One the features of the modern age, something most people think is a good thing, is that armed rebellion is no longer practical, even for the most disaffected. If you were a young man in Serbia just before the Great War, armed revolt was all that was on your mind. If you were a young man in Germany at that time, you may have grown up hearing stories about how your grandfather fought in the 1848 revolution.

Today, a young man would know organized violence only if he was in a street gang, the army or maybe the police. Terrorism is something we experience, but only through our televisions. If you live in the West, the odds that you will experience a terrorist attack are astoundingly low. If you look up some of the stats and do a bit of math, falling off a ladder or drowning in a bathtub are far more likely than being a victim or terrorism.

Part of this drop in political violence is prosperity. Mexico, a poor country by modern standards, leads the world in obesity. It’s hard to ¡Viva la revolución! when your hands are full of churros. I grew up in real poverty, but today’s poverty means basic cable and the low end iPhone, a condition the poor used to think was beyond their grasp. Prosperity, it turns out, is the best weapon against the revolutionary.

That does not mean people are happy with the current arrangements. The political ructions we see all over the West are not without cause. Lots of people are unhappy with their government so they are trying to elect people that promise to change things. UKIP in Britain, AfD in Germany, Trump in America, the Real Fins and so forth are essentially just protests. Supporters look past their eccentricities because they are trying to make a point to the legitimate parties.

There’s also the fact that armed revolts tend not to work. Americans, for example, are not looking to overthrow representative democracy or the Constitutional order. If anything, they want to restore those things. Therefore, burning down the capital and hanging the politicians are not on the menu. Middle-class people in middle-class countries prefer other ways to force change on their political classes.

Of course, there’s also the fact that the custodial state is pretty good at tamping down trouble now. If a public figure gets too aggressive in his vitriol, then he is accused of being Hitler or his private affairs are made public. Maybe some of his professional failures are brought to light. In a mass media culture, it’s pretty easy to find something to use against someone in order to diminish them in the eyes of the public.

Manufactured campaigns are regularly orchestrated against public figures in order to shame them into compliance. In authoritarian hellholes like Canada, they put comics on trial for telling the wrong jokes. That sends a powerful message to anyone who has thoughts about rocking the boat or organizing resistance to the ruling order. Long before a revolutionary leader could get going, he will be shamed off the public stage.

My bet is the assault on Trump, for example, is just getting started. If you look at National Review, it has given itself over completely to spreading every crackpot smear about Trump imaginable. By summer, the party media organs will be talking about Trump as if he was a current a slave holder and member of the Aryan Brotherhood. They are trying to ostracize the man, by ruining his name.

It strikes me that protest is going to have to change in order to be effective in the custodial state. The tools of the state are simply too effective at disrupting anything that resembles armed rebellion. Protest candidates and protest parties are increasingly walled off from having an impact on elections. Fear of being ostracized puts anyone with something to lose on the sidelines.

Revolt in the custodial state, I suspect, will be a loosely organized disruption. The Black Lives Matters is a good example of things to come. They show up and make a nuisance of themselves at some managerial class venue, then leave. They don’t do enough to get arrested and they do their act in such a way that the “name and shame” response is pointless.

Now, Black Lives Matter is stupid and pointless, but the tactic is useful. What’s to stop the Christian working at the courthouse from “accidentally” slowing down the process of issuing marriage licenses to gays? What about people systematically lying on government forms? In isolation, these things mean nothing, but cumulatively they can cause all sorts of headaches for the people in charge.

There’s also the fact that in a mass media culture, things like Black Lives Matter get massive coverage. This invites imitation. When idiotic things like “planking” can catch on in days due to the lubricant of mass media, imagine how cool forms of protest can sprout up and create mayhem. As Steve Sailer points out, the Million Muslim March into Europe is just a big flash mob.

My thinking here is that the custodial state is relying on tools that can just as easily be used against it. The massive bureaucracies needed to manage the inmates are vulnerable to some idiot throwing sand in the gears. The mass media tools used to nudge the population can just as easily be used to encourage ad hoc idiots throwing sand in the gears.

This is not a fully developed idea, but I’m wondering if the current ructions may be due to the inherit instability of the custodial state. Maybe the reason Europe, for example, is not shutting off the flow of migrants is they can’t shut it off. Maybe the reason the main parties are under assault is they can no longer respond to their voters. The feedback loop is broken so the public is migrating to outsiders.

To wrap this up, the custodial state may be good at walling off traditional forms of protest, but it is also good at fostering the sort of protests to which it is most vulnerable. These are the low-tech forms of hooliganism that bedeviled the Soviets but updated to the mass media age. A million white guys ticking the box for “Afro-American Female” is both fun and subversive.

If a million Muslims with iPhones can bring down Europe, imagine what a million smart guys can do when they have time and a full spectrum understanding of how it all works.

