Where my opinion diverges from his is that the old "left" vs. "right" paradigm is kind of ending. I haven't seen a good name for hte new emerging paradigm, so let's just call it "populists" vs. "business as usual". Lousy name, but this is where the political action is, both here and all over the place (Argentina, El Salvador, France, Germany, the UK).
Populism is regularly trashed by the Great and the Good, but the inroads that Trump is making with the Black community doesn't seem to be typical pandering, but rather tapping into a real sense of dissatisfaction with Business As Usual. Kind of like what the rest of us feel.
It also seems that RFK's support comes from the same well spring of dissatisfaction. If that's true, it implies that RFK's candidacy will hurt Trump more than Biden. And I still have the feeling that there's a non-trivial chance that the Deep State will try to assassinate Trump, and maybe succeed. The Great and the Good keep complaining that Trump has "overturned norms" but it sure looks to me that they're the ones that are doing that.
Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.
It's an uberpost so it's impossible to excerpt, but Kevin's conclusion is what made me think:
The public school system cannot be reformed. I must be destroyed and the people in it must never have power over children again.
Alas, destruction would be very difficult as there are too many vested interests at play here. What we need to do it minimize the enemies our plan will make, and maximize the allies it will get. I posted about this several years back, and still think that this plan has at least a fighting chance of getting through:
A modest proposal to prevent the fall of civilization
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
Over the years, I've said (and more often hinted) that what I see in the future is not just the chance of an economic collapse due to the world's unsustainable debt levels. I see a real chance for another Dark Ages. The main driving force there is the Postmodernists in academia pushing the idea of "my truth and your truth"; the idea that there isn't anything other than our perceptions of things. That works fine for simple questions like, "what's your favorite color?" but is completely wrong for "what's the speed of light?", "will this virus survive in air?" or any interactions with the real world. VDH follows those trends to the conclusion a Dark Age may already be starting.
When civilization falls, it falls hard. We hear mostly dry statistics about the collapse of civilization, things like the population of Rome in 100 AD was around a million people. That's impossible to visualize. Instead, we should look at this:
This is Monte Testaccio in Rome. It is a hill made entirely of broken pottery, and it dates to the first and second centuries AD. It's over 100 feet high, around a kilometer around, and historians think that it used to be much larger but has eroded over the last two millennia. The Roman "bread and circuses" was a huge welfare project that fed much of the city's population, and which required huge imports of not just grain but also olive oil - over a million gallons of oil each year, every year, for hundreds of years. The oil was shipped in big clay pots, but what do you do with the pots when you've distributed the oil? The Romans were the best engineers until at least the eighteenth century, and so they came up with an engineering solution: they made a mountain out of broken up pots.
And then it all fell, and fell so far and hard that it was forgotten. The Roman Forum itself - the political center of the Ancient World for centuries - became a cow field, the Campo Vaccino:
It's been said that any system can survive only three generations before facing crisis. The first generation is the generation that created the system. They knew it intimately. The second generation saw the system being created, and so at least understood its main functions and how they worked. The third generation inherited the system. They may or may not know anything at all about how it works.
If this is a system created by the government - and remember that government is politics - then politics will be the main thing that we can expect the third generation to understand. NASA is an excellent example of this dynamic: the generation that won World War II created it. They landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely to the Earth, all in that decade. The generation that followed watched that. They were able to make a Space Shuttle and a Mars Rover. Now NASA is in the third generation and the Space Launch System is pushing a decade late and $20B over budget, all while offering less capability than SpaceX at ten times the price. But hey, a Senator is happy so it's all good, amirite?
This Republic has a population that is observably more stupid than when I wore a younger man's shoes. This isn't just get offa my lawn ranting, it's a measurable fact:
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 year olds have not improved since the early 1970s. That is, the average 17 year old in 2012 got about the same score in reading and math (287 and 306, respectively) as a 17 year old in 1971 or 1973 did (285 and 304, respectively).
The response from professional educators?
Carr argues that flat scores aren’t terrible. “It’s a good thing that they’re not going down,” she said.
Well okay, then. This is the same time period when per-pupil spending on K-12 education has skyrocketed:
If anything, this understates the scope of the problem: there is lots of discussion about how incoming college students can't read or do math very well, and so they have to take remedial course (and take on student debt while doing so) before they can start what would otherwise be their studies.
Note that this discussion has been about the portion of the public education system that is arguably working; it doesn't work at all in the inner cities. None of Baltimore's schools graduate students who can do mathematics, and Atlanta's school system had a huge scandal where test scores were massively manipulated so that administrators could get their incentive bonus. People went to jail for that, but the system is no better almost a decade later.
In short, the more government has gotten itself into education, the dumber the population has gotten - and at fabulous expense. The system is broken, and since it's a government system (in which politics is uber alles) it will not reform itself. Further, the public education system is generally popular throughout the land, so the normal political process will be useless for reform.
And so the Republic slouches towards the Campo Vaccino. The third generation will lead to a fourth, and as Graybeard fears, a new Dark Age approaches.
Immodestly, I believe that there is a solution. It's one that will improve performance, reduce costs, and be politically acceptable to large portions of the voters. The Department of Education can issue a rule saying that if a public school system does not issue vouchers allowing parents to send their children to the school of their choice, that the Department will withhold education grants to that school system equal to the average per-pupil cost in that district. The Department will then issue an Income Tax credit to the parents for that amount. The Department will provide a free home schooling curriculum and teaching materials for free with the tax credit.
Simples. No fuss, no muss. It may even be that the Education Department can do this without any action of Congress. I Am Not A Lawyer, but Congress has granted a huge amount of authority to the Regulatory State.
So why do I think that this is politically possible when the Teacher's Unions and Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will fight this to the death? Consider:
Vouchers are popular among blacks and hispanics and have been for a long time. This makes sense, as its their kids who are locked into failing school districts. You don't get much more White Privilege than mandatory public schools.
Tax Credits allow stay-at-home Moms to school their kids if they want. Home schooling three kids at an average tax credit of around $12,000 per kid is the equivalent of a pre-tax job paying around $50,000/year. Politically, this will play very well with women.
We can expect this to be especially popular with black and hispanic women. No doubt some upper middle class white women will complain that these women of color cannot be trusted to educate their children but we can dismiss this as veiled racism, and the women certainly can't do any worse than the current inner-city schools are doing. At the very worst, the money wouldn't be going to an impenetrable education bureaucracy but rather directly to voters.
Public schools will have to do a better job, at a lower cost. Competition will focus on results, rather than on a politicized curriculum.
Now what's interesting about this is that politically this would hurt democrats and help republicans. However, the people who think that politics doesn't enter into the public education system shouldn't concern themselves about, well, politics entering into the public education system. And anyway, since government is politics, a better description of "public education" is "government education", leading to "political education".
This is no panacea against the New Dark Age. However, it puts resources in the hands of parents who presumably care more about their kids than a set of bureaucrats. Eliminating all the nonsense permeating the schools (hello, Critical Race Theory!) will let teachers and parents focus on reading and math and you know, education.
All the coolkids are posting uplifting things today, and so I'll jump in.
I've posted repeatedly about America as Fall-Of-The-Roman-Empire/Republic before. It's looked pretty bleak for a while, not being able to figure out how the Next Big American Thing will come into being. It's looked like that process will be really blood soaked.
But maybe not. I've also posted before about Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de blog Mencious Moldbug. It was ten years ago that I wrote about him in an uberpost titled The Fifth American Republic. It has perhaps the best opening paragraph I've ever written:
Barack Obama is a communist. That's a low schoolyard insult, even though it's true, but it doesn't matter. You see, Mitt Romney is also a commie. No, this isn't yet another Mitt Romney rant. Allof our political establishment are commies, and have been for a long time.
Glen Filthie found a Tucker Carlson interview with Yarvin. It's quite something - Tucker is a much better interviewer than I had known (I don't watch much - or any - political TV) and Tucker allows Yarvin great big huge uninterrupted blocks of time to explain his philosophy of how America is ruled by an oligarchy, why the oligarchy is decentralized, how the US Government has evolved over time (with a shout out to his original post that I blogged about ten years back), how the periodic evolutions come to be needed as the system slowly degrades, and how this explains why we lost in Afghanistan.
He ends with a discussion of the end of the Roman Republic and how that could plausibly happen here without the rivers of blood. This is a very long and very thoughtful interview that left me feeling much better about this Republic's chances than I have in a long, long time.
Go watch this. I cannot recommend this too highly. You might want to read my old uberpost as an introduction first, because it will set the stage for much of what Yarvin describes. Yarvin is a first rate intellect and you will end up smarter when you're done.
Trump was here to draw aside the curtain and calmly show us that everything that we thought was true and good was only a pile of lies. From government, to the media, to world organisations, to modern thinking and philosophies, to everyday people that you meet on the street, all has been revealed for what it is. The purpose of this time is not to return you to a comfortable life. It is to wake you up and force you to make a decision of whether you will continue to be woken up or if you will willingly crawl in bed with those of the grave. You know it’s not steak but it just tastes so damn good.
In regards to this burden Trump has been spectacularly successful. For a few of us, there is no putting the lid back on this box. The force of Trump has forced people to pick a side. Among your own family, friends and colleagues, you now know where they stand. You even know where complete strangers stand; driving alone in your car wearing a mask anyone?
The reference to the steak, of course, is from the iconic film The Matrix. I have been thinking for a while that Donald Trump has "Red Pilled" millions of Americans. The Red Pill reference, of course, if from the filmThe Matrix:
Back in 2014 I wrote about the "Red Pill/Blue Pill" comparison as it applies to government :
The Dark Enlightenment is a topic that is getting more and more attention, even from mainstream publications. I've touched on it here ("Barack Obama is a communist"is perhaps the best opening line to a post I've ever written), but an old post from Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?) gives the best introduction to the topic, phrased in explicitly"Blue Pill"/"Red Pill" terminology:
The nature of the state
The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don’t.
The power structure of the West
Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.
Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.
The extent of the state
The state consists of elected officials and their appointees.
The state consists of all those whose interests are aligned with the state. This includes NGOs, universities, and the press, all of whose employees are effectively civil servants, and side with the civil service in almost all conflicts.
The last one in particular is a concise description of what is called the "Cathedral" - social institutions not directly subject to the Throne but which work in explicit or implicit ways to support it.
You should click through the link to Isegoria's post which discusses ten specific comparisons. Isegoria picked these up from Mencious Moldbug, who is typically wordy:
Have you ever considered the possibility that democracy is bunk?
I grew up believing in democracy. I’ll bet you did too. I spent 20 years of my life in democratic schools. I’ll bet you did too.
Suppose you were a Catholic in 16th-century Spain. Imagine how hard it would be for you to stop believing in Catholicism.
You are a Catholic. Your parents were Catholics. You were educated by Catholics. You are governed by Catholics. All your friends are Catholics. All the books you’ve ever read were written by Catholics.
Sure, you’re aware that not everyone in the world is a Catholic.You’re also aware that this is the cause of all the violence, death and destruction in the world.
Look at what Protestants do when they get into power. They nail genitals to the city gates. They behead their own wives. Crazy stuff!And let’s not even start on the Turks…
Now suppose you’re you. But you have a time machine that lets you talk to this 16th-century Spanish Catholic version of you.
How do you convince this guy or gal that the answer to all the world’s problems is not “more Catholicism”? How do you say, um, dude, this Trinity thing—the virgin birth—transsubstantiation… ya know…
So you see how hard it is to explain that democracy is bunk.
And along came Donald Trump and showed millions of Americans what is going on behind the curtain. That toothpaste isn't going back in the tube. I expect that's why they hate him so much.
Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter. Sadly, we do. But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck. After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.
The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers. This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat. So how'd that turn out for them?
Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.
- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors
But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name. It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.
The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done." Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.
Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated. His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor. In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome. Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself. That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.
That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem. Once that was gone, it was anything goes. The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight. The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions. As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.
Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters. Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat. Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood. Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full. Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.
It feels like that's coming here. It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize. That's new in American politics. It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt. It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.
And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year. Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers. They'll be higher come the election. It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.
Because Mos Maiorum is dead. The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November. What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?
What was done in Rome? Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola):
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
The Romans didn't screw around.
The Democrats aren't screwing around, either. If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest". The American public looks on, and many realize this.
I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior. In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you. If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them. If they oppose you, you oppose them. Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.
That's not what we have today. What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election. But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic. That's gone.
And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way. It's the Reckoning.
This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:
A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning. Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad. The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.
If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper. It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.
This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan. But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward. The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:
Over the years, I've said (and more often hinted) that what I see in the future is not just the chance of an economic collapse due to the world's unsustainable debt levels. I see a real chance for another Dark Ages. The main driving force there is the Postmodernists in academia pushing the idea of "my truth and your truth"; the idea that there isn't anything other than our perceptions of things. That works fine for simple questions like, "what's your favorite color?" but is completely wrong for "what's the speed of light?", "will this virus survive in air?" or any interactions with the real world. VDH follows those trends to the conclusion a Dark Age may already be starting.
When civilization falls, it falls hard. We hear mostly dry statistics about the collapse of civilization, things like the population of Rome in 100 AD was around a million people. That's impossible to visualize. Instead, we should look at this:
This is Monte Testaccio in Rome. It is a hill made entirely of broken pottery, and it dates to the first and second centuries AD. It's over 100 feet high, around a kilometer around, and historians think that it used to be much larger but has eroded over the last two millennia. The Roman "bread and circuses" was a huge welfare project that fed much of the city's population, and which required huge imports of not just grain but also olive oil - over a million gallons of oil each year, every year, for hundreds of years. The oil was shipped in big clay pots, but what do you do with the pots when you've distributed the oil? The Romans were the best engineers until at least the eighteenth century, and so they came up with an engineering solution: they made a mountain out of broken up pots.
And then it all fell, and fell so far and hard that it was forgotten. The Roman Forum itself - the political center of the Ancient World for four centuries or more - became a cow field, the Campo Vaccino:
It's been said that any system can survive only three generations before facing crisis. The first generation is the generation that created the system. They knew it intimately. The second generation saw the system being created, and so at least understood its main functions and how they worked. The third generation inherited the system. They may or may not know anything at all about how it works.
If this is a system created by the government - and remember that government is politics - then politics will be the main thing that we can expect the third generation to understand. NASA is an excellent example of this dynamic: the generation that won World War II created it. They landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely to the Earth, all in that decade. The generation that followed watched that. They were able to make a Space Shuttle and a Mars Rover. Now NASA is in the third generation and the Space Launch System is pushing a decade late and $20B over budget, all while offering less capability than SpaceX at quadruple the price. But hey, a Senator is happy so it's all good, amirite?
This Republic has a population that is observably more stupid than when I wore a younger man's shoes. This isn't just get offa my lawn ranting, it's a measurable fact:
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 year olds have not improved since the early 1970s. That is, the average 17 year old in 2012 got about the same score in reading and math (287 and 306, respectively) as a 17 year old in 1971 or 1973 did (285 and 304, respectively).
The response from professional educators?
Carr argues that flat scores aren’t terrible. “It’s a good thing that they’re not going down,” she said.
Well okay, then. This is the same time period when per-pupil spending on K-12 education has skyrocketed:
If anything, this understates the scope of the problem: there is lots of discussion about how incoming college students can't read or do math very well, and so they have to take remedial course (and take on student debt while doing so) before they can start what would otherwise be their studies.
Note that this discussion has been about the portion of the public education system that is arguably working; it doesn't work at all in the inner cities. None of Baltimore's schools graduate students who can do mathematics, and Atlanta's school system had a huge scandal where test scores were massively manipulated so that administrators could get their incentive bonus. People went to jail for that, but the system is no better five years later.
In short, the more government has gotten itself into education, the dumber the population has gotten - and at fabulous expense. The system is broken, and since it's a government system (in which politics is uber alles) it will not reform itself. Further, the public education system is generally popular throughout the land, so the normal political process will be useless for reform.
And so the Republic slouches towards the Campo Vaccino. The third generation will lead to a fourth, and as Graybeard fears, a new Dark Age approaches.
Immodestly, I believe that there is a solution. It's one that will improve performance, reduce costs, and be politically acceptable to large portions of the voters. The Department of Education can issue a rule saying that if a public school system does not issue vouchers allowing parents to send their children to the school of their choice, that the Department will withhold education grants to that school system equal to the average per-pupil cost in that district. The Department will then issue an Income Tax credit to the parents for that amount. The Department will provide a free home schooling curriculum and teaching materials for free with the tax credit.
Simples. No fuss, no muss. It may even be that the Education Department can do this without any action of Congress. I Am Not A Lawyer, but Congress has granted a huge amount of authority to the Regulatory State.
So why do I think that this is politically possible when the Teacher's Unions and Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will fight this to the death? Consider:
Vouchers are popular among blacks and hispanics and have been for a long time. This makes sense, as its their kids who are locked into failing school districts. You don't get much more White Privilege than mandatory public schools.
Tax Credits allow stay-at-home Moms to school their kids if they want. Home schooling three kids at an average tax credit of around $12,000 per kid is the equivalent of a pre-tax job paying around $50,000/year. Politically, this will play very well with women.
We can expect this to be especially popular with black and hispanic women. No doubt some upper middle class white women will complain that these women of color cannot be trusted to educate their children but we can dismiss this as veiled racism, and the women certainly can't do any worse than the current inner-city schools are doing. At the very worst, the money wouldn't be going to an impenetrable education bureaucracy but rather directly to voters.
Public schools will have to do a better job, at a lower cost. Competition will focus on results, rather than on a politicized curriculum.
Now what's interesting about this is that politically this would hurt democrats and help Donald Trump. However, the people who think that politics doesn't enter into the public education system shouldn't concern themselves about, well, politics entering into the public education system. And anyway, since government is politics, a better description of "public education" is "government education", leading to "political education".
This is no panacea against the New Dark Age. However, it puts resources in the hands of parents who presumably care more about their kids than a set of bureaucrats. Eliminating all the nonsense permeating the schools (hello, Common Core) will let teachers and parents focus on reading and math and you know, education.
I'll deal with Higher Education in a future post. Turning that around will be harder in some ways and easier in some.
