Whither Managerial Polyarchy?

Posted on August 8, 2024 by thezman

One of the strange truths about democratic governments is that they can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. This seems counterintuitive as the whole point of democratic government is to have public policy reflect the general will of the people. In theory any divergence should be rectified in subsequent elections so that over time, the majority support the policy. As we see in the modern West, this is not how things work in “our democracy.”

There is a great example of this in the UK. Immigrant crime has reached a point where even the most teary-eyed immigration romantic has had enough. All of the polling shows that the majority wants an end to immigration. The new Labour government won power largely by hinting they would be tough on immigration. They were lying, of course, and that is clear now. The government only had about thirty percent support at the election, and you can be sure it is lower now.

In other words, the current rulers of the UK have less popular support than the current ruler of Venezuela. The UK is allegedly a democracy, while the democracies all claim Venezuela is a dictatorship. While technically correct, if we redefine democracy to mean having some sort of voting process, the undeniable fact is the ruling class of Venezuela has far more popular support than the ruling class of the UK. Yet, for now at least, the UK government does not fear being overthrown.

Immigration is a great example of how democracy can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. There has never been a time when there was popular support for open borders and unfettered immigration. The issue may not have ranked high on the list of voter concerns, but there was never a clamoring for violent foreigners to be imported into the country. Now there is massive hostility to it, but the policies not only persist, but they get worse.

Immigration is just the latest example of this. The de-industrialization we saw in the 1970’s and 1980’s never had popular support. People in the emerging service industries or technology may have been indifferent, but there were no rallies in the streets demanding the government ship the car parts plant to Mexico. The people in the manufacturing sector certainly cared, but their interests were ignored because the oligarchs saw a quick buck in selling off the manufacturing base.

The point is the so-called democracies of the West have been unpopular for an exceedingly long time, but it persists due to two factors. One is the people assume they can eventually get what they want through the democratic process. The ballots at every election have two options, heads they win and tails you lose, but people insist on picking from those options. It takes a long while, as we are now seeing, for people to lose faith in the democratic system.

The other reason, and perhaps the main reason, why democratic governments can remain unpopular for so long is the people who run the democratic system grow increasingly convinced they can trick and cajole enough people to manufacture a majority in their favor. In fact, as we keep seeing, this becomes the primary focus of the people running the system. It is as if they seek to prove Lincoln wrong and find a way to fool all of the people all of the time.

The guy running Venezuela knows that a large swath of his population thinks the system is rigged. He certainly knows it is rigged. He also knows that unless he keeps that disgruntled portion of the population pacified, he will be swinging from a tree branch, so that is his primary focus. He needs to always be looking to expand popular support for his policies, while at the same time defusing the anger in the portion that is unhappy with him and his policies.

The glue that has held Western democracies together for so long, despite not being particularly popular, is managerialism. The vast administrative state controlled by a permanent ruling class of managers is an unprecedented defense against any threats to the democratic system. Internal opposition is assimilated into the system so quickly that it never has time to flower into a palace coup. External opposition is subverted through the complex network of government affiliated organizations.

If you look closely, for example, at the pro-government protests in response to the anti-immigration protests in the UK, you will see people wearing the colors of groups like Amnesty International, Hope Not Hate and various immigrant charities right next to the cops waiting to crack the skulls of native Brits. Much of the police action, in fact, is coordinated by these “private groups” who “defend our democracy.” All of them are client organizations of the managerial state.

For this reason, managerial polyarchy¹ is highly resistant to popular discontent, even when that discontent is near universal. The problem though is that it is top-heavy, which makes containing internal dissent increasingly difficult. With so many people inside the managerial system or dependent upon it, factionalism is inevitable. It is why the managerial class has its politicians chant about unifying the country. What they really mean is unifying the managerial elite and the oligarchs.

We see a glimpse of this with Elon Musk. When he bought Twitter and reopened it, the system quickly moved to suppress him. Ben Shapiro and the ADL made him pray at the pile of shoes. The trouble is, Musk is the world’s richest man and someone who does not like being pushed around, so Twitter remains largely open. Musk has now weighed in on the two-tiered justice system of the UK. Elon Musk is a serious problem for a system that thinks it needs complete unity.

Why is Elon Musk a serious problem? A society in which the majority is disgruntled but lacks a leader and a method to compel change is like dry leaves and wood in the underbrush of a forest. It is a forest fire waiting to happen. The disgruntled inside the managerial system may look at the disgruntled masses as an army in waiting and decide it is a good time to stage a palace coup. This is why the British government is one step away from declaring war on running dog deviationists.

In the end, government, regardless of form, must not only satisfy the majority, but pacify those unsatisfied so they will not revolt. The present systems in the West have proven quite resistant to this reality, but reality must always prevail. The crisis in the West is over the central question of managerial polyarchy. Can it adapt and reform itself to comport with the demands of the people over whom it rules? If not, then what happens when these long bottled-up forces finally explode?

¹Managerial Polyarchy refers to the fact that large complex society does not have central control. Instead it has nodes that control specific domains, like banking, the media, the academy, and so on. These are networked together by a common understand of their role in society. This polyarchy of institutions shares the ideology of managerialism, thus we get the term Managerial Polyarchy.

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The End of Israel

Posted on August 7, 2024 by thezman

One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.

It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.

The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.

What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.

It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that they must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.

The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.

There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.

This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.

On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it. The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”

The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.

The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.

What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.

How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?

Regime Games

Posted on August 6, 2024 by thezman

Today is supposed to be the big day when the world learns who the regime has selected to be the running mate of kamala Harris. Last week, the Mayor of Philadelphia tweeted out that it was to be Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, but regime media ignored it. In fact, they continue to ignore the story. As of now they are “reporting” that the choice is down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Harris is scheduled to be cackling in Philadelphia today, so would make sense if it were Shapiro, but regime media says the plan is to do the reveal game show style like they did when Biden “picked” Harris. They will stage a video of Harris calling the condemned man over Zoom, because you know strong diverse female loves to use the latest technology like a big girl. She will cackle, he will make the soy face and accept his role as the loyal aid to girl boss.

One clue is this item posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, showing a fleet of black SUV’s at the home of the Minnesota governor. A similar thing happened at the home of J.D. Vance once he was notified. Once the pick is made, the Secret Service is dispatched to explain how things will work as far as security. It is possible that this is some sort of ruse, but that would be dumb even by Harris standards. On the other hand, she is a remarkably stupid woman.

Regardless, you can get a sense of how the regime really thinks about the race by the final three contestants. The fact that two are white men and one is a Jewish man is what everyone will notice. More important is that all three look old and therefore can be passed off as a steadying force. They did this with Obama when they picked Biden to be his running mate. The claim was that Biden was a longtime Washington insider and he would help steady the Obama ship.

Of course, Biden was both an olive branch and an insurance policy. Team Obama ruffled a lot of feathers in official Washington during the primary and they made enemies of the Clinton crime family. Adding Biden was a signal to permanent Washington that Obama was a team player. For similar reasons he made Clinton Secretary of State and turned a blind eye to her selling access. Biden was also an insurance policy, as no one could imagine him being president.

Harris is completely controlled by the regime, as they selected her for Biden and now have selected her to replace Biden. Her only base of support is the regime, so there is no need to pick a running mate for her that is regime friendly. Instead, they need someone that can make her more plausible as a candidate. That is why they obviously cast around for an old white guy. It is an admission that Harris comes off as a bumbling simpleton that could frighten many white voters.

The fact that they have settled on three unknowns is also telling. Shapiro is the only name with any recognition and that is only regional. Walz and Kelly are complete unknowns outside their respective states. Presumably all three can help win their respective states, which is interesting given that Walz is the governor of Minnesota, a state everyone thinks is safe. Trump lost there by 200,000 votes in 2020, but only by 50,000 in 2016, so maybe it is not that safe.

