The Myth Of Meritocracy

Posted on January 17, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not related to the topic of the day, but a topic that is becoming more important every day. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the struggles of Mumbly Joe and his crew.

Marilyn Mosby has been the State’s Attorney for Baltimore since 2015, despite the fact she has been under federal investigation for years. A federal grand jury indicted her last week on two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements on loan applications for two Florida vacation homes. Mosby applied for loans against her retirement account, exploiting a CARES Act provision for those hurt financially by the Covid-19 panic, despite never having been affected.

These may seem like petty charges, but as is often the case with public corruption investigations, this is the opening gambit in a broader investigation. Mosby’s husband has also been living under a dark cloud for years. He is the current President of the Baltimore City Council. The two of them owe the IRS over $45,000 in back taxes, despite making close to half a million a year from the city. Their lifestyle does not comport with what their financials indicate.

For her part, Mosby is promising to fight. She claims the charges are a plot by her political opponents and, of course, the invisible army of white supremacists that secretly control this racist society. The fact that Baltimore is 70% black and the political establishment in the city is 100% black does not matter. Mosby has been doing the rounds, claiming she is innocent and playing the race card. It is the usual theater of the absurd that has come to define city politics.

Public corruption is part of politics and it seems to be much more common in democratic politics. The salary for elected officials is low relative to the people who underwrite their political careers. Unlike all the other entertainment businesses, the stars of politics do not make the majority of the box office. It is the wealthy donors and lobbyists who benefit the most, so there is a natural resentment and a temptation to take a little more than what is allowed.

Compounding this arrangement is the fact that corruption is often permitted, if you are in the right part of the business. The Congressman who represents Mosby in Washington is allowed to trade on insider information, for example. He can take information known only to members of Congress, use it to front run the stock market. From the perspective of local politicians, this must seem terribly unfair, which only adds to the culture of corruption and the temptation to steal.

All that aside, Mosby is a good example of how the concept of a meritocracy does not hold up in a multicultural society. She is not in the job because of her sterling legal career or because she has done important things for the community. She was placed in the job because it looked good for her benefactors. In fact, this is the story of her life from grammar school to now. Mosby has been pushed along by the desire for salivation by members of the managerial elite.

Mosby was born and raised in Boston. Both of her parents were police officers and her grandfather was a policeman. He was one of the first black cops in the city, part of a program to boost the fortunes of black people in the city. She was sent to nice public schools as part of a program to boost the fortunes of black students. The METCO program is designed to get black students into college by placing them in predominantly white high schools outside the city.

Even though Boston has many colleges that love METCO students and New England is full of well-regarded liberal arts colleges, Mosby wound up at Tuskegee, a private historically black college in Alabama. Then by some miracle she wound up at Boston College Law. Despite graduating from one of the better law schools in the country, she could not find a paid position. Then by another miracle, she hooked on as Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a city with which she has no connections.

Mosby’s tenure as State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a position she has held since 2015, is charitably described as amusingly inept. During the Freddy Gray crisis, she often appeared disoriented at press conferences. She then declared jihad against the police department and over-charged the cops involved. The police department stopped arresting bad guys, crime shot up and the case against the cops collapsed. In time it may be seen as the peak of her political career.

The fact is Mosby should never have been put in this position. She is not qualified for the job and has no connection to the city. She was placed here because her sponsors thought she ticked certain boxes and she did not ask too many questions. Like Mortimer and Randolph from Trading Places, they thought they could make her a national political figure for reasons that had nothing to do with the public good. Merit had nothing to do with her getting placed in this position.

Defenders of this system will say that lots of white males benefit from connections and favors in their career. Private colleges, for example, give special consideration to legacy applicants, which is often affirmative for rich white people. Politics has always been a game of connections. You make the right friends who then help you along the way on the promise you will help them when the time comes. Mosby, some would argue, is just what is to be expected in a diverse democracy.

While true, it is not a defense of meritocracy or even diversity. In fact, it acknowledges that objective merit has no role in a liberal democracy. Instead, it is about the spring of democracy, which is morality. Those who champion the prevailing orthodoxy are rewarded while those who do not are excluded from the halls of power. Mosby was good for the new religion of diversity and inclusion, so she was handed the winning lottery ticket in the game of life.

In fairness, the ruling class of America does concede this. They are always going on about how success is the result of privilege. If you are born with the right characteristics, you get opportunities denied to others. The problem, of course, is this puts the lie to the foundation of managerialism. Rule by expert does not make any sense if the experts are just the product of random chance. If Mosby is the legal expert for the city, then what is the point of having rule by expert?

Mosby is just a minor figure in the provinces, but the entire political structure is built on this feeder system. Managerialism is supposed to select for and promote the very best, but instead it selects and promotes the most fashionable at the moment. Such a system cannot survive contact with reality for very long. When rule by expert becomes rule by bourgeoise social fashion, disaster is waiting to happen. It is why the future of managerialism is a city like Baltimore.

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The World State I

Posted on January 14, 2022 by thezman

One of the things that plagues opposition to the ruling regime is a poverty of language to label what is happening. The bad guys have a million ways to label their enemies, but the good guys are lacking a language to categorize the other side. The paleocons got close when they coined the term managerialism. This is both accurate and simple, but it only describes one aspect of the current system. Managerialism is one result of an ideology that has evolved over the last century.

When people hear the word “Marxism” or “communism” they immediately think of a set of economic arrangements. They may not know much about Marx or Marxism, but they know that it means the end of property and the rule by a party of ideologues. It is a simple and effective label. The same is true of communism or socialism. These words have connotations that make for effective shorthand. Even capitalism, a thing that may not actually exist, carries meaning for people.

We don’t have a label like that for the current political regime. Liberal democracy is probably accurate, but it has positive connotations. Democracy is supposed to be a good thing and liberal government is peaceful and accommodating. There are examples of things that are good separately but horrible together, like fish ice cream, but that is not really the same thing. When people in the public square use the term liberal democracy, they tend to use it in a positive way.

This conundrum is the inspiration for the show. Instead of trying to come up with a clever label for the current political order, maybe the better starting place is to just describe some of the big attributes. After all, the word “Marxism” did not come into use until the thing itself existed in some form. Once we can come up with a description for what we are experiencing, then maybe a label comes into focus. At the minimum, it starts the process of thinking about it beyond platitudes.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Managerialism
23:00: Pluralism
43:00: Democracy

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG-2Ynb2YvM

The Praetorian Psyop

Posted on January 13, 2022 by thezman

The Pentagon announced that it will be conducting guerilla warfare training in North Carolina in the coming weeks. The point of the exercise is to train American soldiers to battle “seasoned freedom fighters”, according to the Army. They say they made the announcement so that the public would not be shocked by the sound of weapons or the sight of the soldiers conducting war games. The exercises are going to be conducted on private lands in the western part of the state

This announcement coincides with the Department of Justice announcing the formation of a specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism. According to the DOJ, “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” What they are saying is the hysterical reaction to the January 6 protests is entirely justified as there is an invisible army out there making bombs.

Many assume this is about the ongoing shift toward treating all opposition to the regime as domestic terrorism. The color revolution they orchestrated against Trump will become a full-time revolution. Politicians will go on about the threat to our democracy while agents of the secret police drag people off for made up crimes. Liberal democracy is in its terror phase. The gross violation of rights is justified by the perpetual state of emergency over the alleged threat to the system.

There is some of that, for sure, but the FBI has been framing people as domestic terrorists for generations. They used to work with organized crime to frame people for murders committed by gangsters. That made the FBI look good and they did not have to do any real work. They orchestrated antiwar protests in the 1960’s and racial crimes in the South during the civil rights era. They framed too many people to count during the Bush years in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism.

In other words, the FBI and the rest of the intelligence agencies have never needed a reason to abuse the rights of Americans. The reason these organizations came into existence at the same time the American empire went global is every empire needs a secret police to prevent domestic enemies. Empires do not treat the core population very well, so they have to worry that the core population will get tired of sharing the wealth and revolt against their rulers.

There is another reason for these announcements. The intelligence agencies have broken free of civilian oversight. We saw this in the Trump years when they spied on his campaign and tried to frame any number of people in order to perpetuate the cover-up now known as the Russian collusion hoax. Chuck Schumer told Trump in public that he better not take on these agencies as they have a six million ways to get him. The politicians fear the intelligence community.

A big part of their power is the ability of these agencies to perpetuate fear among the people in the political class. It is why they tried to frame Congressman Matt Gaetz for sex trafficking early last year. Every member of Congress looked at what was happening and thought about their younger days. If they could ring up a sitting member of Congress for being a party boy in his youth, they will do anything. Also note how the media did not report on the disposition of the case.

That is what is going on with these ostentatious displays over the alleged domestic terrorism threat. The FBI and DOJ looked at the way the political class reacted to the January 6 protests and realized they could use their fear as a tool of control. A few times a year they will arrest some patsies for trying to attack a politician and then use these as examples at public hearings. The FBI will never have to answer another difficult question from Congress.

This is also a nice bit of insurance in case the people screw up again and vote Trump back into office. The FBI and DOJ assume that Trump will do what they would do if the roles were reversed and that is seek revenge. Any digging around in the FBI or DOJ will be met with howling about Trump’s links to domestic terrorism. The Russian collusion hoax will be replaced by the insurrection hoax. The media, of course, already knows the drill so they will be all over this too.

There is another aspect to this. Orwell noted how authoritarian regimes needed an enemy to rally the people against. He was a socialist so he naturally thought a traitor to the cause made for the best villain. Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 and Snowball from Animal Farm were both modeled after Trotsky. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, just needs non-democratic enemies. They do not have to be from the ruling class to be a useful villain to rally support.

In the last thirty years, the empire has had many types of Muslim baddies to use as the designated threat to democracy. The American police state was built as a defense against this alleged threat. Russia has been conjured into a global threat to democracy for the same reason. Now they are manufacturing all sorts of domestic baddies to be the great threat to the system. The intelligence agencies are always right there to confirm the regimes worst fears.

It is not that people are sitting around saying, “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen.” This fear of what lies outside the snow globe that is imperial politics just comes naturally to people who have to no real purpose. Politics in a managerial state is ceremonial, having no real impact on life. Despite their lofty titles, the people in the political system feel utterly helpless. Fear and paranoia are the natural consequences of their impotence.

