Eric Hoffer famously said that what starts out in America as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation. As we saw with Covid, it can often be all of these things at the same time. When Hoffer made this observation, mass media was still in the analog age, so things moved slower. A movement would linger for while in the corporate stage before devolving into a racket. In the digital age, these things can happen simultaneously and instantaneously.
The reason for this is America is not an actual country, like France or Sweden, but an open outdoor bazaar held together by a merchant class. As Coolidge supposedly said, the business of America is business. That means everything is treated as a business, even things that should never be a business. It is the worship of the marketplace where everyone assumes the right answer will magically arise from the transactions that occur in the marketplace. The invisible hand is our god.
The trouble is, there are things that are true that people would like to think are not true, so those market results will be at odds with reality. There are things in every society that should never be exposed to market forces. They are too important to let the fickle mobs in the marketplace decide. In theory, this is supposed to be a bedrock assumption of the American form of government. There are things like natural rights that are beyond the reach of the political process.
The corrosive effect of marketism on the political process is clear in the political industrial complex that has consumed the political system. Billions are made every election cycle in politics. What should be a straightforward process whereby the parties and candidates make their case to the voters, is instead run by a massive political industry of consultants, advisers, technicians and the media. All of these people are in the process to make money from politics.
Here is a useful example in a legacy site called the American Spectator. The post is an argument in favor of something called rank choice voting. This a system that requires voters to list their preferred candidates in order of preference. The first choices are then counted up and you get the normal total. In some systems, if no candidate gets fifty percent of the vote, then the second choices are tallied up and added to the candidates total. In other systems, this is automatic.
There are two rather obvious problems with this system. One is it adds a layer of complexity to the voting system. A central tenet of all democratic systems, even those that limit the role of voting, is that voting is clear and open. In the rank choice voting systems, you can get a minority candidate winning the election, despite most people voting for some other option. Put another way, it is not clear to the users of the system how their inputs will affect the outputs of the system.
Therein lies the other problem. This added complexity becomes a bonanza for the army of grifters in the political system. Now that the social media consultant racket has run its course, they get to jump on the ranked choice voting scam. You can be sure that all of the pinheads with “social media influencer’ in their bio are now thinking about removing the Ukraine flag so they can make room for the letters RCV. This “innovation” is quickly becoming both a racket and a business.
The proof of this assertion is the man behind that post. According to his bio, Eric Wilson is a digital-first political strategist based in Washington, DC. He was a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, located at the Harvard Kennedy School. In other words, his post at The American Spectator is simply advertising for his services. Ranked choice voting, according to Eric Wilson, is good for the people, because it is profitable for him.
It cannot be emphasized enough just how terrible ranked choice voting is for a country that is quickly losing trust in its systems. With normal voting it takes some jurisdictions weeks to count the vote. The Alaska election he holds up as a great example took weeks to sort out after the election. Imagine that in a big corrupt state like California or New York. It will take years to resolve an election. There are still court cases going on over the 2020 presidential election.
Of course, this can only add to the sense that voting is rigged. Every innovation, like mail in voting, early voting, ballot harvesting and drop box voting has come with an observable increase in shenanigans. The states at the center of the 2020 election scandal were states that suddenly embraced innovated voting methods. Imagine a state like Pennsylvania suddenly switching to ranked choice voting a week before the election and you have the beginnings of armed revolt.
Of course, the promise of chaos is exactly why the consultant class want yet another way to muddy the waters on election day. Chaos is good for business. The fact that it is bad for the health of society is besides the point. Those racks of donuts are not going to buy themselves, so that means Eric Wilson needs steady work. If that work is bad for the people, well, too bad for them. They should have figured out a way to grift on the collapse of their country like Eric Wilson.
This is the problem with marketism. When everything must be exposed to the marketplace, everything quickly becomes a racket. When the governance of your country becomes a racket, you no longer have a country. That is why the people at the top of the racket so fiercely oppose anything that looks like community. It offers an alternative morality to that of marketism. If people begin to put something ahead of making a quick buck, the market could collapse.
That is where things are headed. Politics is a massive racket run by conmen, grifters and sociopaths who care only about a quick buck. The system staggers on because of the cultural inertia behind it, but eventually, it must succumb. There are also ideologues that take advantage of this to push their agenda. We see that with the neocons and their efforts to blow up the world. With no one in power interested in the wellbeing of the system, the system will eventually collapse.
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“An open outdoor bizarre held together by a merchant class.” Nice turn of phrase, but I think Modern Heretic 3000 nailed it when he describes the United States as a “globalist Kosher bodega”.
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“Bazaar”, though it also is bizarre.
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There have actually been a few lib op-eds that argue the ideal version of America is something resembling a Third World souk surrounded by restaurants and temples that serve up copious amounts of alien cuisines and faiths.
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That is a curious irony that is lost on the lefties in my life. They love seeing the foreigners and the foreign restaurants in their suburban towns. For a lefty, if you can’t be rich, then at least be well-travelled. Lefties love travelling and “expanding their minds” which is why they love having foreigners and diversity within their midst: they don’t have to travel to eat that street falaffel they gushed about in Berlin. So now they can gush about that modest Arab street food they found 15 minutes away.
I might bring up the fact that that food exists because Arabs exist and have lived in Arabia for centuries. That quaint Irish pub food they love exists for the same reason. Of course, the falaffel or colcannon would not have ever existed had those host countries allowed unfettered immmigration and willful replacement.
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I’ve said before, but I think it has already collapsed, at least for all intents and purposes. I have not travelled outside of the country in some time, but my sense would be if I were suddenly on the Uris de looking man I would see the country in its true state.
And part of this is that we are becoming a prison, and even the general aesthetic has prison overtones, namely where else are there tons of dykes in charge and the only woman a man could ever hope for is a man in a dress? I mean they’re taking prison life and imposing it on all of us, and under the guise of equality and inclusion?. I guess they think that sounds better. But the way the people were all encouraged to get tatted up like prisoners should have been an early warning.
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* If I were suddenly on the outside looking in
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Yeah and I think as the collapse becomes more apparent our ‘leaders’ will become more authoritarian to usher in the slave state they’re so excited about. And their war to destroy Russia has spectacularly blackfired. if Putin succeeds with BRICS it’s going to take them off the top of the hill and isolate them. Yeesh. This is gonna get worse and be bad for while. Oh well. Where’s the challenge in a peaceful death?
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What the morons in control fail to realize is that there can be no innovation in a slave state.
That said, they will push for nuclear war as soon as they internalize the reality the GAE is so de-industrialized it has no hope of winning a conventional war against Russia or China.
I believe the weird nuclear attack PSAs eminating from NYC were the first signs of this realization.
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RCV also a year ago produced the simpleton vegetarian mayor of NYC, Eric Adams.
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I haven’t read the article, but it needs to be asked what issues does the current system have and will RCV help address those issues. I seriously doubt anyone pushing RCV is honest about the issues in the current system which renders any “fixes” it’s supposed to deploy meaningless. As your example points out, it appears it actually only serves to make a bad situation worse.
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RCV is peddled as a way to give 3rd party candidates a chance. You’re not “wasting your vote” by voting green, or libertarian, or communist, or whatever…because when they don’t win, your “second choice” (i.e., the D or the R) gets the vote.
Alaska really proved how sneaky this is : More Republicans actually voted, but the Democrat won the seat.
RCV: Good on paper, not so good in real life. Democracy in America as a dating app. How appropriate.
Haven’t read The American Spectator in awhile. I didn’t realize they were publishing paid for content like National Review. Their comments section, which I assume is regular readers were not interested in what this shill is selling.
One of the many opportunities Trump missed was not attacking the third world vote counting in California. Especially after the 2018 midterms when they were still counting votes after Thanksgiving, this should have been low hanging fruit for his administration.
4
Nonsense.
Blame the market for grift, corruption and cheatery? You may as well blame white gun owners for black crime.
Criminals thrive in a society that tolerates them. We are seeing increased criminality because guys exactly like you and I tolerate it. We sit on the sidelines and maybe gripe about it on the internet. Not to fed-poast… but things will not change until there is a downside to engaging in this behavior. Joe, Hilary, Romney, Kerry – every single rat bastard one of them would not do the things they do if there were a good chance of winding up dead or in jail.
No, the market is not to blame, nor is the system. It’s the guys running it, and the refusal to enforce laws that are already on the books that prohibit this kind of conduct.
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It’s kinda like blaming “breathing” for inhaling the virus that made you sick.
1
In Ireland we have a voting system like the zman describes, but we also have multi seat constituencies, it more or less works for us. But I don’t see it working in the US
When I say it more or less works, I mean our problems run along deeper than the voting system. We still have a terrible ruling class
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Our problems also run deeper than the voting system. I cannot possibly see a benefit to ranked choice voting in any form of government. The idea that the in a democracy with virtually no restrictions on the franchise and a totally ignorant populace that you would want voters trying to spend the time to rank candidates is insanity.
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There is no voting your way out of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11184043/Teacher-refused-use-students-gender-neutral-pronouns-JAILED-Ireland.html
The West is now ruled by a class every bit as degenerate and corrupt as the Ancien Régime. It must meet the same fate.
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Paper ballots, filled out in person with ID (and purple finger ink while we’re in fantasy land) fixes all the corruption. Which is why it will never happen.
Japan rejected electronic voting machines a few years back. They have auditable paper ballots with results in under a day.
