Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hayes on elite failure and their lack of fear (from Aug. 2012) [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

One of the issues that has most interested, and most baffled, me, about all of these matters is the palpable lack of elite fear. In the past, the nation’s plutocrats were instilled with at least some fear — a healthy and necessary fear — of what would happen if inequality became too pronounced, if the 99.9% began suffering too much as a result of elite plundering and greed. Sometimes this fear led to extreme precautions (tycoons stashing wealth on a ship able to flee at the first sign of a Socialist Revolution), while other times it led to symbolic gestures (public acts of charity) or more substantive appeasement (the New Deal) as a way of placating mass anger. Especially when, as now, the force of law ceases to operate as a constraint on them (because the rule of law breaks down and no longer applies to the powerful), this fear of mass rage-fueled uprising imposed at least some limit on elite corruption, all grounded in self-interest: the worry that too much abuse would upend the system responsible for their wealth, status and power.

Yet even in the wake of the oligarch-caused 2008 financial crisis that has spawned extreme levels of sustained suffering around the globe, and even as social unrest emerges in several places in the Western world as a result of this insecurity and sense of outrage and betrayal, the American elite class still seems remarkably free of any such fear. The main reason I was and remain so enthusiastic about the Occupy movement is precisely because something is needed to pose a credible threat of unrest if America’s elite class continues on the same course.

I see no evidence that “rich people are very, very afraid” — at least not by their actions. And that, to me, is the problem. That fear — a lot more of it — is necessary. Their ability to rope themselves off from the society they are degrading, combined with the para-militarization of domestic police forces (aggressively displayed in response to the Occupy movement and related protests), and the rapidly increasing domestic powers of surveillance and detention (designed to intimidate the citizenry and thus deter and guard against mass protests), have convinced them, I think, that they need not fear any protest movements or social unrest, that America can and will become more and more of a police state to suppress it. An elite class that is free to operate without limits — whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior — is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/chris_hayes_on_elite_failure/