Latin Americanization

David Neiwert is worried about America. All of America, but especially the middle and lower classes. This is the first of two posts I'm going to link to that rely in part on an article by Jamie Galbraith, in Salon. I'll get around to reading it in an hour or two. In the meantime, go read this, and weep. This is the state of our union, and it isn't pretty.

Orcinus:
Latin Americanization: I wound up interviewing Church several times, and much of what I learned from him has stuck with me over the years. It indeed seems to me relevant today. 'Choose your enemies wisely,' he counseled, 'for you will become like them.' He was describing the American government's propensity for imitating in substance and nature the behavior of Soviet communists -- but his warning could just as easily reflect the current 'war on terrorism.'

One comment in particular, however, stands out in my mind these days. We were talking about America's future, and where the conservative cadre that was then taking over the Republican Party intended to take us. His expression darkened, and it was clear that he had a good deal of foreboding in this regard. 'What I fear most,' he said, 'is the Latin Americanization of America.'

He wasn't concerned, of course, with the arrival of Latinos on American soil (or what Pat Buchanan calls 'Meximerica') except insofar as that could be manipulated to achieve this end. What he feared was that corporatist conservatives, if given free rein, would turn our standard of living into what you find in Latin America. That working Americans would one day be reduced to the level of near-serfdom that is the common way of life for millions of Latinos.

(SNIP)

If the current generation of Democrats does not recognize it, and fails to begin shouting it from the rooftops, then I genuinely fear that Frank Church's darkest premonitions will finally be realized. It simply boggles my mind that, over the past generation, progressives have allowed working-class people to increasingly identify with conservative Republicans. The GOP has mainly achieved this through a combination of demagoguery and jingoism, appealing to people's baser instincts, particularly the desperate selfishness that in fact is forcibly part of life in the sinking classes. In the process, they have convinced working people to slit their own throats -- and ultimately everyone else's too.