It’s so incredibly obvious that the US voting system is designed from floor to ceiling to be corrupted it’s a wonder any thinking person ever votes.
1
Politics is a massive racket run by conmen, grifters and sociopaths who care only about a quick buck.
Maybe you mean adjuncts like David Axelrod or Jim Messina. But even these electoral mercenaries aren’t temporary figures in politics. Success makes them, and perhaps their offspring, wealthy over the long haul.
The actual officials that they engineer into office establish dynasties with influence over many years. The degenerate Kennedys are a great example, as are the Gores, Longs, Adams, Bushes and now the dumpy Chelsea and the soon-to-be incredibly influential and electable Obama progeny. The quick political buck can exist for generations.
1
With no one in power interested in the wellbeing of the system…
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Just like “power comes from the wall socket” and “food comes from the grocery store” the political system comes from the buildings it occupies. They keep assaulting the back-end supports for everything and yet they show up every day and there’s still power coming out of the socket, food at the store, and government in the buildings…at least until there isn’t.
(A meta-issue of course is that all these clowns had to be as semi-functional and their descendants would be able to grift far into the future, but, they cannot help themselves).
4
Reminds me of the female Ceo of GM demonstrating and talking about their electric car and more importantly the advantages of electric. Someone asked where does the power come from? Meaning it doesn’t miraculously power itself without the grid and all the repercussions to the environment.
She said it comes from the building behind her. That’s where they charged it.
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Here is the clip of the incident described:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/RoHYtP7Uory6/
Eventually they find a stale pale male who explains the local grid is, “…about 95% coal.”
3
Probably the most ubiquitous mindset that shows most people are just a bunch of spiritual merchants is when you ask them about solutions to problems.
Lousy schools? Lack of funding.
Water Treatment Plants failing? Lack of funding.
Mass homelessness? Lack of funding.
They never ask how schools operated when the local literally built the schoolhouse themselves and hired a teacher themselves, all while being poor farmers.
They never ask why the Water Treatment Plant worked fine on a fraction of the budget when it was a culturally cohesive group of white guys running it.
They never ask why funding homeless programs has seemed to make homelessness worse, and their behavior even more detrimental.
You see this even among conservatives with their “build your own” mindset, completely oblivious to the corporate stranglehold and subtle ways they can be destroyed in the new business environment, or explaining that these programs would be fine if they weren’t done by government but the private sector instead.
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Back then, the teachers accepted corn, apples, or other truck as a salary. Today’s blue-haired cross dressers are too entitled to make such a sacrifice.
4
Reminds me that a Japanese politician – remarking on Coolidge’s quote – said the business of Japan is the Japanese.
We are controlled by a group who were bred to parse and manipulate words. It’s why they so hate simplicity. They want to debate every word until their is no meaning other than what they want at that moment.
The Japanese know that Japanese means one thing and one thing only – the ethnic people living in Japan. No clever wordsmith can get around that.
The marketplace – both economic and political – has taken over because we never had a simple notion of who we were, or, maybe we did and forgot it, so we just go with what’s popular or sounds nice. The American experiment is a failure. We’ve learned that you can’t base a people on ideas because those ideas can be manipulated, either by clever minorities or stupid majorities.
There’s no bedrock on which to fall back when the basis of your society is challenged. The Japanese openly and proudly say that the Japanese people are a race, united by ancestry, history and culture. No amount of word play will convince them otherwise. Sadly, this is not true of the various European tribes, but, like us, they are also failing.
Societies built around values and not a people are a failed experiment, the likes of which we won’t see again for a very long time.
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In a confident society, there are certain tenets you do not question, not because of some authority but because, regardless of pedantry, there are things you simply know in your bones. Once a people put these core pieces of identity and seeing the world open to debate, it’s only a matter of time before it all collapses. It’s not because the new way of thinking is better either, but often simply because it’s more subversive, a sort of mind virus that acts like those flies that burrow into a beetle’s skull and convinces the creature to drown itself.
The people most susceptible are the intellectuals, who then try to spread their virus to the people closer to the Earth.
5
Intellectuals are the most easily manipulated because they don’t feel a connection with regular people and because they do feel a connection with other intellectuals who are spread around the world.
An intellectual’s world is global and works just fine for them. The faculty are from around the world and their college town is very nice, so they can’t understand why the whole world can’t be like their little world.
4
Thinkers should be required to be worldly before they sequester in the academy. It’s a global network of the most provincial places.
1
I suspect intellectuals are easily manipulated because it’s expected of them to think big thoughts. And if your thoughts are no different from those of the hoi polloi, you’re not much of an intellectual, are you?
So they deliberately go in search of thoughts that fly against common sense, thoughts that only fellow intellectuals can understand: any pleb can argue that there are only two sexes, it takes real intellectual edge to argue there are 72 because that’s a much harder argument to make.
I Liked this:
“an open outdoor bizarre held together by a merchant class.”
But you probably meant this
“an open outdoor bazaar held together by a merchant class.
2
Either is perfectly descriptive!
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It’s a bizare. It’s a bizarre bazaar.
“Chaos is good for business.”
It’s also a necessary prerequisite for remedy. Chaos does many things. It creates a fog of civil unrest typically in the form of street protests and mass demonstrations. In the case of Antifa mobs, it also includes wanton violence and destruction of property; typically via arson, smashing windows, and looting. What does this do? Well, it ties up nearly all of the existing emergency services in the big cities where this occurs. Typically police and fire departments are quickly overwhelmed, and if protests persist for days, those resources deplete due to overwork and being spread too thin. No one is issuing parking tickets during a riot and the normal incidences of dispersed crime are necessarily ignored because there are no resources left to address those events. And even when national guard forces are brought in to help, they mostly just create barriers to protest movement and enforce curfews. No one is “minding the store” in the traditional sense, so looting becomes easy and effectively risk free. For the typical ghetto looter, the fog of chaos is your friend. This principle has broad application.
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1
“Politics is a massive racket run by conmen, grifters and sociopaths who care only about a quick buck.”
When was it different in the USA? There have been times when populist sentiment held sway but these have been the exceptions that prove the general rule. Today the only question we need to ask of any American politician is what constellation of special interests owns him (or her). The “political-industrialist complex” is there to manufacture consensus and to get votes from the marks and rubes who bother to vote. But as Emma Goldman pointed out over a century ago, if voting could make a difference, they’d have abolished the ballot box a long time ago.
The only function voting serves today is to provide a patina of legitimacy to decisions made by an oligarchy, and to camouflage the deep state mechanisms through which this oligarchy exerts control. On the rare occasions when a maverick arises — such as Trump — and the voters don’t back the establishment candidate, the system either gets rigged or the maverick candidate finds himself hamstrung.
The US establishment likes to make-believe that it is both “capitalist” and “democratic.” But at the philosophical level there’s no way to reconcile the two. In practice large capitalist interests own and control the political process, which serves as the velvet glove to disguise the iron hand of authoritarian control beneath. But the glove is now threadbare.
10
The real problem with ranked choice is that it tends to exclude the majority candidate in favor of someone nobody likes. So in order to always elect Democrats, you wait for the Rs to flush out their single “winner” then flood the ballot with crappy Ds, and lo and behold, one of the lower-ranked Ds will win, every time. Exactly as happened in Alaska. (California’s “two highest vote getters make the ballot, regardless of party, so always two Democrats” might be regarded as a form of RCV.)
RCV only “works” to extract a candidate everyone likes when there is already a strong clear majority. When things are more confused or more evenly distributed, as with American political voting, it always promotes from the bottom, because that’s what’s left at the end.
RCV was employed at an organization I was involved with for many years, and I saw it in action enough to realize it was a fraud designed to make everyone think they had more control than they do, while promoting the otherwise-unelectable.
7
Inevitably, somebody found the clip
https://youtu.be/FJ3N_2r6R-o
Ideology frequently opposes marketism. For example, detestable as it may be, wokery is not looking to persuade the market of the value of its wares aside from the D.I.E. mantra which most wokesters don’t believe. The BLM signs on wealthy white lawns are virtue signals meant to proclaim virtue not to promote it in any sort of market sense. Dictatorship needs no market savvy in a command economy. The failure to take market forces into account frequently spells the demise of dictatorship as may happen here amid the general ruin of each against all being the primary value dictatorship nurtures for its illusory self-preservation.
“ The only function voting serves today is to provide a patina of legitimacy to decisions made by an oligarchy,…” Arshad Ali
Yep. RCV is a shiny object pointed to in order to distract from the present (corrupt) process. It’s lipstick on a pig. There are at least half a dozen serious flaws identified in the current ballot process that were used to “fix” the last election. All that’s needed is to address those flaws and we’d achieve: 1) a much more transparent, and understandable process, 2) a much less corrupt process, or at least one where cheating would be minimized to a futile endeavor.
Z-man has hit the nail on the head coming from the other direction. The problem with elections today is not the election result, it is in the process which has, little by little over decades been corrupted—ironically in the name of *more* “democracy”!
RCV is designed to obfuscate and cover up all the current balloting flaws by denying voters any clear perception of the truly favored popular candidate, force elections to be computer tabulated, and at the same time prevent hand count auditing of election results due to the amazing complexity of the tabulation process. And as Z-man has pointed out, will as likely produce a “winning” candidate no one likes—which perhaps is the whole idea (see Ali quote above). 🙁