Another thing about these three options is that none of them have been mentioned as serious 2028 candidates. The big names like Gavin Newsom and Karen Whitmer were not interested, as they probably think they can win the nomination in 2028, even if the regime finagles Harris to a general election win. Despite the regime media campaign the last two weeks, the general consensus is that Harris is so terrible that once the action starts her balloon deflates quickly.

Of the three, Shapiro is the best option, as he brings the massive vote rigging machine to deliver the state to Harris. There are basically five states that decide the presidency at the moment. Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. There is some possibility that Minnesota adds itself to the list. If we take Pennsylvania off the board that leaves the four states and a 251-to-245 electoral college score in favor of Trump, so Harris is within striking distance.

The problem with Shapiro is his biography makes clear that his primary loyalty is to his people and his people are not Americans. He volunteered to serve in the IDF, rather than the American military. Imagine him explaining this while on stage with Vance, who served his people in the Marines. A Harris – Shapiro ticket is so alien and weird that even the dullest normie will notice it. A ticket that looks like every television ad, rather than America is not a good look right now.

Kelly is probably the second-best option, mostly because he has a good biography, but otherwise he adds nothing to the ticket. He is not the most likable guy, which is not a great thing for a ticket already short on charisma. Walz is the safest choice as he has carefully cultivated the “aw shucks” hick-lib act and he is a true believer. Walz is Bernie Sanders without the grating New York personality. He is Trotsky reimagined as a character from the television series Fargo.

What all of this tells us is the regime continues to struggle keeping all of the plates spinning, so they keep dashing about creating new narratives. Week one was the “weird” nonsense and now they are going with the claim that Trump is in a panic over Harris having such a good honeymoon. Like everything else we are seeing with the regime, there is no thinking past the first move. As a result, they rush from one fire to the next, claiming victory after avoiding disaster.

The Beginning Of The End

Posted on August 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the difference between work and exercise, a post about the alienness of the Democratic ticket and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The Nikkei 225 opened the week by plunging 12%, its worst day since the infamous Black Monday in 1987. European markets followed, but due to their controls on the markets ever going too far down, they declined just over two percent. The American markets are expected to open down as well. As with Europe, there are controls in place to prevent the markets from sliding too far too fast. This is determined by the Plunge Protection Team who protect the bankers.

All of this got going last week when markets began to decline and then it was revealed that the world’s most bullish investor, Warren Buffet, was dumping stocks at an unprecedented rate over the last quarter. Berkshire Hathaway dumped 58% of its Apple stock, which has been viewed as a signal that Buffett thinks the American economy is headed for a recession. In lean times, the companies hardest hit are those who make frivolous items like high end mobile devices.

Even setting aside the economic issues, the market was long overdue for a correction, and they often happen around elections. When Trump left office the Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 31,000. It peaked this year at around 40,000, which is roughly a thirty percent climb in three years. If one wants an example of irrational exuberance, there is a perfect example. The American stock market is a speculative bubble that was due to burst.

The speculation mainly rested on the assumption that the Federal Reserve would once again start handing out free money to its friends. The inflation reports had been manipulated to the point where the only people still worried about prices are the people buying things. The jobs reports and GDP numbers have similarly been set to look as if the economy could use a jolt of free money. The trouble is Jerome Powell is not in a rate cutting mood and has made this clear.

The other assumption has been that the American economy is fundamentally sound and all the bad stuff since Covid has been resolved. That has turned out to be wrong, as new bad stuff has emerged since Covid. The new Cold War launched against China and Russia is accelerating changes in the global economy, which is already putting downward pressure on Western economies. It seems that investors are now starting to understand that we are on the cusp of a new world order.

Of course, equities markets are supposed to reflect the general investor sentiment about the underlying economy. You buy a stock because you think the company will be better tomorrow than today. You sell the stock for the opposite reason. The markets are supposed to be about the future of the underlying economy, but that has not been true for close to forty years now. Instead, it has been about where to put all the extra cash the central bank creates in its role as global banker.

