Corporations as soulless money-machines and a disengaged electorate — the soft-fascism / "backlash" diagnosis behind…
echoes
From: 'A Frightening Time in America': An Interview with David Foster Wallace (Ostap Karmodi, Radio Svoboda / NYRB)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — corporations have gained cultural and
political power because "it now takes large amounts" of money to run for
office; they "have the legal status of a person, but" "they don't have a
conscience or soul the way people do." DFW warns there "may be a" "backlash, a
kind of spasmodic reaction against it", and that the alternative to political
counterbalance is a form of fascism — "what fascism really is is a" "close
alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large" corporations. On
moral progress he ends: "these are very bad times" in America because "the
American electorate is simply not interested for" the most part. [NYRB text]
- IJ echo: the disengaged-electorate → Gentle/ONAN reading of IJ's political
world (Schtitt's argument that a citizenry which will not choose its own
limits invites an external one). DFW's real-world 2006 diagnosis — corporate
capture, an emptied civic culture, a passive electorate — is the same engine
the
gentle-electorate reading maps onto the novel; the corporate-domination
point also feeds media-prescience.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation