One of the many complaints in the brief against conservatives is that they care more about Israel than they do about the southern border. A similar complaint comes up with regards to the war in Ukraine. Professional conservatives do not care about the things that normal people think are important. Instead, professional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, spend their days convincing normal people that the concerns of Israel or the Kagan cult matter more than the opioid problem.
While this is true, professional conservatives are not the ones spearheading this approach to politics. Look at the other side and you see the same. The people we call the Left spend their time telling the world that the mundane things that can and should be addressed by government must take a back seat to the bogeyman. Joe Biden is kicking off his campaign by visiting places where the bogeyman was seen doing the things they claim the bogeyman does.
In other words, it is not just so-called conservatives who spend their time focused on things over the rainbow. It is that our politics, in general, deliberately shifts the focus from the local and practical to the distant and obscure. No one running for anything talks about the fact that America has a $34 trillion dollar debt and that we spend almost $15,000 per person per year on medical services. America is a sick society that is becoming too broke to mend itself.
In fairness, a candidate who ran on a platform of deregulating the health care rackets and restoring order to the legal system would have no audience. Over several generations the people have been conditioned to care more about the bogeyman and Israel than their own neighborhood. A practical candidate could go into a suburb strewn with trash and illegal aliens promising to clean up both and the locals would demand to know his position on the war in Gaza or abortion.
This was not always the case. Within living memory congressional candidates would show up in their district to ask for votes. The whole “kissing babies” thing was a joke because it was a real thing that happened. Not only did politicians mingle with the voters, but office holders also responded to questions and complaints from them. Not so long-ago elected officials held town-style gatherings where normal people in the area could show up and ask questions.
Nothing like that happens now. The closest you get is Trump flying around to rural airports to hold his raucous rallies. Joe Biden will run his 2024 campaign from his beach mansion in Delaware. Occasionally they will produce a television event that makes it seem like he is in front of real people. Most likely these will be done using modern technology as he is incapable of forming a sentence now. His avatar will talk about the bogeyman and maybe Ukraine or Israel.
What we are experiencing is an inverted version of America. The founding of the country was by people who had the exact opposite view of the world. They came to the new world for selfish reasons. They did not want “freedom” or “liberty” and they did not give a damn about American values. They wanted cheap land and an opportunity to provide a better life for themselves and their family. Their patriotism, if it existed at all, was focused on the things close to them.
Well into the 19th century the typical American had little reason to care about the federal government because it was far away and did nothing that was of a great concern to the average person. The town council, on the other hand, was important because it did important things. People cared about those offices and who held them because those people had the power to do things that mattered locally, and the people were primarily focused on local matters.
The point here is that empire does not just invert the sensibilities of the ruling class but also the people in the empire. Throughout the Cold War, Finland was sandwiched between the two great empires. As a normal country with normal citizens, they focused on what was best for Finland and the Finnish people. They did not worry themselves about communism versus capitalism, other than when they needed to placate one or the other side of the Cold War.
Now that Finland has submitted itself to the empire, the primary focus of the Finnish state will be the bogey man and the enemies of the empire. Finnish politicians will feel the need to have a position on Israel. They will shake their fists at the current enemy of the empire. Meanwhile, the borders will be left open, and the social capital will be monetized and hauled away by the usual suspects, but Finns will feel good about hating the current bogeyman of the empire.
It is the nature of empire to flip the normal relationships upside down so that people focus on what is far away rather than what is near. Right now, conservatives are cheering that Harvard replaced their black lesbian president with someone who looks like he is from an antisemitic pamphlet. Meanwhile the public schools are full of pedophiles and drug dealers. No one should care about Harvard’s president, but they should care about who is running the local schools.
It very well may be that the antidote to the problems of empire is to stop thinking like the subject of an empire. When people care more about the school board elections than the presidential election, it is no longer possible for the beneficiaries of empire to frame elections around the issues of empire. Imagine if the next GOP debate was about the color of crime rather than how much everyone loves Israel. Of course, no one currently in the race would qualify under that system.
This is why empires must always run their course. The empire is born and soon the focus of everyone is on the maintenance of the empire. The people in the empire come to define themselves in terms of the empire. The empire then fades, and the people have to relearn how to be normal again. The empire must end before people can replace their imperial identity with something new. It is why the only true patriots are those who oppose the Global American Empire.
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