Wednesday Dytopia Blogging

Buenos Aires, Argentina (cc photo by edgar zuniga)

Jim Henley is in the grips of despair and I don’t think he even favors universal health care:

I’ve become a pessimist. I think our future is Argentinian: a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves if the commonality is financially secure and healthy, but history shows that a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves even if most people live crabbed, fretful existences. You just need more security guards or, if necessary, paramilitaries. Since the financial crisis of last year, we’ve seen that the FIRE sector will work overtime to redistribute wealth to itself while working overtime to keep from redistributing wealth elsewhere. I think that with the normalization of the filibuster in the Senate, we’ve just about completed a revolution-within-the-form that is a much bigger deal than Barack Obama’s personal failings. The government works perfectly well at ensuring the lifestyles of defense contractors and investment bankers. That is its purpose. America may have one more good bubble in it. Or we may go straight to villas and bodyguards for the comely daughters.

For one thing, this sounds more like America-as-Brazil than America-as-Argentina to me.

For another thing, I think that cyncism and demoralization of this sort ultimately play into the hands of elite malefactors. The fact of the matter is that the outcome of the 2006 elections improved the quality of governance in the United States. And so did the outcome of the 2008 elections. Governance improved because politicians were replaced by other, better politicians. The same method—replace existing politicians with new, better politicians—can continue to reap improvements in the future. You can replace a politician with a better politician through a primary election just as easily as through a general election. Both are important. But just throwing our hands up doesn’t change anything.