As their first initiative in 2015, the RNC has banned all remnants of the Enlightenment and declared the USA a collection of feudal fiefs. Let’s review the similarities of the middle ages to our contemporary America.
At the top, we have our version of the Lords of the Medieval period back in the 5th to 15th centuries. They are the Corporations and 1% who own the lions share of all property. They earned their status by accumulating assets. All other social groups work for their benefit in the Manor. Today’s equivalent to the Manors are our States, which under the Republican plan are a loose neo-confederation.
Next in pecking order are the Barons, Bishops, Vassals and Knights……today’s version being elected officials, sponsored by the Lords. They do the Lords’ bidding in the public and private spheres. The Bishops, today’s mega churches and diocese, have a special place in society; all the necessary protections, but without having the pay homage to the Lords, or in today’s vernacular, taxes. They are tax exempt. Their job is to protect the Lords by declaring their value to the social order.
A special category of the modern Knights, or warriors tasked to protect the Lords are in today’s structure, the defense contractors. Like their predecessor Knights, their reward for service are property and assets. A key task in today’s world is manor or homeland security and preemptive attacks on threatening hordes of barbarians. Additionally, internal dissidents are dealt with by militarized police forces reporting to the Barons and Vassals.
Do the similarities between gated communities and moats ring some bells with you ? How about the torture techniques of the middle ages and today’s waterboarding? Drone attacks and swat teams and village scorching?
Also serving the Barons and Vassals are a few skilled working class, known as our middle class. They provide technical and specialized expertise needed by them as well as the Lords. Their reward for service is limited amounts of property and assets, including small amounts of capital loans to expand their services.
The Lords, Barons and Vassals oversee the work and production of the serfs and peasants. These are mostly unskilled persons who are compensated on a very limited scale to barely sustain their families and whose work is considered easily replaceable should they prove uncooperative or unproductive in their service. They comprise the vast majority or about 80% of the population of the manors or states.
This group is dominated by persons of color and ethnic heritage considered of lesser quality of personhood. As a result, though granted minimal rights of citizenship, those rights are being restricted and suppressed for fear that they might challenge the existing social order.
To maintain this social order, Republicans today emphasize limiting public services to the serfs and peasants, including both education and health care, for fear that strengthening their intellectual, mental and physical well-being could result in insurrection and revolution against the rule of the Lords, Barons and Vassals.
This system served a few very well for about 1,000 years. Seemed to work for them, so why fix what ain’t broke?