In the end, nothing much will change for the Dirt People. When the FBI needs some trophies to display to Congress, they will round up the usual suspects. Sure, many now wriggle through the net as even the dumbest have caught on to how this works, but there is always at least one idiot willing to play along. Otherwise, the domestic terrorism unit will be creating security theater for the political class. They will be the narrator telling them to fear what lies outside the Capital Beltway.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The Crisis of Gerontocracy

Posted on January 12, 2022 by thezman

Anyone who has had to plan for the departure of a long time employee or co-worker knows that it is more than just replacing their work product. People who have been in an organization for a long time have a gravity to them. Their personal style, their way of going about their business, changes the work habits of those around them, so when they leave lots of things will change. There are unknown unknowns that you can never account for, but you can anticipate to some degree.

This is something indirectly raised in this Wall Street Journal story about the possible return of Hillary Clinton. The authors are long-serving political operatives tied to the Clinton political machine, so it is not unreasonable to assume they were instructed to write this and get it posted in regime media. They picked the Wall Street Journal because it speaks to the right-wing of the political elite. The idea is to position Hillary Clinton, of all people, as a unifier of sorts.

There is a bit of the old Clinton triangulation going on here. The way this works is the left-side of the political class led the charge to get rid of Trump, but they are fumbling badly and upsetting the right side of the political class. The threat of Trump running in 2024 rustles them even more than a demented Biden staggering on for another term, but it is a close call. The answer, so the theory goes, is the old familiar Hillary Clinton, who will play ball with both sides.

The problem, of course, is Clinton is 74, which may be the springtime of youth compared to the rest of the political elite, but it is still old. People forget that Clinton was in rough shape when she ran in 2016. She mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for a while and had the incident where she collapsed on the street. She was also wearing some sort of contraption that was never explained. Time heals all wounds, but only in the emotional sense, not the physical sense.

In fairness, Donald Trump is 75, so he is not exactly the youthful alternative to the gerontocracy that currently runs the country. The thing is though, he is a vigorous man for his age and has shown no signs of slowing down. One thing that went unnoticed is unlike other presidents, Trump did not suddenly get old while in office. He seemed to grow stronger off the endless battling. His father was supposedly quite vigorous into his 90’s and Trump appears to have inherited those genes.

Again, the authors of that post are attached to the Clinton machine so they did not just dream that up for the fun of it. They make clear that Clinton is beginning the process of mounting a campaign. It could mean running against Biden in the primary, which would not go over well with the Obama wing or the Sanders wing, so they are beginning the process of normalizing the idea so it is not an issue. Clinton will position herself as the moderate trying to save the party from Biden.

Of course, this is another example of how the political class is unwilling to look forward so it instead tries to reboot old ideas. They Republicans plan to run their midterm campaign as a reboot of the Newt Gingrich show from the 1990’s and now Hillary Clinton is imagining herself as Ted Kennedy in 1980. Forty years ago, the left-wing of the party was sure that the reason Reagan won in 1980 is the old guard of the party refused to jettison Carter in favor of Kennedy.

It speaks to the bankruptcy of the political class that they keep indulging in these weird walks down memory lane. Within living memory politicians would run on specific agendas, tied closely to things that were important to people. Biden ran on not being Trump and now Hillary plans to run on not being Trump or Biden. Elections have always been beauty contents, but now they have been stripped of their talent portion, leaving us with the terrifying image of geezers in swimsuits.

The actuarial tables are immutable. Whoever is calling the shots in both parties will eventually have to move on from the geezers. If Trump runs and wins in 2024, he serves one term. Who is the next man up? If Hillary runs and wins, she could serve two terms, but that means living to 84. It also means not getting the Joe Biden treatment after one term. Who is being prepared on the Democrat side to take over for the collection of geezers now in charge?

The fact is the empire is facing the same problem the Soviets faced in the mid-70’s when Brezhnev’s health rapidly deteriorated. The party knew he was not long for the world, but there was no clear plan to replace him. When he died in 1982, the 70-year-old Andropov served for two years then died. He was followed by the 73-year-old Chernenko who promptly died. Gorbachev was next in line and he proved to be incapable of maintaining the empire.

The reason the Soviets did not have a competent new generation of leaders ready to supplant the Brezhnev crew is they had never been developed. We see the same thing with the current generation in Washington. The next generation does not exist as they have been boiled off for fear they would be too ambitious. What is left is a collection of dull-witted time servers and youthful morons like Sandy Cortez. No wonder no one wants to see the geezers carried off the political stage.

Getting back to where we started, it is prudent to think about the knock-on effects of the current generation of political leaders shedding this mortal coil. The political system has been warped by their long time in office and that will change as well. The old Soviet system had evolved for men like Brezhnev and his henchmen. Our political system has evolved for this long serving generation of politicians. When they are gone, the system around them will change radically and perhaps violently.

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Another Reboot

Posted on January 11, 2022 by thezman

Hollywood figured out a long time ago that they could make a lot of money on a sequel to a popular movie. They could count on attracting most of the original audience without having to think too hard or spend a lot of money. If the sequel was just the original with a couple new twists, then it was easy money. The reboot is a similar concept, except it relies on nostalgia to sell the concept. Fans of the original Star Wars movies could take their kids to the reboot of the franchise.

The general consensus is that the reboot and remake are a sign that Hollywood has run out of creative writers. The wrinkly brains are now in the technical end, making cool graphics and special effects. The writers arrive in a short bus. This cultural dead end where they just keep rebooting prior ideas has reached a point where they are rebooting reboots of reboots now. The only novelty is they are stripping away anything of interest and replacing it with ideology.

The same process has been happening with politics. The first little hint of it happened with Bill Clinton who was sold as his generation’s JFK. This played on Baby Boomer nostalgia, which has been powerful juju since the 1980’s. The first genuine political reboot was Obama. He was pitched as the black JFK, which was a foreshadowing of what has been happening in popular culture. Just as the role of JFK was being played by a black guy, everything on TV is now played by nonwhites.

The thing that was interesting about Obama was that despite all the talk about the future, they were obsessed with the past. His signature program, health care, was a re-do of the failed health care fight in the 1990’s. His Russian reset was a rebuke of Reagan’s tough approach to the Soviets. His Iran policy was a re-do of what happened in the late 1970’s under Carter. The Obama years were a series of remakes of old defeats by the Left, but this time they were the winners.

Of course, the Trump years had a strong undertone of nostalgia for the 1980’s and Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme. It was clear Trump planned to run a similar reelection campaign until Covid. The crazies, of course, relived the Nixon years, replaying the fantasy version where they got to actually impeach their foe, rather than have him resign. The Trump era was a very weird nostalgia trip for an aging political class unable to contemplate what comes next for them.

It appears that this election season, the Republicans are planning to release a reboot of one of their old franchises, the Contract with America. To great fanfare, Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, has unleashed the Commitment to America, which is a remake of the New Gingrich program. According to the poster, “Republicans helped build the greatest economy in a generation and the American way of life was thriving. We are ready to do it again. This is our commitment to you.”

The problem with the sequel was always that the original successfully followed the woman’s swimsuit model. It was long enough to cover the important bits and short enough to keep everyone interested. In other words, the original addressed all the important plot points and the characters had finished their arc. Reboots offer the chance to retell the original story with a slightly new angle. Today, of course, that means replacing the white males with strong diverse females.

The problem for the Republicans trying to reboot the Gingrich franchise is that most people recall that it was not a scintillating success. It was a clever marketing strategy that got Gingrich the speaker’s gavel, but exactly no one is romantic for the early 1990’s or has warm thoughts about Newt Gingrich. If anything, Newt Gingrich is a reminder that managerial conservatism was a disaster. It led directly to the “Big Government Conservatism” of the Bush years.

Looking at the site, it is clear that the Republicans went to Hollywood and snatched a few writers off the short bus. “Restore. Rebuild. Renew” is the answer to “Build Back Better” which is itself a hollow slogan. Under each word is a list of “promises” that are so vague and meaningless, you wonder if this is a deliberate insult. The top item under “Restore” is a promise to do the same things for Covid that the government has been doing for two years now. “What do we want? More of the same!”

Perhaps the most amusing and ridiculous claim under the “Restore” tab is the promise to address tech censorship. Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP is so mobbed up with Silicon Valley cash they should be forced to wear corporates logos on their suits like race car drivers. They have opposed every effort to do something about the gross abuse of civil rights by these firms. This is also true of Conservative Inc., which is bought and paid for by big tech money as well.

What is most remarkable about the plan is that it manages to avoid every issue of interest to the typical Republican voter. The Gingrich strategy was to sound like radical reformers, while not threatening anything important like entitlements. McCarthy’s strategy is to sound completely harmless while promising to let the crazies continue smashing the civic life of the country. You get the sense this is a promise to the oligarchs that they will have no trouble with the Republicans.

Notably, there is nothing in this plan on immigration. That is because the GOP is not just the party of open borders, but the party of aggressive importation of the least desirable people into your neighborhood. When you vote Republican, you are voting for your children and grandchildren to live as hated minorities. The GOP is the other side of the turd sandwich with regards to immigration. One side wants open borders and the other side wants to build massive welcome signs.

Getting back to the reboot topic, what this plan suggests is that the critics of Hollywood are correct about the lack of ideas. The Republicans have nothing to offer, so they are rebooting old campaigns. McCarthy has never had a job or met a normal American, so he has no idea who he is pitching with this slop. It sounds good to the feckless airheads in marketing, so he just assumes it will work. It will not get him in trouble with his handlers, which is what really matters to him.

Finally, what is shaping up in the 2022 midterms is a replay of the Biden strategy in the 2020 election. The Democrats hid Biden away and made the election about Trump being Hitler. McCarthy and the Republicans will hide under their beds and hope the public is sick of the Democrats. In other words, it is another election in which one side wins by default. The political class has nothing to offer, because from their perspective, everything is going great and you need to shut up.

The Cost Of Custodialism

Posted on January 10, 2022 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. It ties in with the post today about the cost of the custodial state. Behind the green door is the weekly podcast.

In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that societies collapse when their investment is sustaining their societies reaches the point of diminishing returns. The complex systems they evolved to solve the problems they have faced come with a cost. Complexity itself brings a cost, as maintaining any complex system has special requirements. These costs are not fixed. They increase over time and at some point, they exceed the benefits.

In modern life, this is obvious in software systems. They are initially created to solve a specific set of problems like accounting or tracking parts in a warehouse. Over time they become increasing complicated as they are expanded to solve other problems like tracking costs or forecasting cash flows. They are patched, upgraded and modified continuously until they reach a point where the cost of maintaining them is greater than the cost of replacing them with something new.

This idea of diminishing returns is useful in thinking about how the custodial state is evolving and how it will end. There is a cost to making sure you are not using the wrong pronouns or teaching your kids the wrong values. There is a cost to bullying people into taking certain medicines or avoiding certain foods. Of course, there is a cost to dreaming up these new taboos. The American university system, which is the primary source of production for this stuff, is not cheap.

In prior societies, the care, custody and control of the population was not much of a concern to the ruling class. The duty of the king, for example, was to make sure his lands were safe from threats. Otherwise, his people were on their own as far as raising crops and managing their affairs. They had duties to their lord, but those were in terms of labor and produce. The church made sure everyone followed the cultural rules, but the cost of that was paid for through rents as well.

Even in liberal societies of the 19th and early 20th century, the people in charge did not invest much into making sure people had the right thoughts. Public education was focused on improving the workforce. Public safety was about securing the property and safety of rich people. Public administration was still largely focused on collecting taxes for the state. In 19th century America, social reform was a private affair, financed by the wealthy as a form of public piety.

It is in the 20th century things began to change. Public education became universal in the West and shifted from the basics to moral and social conditioning. When politicians say that parents should have no role in the training of their children, this is not the radical idea that many claim. Inside the ruling class, this is just assumed and has been for a very long time. A century ago, Progressive reformers assumed education was necessary to train people to be good social democrats.

The little light on the dashboard of your car telling you that you are too close to another car and the warnings about drinking the contents of the shampoo bottle are all part of the custodial state and they come with a cost. The federal government spent over six trillion dollars in fiscal year 2021. That is 30% of the GDP. State and local government spent another three trillion. Roughly half of the U.S. GDP is consumed with the cost of governance. This is true throughout the West.

This is not the end of it. Regulatory costs do not show up in the government budget, but they show up in private budgets. When companies impose vaccine mandates, they are incurring a real cost. Some percentage of their workforce will quit. The cost of hiring and training employees is substantial. Then there is the cost of making sure everyone has the Nth booster shot. This is just one example, but there are thousands of these sorts of costs incurred by every business.

One way the managerial system has made this work is through socializing the costs around the world via the currency. The U.S. exports the cost through dollar production and trade. They create money which is spent on foreign goods. This exports the inflation to the foreign producer, but some of it comes back as foreign investment in government bonds and equities. American asset values go up while the quality of life goes up without causing domestic inflation.

This is one reason European consumer culture lagged behind America. The individual countries with their own currencies could not do this trick. Once the Euro was in place, consumerism in Europe took off. The consumer culture of the West, a feature of the custodial state, was made possible by shifting costs to low cost countries in the newly “free” east, South America and Asia. The spike in inflation suggests this has run its course and the West can no longer export the cost of custodialism.

The problem we see with Covid, is the custodial state comes with an ideology that justifies it and drives its development. Covid was a real problem, but the system wildly overreacted because it exists to manage these problems to an ever increasing level of detail that has now taken on a life of its own. The extreme example of this is New Zealand, where the ditzy Prime Minister has said that her Covid tyranny is now a permanent feature of life. She is the Kiwi den mother.

Another problem in addition to the direct cost is the cost of what managerialism does to the population of a society. Public services are declining rapidly as the people in those jobs no longer feel any duty to them. Like children shirking their chores, people in the custodial state stop caring about their work. The great Covid sick out we are experiencing is a glimpse of things to come. If your needs are the responsibility of the custodial state, why should you work hard and be conscientious?

One of the realities of Soviet communism was that it was more expensive to maintain than it was worth. It was a system that had a 70-year run and if you net out the years through the war, it was a two generation system, give or take. There have been kings that have served longer. The reason it was short-lived is it turned social capital into the fuel to maintain the system. Worse yet, it consumed the means of producing social capital, which accelerated the collapse of the system.

The Western system took longer to form up than communism. Its development was retarded by the necessity of the Cold War. In the thirty years since the end of communisms the custodial system has evolved quickly. Along with it the social costs have gone up and the stock of social capital has declined. In the 1980’s, no one saw the collapse of the Soviet empire coming, but the signs were there. Similarly, Western custodialism is headed to collapse for the same reason.

The Return Of The King

Posted on January 7, 2022 by thezman

This week the Power Hour makes its triumphant return just in time to celebrate one of the newest, but most solemn festivals, Insurrection Day. Given the way they have been carrying on for the last year, it is surprising that a congressional idiot has not suggested making it a federal holiday. Then again, that would make it more difficult to brainwash school children into thinking that this is the time when orange Nazis tried to burn down the ~~Reichstag~~ Capitol and seize power with Big Lies!

The absurdity of this ridiculous drama conceals something interesting about the psychology of the political class. They seem to require an Alamo-type event to rally their minds around as they lash out at their enemies. Charlottesville, another trivial affair, has been a rallying point for them. They got three years out of that one, so January 6th will probably be with us through the next presidential election unless some new political tragedy is engineered by our good friends at the FBI.

Part of it is the fact that the ideology of liberal democracy does not provide the sense of struggle required to keep everyone engaged. Like communism, liberal democracy has evolved into a revolutionary mindset without a defined end. It is just a process that goes on until something magical happens and we reach utopia. The commies came up with perpetual revolution to solve this problem. Liberal democracy is evolving a culture of permanent crisis to keep the believers engaged.

Charlottesville and now January 6 are legends that can be told around the campfires as reminders of the struggle. They both have the same elements. The cause was the good people were not vigilant, which allowed the bad guys to form up. Both stories have a point where things could go either way. Both have the point when the righteous swept the villains from the field and triumphed over evil. Both have their martyrs, although the January 6 martyrs are imaginary.

Of course, the more you examine it the more you see that the overlap between ideological zeal and insanity is quite large. These people cannot exist in the world as it is, so they have created a fantasy world. This world of imaginary villains is one where they can pretend to be on the side of angels in the great struggle. By itself it would be harmless, but this madness comes with a fanatical drive to control society. These people are crazy and highly motivated to take over society.

