Betrayed

I was betrayed by English professors. Instead of the works of the best and the brightest, I was pointed to the scratches of scumbags.

The One Percent and the Rest, according to John Adams.

From Gordon S. Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different:
Americans, Adams now believed, were as driven by the passions for wealth and precedence as any people in history. Ambition, avarice, and resentment, not virtue and benevolence, were the stuff of American society. Those who argued that Americans were especially egalitarian were blind to reality....

Only a handful made their way to the top in this ferocious struggle for superiority, but unfortunately there was little guarantee that these few would be men of talent and virtue. The republican hope that only real merit should govern the world was laudable but hollow....

It seemed that noting meritorious in those who reached the pinnacle of society except their ability to get there. And once on top the few would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their position by opprssing those below them. Those on the bottom of the society, meanwhile, driven by the most ambitious, would seek only to replace and to ruin the social leaders they hated and envied....

The English Crown had not been, as many in 1775 believed, the source of colonial America's corruption and factionalism after all. social struggle and division were endemic to every society, and America possessed no special immunity....

It was impossible, said Adams, to reconcile the "diversity of sentiments, contradictory principles, inconsistent interests, and opposite passions" of America "by declamations against discord and panegyrics upon unanimity...." "Nothing," he said, "but Force and Power and Strength [in the form of a powerful, disinterested Executive] can restrain them."

Look into the future

 

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, page xxiii-xxix

Stalin took a long-term view: proletarian revolution would take place in due course, but before that could happen, the region first had to have a bourgeois revolution….

Yet… the Soviet Union did import certain key elements of the Soviet system into every nation occupied by the Red Army, from the very beginning. First and foremost, the Soviet NKVD in collaboration with local communist parties immediately created a secret police force in its own image, often using people whom they had already trained in Moscow.…

Secondly, in every occupied nation, Soviet authorities placed trusted local communists in charge of the era’s most powerful form of mass media: the radio’ authorities hoped that the radio, along with other propaganda and changes to the educational system, would help faring mass numbers of people into the communist camp.

Thirdly, everywhere the Red Army went, Soviet and local communists harassed, persecuted, and eventually banned many of the independent organizations of what we would now call civil scenery: the Polish Women’s League, the German “anti Fascist league,” church groups, and schools. In particular, they were fixated, from the very first days of the occupation, on youth groups: young social democrats, young Catholic or Protestant organizations, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts.

Even before they banned independent political parties for adults, and even before they outlawed church organizations and independent trade unions, they put young people’s organizations under the strictest possible observations and restraint.

Has much changed?

From Howard S. Abramson's National Geographic: Behind America's Lens on the World:

In the 1880s, Washington, DC was still a dusty, backwater town, even judged by nineteenth century American standards. Although its population had climbed to nearly 180,000, the capital was really just America's newest tourist attraction of the rich and powerful. Washington offered itself as the cradle of a federal government that was growing rapidly in size and importance as it consolidated the powers formerly excised by the states. Indsutrialization was changing the face of the nation, and the founders' planned confederation of nation-states no longer suited the country.

The North's victory in the Civil War sealed the demise of that confederation and marked the start of an era of swift federalization. "What transpired in Richmond, Columbia, or Baton Rouge, indeed in Albany, Topeka, or Sacramento, now mattered far less than what politicians decided on Capitol Hill; Americans must go to Washington to be in the swim," wrote histroian Constance Green. Thus, Washington's winter social season quickly became the most important one in the nation, one that was not to be missed. and society and government soon became the city's only primary products, for while commerce and industry thrived in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, it faltered in Washington....

In addition to its failure to industrialize, the city proved incapable even of managing its own treasury. After its terrirtorial government went bankrupt in 1874, following several years of teetering on the brink of insolvency, the federal government took over Washington's affairs. Being run by the US promiesed residents a solvent government, but it also stripped DC of all their self-governing powers. But becoming a federal city helped inspire the only real economic boom the town was to have: real estate....

Washington in those days seemed mostly populated with bankers, generals, scientists, and schollars-- in addition of course to politicians.Wrote one late-nineteenth century visitor from England: "Compared with New York or Chicago, Washington, although it is full of commotion and energy, is a city of rest and peace. The inhabitants do not rush onward as though they were late for the train or the post, or as though the dinner hour being past they were anxious to appease an irritable wife." Wrote another, "It looks a sort of place nobody has to work for his living, or, at any rate, not hard."

And we trusted our entire nation to these nonindustrious, spendthrift people?