The Center Cannot Hold: Kleptocracy Delegitimizes the Status Quo

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The Center Cannot Hold: Kleptocracy Delegitimizes the Status Quo
Nov 5, 2012 | Charles Hugh Smith

The center cannot hold because it has failed the nation by defending the Status Quo kleptocracy.

Let's start with William Butler Yeats' (1865-1939) poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Though the poem was penned in 1919, it speaks presciently to our era. If we take "the center" to be the political machinery at the gravitational center of the Status Quo, Yeats is suggesting the center cannot hold as things such as the economy and living standards fall apart.

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