians’ lives. We’ve lost it—that basic sense of trust and confidence—in everything.”

***

After a 50-year decline, just 14 percent of respondents in a 2011 Gallup Poll said that the federal government could be trusted “a great deal

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/05/trust.html

If the elected ruling class tend to pursue agendas their own constituents find disagreeable then there really is no representative democracy. That's for all the plutocracy deniers.

[Necrosopher]

1789

What's your obsession with the French Revolution? Would you prefer to be a serf?

[crow]

Everyone has an obsession. But his is not to be a serf.
Perhaps an aristocrat? Now there's an appealing obsession!

[scourge]

Oh, no it isn't like that. Now, everyone gets to play aristocrat according to the following merits: TV, house, internet, savings account, retirement fund. See? Serfs didn't HAVE STUFF so therefore there are no serfs.

[crow]

Not now there aren't, but there were, back then.
Anyway, it's probably not so bad being a serf. A healthy life, lots of sun.
Backbreaking toil, to put hair on your chest. Diseases to give the immune system a workout...
Count me in: I'd make a uber-serf.

[scourge]

What’s interesting about the governance failures of these states is how comprehensive they are. Other than politicians, union officials and Wall Street investment banks, nobody really benefits from the choices Illinois has made. As the Volker-Ravitch report tells us, even the public sector unions, the architects of many of the state’s most destructive policies, are going to get shafted as a result of the bad policies they’ve supported. They’ve created a state that simply won’t be able to honor its promises to the workers the unions represent.

The French say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. But it is also true to say that behind every great failure lies a great blunder. Late 20th century American liberalism is wrong about the way the world works. It doesn’t understand cause and effect very well. It cannot feed itself. Given full power it cannot design and implement policies that advance the causes it honors. Modern American liberalism can only win Pyrrhic victories, because liberals in power take steps that advance their decline.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/10/25/news-from-obamas-home-state/

[BillHopkins]

I don't think the legitmacy of liberal democracy is eroding at al. Legitimacy implies general acceptance. And this is as strong as ever, fortunately or unfortunately.

The Masses are dependent on the state for child support, education, unemployment benefits, health care, retirement pensions, i.e., from cradle to grave. The state's promotes liberal democracy (or more specifically, engineered pluralism). People aren't going to get rid of the state, and so liberal democracy is going to be a reality for a long time.