USAnians view the rest of the world through a very narrow slit – often even those who indulge in a certain amount of travel, whether for business or leisure. And like a diffraction grating, the light that passes back through presents a very distorted picture of the objects it reflects back to the viewer. A recent debater discussing proposed reforms of Portland’s form of government admitted he had “never heard of proportional representation” (even though it has featured most prominently in high-minded debates for at least the past seventy five years, surrounding the defects of the form of democracy prevailing in the United States, since long before “Citizens United”).

Today, there are two “major parties”. They are the neoliberal capitalists, on the one hand, and the ultrareactionaries and neofascists on the other. Neoliberal capitalists are the party of the “bad old days”. Ultrareactionaries and neofascists are the party of the “good old days”. Reactionary, ahistorical narratives of “progress”, which attribute it to various kinds of semi-divine “providence”, or rational, meritocratic decisions by the economically and politically powerful, or the reliable prevalence of “enlightened self-interest”, are omnipresent in bourgeois discourse.

Slavoj Zizek once quipped about the supposedly recent emergence of a “lumpen bourgeoisie”, a riff on Marx’s observations about the sub-class he referred to as the “lumpen proletariat” (ie, otherwise working class people condemned to what more recently has been called the “informal” sector, who are chronically unemployed or underemployed, and serve as part of the “reserve army of labor”, even if they are never fully integrated into formal, wage-based capitalism and its working class).