Communism eventually sidelined the fanatics. That is largely what happened when the Brezhnev faction deposed Khrushchev. The more sober minded saw that rule by true believer would get everyone killed. They were still left with an unworkable system full of logical contradictions, but they were able to stabilize it for a generation. It remains to be seen if liberal democracy can pull it off. Biden is the closest analog to Brezhnev and he is a doddering old fool incapable of doing anything.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Insurrectionism
- NYT: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized in Effort to Aid Trump – Link
- NYT: Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy – Link
- NYT: Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but Big Questions Remain – Link
- NYT: One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look Away From Us – Link
- Daily Beast: The Real Tragedy of Jan. 6 Is That It’s Still Not Over – Link
- Bulwark: Did the January 6th Coup Fail? – Link
- Salon: Republican voters don’t actually “believe” the Big Lie about January 6 — they’re in on the con – Link
- Mother Jones: A Key Reason Jan. 6 Rioters Aren’t Facing Sedition Charges: They’re White – Link
Martyrs
- AP: Ashli Babbitt a martyr? Her past tells a more complex story – Link
Paranoid Delusions
- Boston Globe: The coup is still underway – Link
- WaPo: If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift survive – Link
- Salon: Mussolini seized full power 97 years ago: Does Donald Trump long to follow suit? – Link
- NyMag: Conservatism and Fascism Are Not the Same Thing – Link
Authority Appropriation
- Twitter: Doctor Hailey Banack – Link
The Pigs & The Farmers
- New Republic: Inside D.C.’s Rowdy New Progressive Scene – Link

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Electric Boogaloo

Posted on January 6, 2022 by thezman

In the history of motoring, no owner of a sports car has ever said, “This car would be perfect if it sounded like a washing machine instead of a sports car.” In fact, a common complaint from sports car enthusiasts over the decades is that their favorite model does not have a sexy enough exhaust note. A big part of owning a sports car, even a budget model, is the sound it makes when driving. Watch a car show or YouTube car channel and exhaust sound is always mentioned.

Even if you are not into sports cars, the sound of the engine revving is something everyone associates with a sports car. The sound of the car shifting gears, the echo of the exhaust in a narrow canyon, is a big part of the experience. Similarly, driving enthusiasts prefer manual gearboxes to automatics, even though they will tell you that computer controlled automatic transmissions are far superior. The manual gearbox allows the driver to feel like he is part of the machine.

With that in mind, the world’s premiere sports car makers are promising to take all of that away in the coming years. They say they will stop building internal combustion engines and go completely electric. Most have already abandoned manual gearboxes and the rest promise to do so shortly. The supercar makers are investing all of their time in electric motors and self-driving technology. Their goal is to make the elite sports car into something close to an autonomous vehicle

That means the sports car driving experience will soon be like sitting in front of your laptop to the sound of kitchen appliances. Car shows will have soft looking men and women climbing into futuristic vehicles then sitting there in silence as the vehicle goes about the business of being a car. Presumably, the sports models will come with a VR system so the driver can pretend to be driving an actual sports car or maybe it will just have a screen to see what it used to be like.

The question is why? Again, no one can find a Ferrari owner saying he wishes his supercar sounded more like the kitchen juicer. No one has ever daydreamed about driving his blender through the countryside. People into motoring do it for how it makes them feel and it makes them feel alive. It reminds them that life is for living, not ticking boxes on a spreadsheet dreamed up by a sadist with a graduate degree. That’s the thrill of driving a fast car to your limit.

Granted, there is a group of people who claim to be sports car enthusiasts who think electric sports cars are a great idea. They like telling people that electric cars have a flat torque curve, meaning they can accelerate faster than a normal car. BMW has made a lot of money selling them Z-series sports cars, the ones that look like a clown’s shoe, because these are people who are dead inside. Their enthusiasm for sports cars is superficial and performative.

Of course, there is the environmental angle. The Gaia worshippers claim that electric cars are better for Mother Earth. These are the people who tote their groceries home from the market in grimy canvas sacks. These are the people who wear ornamental face gear thinking it wards off evil spirits. The people who have made a childish fear of the bogeyman into both a science and a religion love electric cars. They also think everyone should live in pods and ride the bus.

Putting aside their superstitions, electric cars are not eco-friendly or a more efficient use of natural resources. Electric comes from power stations. The most common powerplant fuels are coal, natural gas, and uranium. In the United States, only 20% of electricity comes from so-called renewables like solar. These “good” sources of electric like solar are a blight on nature and environmentally toxic. The long term costs far outweigh the costs of conventional energy production systems.

Then there is the practicality of electric cars. Fueling a normal car takes a few minutes while charging an EV takes hours. Again, no one is sitting around saying, “I’d like to spend hours at a roadside station talking with people who tend to loiter at rest stops while my electric car is being charged.” Then there is the fact that you have to install a charging station in your home. Imagine buying a car and being told you have to install a filling station in your backyard in order to use it.

In other words, the natural demand for electric cars was zero and remains low even with the push to manufacture demand. There is a novelty factor, for sure, but if no one had bothered to push the production of electric cars, they would not exist. Tesla exists as a way for Elon Musk to hoover up billions in government money, not because he found an unexploited niche in the automobile market. What he found was a clever way to become a rent seeker and the P.T. Barnum of the technological age.

