Schlagwort: Bill Clinton

No society can do without social inequality, because it must foster the useful knowledge and skills of its citizens in order to survive in the competition among nations. If it were to defy this imperative—as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution and as Vladimir Putin has done since the attack on Ukraine, through which he lost his best minds to foreign countries—then a country slides into the abyss because it falls behind technologically. If, on the other hand—as in turbo-capitalism—it is a state’s declared goal to reward useful knowledge and skills beyond measure, then it risks an uprising by the disadvantaged segment of the population and thus destroys social stability. Nothing is as dangerous to a state’s cohesion as the resentment of segments of the population who were respected citizens just yesterday but suddenly count for nothing. When millions of Germans lost their jobs in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929 and were forced to beg at public soup kitchens to feed their families, they turned to a man who, until 1928, had been nothing more to the overwhelming majority than a political clown: they turned to Adolf Hitler.
Putin and Trump – Resentment and its Bloody Legacy weiterlesen