Entrenched interests?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Entrenched interests?

Even if only a fraction of Mr Cowen’s vision comes to pass, he is too sanguine about the politics of polarisation. Inter-generational tensions fuelled 1960s unrest and would be back with a vengeance, this time in the form of economic competition for scarce resources. The Middle Ages were stable partly because peasants could not vote; an unhappy modern electorate, by contrast, would be prey to demagogues peddling simple solutions, from xenophobia to soak-the-rich taxes, or harsh, self-defeating crime policies. Yet Mr Cowen’s main point is plausible: gigantic shifts are under way, and they may be unstoppable.

Politicians are skittish about admitting this. Barack Obama calls America’s wealth gap “our great unfinished business”, describing a crisis of inequality decades in the making. Think of technology, he tells audiences, and how it has thinned the ranks of travel agents, bank clerks and other middle-class gateway jobs. At the same time, global competition has reduced workers’ bargaining power. People have “lost trust in the capacity of government to help them”, he sorrows. But then Mr Obama implies that political villainy is the real culprit. He accuses entrenched interests of working for years to spread a “great untruth”: that government intervention is either harmful or a plot to grab tax dollars from the squeezed middle and shower them on the undeserving poor. Politics risks becoming a “zero-sum game where a few do very well while struggling families of every race fight over a shrinking economic pie.”