To judge from his faltering campaign for healthcare reform, President Obama, well-read as he is, appears to have neglected to read Machiavelli. If he had done so, the American president would have learned this from the Florentine statesman and philosopher in "The Prince":
Back in the
1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal
sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone
could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded
that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly,
of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally
disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote
the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote.
Therefore they had to be crazy.
On June 3, 2003, the Treasury Department’s James Gilleran brought a chainsaw to a photo-op. While speaking to reporters, he promised to cut up piles of paper representing regulations of the financial sector. Joining him were representatives of four other U.S. regulatory agencies in charge of overseeing finance, armed with less formidable (but still sharp) gardening shears. The message was clear: The Bush Administration was tearing down the final pieces of the New Deal regulatory wall.
In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":
The populist backlash that many have predicted would follow the crash of 2008 is here. Well, not here, exactly. Over there, in Europe.
In the June 7 elections to the European Parliament, center-left social democrats were devastated, while far-right nationalist and populist candidates made big gains. The center-left fell from 217 seats to 159, while the center-right coalition remained the largest bloc with 267 seats.