The Cathedral is one of the most important concepts to emerge from what is called the Dark Enlightenment. It is a loose grouping of the Universities, the Media, and Non-Governmental Organizations. People employed by these groups are essentially pseudo governmental employees and direct funding, education, and publicity towards efforts supporting larger and more powerful government. A quick overview of this philosophy as stated (vs. what it really means) is here.
The Cathedral has benefited greatly from this dynamic. People employed by Cathedral organizations have gotten more money, power, and social status over the last 40 years, while the working class has stagnated or shrunk towards poverty. Interestingly, the Cathedral has offered an out to the working class, one that has simply reinforced the dynamic of an ascendent Cathedral and a sinking middle class:
It’s worth noting, along these same lines, that every remedy that’s been offered to the wage class by the salary class has benefited the salary class at the expense of the wage class. Consider the loud claims of the last couple of decades that people left unemployed by the disappearance of wage-paying jobs could get back on board the bandwagon of prosperity by going to college and getting job training. That didn’t work out well for the people who signed up for the student loans and took the classes—getting job training, after all, isn’t particularly helpful if the jobs for which you’re being trained don’t exist, and so a great many former wage earners finished their college careers with no better job prospects than they had before, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt burdening them into the bargain. For the banks and colleges that pushed the loans and taught the classes, though, these programs were a cash cow of impressive scale, and the people who work for banks and colleges are mostly salary class.
Donald Trump ran on this issue - the resentment of the formerly middle class and now increasingly immiserated - and suddenly it looks like his enconomy is reversing the dynamic:
Blue-collar jobs are growing at their fastest rate in more than 30 years, helping fuel a hiring boom in many small towns and rural areas that are strong supporters of President Trump ahead of November's midterm elections.
Jobs in goods-producing industries — mining, construction and manufacturing — grew 3.3 percent in the year preceding July, the best rate since 1984, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Blue-collar jobs, long a small and shrinking part of the U.S. economy, are now growing at a faster clip than those in the nation's much larger service economy. Many factors collided to produce the blue-collar boom. Some are linked to short-term boom-and-bust cycles, but others may endure.
The rapid hiring in blue-collar sectors is delivering benefits to areas that turned out heavily for Trump in the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institution, a shift from earlier in this expansion, when large and midsize cities experienced most of the gains.
And this will be particularly galling to the Cathedral types:
Rural employment grew at an annualized rate of 5.1 percent in the first quarter. Smaller metro areas grew 5 percent. That's significantly larger than the 4.1 percent growth seen in large urban areas that recovered earlier from the Great Recession, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program of a separate set of Labor Department data released Wednesday.
No wonder the Cathedral hates Trump with the fires of a thousand suns. Why would a young person go into debt (hello, Banksters!) to go to College (hello, leftie Professors and Deptartment of Education!) when he can get a good paying blue collar job? What happens to the money, power, and status for Cathedral employees when high school graduates can start making decent money in traditional blue collar professions? What happens to the Coastal Cities without a continual influx of people from the Heartland who no longer have to move to expensive and highly regulated Blue cities?
The money, power, and status enjoyed by the Cathedral is under threat by Trump's reforms. Of course they hate him.
John A. Stormer, whose self-published 1964 book, “None Dare Call It Treason,” became a right-wing favorite despite being attacked as inaccurate in promulgating the notion that American government and institutions were full of Communist sympathizers, died on July 10 in Troy, Mo. He was 90.
...
Mr. Stormer’s book, published by his own Liberty Bell Press, tapped into a vein of conservative alarm that was still very much present in the early 1960s, even though the Red-baiting era of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had faded in the 1950s.
The book landed in the year that the Republican Party nominated Barry M. Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator, for the presidency, and Goldwater sympathizers latched onto it, buying up copies and distributing them at rallies and by other means. The far-right John Birch Society was among the groups spreading the book around.
I hadn't know this yesterday when I posted a link to this old post of mine. In it, I excerpt what may be the finest summary of Stormer that I've seen:
Moldbug amplifies this battle, and then we'll get to the meat of the argument here:
It is not that the American left was the tool of Moscow. In fact, it was the other way around. From day one, the Soviet Union was the pet experiment of the bien-pensants. It was Looking Backward in Cyrillic. It was the client state to end all client states.
...
The theory of Russia as a client state of the American left helps us understand the behavior of the great Communist spies of the 1940s, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Essentially all significant institutions of today's transnational world community - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank - were designed by one of these gentlemen, whose role in passing American documents to Soviet military intelligence is now beyond dispute. John Stormer was right.
Or was he? The thing is that while, technically, Hiss and White were certainly Soviet agents, they hardly fit the profile of a traitor like Aldrich Ames. Hiss and White were at the top of their professions, respected and admired by everyone they knew. What motivation could they possibly have for treason? Why would men like these betray their country?