What happened to the American stock markets over the last half century is they went from being a place to bet on the economy and individual companies to a place to bet on the Global American Empire being the sole superpower. As long as the dollar remained the global currency and Washington controlled the rules of the global economy, there was only one bet to make. Everyone did the rational think and bet on this not changing, so over time the line went up at a steady pace.

The last two years have revealed this to be old thinking. The sanctions war against Russia has been a disaster for the empire. The Russian economy has outpaced Western economies during this time. Similarly, BRICS, which was just a worthless acronym, has now become a legitimate alternative to the Western model. Their alternative to SWIFT, the default banking transaction system, is slowly emerging as a viable and perhaps superior option for the rest of the world.

The main reason for this is the chaos at the top of the imperial order. While the endless political drama out of Washington entertains the people of the West, to those outside it looks like chaos and instability. The world’s largest economies have no idea who is in charge of imperial policy, as Joe Biden is clearly a vegetable. Further, Washington is not on speaking terms with the two most important countries at the moment. They have Russia and Iran on mute.

What we may be about to see is the canary in the coal mine fall off his perch, thus signaling the great reordering. Western economies evolved over the last half century on the assumption that Washington would control the global money supply. Over the last thirty years the assumption has been that the days of national economies were over, as all economies would be integrated. The rules based global economy using the dollar would be run from the imperial capital.

That is not going to be the future. This presents a massive problem for the West, as industrial policy, economic policy, government policy and demographic policy has all been based on the assumption that the Western managerial elite would sit atop this global system like Mustapha Mond, the world controller in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. Of course, that is the reason the dream is unraveling, as Mustapha Mond was both corrupt and cynical.

As is usually the case, the great transition will take time. It took forty years for the West to evolve down this cul-de-sac. It will take time for the world to adapt to the decline of the West and for the West to regain itself. The collapse of the Soviet system was followed by two decades of disorder. The difference is the West has further to fall, as the Russians were already poor. Americans are about to get poor because they no longer deserve to be otherwise.

Lessons From VDare

Posted on August 2, 2024 by thezman

The show is a bit rambling today as I was pressed for time due to the day job, but the topic is a good one. Failure is always a better teacher than success, so the failure of VDare has some good lessons for us. I say failure in that it lost the fight with the oogily-googily people in the state of New York. It had a twenty-five-year run and helped make immigration a central issue.

Probably the most important lesson to come out of the VDare story is that the old America that operated by rules is gone. If you want to join the fight, the first thing you need to understand is we no longer live in a rules-based society. The bad guys talk about the rules, but that is because they change the rules to fit their needs. They want you to follow their rules, while they do what they want.

That is probably the biggest psychological barrier for people. You see it with the young guys who think they are the forefront of radical. In reality they are Zoomer-Boomers, young guys who think they can roll back the clock to the time when the people they criticize were their age. They still think they can vote their way out of this mess and back to the old America of their grandparents.

That America is gone and it is never coming back. You see that with VDare. The people who lawfared them out of existence had no place in old America, other than sweeping floors, but in new America they set the rules. Once you reach the point where such people have access to power, the rules-based society is finished. In fact, society is finished and waiting for the death blow.

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Address Your Priors
The Best Ability
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The Bad Guys
Reform Ain’t Possible
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The Eighth Decade Curse

Posted on August 1, 2024 by thezman

Israel’s efforts to start a regional war in the Middle East took a big step forward when they murdered a Hamas official in Tehran and another in Beirut. The murder of Fuad Shukr in Lebanon is something the Israelis have been doing for a long time, but the missile attack killing Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is both a clear violation of international law and a provocative escalation. Taken together it suggests that the Israelis want a war with Iran and are doing everything they can to provoke it.

The puzzle is why are they are doing this, especially now when it is clear that Washington is in turmoil and the American empire is stretched thin. Joe Biden is at best a caretaker at the moment. Netanyahu met with him last week, so he must know that Biden is a vegetable. He also has to know that it is not clear who will be in the White House six months from now. The only thing certain is it will be a new team running foreign policy, regardless of the results.