It would be easy to go through all of the arguments in favor of electric cars and show them to be ridiculous or plain wrong. That is not the point. The point is despite the obvious, Western elites are hell bent on forcing us into electric cars. Those super car makers are not marketing to the hoi polloi. They cater to the global elite and they think the global elite believes in the miracle of electric cars. They are catering to their audience and their audience is our ruling class.

The point of this exercise is not to argue against electric cars, but to point out that practicality and self-interest are not what motivates the ruling class. All of them mouth the platitudes of Gaia worship because that is the prevailing orthodoxy. It is a way for them to signal their adherence to the faith. The local officials installing charging stations at the local school, yet ignoring the broken pipes and boarded up windows, are not thinking practically or responding to the demands of the people.

The electric car grift is useful in thinking about how partisanship in a liberal democracy becomes ideology then something closer to theology. The old partisan divide of the last century, good whites versus bad whites, has become a basket of beliefs untethered from practical reality. That basket of beliefs now forms a religion that bounds and defines the ruling class. The managerial class now has its own religion to control and define the members.

The Administrative Crisis

Posted on January 5, 2022 by thezman

A feature of modern society is the vast administrative state that manages every aspect of modern life. Modern people take it for granted, as they have never known any other way to live, other than being guided by massive bureaucracies. No one alive today remembers a time when there was not a bureaucrat behind every bush ready to shout instructions or warnings. A big part of what the paleocons call “managerialism” is the vast system of administration that runs society.

It is tempting to say that the Romans had a big administrative state. Diocletian expanded the empire’s civil and military administration. He established administrative centers around the empire, especially near the borders, in order to extend control from Rome to all areas of the empire. He is often referred to as the father of bureaucracy and what we think of as civil administration. People may also point to Byzantium, which expanded this concept into a complex form of rule.

There are two big differences between these older forms of government bureaucracy and what we live under today. One is the old system was not built around an ideology like we see now. Our administrative state is built around the idea that society can be managed scientifically by an army of experts. The other difference is the modern administrative state is about training the citizen to achieve his fullest potential within the liberal democratic order, to be a good liberal democrat.

Interestingly, the administrative state in modern liberal democracies looks and acts much like the bureaucracy that evolved with the Soviet system. Both were driven by ideology and both were designed to micromanage the life of the people. The fascist systems that sprung up in the interwar years showed the signs of developing an administrative state as well. Like communism and liberal democracy, fascism embraced the rational management of society.

The other not so obvious similarity between liberal democracy and communism is their respective administrative states evolved as a response to democracy. Running a country where everyone has a say can only be done if the overwhelming majority are saying the same thing. Therefore, a primary duty of the state is to train people to hold the same beliefs, to share the same common sense. The administrative state is as much about promoting ideology as administration.

Something else that is unique to the modern age is the scale and reach of the state in terms of its ability to control activity. Those old forms of imperial bureaucracy were mostly built around protecting the interests if private rulers. Vast swaths of life were left to the people to sort for themselves. In modern systems, the state protects the interest of everyone, so the activity of everyone is heavily regulated. 19th century prisons offered more freedom than the modern Western democracy.

When he was inaugurated, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time, we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.” Those words were rooted in Reagan’s reading of people we now call paleo-conservatives, who were early critics of managerialism.

Fast forward to now and what is called conservatism is a celebration of the administrative state. In the Bush years, they were pushing what they called “big government conservatism” which was an explicit endorsement of scientific management of society. Their claim was that they could harness the power of the administrative state to achieve what they claimed were conservative ends. Green eyeshade conservatism had given way to administrative conservatism.

Covid has revealed that the overwhelming majority of people in modern Western democracies just accept that their fate is in the hands of the state. The proper response to Covid was to redirect resources to hospitals to treat sick people, but otherwise let nature take its course. In the administrative state, no aspect of life is left unmanaged, so an army of experts was unleashed to put nature back in her bottle. The crisis of Covid is that nature won and the administrative state failed.

The crisis of the administrative state began to form up on the horizon at the end of last year as the economy began to do weird things. Prices for consumer goods started to spike and the supply chain began to break down. It was assumed that modern monetary management had made inflation a relic of the past. An army of experts trained in our best universities managed the supply chain, so goods and services could be efficiently managed in response to economic conditions.

Even more bizarrely, the labor markets no longer make any sense, according to the rules of the economic elites. Millions of people have left the workforce despite millions of unfilled jobs. Wages have started to creep up, but that has not had any impact on the employment situation. Of course, rising wages and rising retail prices is exactly what modern economic planners said was no longer possible. As with Covid, nature seems to be resisting the efforts of our experts.

The reason that the vast administrative state has been accepted by people is it looked like it was working as promised. The various financial crisis did not result in bread lines like they did in the past. Instead, men in suits pulled levers in the Federal Reserve and Treasury to navigate around the crisis. The retail economy was brimming with new products and services, making life more comfortable. Managerialism has been accepted because it seemed to be working.

The question that has never been tested is whether the administrative state can withstand an internal crisis. Managing through a natural disaster is a very different thing than managing an irreconcilable contradiction within the system itself. This is what the administrative state is now facing. If the problem of this age is the system, there is no systemic solution. In fact, every effort by the system to address the crisis is seen as contributing to the crisis.