The obvious answer, in my opinion, is that they didn't see themselves as betraying their country. The idea that they were Russian tools would never have occurred to them. When you see a dog, a leash, and a man, your interpretation is that the man is walking the dog, even if the latter appears to be towing the former.
Hiss and White, in my opinion, believed - like many of their social and cultural background - that the US had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. They saw themselves as using the Soviets, not the other way around, helping to induce the understandably paranoid Russian leadership to integrate themselves into the new global order.
So a Puritan drive towards the perfectibility of mankind drives the entire political establishment - including Presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush - to support what on the face would be far left wing policy positions.
This post may be the best introduction to the Dark Enlightenment that I've done. You can, of course, read Moldbug directly, but he's pretty thick going. My post (and the post I link to at Foseti) spend some time to digest Moldbug for you.
Or you can read Stormer yourself, as a free download from the Internet Archive. The title comes from a very old quote: Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason. Pretty clever, that.
At the time, Robinson's supporters tried to claim that his arrest and (suspended) sentence were violations of his right to free speech. They were not, as the judge made clear. He violated British laws, he ignored common practice concerning interfering with defendants and/or witnesses in a criminal trial, and he arguably jeopardized the defendants' right to a fair trial by his conduct. I have no issue with the sentence given him.
Peter is correct and puts together a strong argument for following long established social norms - which is after all, what the legal code is supposed to encapsulate. You should go RTWT because I am going to pose a number of questions, all pointing to the same meta question: has the UK government lost its claim to legitimacy, and if so, do any of these long held social norms still apply.
Question 1: Is justice being served in the UK?
Technically, it is a "Court of Law", but when we speak in terms of governmental legitimacy the view is broader. It must be a Court of Justice if society is to keep to the old bargain negotiated 1000 years ago. Back in the Dark Ages, "justice" was the responsibility of the people - specifically their extended family. Clan feuds were the norm - and this has echoed faintly down to our own times with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys. Government was weak then and so justice was rough. The deal that was negotiated between the states and their subjects over the next 600 years was that the State would administer justice, but do it as fairly as it could, making blood feud unnecessary.
Is justice being meted out in Her Magesty's Scepter'd Isle? For those who haven't been paying much attention, there have been dozens of arrests (perhaps hundreds) of adult men who have gang raped under age girls. This has occurred in many locales throughout the land. It has been doing on not for years, but for decades. The number of victims is not reported, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. In each case, the State knew what was happening.
As far as I can tell, none of the State officials - local, county, or national - have lost their jobs over this.
Remember, the deal was that the State would enforce justice fairly so that blood feud would no longer be needed.
Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?
Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an "activist" while Peter refers to him as "Alt-Right". I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like. But it also cuts to the heart of this question. If we don't look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment. The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades. The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.
The alleged perpetrators are described as "asian males", as if some of them were from China or Korea. This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.
Are the "asian males" actually Pakistani immigrants? Are they all muslim? Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims? To simply ask these questions is to answer them.
The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here. It's actually worse - one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary - the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.
It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we're told is an "Alt-Right" fringe.
Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?
This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris. If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.
You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.
This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.
Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off. Blood feud may be the only option.
Question 4: Is this worse than the Child Abuse done in the Catholic Church?
Peter has written eloquently about the crimes that were committed by many, many priests, and covered up by their bishops. I myself lived outside Boston when the scandal broke, and saw Cardinal Law recalled to Rome (and promoted) by the Pope himself - a more stark depiction of institutional rot is hard to imagine.
But now consider that membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary. If you don't like their church, you are free to go to a different one. But if you don't like your local UK Council (local government), you have to move away from your family and friends.
I guess you could try to vote them out, but what are your chances making this an election issue when there's a chance that some Judge will throw you in jail for talking about it?
Question 5: Is Justice being served in the UK?
Yes, I already posed this question, but want to bring it back into focus after the discussion above. Certainly some people think that the answer is no:
Even if everything done by the police or the court was perfectly legitimate and reasonable, the problem is that many people in England believe that Tommy Robinson is being unjustly persecuted by his government. The fact that he was arrested so shortly after his successful Day for Freedom event, where he gathered thousands of people in support of free speech, strikes many as a little bit more than a coincidence.
Discussion
This is what a collapse of legitimacy looks like. The answers to the questions are more or less irrelevant; the fact that they can be posed without being dismissed out of hand is the point. Societies are remarkably resilient: Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country, and Roman political and social institutions outlived the fall of the Western Empire by a century or more. But that was because everyone more or less agreed that those institutions still deserved support even though the Emperor had been replaced by the Rex of the Goths.
