By an Anonymous Political Consultant:
Regardless of the fact they will never admit it the fundamentalist criticism of popular consumer culture is in fact a critique of market relationships. You cannot oppose the marketing of denigrating cultural products without conceding to the idea that the market should not be the sole arbiter in regulating all human activities and relationships.
The genius of the economic right and the neo-conservatives has been their ability to ignore this fact and work instead to fill in the blanks in the vast empty spaces within the worldview of the religious right with militarist and pro-corporate ideas.
The tasks of progressives is to tear apart the conservative consensus of the past thirty years by advocating agendas that will consistently split the constituencies of the religious right from its corporate right partners.
If progressives are serious about winning victories that can realign our politics, they must find a way to marry the legitimate criticism of the decadence of popular culture with criticism of the decadence of an economic system that create the savage inequalities we see in America today. Once that is done, the entire project of the right collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Philia, caritas, and amateur - three words who root meaning is "love." The things we do for money, or because we are told to do so within a hierarchy, or what we are propagandized into doing, versus what we do for love. The citizen sector, the voluntary sector, the third sector are, maybe, the space in which a less decadent version of freedom and liberty will flourish across the political spectrum. As Boomer donors or clients, awakening to their own mortality, consider "first and last things," "origins and ends," and their last will and testament, they might benefit from a reflective moment in community with others in their tradition. Might religious communities and liberal arts colleges stage such market-free moments as a gracious element within their donor education work?
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