I cam across this recently in my reading and thought twenty years old it still fits perfectly. Bold addresses on topic.
"In the United States, despite the disappearance of the worst sorts of public racism and the emergence of a small black middle class, including some highly successful politicians, the blacks have been confirmed in their sub-working-class role. This emerges from all the statistics on unemployment, health care, mortality rates. education, prison occupation and family status. For example, infant mortality among blacks is more than double that of whites and the gap is widening. To this racial problem has been added a second sub-working-class made up of Hispanics who will be at thirty million, the largest ethnic group in the United States by the year 2000. A large number of these immigrants fuel a low-cost, low-employment-standards black market economy which escapes all social regulation. This in turn has placed great pressure on the economies of the southern states to remain or return to pre-Roosevelt conditions, which in turn has created an industrial drain from the northern states. As a further pressure on this lowest denominator style of competition, America is gradually integrating its economy with that of Mexico, a country that operates at the cheap and rough levels of the Third World.
In Britain a similar approach has led to the creation of large pockets of new wealth and to equally large pockets of new poverty. This return to the old rich-poor society with a gap in the middle has been encouraged by a decline in universal state services - whether practical, such as transpcrtaucn, or social, such as health care,
In other wcrds, there has been a gradual undermining of the idea of a general social consensus. All of this has been fuelled by a slavish devotion to the rational certitude that there are absolute answers to all questions and problems. These absolute solutions have succeeded each other over the last twenty years in a jarring and disruptive way. At the same time the ability of governments to effect economic development has been severely handicapped by a growing reliance on service industries for growth ~ a sector dominated not by sophisticated items such as computer software but by consumer goods and personal consumer services. These sectors, it goes without saying, also flourish on labour which is part-time, low wage and insecure, thus creating a false sense of having solved part of the job-creation problem. This growth in services also leaves the Western economies dependent on the most unstable areas of economic activity, which is the first to collapse in an economic crisis. Put another way, service industries are to the economy what the uncontrolled printing of money is to monetary stability. They are both inflation. "
These examples of a general decline stand out in contrast to state mechanisms which have never been so sophisticated. This sophistication has reached a level of complexity so great that the systems are, in truth. incomprehensible not only to the citizen, but to the most part of the political class. The latter, in a slothful loss of intellectual and practical self-discipline, have simply accepted that this is the way things must be. The resulting void in responsible leadership has allowed an hysterical brand of simplistic politics to rise and take power on the back of truisms, cliches and chauvinism, all of which fall below the intellectual level of Jenkins' Ear jingoism.
When President Bush, in his inaugural address. warmed to the theme of a kinder, gentler America, he said: "We know what works: freedom works. We know what's right: freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections." No one laughed at his absurd ordering of these three freedoms. The men of reason in the other political party, in his own party, in the media and in the universities found nothing to say.
Every word and concept of the wars of democracy and justice has been appropriated by those who traditionally opposed both and who seek power to undo what has been done. The moral sense of the eighteenth century has not only been turned upside down, this has been done with its own vocabulary. Thus Bush could give primacy to free markets over free men, as if to say that the right to speculate in junk bonds is more important than the removal of slavery. And Jefferson, Reagan could say, was against big government. Therefore, the forty million Americans without health care were not a government concern. But what Jefferson was against was unnecessary government - organisms which no longer contributed anything. He saw political power as a limited deck of cards. Those who held office were to play their hand carefully and endlessly, picking up old cards and putting down new ones, as old problems were solved and new problems arose. Those who seek and often gain power today use the vocabulary of the eighteenth century the way television evangelists use the Old Testament."
pps 237,238 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