This is what brought down the Soviet system. All systems become sclerotic over time, as any software engineer will tell you. The social software of the Soviet empire became so burdened with patches and workarounds that it eventually crashed. The software of a society is the internal logic of it. When those rules begin to fail everyone questions the system itself. This sets of a dynamic where the system fails, a patch is made and confidence declines until eventually no one trusts the system at all.

We may be seeing something similar with liberal democracy. In order to justify itself, it looks for crises to manage, often creating them, but lurching from crisis to crisis is making it less competent at the basics. As people begin to lose trust in the software of liberal democracy, the system administrators are releasing poorly thought out updates and lecturing the users about their conduct. The result is a spiral of increasing incompetence and decreasing trust in the system.

At the heart of the current crisis is a question never asked. That is, can the administrative state survive its own failures. A bad king in a monarchy can be replaced by the next in line. The bad office holder in a republic can voted out of office in favor of someone new. What happens when vast swaths of the administrative state have become gangrenous? How is that addressed. How are the rotten bits removed and who is given the authority to remove them?

Coup De Jour

Posted on January 4, 2022 by thezman

One of the iron laws of the universe is that whatever the America Left is warning about is usually something they are plotting. Alternatively, whatever they are accusing others of doing is something they have already done. The Russian collusion stuff is the most recent example of this. They accused Trump of plotting with a foreign government, the Russians, but we learned it was official Washington all mobbed up with the Ukrainians, Chinese and anyone else with extra cash.

Of course, for the last year the ruling class has been yammering about the insurrection and the ongoing threat to “our” democracy. Meanwhile, they have been dragging people off to secret dungeons, harassing citizens for their politics, throwing people off social media and all the things we associate with a thug regime. Go back further and they spent four years claiming the 2016 election was rigged and then committed massive election fraud in the 2020 election.

This is how you can discern the future in regime rhetoric. Regime-ology, like Kremlinology in the Cold War, is becoming a skill in this age. You read the regime organs like the Washington Post or New York Times not for the literal content, but for the esoteric content, the stuff between the lines. In order to be prepared for what they will do next, we have all been forced to be Straussian. Of course, we also have the opposite rule of liberalism to guide us.

This is why the stories about a potential military coup are interesting. This one from December got the ball rolling. It is framed as a warning of a possible coup by the imaginary army of insurrectionists, but clearly the authors are imagining themselves as a triumvirate saving “our” democracy. A couple of weeks later, the Pentagon assured us that they are ready to send troops into Washington and seize control of the government if people vote the wrong way in the next election.

You do not have to be a geezer to recall a time when such talk was strictly forbidden by the mass media and political class. In fact, they went out of their way to assure themselves and the public that no one in the army would ever think of such a thing, much less suggest it. You see, America was a republic with civilian control of the military, so such a thing was impossible. It was often implied that the greatness of the military was the result of its republican virtue.

It used to be that the far-left would have been berserk with anger over the suggestion that the military would be needed to secure “our” democracy. They hated the military and saw it as the enemy of democracy. An indication of just how much the Left has changed over the last decade or so is their reaction to that column. They think it is wonderful that the military is publicly expressing their loyalty to “our” democracy and promising to crush the alleged enemies of it.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at these ridiculous sissies in regime media cheering for a military coup. One of the interesting features of the managerial class is their assumption that the institutions exist to serve their interests. They never think for a second that the men with guns defending “our” democracy may realize they no longer need the managerial class to run the administrative state. Meetings are for men in suits, not for men in charge holding guns.

Putting that aside, this coup talk offers some insight into what the people in charge are plotting for the near future. The upcoming midterm election is of little interest as it just means the Republicans gain some seats. The focus is on the 2024 election, which they now view as the great battle between “our” democracy and the imaginary insurrectionists, otherwise known as Trump voters. They have no intention of allowing Trump to win and take office again.

This strikes normal people as a bit strange. After all, what was plain in the Trump years is he is no threat to the regime. If he returned to office, he is not going exact revenge on those who wronged him. He will crawl on his belly for their approval. The regime, on the other hand, cannot see this. They always project their own qualities onto their enemies and in this case, they assume Trump would seek murderous revenge. After all, that is what they would do if they were him. They will not allow it.

This offers another insight into regime thinking. They assume Trump would act like they would act if in the same position. That means they assume he will have them jailed and tossed into dungeons on made up charges. They see this as a threat to “our” democracy, which then justifies any means necessary to stop it. This is how the 2020 election was fueled by widescale fraud. They told their election volunteers that any means necessary was acceptable.

Looking ahead, what this suggests is that a military coup of some sort is in the cards within the next decade. Since the generals are all super-woke, it probably means something like a hybrid civilian-military junta. The leaders of the Democratic party will lock arms with the military leadership to “defend our democracy” by overturning the elections and imposing a form of martial law. Some Republicans will be arrested as conspirators and insurrectionists.

There is another thing evident in these posts that offers some insight into what will happen in the near term. These super-woke generals are just as delusional as the super-woke regime leaders. Would the rank and file in the armed services support a scheme to “defend our democracy” from Boomers waving flags? The most likely result would be a schism in the services. Instead of being a show of strength, a coup would turn into another display of weakness and incoherence.

Another iron law of the universe is that managerial regimes become decreasingly competent over time. This was what brought down communism. The Soviet system was so corrupt it was no longer functional in the end. That is the most likely end for the regime’s coup plans. The will is there but the system has simply become too incompetent and corrupt to do it. There will be tanks in the streets, but they will be broken down and abandoned like the regime itself.

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