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To: wsringeorgia who wrote (39075)	11/19/2000 5:53:17 PM
From: Oblomov	Respond to of 436258

WSR, I am not an expert on Brazil, but you are correct that there are many nuances in Brazilian culture that make their particular social arrangement possible. For one, Brazilians are apparently not greatly concerned with class differences. For them, it is just a characteristic of a person that is conferred at birth, like race or sex. This is very different from the American attitude toward class. But then, the American attitude toward class has shifted since de Tocqueville's day, and it continues to evolve. The American middle class seems rather anxious about its position in the social hierarchy these days. Thus, the stock market mania, the vast increase in the average household's debt load, and the stunning growth in the consumption of luxury goods over the past five years. It is as if the middle class anticipates the future that I sketched, and they are trying to secure their spots in their gated communities of choice. It amazes me to think of how different the average American's aspirations are from those of my great-great-grandfather, a German immigrant blacksmith who voted for Debs. What bothers me about the Democrats and the Republicans is that both simply seem eager to grab more power whenever possible. Take, for example, welfare reform, which occasioned the passage of many new laws and regulations for the administration of welfare policy. If the point of welfare reform was to reduce government, they why didn't Congress simply repeal some laws? One topic on which I agree with the left is the threat of private power to individual liberty. What has come about in the U.S. in the last 40 years is a form of "state capitalism" that barely resembles the entrepreneurial capitalism of bygone days. Could a company ever achieve a $600 billion market cap if the government didn't selectively grant tax breaks and subsidies to industry? The means of access to bank loans and the capital markets for start-up companies has become far more regulated and regimented than it was in, say, 1950. And, I think that some amount of freedom is lost when the idea of public space disappears. On the other hand, it's possible that venues like the Internet provide the outlet that public space once did. I'd like to think that there will come a time when I will be more than superfluous in the political sense. The political system is in dire need of a shake-up, but I think that the only way it would happen is if good people of the right and left act together.