It may be that Netanyahu calculates that if the next administration inherits a regional war in the Middle East, they will have little choice but to continue whatever policy they inherit, so it is best to get everything in place now. It is not as if the Israelis do not have control of both parties. The neocons may think Trump wins the election, so leaving him with a regional war will cripple his term before it gets started. As a result, they are telling the Israelis to start the war.

Another theory floating around is that the Israelis have determined that Iran does not want a war right now, so their response to these moves will be limited. The Israelis can literally get away with murder, as long as the people they are targeting are not Iranian officials or important Iranian citizens. The two people they just murdered have been on their kill list for a long time. Targeted assassinations have always been a part of the Israeli toolkit, despite the civilized world’s protests.

Along the same lines, the Israelis may be looking at the way things are shaping up in the neighborhood and think they have to flip over the board with a war. Russia and Iran have close ties. China is now building relations with Iran. This has led the Saudis to end the petro-dollar agreement and begin to normalize relations with Iran now that they are both in BRICS. A new regional order is forming up where Russia and China supplant the American empire as the patron.

From the Israeli perspective, this is a catastrophe. Both Russia and China are wise to how the Israelis operates, and they have no Israel lobby in their countries. While both countries have always tried to maintain good relations with Israel, they both see Israel as part of the Global American Empire. It is not all that clear if they understand how the neocons use Zionism as a cover, but they certainly understand that Israel is a launching pad for American shenanigans in the region.

Instability has always been part of the Israel playbook too. Whether it is exploiting rivalries between its neighbors or rivalries inside its neighbors, the game has always been to maximize regional instability. This not only keeps the Arab countries on shaky ground, but it keeps the American empire involved. A war with Iran that draws in other Arab countries, thus forcing the American empire to get directly involved maximizes uncertainty and instability in the region.

One final possibility here is that the neocons may have decided that the Ukraine project is hopeless, so it is time to open a new front. Russia has strong relations with Iran, so war between the American empire and Iran would inevitably force the Russians to provide support to Iran. This would fit with the overall strategy laid out by the Rand Corporation five years ago and the philosophical outlook of the neocons going back to the end of the Cold War.

The question no one asks is if the American empire could wage a war against Iran and whether it could survive it. For decades it has just been assumed that the empire will win any war with any nation if it so chooses. A big part of the mythos of the American war machine is the assertion that the only wars the empire has “lost” are those it chose not to fight to win. This started with Vietnam and has been a fog that rests over any analysis of American war capacity.

The Ukraine war revealed this to be a myth. American wonder weapons either failed to live up to their promise or were quickly neutralized by the Russians. More importantly, NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger with regards to its ability to manufacture the sorts of weapons necessary for a long war. You can also throw in the failure to suppress the Houthis with expensive bombing campaigns. Clearly, the rest of the world learned something from thirty years of American war making.

Iran does not have the military industrial capacity of Russia, but it does have the support of Russia and China. Iran can also count on Syria and Iraq to help deliver weapons and men to the border of Israel. She can also count on OPEC not coming to the rescue when oil prices double overnight. In other words, whatever the motivations, a regional war that drags in the American empire to fight Iran could very well be a catastrophe for the American empire.

What all of this points to is exhaustion. The Israeli political culture is a chaotic mess that shows all the signs of being a spent force. It is a bunch of old guys living in the past, trying to cling onto life and power. This is not much different from the state of play in Washington, where it is a political class trapped in the last century. The flailing about that now defines imperial foreign policy is the result of yesterday men unable to come to terms with the reality of current age.

If this comes to pass, the American empire would not be the first to face its mortality in the Middle East. The Romans eventually learned that the Middle East was more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps it also spells the end of the Zionist project. It has been eighty years since the birth of the Zionist state, so maybe they are about to succumb to the curse of the eight decade. Of course, the Global American Empire is in its eighth decade as well, so maybe there is something to it.

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