If you scroll right down below ⬇️ you’ll be able to read the dirge written by a Harvard Professor of Ethics that struck me as nothing but the ravings of a bad loser going around breast-beating and wailing the defeat of the Democrats in the just concluded U.S. Presidential election 2024.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/christopher-robichaud
If I were to meet Harvard Ethics professor, Christopher Robichaud face-to-face, I’d surely hand him a lesson or two in political ethics…. lessons that would make him realise that all his hand-wringing and tears of his cannot really cancel out the single most egregious of causes for the defeat of the candidate of the U.S. Democratic Party which once upon a time (called the “Copperheads” Party then!) was a sworn adversary of Abraham Lincoln’s own party that had promised a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
The Harvard Professor writes this :
America, culturally, has completely abandoned a politics of decency and respect and has embraced instead a politics of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia, and bullying.
He is dead wrong .
American people have rejected indeed precisely what the Professor says they have “embraced”.
The American people have resolved to “abandon completely” a Party that they believe is singularly lesser qualified to put an end to the country’s 20-year long slow but steady drift towards governments “of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy” .
The people have seen at last that between the Elephant and the Jackass, it was more likely the pachyderm than the donkey which could help them survive the dangerous rising tide waters of Plutocracy that has been threatening for quite some years now to engulf the whole country.
The American people in the last 16 long years — between 2008 and 2024 ! — placed their trust in the jackass. They gave it all of 12 full years to deliver them from the tyranny of the left-liberal plutocracy. They expected their governments under Obama and Biden to do something to ease the pain of the under- and middle-classes that have had to suffer both the causes and the effects of the yawning income and wealth gap separating the 1-percenters from the 99-percenters right across America today.
Nothing was done to ease that severe pain.
In the interregnum of 2016-20, the people did get off the donkey’s back and chose to saddle up on the elephant for a ride into prosperity that the mahout Trump promised them then.
The elephant however turned out to be a bull in a china-shop beset by the berserk mood swings … with people witnessing often the GoP far more focused on tearing down than on building up…
Again nothing much hence got fixed in America in those 4 intervening years.
In 2020, the people in exasperation switched back to the Dems … but under Biden and Harris the evil of Plutocracy wasn’t weakened but prospered, in fact, even more than ever before …
The people simply got done in by the Deep State of America … And by “deep state”, I mean not so much the great and mighty legendary military-industrial complex — viz. the tycoon-DoD contractors, BigTech corporates… (alluded to by the Prof. as “the tech industry’s assault on the arts through AI”…. ), the political lobbyists and all the venally compromised US Congressmen and Senators whose legionnaires indeed are the Pentagon, the US State Department, CIA and FBI— I don’t mean them all so much as I mean the Wall Street, the American banking industry, the American gun-lobby, the American academia and the entire American media world … all of whose collective, cultural capital is what is now known in America’s folklore as the “Washington DC Swamp”.
I wish I could open Prof. C. Robichaud’s half-blind eyes to the fact that it is not the ordinary, honest, hardworking American people who are responsible but it’s this Plutocratic Deep State …which thrived and grew throughout the first two decades of this millennium into a Hobbesian leviathan … for engendering the “culture of debasement” prevailing in America, a culture he wails about in the following telling words of his own :
… a culture that has descended to this level of debasement is not easily fixed. In fact, it may not ever be fixed. The timeline for changing something like this is decades–at best–not two-to-four-year election cycles.
Well, Harvard Professor Sir, you may have given up on America , but the American people haven’t given up hope— they’re the poor hopeful folks and they have nothing to cling to but Hope. And for whom, and for whose voting choices, you’ve shown that you have nothing but utter contempt.
Those people seem to be firmly set on course to go into what you’ve termed it as “seed-planting stage” … they truly believe they’ve sown the seeds for an America about to be “made great again”. It mustn’t be forgotten that it was Lincoln’s Republican Party that brought America together after the bloody Civil War… not the Democrats. So, there’s a flame of hope still that burns bright within the American breast.
If you’re a Harvard Plutocrat, it’s time to shut up and put up , Professor Sir.
Sudarshan Madabushi
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From Harvard Ethics professor – Christopher Robichaud
“Everyone in the days and weeks ahead will use this loss as an opportunity to seek validation for their own hobby horse complaint. Harris lost because she campaigned with Liz Cheney. Harris lost because she didn’t embrace Gaza. Harris lost because she didn’t choose Shapiro. Harris lost because she wasn’t progressive enough (possibly my favorite one).
Take a good hard look at the map, my friends. Trump has won the popular vote. Trump ran the table. Explaining that with your hobby horse issue isn’t going to cut it, tempting and consoling as it may be.
The problem isn’t the electoral college. The problem isn’t that we didn’t have a full primary. The problem isn’t Harris. The problem isn’t that Dems didn’t have the right message. The problem isn’t even inflation or the border.
The problem is so much worse than any of those things. Those are all technical problems, with straightforward expertise fixes. If only it were so!
No, our problem is not technical. It’s very much adaptive. A party that embraced the Big Lie, supported an insurrection, and has been selling conspiracy-addled madness for years was widely and enthusiastically embraced. Voter turnout was profound! People didn’t sit this out.
Simply put, the problem–as some of you have rightly posted–is cultural. America, culturally, has completely abandoned a politics of decency and respect and has embraced instead a politics of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia, and bullying.
And if you look at the demographics, you also won’t be able to comfort yourself that it’s just a white thing, or a working-class thing, or an education thing. It’s multi-class, multi-gender, multi-educational and multi-racial. That’s what winning the popular vote means. That’s what running the table amounts to.
A culture that has descended to this level of debasement is not easily fixed. In fact, it may not ever be fixed. The timeline for changing something like this is decades–at best–not two-to-four-year election cycles. You can extend that in this case, because with the GOP likely controlling all branches of federal government and the courts, they will ensure that mechanisms are in place to keep them in power long after their popularity has waned. You can count on that.
The GOP evolved into a party of rage, lies, and revenge–and it correctly diagnosed that there was and is a large appetite for that. That’s what the country wants. At least, enough of the country wants it to ensure broad appeal and widespread electoral success. The old GOP will never return, and the Dems have nothing to say to American culture now. Nothing. They’ve been speaking to a country that’s gone, like dust in the wind.
And that’s my final thought, which my posts last night alluded to. The America I knew and loved is gone. This new America–nah, I won’t even bother. I will say that cultural change is less likely to occur in politics, or in the academy. You’re not going to get people to see how vulgar they’ve become through a clever argument or a nice campaign speech, that’s for sure.
This would be time for the arts, broadly understood, to step in. The arts can change hearts and minds. Too bad the arts have been systematically dismantled in education in this country, and on the other end, the tech industry’s assault on the arts through AI is sure to hollow out any good-faith efforts that might emerge.
And for the rest of the world, America’s rightward lurch is, I’m afraid, bad news for you too. I know you know this. Because it’s not isolated, is it? It’s just now the most prominent example of a burgeoning trend. And this will embolden others in other countries, to be sure. We need not speculate what happens when countries become mired in lies, embrace resentment, and savor bullying. We know exactly what happens. Bloody conflict and global destabilization.
The first quarter of the 21st century will therefore in hindsight be viewed as the seed-planting stage for the absolute shit show that’s about to unfold globally over the next two and a half decades. Count on it.
Adopt whatever coping and endurance strategies you have available. You’re going to need it.
I think that’s all I’ve left to say.”