OT: understanding weird politics? executive summary (sorta)

(re: http://www-dev.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/281.html

linked from:
 http://www-dev.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/ReviewsIssue.html )

excerpts:

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http://www.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/373.html

"...as it turns out, the Clinton/Blair Third
    Way is not the only Third Way around. If one goes to
    www.thirdway.org on the Web, one discovers the Third
    Way party, the 'voice of the radical centre,' a small but
    feisty British group whose use of the term actually
    predates Clinton's and Blair's. 

    This Third Way successfully eludes the stock
    left/right labels with a set of positions (including support
    for ecology, decentralization, regionalism, co-ops, a
    guaranteed basic income, opposition to the European
    Union, etc.) that defy easy categorization. Perhaps
    because Third Way party executive board member
    Patrick Harrington was formerly a leader in the National
    Front in the 1980s, the watchdogs of the British left have
    seen the Third Way as some kind of extreme-right trick to
    co-opt the left's pet issues. It would seem more likely,
    however, that when Harrington admits, 'I have revised
    some of my former views as unsound,' he means what he
    says, and that the Third Way party represents a genuine
    attempt to break out of old ideological traps. Whether a
    small alternative political party--especially one whose
    name is now associated with Clinton and Blair--can really
    make a difference, remains to be seen. 

    The New Class 

    Another interesting attempt to see beyond the old
    categories has been the critique of the 'new class,' an
    analysis which can be traced back to several sources,
...

    At the risk of oversimplification, this critique
    identifies the rise in the twentieth century of a new class of
    professionals, managers, and administrators who have
    come to hold the reins of cultural, corporate, and state
    power. As might be expected, their solutions to the social
    problems that they identify entail programs and
    bureaucracies administered by themselves. As a class,
    their interests transcend both left and right, and no matter
    what party may occupy the White House or Congress, the
    new class remains entrenched. 

    The triumph of the new class has been implicitly
    celebrated in recent decades in paeans to the burgeoning
    Information Economy, in which information and its
    manipulation have allegedly become the new determiners
    of power and wealth. 
...

    Social critics coming from the left, such as
    Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites (Norton,
    1995) and Paul Piccone, editor of Telos: A Quarterly
      [http://www.angelfire.com/biz/telospress/]
      [http://www.ncafp.org/]
    Journal of Critical Thought, in tandem with critics coming
    from the right, such as paleo-conservatives Samuel
    Francis and Paul Gottfried, have sought to counter the
    new class dominance by encouraging decentralized
    populist struggles against liberal social engineering. 

    Populism is, of course, a loaded term that usually
    refers to 'the common people' rising up against an
    oligarchic elite that has usurped their control over their
    own lives. The traditional left and right, while employing
    the rhetoric of populism from time to time, have generally
    shied away from actually stirring it up, for fear of sparking
    a brushfire that might prove impossible to contain. In fact,
    despite all the talk about spreading democracy that both
    liberals and conservatives engage in (for liberals
    domestically, for conservatives internationally), it is an
    open question whether our leaders really still believe in it. 

    William Ophuls, whose recent book, Requiem for
    Modern Politics (Westview Press, 1997), is a profoundly
    sobering look at the breakdown of Western liberalism,
    probably speaks for many of those in power when he
    observes that 'our physical and social milieu is now so
    grandiose in scale, complex in structure, and isolating in
    character that confusion and anomie are rife. To be blunt,
[]


[--->] the putative citizen can no longer comprehend his world

[--->] well enough to cast an intelligent ballot. 

[]
    The major
    political issues of our time have become so esoteric that
    only full-time specialists can hope to understand them.'

    If this is really true, then democracy is clearly
    threatened, if it isn't already gone in everything but name.
    The populist response to this dilemma is to pare back the
    scale of governance, as much as possible, to the local and
    regional; to insist that schemes for improving our lives
    require the approval of those affected; and to rethink the
    roles that economic entities, such as corporations, play in
    impacting our society. 

    On this latter point, some new ideas are emerging. 

    The Market Vs. Capitalism ..."

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http://www-dev.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/289.html

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http://www-dev.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/81.html

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http://www-dev.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/197.html

...
   Richard K. Moore, a retired Silicon Valley software
   engineer living in Ireland who now devotes his time to
   socio-economic inquiry, is the most provoking
   non-orthodox theorist at work today. Moore focuses on
   how the process of economic and political globalization is
   rapidly evolving to benefit transnational corporations and
   allied elites as it dismantles the sovereignty of nation
   states. He identifies an authoritarian impulse in the steady
   erosion of civil liberties, privacy, human-scale enterprises,
   and democratic participation, a kind of "stealth fascism"
   ripening under the guise of anti-terrorism and the drug
   war. This, no doubt, sounds extreme and paranoid, but
   Moore's reasoned analysis avoids most of the pitfalls
   found in the conspiracy theories retailed by the John Birch
   Society or the Montana Militia.