That's not we're looking at here.
Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven. We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties. Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments. Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection. And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon.
But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night. The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice. What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken? How big does that group need to be?
I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important. What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.
UPDATE 1 June 2018 12:42: Via Brock Townsend, I see that I'm not the only one who sees things this way.
Isegoria finds a fascinating article (at Politico, of all places) that paints Steve Bannon as perhaps the most interesting man in Washington, D.C. - at least intellectually:
But if Bannon has been the driving force behind the frenzy of activity in the White House, less attention has been paid to the network of political philosophers who have shaped his thinking and who now enjoy a direct line to the White House.
They are not mainstream thinkers, but their writings help to explain the commotion that has defined the Trump administration’s early days. They include a Lebanese-American author known for his theories about hard-to-predict events; an obscure Silicon Valley computer scientist whose online political tracts herald a “Dark Enlightenment”; and a former Wall Street executive who urged Donald Trump’s election in anonymous manifestos by likening the trajectory of the country to that of a hijacked airplane—and who now works for the National Security Council.
Woah! Readers not familiar with the concept of the "Dark Enlightenment" (and who are a glutton for punishment) will find this idea explored in a dozen or more posts here over the last 5 or 6 years. It sets the stage for understanding Politico's article on what is really an intellectual revolution. I'm kind of stunned to find this at ground zero of the Trump White House.
My take is that this is very, very bad news for the anti-Trump side. All of the intellectual action for at least a couple of decades has been on the other side from them:
And thus we see described all we need to entirely understand Thomas Friedman's oeuvre: "adequately predictable". While I disagree with much that is in the book (in this, I clearly benefit from knowing the history of the last 50 years, which Galbraith could not), this is a tour de forcewhich is an absolute pleasure to read.
And who are now finding that this intellectual revolution is at the center of the Trump revolution.
There's a lot to read in all these links, but this is big, big stuff. I must say that I am more impressed with Donald Trump today than I was yesterday. He doesn't think small or conventional thoughts, and it doesn't look like he surrounds himself with those that do.
Overall, there were at least eight elements built into the fabric of the federal government for the purpose of balancing the states’ power against that of the federal government. There are still four left.
Actually, by his count there are three left. His first one is Secession, which Foseti dealt with some time back. That link is well worth a read.
In unrelated-but-related news, we are told that the grandsons of John Tyler - the 10th U.S. President - are still alive:
The Tyler men have a habit of having kids very late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, one of President Tyler’s 15 kids, was born in 1853. He fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928.
And so back to Aretae's list. All eight elements were in full force when Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr's father was born. Five were left when he was born, and he has watched another two be eliminated.
TL;DR: it only took two generations for the majority of the pillars of Separation of Powers to be eliminated. Moldbug said something similar, although in eleventy million more words.
But hey, Aretae's back! Go leave him some welcome-back comment love.
Over the last year or so, though, it’s become increasingly clear to me that one of the great tides of American politics has turned and is flowing out to sea. For almost precisely two hundred years, this country’s political discourse has been shaped—more powerfully, perhaps, than by any other single force—by the loose bundle of ideas, interests, and values we can call American liberalism. That’s the tide that’s turning. The most important trends shaping the political landscape of our time, to my mind, are the descent of the liberal movement into its final decadence, and the first stirrings of the postliberal politics that is already emerging in its wake.
There's a lot of background here about where progressivism came from (Harvard, 'natch, but back in the 1820s) and the ground from which ground it grew (New England Congregationalism - the institutional church of the Puritans - along with Unitarians, a religious sect for the intellectuals of the day). What's interesting is how closely this dovetails with what Moldbug posted quite some time ago:
The "ultracalvinist hypothesis" is the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called "progressive," "multiculturalist," "universalist," "liberal," "politically correct," etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.
Specifically, ultracalvinism (which I have also described here and here) is the primary surviving descendant of the American mainline Protestant tradition, which has been the dominant belief system of the United States since its founding. It should be no surprise that it continues in this role, or that since the US's victory in the last planetary war it has spread worldwide.
...
The "calvinist" half of this word refers to the historical chain of descent from John Calvin and his religious dictatorship in Geneva, passing through the English Puritans to the New England Unitarians, abolitionists and Transcendentalists, Progressives and Prohibitionists, super-protestants, hippies and secular theologians, and down to our own dear progressive multiculturalists.
The "ultra" half refers to my perception that, at least compared to other Christian sects, the beliefs of this faith are relatively aggressive and unusual.
...
