Very few Americans know how close the country came to catastrophe this week

[fleabiscuit]

75. I’m beginning to understand that I am officially turning into an old fart.

Pretty much anyone even 10 years younger than me, and a good deal my age, look at me cross-eyed when I tell them the party lines have shifted dramatically, and there has been no economic gain for working peeps since the early 70’s.

Anyway, worth a read IMHO….

Noam Chomsky | On Shutdown, Waning US Influence, Syrian Showdown

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19287-in-conversation-with-noam-chomsky-on-us-politics-global-affairs-and-capitalist-reform

“…There's a reason why they have a collection of near crazies as the base. Over the past 30 or 40 years, both political parties have drifted to the right. Same thing's happened in Canada, incidentally. This is all part of the whole neoliberal shift in the economy. But the parties have shifted to the right. Today's Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans a generation ago. And the Republicans went so far to the right that they just can't get votes. They've become a dedicated party of the very rich and the corporate sector. And you can't get votes that way. So they've been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists. The United States is off the international spectrum in religious extremism. I mean half of the population, roughly, thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago. Two thirds of the country is expecting the second coming of Christ. They've also had to turn to nativists. The gun culture in the United States, which is out of control, is party fueled by people who think 'we've got to have our guns to protect ourselves.' Protect ourselves from whom? From the United Nations? From the federal government? From people from outer space?

There are big, extremely irrational parts of the society, and they have now been mobilized politically by the Republican establishment, hoping that these people could be an electoral base to keep them in power, but on the assumption that they'd be able to control them. And that's turning out not to be easy…”