Other than libertarians, people of every ideological strip start with the basics of modern civics. All of us have an obligation to our fellow citizens and our government has an obligation to all of us. Your duty as a citizen is not to the ruler, but to your fellow citizens. That means the men and women in government jobs have those same obligations. That’s the foundation stone of popular government. We create among ourselves the apparatus of the state so it can serve our collective interests.

Fundamental to making this work is the idea of fairness. No one gets everything they want and few are deprived of getting something they want. Similarly, no group is getting to game the laws to take advantage of others. The laws in a society under popular government are often aimed at addressing the issue of fairness. Rich guys pay more in taxes than poor guys because the bulk of the people think it is only fair. After all, the rich guy is getting more from the bargain.

That’s obviously a very simple way of putting it, but fairness is the canvas on which popular government is drawn. It is the sense of fairness that is at the heart of reform campaigns and the primary appeal of political parties. Democrats in America have been campaigning on fairness for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Even Republicans tuck the fairness issue into their appeals for low taxes and open borders. In the West, at least, popular government is nothing but a debate over what is fair and equitable.

I suspect that part of what’s happening to the Republicans, and the Buckley Conservatives, is rooted in the fairness issue. The people fobbing themselves off as conservatives these days are mostly libertarians with some social conservative ideas bolted on as decoration. This is the result of Frank Meyer Fusionism, which was supposed to bring together the free market ideas of libertarians and the traditionalism of the old Right. Today it is just technocratic libertarianism with some hand waving about abortion and the gays.

As I’m fond of pointing out to libertarians, people are not moist robots. Their heads may say that the factory has to close because it is losing money, but they still feel terrible for the men getting pink slips. They may be swayed by free trade appeals, but they still feel wrong seeing jobs being shipped to China, while Americans end up on the welfare rolls. It’s the nagging sense of fairness that leads us to think that maybe we’re not living up to our obligations to our fellow citizens.

Consider this story from a couple of weeks ago.

Union leaders at an air conditioner factory in Indianapolis threatened with losing 1,400 jobs to Mexico said on Tuesday the plant’s owner expects to pay Mexican workers $3 an hour compared to an average of more than $20 an hour for the U.S. workers.

“We haven’t given up the fight yet,” said Chuck Jones, president of the United Steelworkers union local that represents workers at the Carrier Corp plant. “But Carrier has pretty well indicated that the wage differential is too great and there’s not much we can do.”

A spokeswoman for Carrier, a unit of United Technologies Corp (UTX.N), said the company pays a “competitive wage” based on local conditions and could not discuss pay levels.

Union and Carrier officials were locked in talks on Tuesday as a political storm raged around them.

The announcement last week from Carrier that it would shift 1,400 jobs from Indianapolis and 700 from another plant in Huntington, Indiana to Monterrey, Mexico starting in 2017 prompted Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump to say he would tax Carrier air conditioning units for moving to Mexico.

Normal Americans can wrap their heads around the fact that Carrier will save a lot of money by moving their plant to Mexico. They understand that this may be necessary to remain competitive. They also wonder why our government is doing all of these favors for Mexico, when the Mexicans do things like ship us narcotics, gangsters and illegal aliens. In other words, something feels wrong here. Whose interests are being served here? It is clearly not the Americans working at the Carrier plant.

Now, look at this story from Silicon Valley.

Human-resources software company Zenefits had to send an uncomfortable HR email to their own to staff recently following a few incidents within their San Francisco office.

The startup, which launched less than three years ago but was evaluated last May at $4.5 billion, was forced to ban staff from drinking in the office after some wild parties that involved employees having sex in the stairwell of the building, according to emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The emails, sent around last summer by Zenefits Director of Real Estate and Workplace Services, Emily Agin, described the situation of employees having sex at work as ‘crude behavior’.

‘It has been brought to our attention by building management and Security that the stairwells are being used inappropriately….Cigarettes, plastic cups filled with beer, and several used condoms were found in the stairwell. Yes, you read that right,’ the email said.

‘Do not use the stairwells to smoke, drink, eat, or have sex.

‘Please respect building and company policy and use common sense…’

The alcohol ban was officially brought in last week by Zenefits’s new chief executive, David Sacks.

Sacks said it is important to cultivate a more mature work atmosphere in a staff memo that was sent around last Wednesday.

Zenefits is a company that exists because of the financialization of the US economy. Cheap credit means cash to create this firm and keep it afloat while it parties its way through a ton of cash. It’s also the sort of firm that helps business treat their employees like furniture. Americans see these stories and naturally wonder how these rich pricks are allowed to get away with this nonsense. No American can smoke and drink at work, much less get it on in the stairwell.

When the boys and girls of Conservative Inc, cloistered in their taxpayer financed monasteries around Washington, cry out “A furore Lutumnorum libera nos, Domine” they are not thinking about stories like these. They have been insulated from the consequences of the polices they are paid to promote. The Dirt People, however, look at the unfairness they see everyday on their televisions and on-line and wonder why their leaders have forsaken them.

A mistake to which all of us are prone is to imagine that the future will be just like the present, just with more. If you are Gloomy Gus, the future will be more surveillance, more control and less liberty. If you are Suzy Sunshine, the future will be flying cars and hot looking women in Lycra jumpsuits. These are not conclusions drawn from evidence, but the starting point for accumulating evidence.
This is why humans have a fondness for rewriting history. Progressives go so far as to cut themselves off from the past as it tends to contradict much of what they believe. Normal people are content to just pluck the lessons of the past that confirm their beliefs. Gloomy Gus will compare today to the days before a great calamity. Suzy Sunshine will use the same event to point out how much better things are now.
The point here is that the future is probably not going to be better or worse. It will simply be different. The things that are different will feel better to the people of that age, because they will be living in that age. Their customs and solutions will have evolved for the challenges of their age. That’s the thing to keep in mind when thinking about human societies. The social and political arrangements exist as solutions to prior problems. They did not spring from nothing.
Our mass democracy, for example, is no more a permanent feature of life than slavery was a permanent feature in the 19th century. Slavery stopped being useful to human society so it was eliminated. If democracy stops being a benefit, then it will be junked in favor of something thought to be a better fit for the time. Popular elections and self-government are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The attempt to democratize Iraq is a rather obvious example.
The reason we have popular government is rich people needed an alternative to inherited rule and autocracy, which were ill-suited to commercial societies and dangerous in industrial societies. Allowing the people to pick among acceptable options put forth by the upper classes brought social stability, a thing the rich always want above all else. You cannot maintain your position in a world of turmoil. Allowing the masses to participate, brought stability so it evolved as the preferred option.
The West is now post-industrial. In fact, we are arguably in a post-scarcity, technological society. The growing custodial state is a response to technology and abundance. The old saying about idle hands doing the Devil’s work is true. In the modern West, most hands are idle for long periods of time. One could argue that the explosion of rules on speech, conduct and privacy is a response to this.
The question is whether mass democracy can still work in a mass media culture with a custodial state. In 1992, which is roughly the dawn of this current era, 35 million Americans voted in the party primaries. Both parties had exciting races, but turnout was in line with prior elections. In 2016, more than 70 million people will vote in these primaries. The reason for this is it everyone has a stake in who is in control of the custodial state.
Low turnout used to be a topic of conversation in America. Europeans voted in huge numbers while Americans tended to blow off elections. That’s no longer the case as government in America has become almost as pervasive as in Europe. When everything is political, which is the case in a custodial state, everyone has to be political. In a prison, the inmates know every tick and habit of the guards.
This sounds like a winning formula. The rich people in charge offer up acceptable options and the people come out in huge numbers to confirm one or the other. But what if some nut job manages to win and gain control of the all-powerful custodial state? Barak Obama was able to use the IRS to harass opponents. What is some truly deranged guy gets into the White House? What sort of damage could he do to the country?
In a mass media age where the people interface with everything through TV and the Internet, the guy who wins the election is the best actor on screen. Donald Trump is winning the GOP primary because he is a master of mass media. He’s been doing it his whole life. He’s running a modern, 21st century celebrity campaign and on the verge of toppling one of the political parties.
How many professional Republicans are big fans of democracy now?
Now, I don’t think Donald Trump is a power-mad super-villain, who will seize power once he wins the election. In all probability, he will usher in a few reforms and otherwise be more of the same. That’s not what’s important to the people in charge. They will quietly push their own reforms in order to prevent the next Donald Trump, who may be the charismatic super-villain they fear.
The Democrats have already changed their nominating rules so the party can put their thumb on the scale and block an insurgent candidate. The super delegate system means Bernie Sanders could win every primary from here on out and still not win the nomination. Party officials now control so many delegates, they can pick the winner in spite of the voters. The GOP will surely do something similar after this election to make sure they never suffer another Trump.
Beyond these changes to the party system, we are seeing the adoption of the European habit of removing whole topics from popular consideration. These are transferred to supra-national organizations that operate beyond the will of national governments. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example, is about removing trade and immigration discussions from politics. There’s a push to circumvent the US Constitution by signing off on arms control deals that strip citizens of their gun rights.
As an aside, this steady transfer of power from the national government to other entities may be a part of what’s driving voter participation and anger, despite relatively good economic times. People sense that control is slipping beyond their grasp so they are “getting involved” in an attempt to arrest this development. That’s purely speculative, but a byproduct of mass media is a loss of identity. We’re all plankton floating in an ocean of information.
I’ve gone on longer than I like so let me just finish by pointing out that liberty is an anomaly. For almost all of human existence humans have lived in authoritarian systems of one sort or another. The way to bet is that what comes next is closer to the norm than the constitutional liberty we think is the ideal. A generation from now, voting may still exist, but be entirely meaningless, like the result of a football game and no one will think it odd.