And when we look at the real-world beliefs of ultracalvinists, we see that ultracalvinism is anything but content-free. By my count, the ultracalvinist creed has four main points:
First, ultracalvinists believe in the universal brotherhood of man. As an Ideal (an undefined universal) this might be called Equality. ("All men and women are born equal.") If we wanted to attach an "ism" to this, we could call it fraternalism.
Second, ultracalvinists believe in the futility of violence. The corresponding ideal is of course Peace. ("Violence only causes more violence.") This is well-known as pacifism.
Third, ultracalvinists believe in the fair distribution of goods. The ideal is Social Justice, which is a fine name as long as we remember that it has nothing to do with justice in the dictionary sense of the word, that is, the accurate application of the law. ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") To avoid hot-button words, we will ride on a name and call this belief Rawlsianism.
Fourth, ultracalvinists believe in the managed society. The ideal is Community, and a community by definition is led by benevolent experts, or public servants. ("Public servants should be professional and socially responsible.") After their counterparts east of the Himalaya, we can call this belief mandarism.
That's a pretty good description of progressivism. But the Archdruid posits that this movement is running out of gas:
Let’s take current US immigration policy as an example. This limits the number of legal immigrants while tacitly allowing unlimited illegal immigration. There are solid pragmatic reasons for questioning the appropriateness of that policy. The US today has the highest number of permanently unemployed people in its history, incomes and standards of living for the lower 80% of the population have been moving raggedly downward since the 1970s, and federal tax policies effectively subsidize the offshoring of jobs. That being the case, allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who have, for all practical purposes, no legal rights, and can be employed at sweatshop wages in substandard conditions, can only drive wages down further than they’ve already gone, furthering the impoverishment and immiseration of wage-earning Americans.
These are valid issues, dealing with (among other things) serious humanitarian concerns for the welfare of wage-earning Americans, and they have nothing to do with racial issues—they would be just as compelling if the immigrants were coming from Canada. Yet you can’t say any of this in the hearing of a modern American liberal. If you try, you can count on being shouted down and accused of being a racist. Why? I’d like to suggest that it’s because the affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.
That is to say, a movement that began its history with the insistence that values had a place in politics alongside interests has ended up using talk about values to silence discussion of the ways in which its members are pursuing their own interests. That’s not a strategy with a long shelf life, because it doesn’t take long for the other side to identify, and then exploit, the gap between rhetoric and reality.
If there's a single theme to the current election season, it's a revolt against hypocrisy:
The current US presidential election shows, perhaps better than anything else, just how far that decadence has gone. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is floundering in the face of Trump’s challenge because so few Americans still believe that the liberal shibboleths in her campaign rhetoric mean anything at all. Even among her supporters, enthusiasm is hard to find, and her campaign rallies have had embarrassingly sparse attendance. Increasingly frantic claims that only racists, fascists, and other deplorables support Trump convince no one but true believers, and make the concealment of interests behind shopworn values increasingly transparent. Clinton may still win the election by one means or another, but the broader currents in American political life have clearly changed course.
It’s possible to be more precise. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in stark contrast to Clinton, have evoked extraordinarily passionate reactions from the voters, precisely because they’ve offered an alternative to a status quo pervaded by the rhetoric of a moribund liberalism. In the same way, in Britain—where the liberal movement followed a somewhat different trajectory but has ended up in the same place—the success of the Brexit campaign and the wild enthusiasm with which Labour Party voters have backed the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn show that the same process is well under way there. Having turned into the captive ideology of an affluent elite, liberalism has lost the loyalty of the downtrodden that once, with admittedly mixed motives, it set out to help. That’s a loss it’s unlikely to survive. [emphasis mine - Borepatch]
That last is the key condemnation of the movement. It was always a philosophy for the intellectual "elite", but the last several decades have seen it used to entirely capture public policy - policy that has been exercised solely for the financial benefit of that "elite" and at the expense of what in a simpler day were called "the masses".
And the masses have woken up to the fact that they are being fleeced by the "elites". The reaction from both groups is entirely predictable:
Over the decades ahead, in other words, we can expect the emergence of a postliberal politics in the United States, England, and quite possibly some other countries as well. The shape of the political landscape in the short term is fairly easy to guess.Watch the way the professional politicians in the Republican Party have flocked to Hillary Clinton’s banner, and you can see the genesis of a party of the affluent demanding the prolongation of free trade, American intervention in the Middle East, and the rest of the waning bipartisan consensus that supports its interests. Listen to the roars of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—or better still, talk to the not inconsiderable number of Sanders supporters who will be voting for Trump this November—and you can sense the emergence of a populist party seeking the abandonment of that consensus in defense of its very different interests.
Read both of the linked posts, which do a better job explaining the current political dynamic than anything I've seen in ages.
