Back in the Clinton years, a main paleo-conservative argument was that Wall Street had bought both parties. The tradition counters to big business were unable to compete with the vast amounts of money pouring into the parties from global corporations and their bankers. The old conservative aphorism, “the trouble with capitalism is capitalists” had given way to unanimous support for Gramm-Leach.
At the time, I was a little skeptical as it seemed to me that the rich and powerful would always have the whip hand in politics. It has always been thus so why should the future be any different? If America was transitioning from an industrial power to a financial and technological power, then the people in charge would the titans of finance and technology.
I think that the thing that no one saw coming is the class awareness of the global elite. For all of human history, the rich and powerful were tied to their country of origin by blood, language and tradition. The rootless cosmopolitan was a fringe character, never to be trusted. The new elite are different in that they are much more like the rootless cosmopolitan, with infinitely more money and, consequently, power.
The consequences are becoming apparent to many grassroots Republicans. They rallied to give the GOP majorities in both houses only to see the GOP embrace the Obama agenda with an enthusiasm of a fanatic. If you trundled out to vote in 2010 and 2014 and you don’t feel like a fool right now, you’re not paying attention. Just wait until the court rules against ObamaCare and the GOP rushes a fix through both houses. Maybe then you’ll see.
If not, the people with the whip hand are about to make sure you know who is running things now. Business Insider reports that the paymasters have grown tired of appeasing the provincials and their primitive customs.
For years, when it came to presidential candidates, Wall Street made huge compromises in order to support the Republican Party.
The money men in New York City set aside their socially liberal views in order to support fiscally conservative candidates because that was the only way to get on the same page as the GOP base.
The result has been a series of candidates Wall Street’s big donors didn’t really want.
It seems those donors are getting tired of that outcome.
Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman recently vented his frustration with this arrangement on an episode of Wall Street Week.
“I tend to be more Republican in my views, but socially very liberal. I’m going to have trouble with any Republican that does not disavow a fixation with social issues,” he said.
“Republicans have to understand that because young people in our country are not grabbed by those issues.”
“Republicans have to understand that because young people in our country are not grabbed by those issues.”
Republican candidates are not getting the message.
In fact, some social conservatives are actually hardening their stances before a new wave of younger voters has the mass to make a difference at the polls.
A recent Pew Research poll found that Republican Conservatives are the only group in America who have become less accepting of homosexuality over the last two years.
This is not what Wall Street wants to see.
As an aside, the obsession over young people is a strange psychosis that you don’t see in the history books. Up until the birth of mass culture, people just assumed young people did not know enough to be trusted so they had to be taught. Suddenly, that got flipped on its head and everyone claims to be living on a knife’s edge over the choices made by teenagers.
Anyway, the old crime thinkers who were run out of conservative politics decades ago are being proven correct about the culture war. Culture trumps everything. The plutocrats living off the financial system will do business with the either party, but they will favor those who share their worldview. Leon Cooperman will give money to Elizabeth Warren over Ted Cruz because Warren is better for the gays.
If you look at how the people who invented Christianity converted Europe, you’ll see it was not a bottom up approach. They went for the top guys, knowing they would compel their people to convert. That’s exactly how Augustine went about converting the Anglo-Saxons. He baptized Æthelberht, the king of Kent, assuming the people would follow.
That’s a lesson to consider here. The people in charge of the two political parties are wholly owned by the financial class. That financial class is culturally at odds with the people, but they control the means of public expression, as well as the dominant cultural institutions. History says they win, no matter how many times you vote Republican.
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It is amazing to see how lacking in awareness this new cosmopolitan ruling class is. They really have no concept of what it is they will be ruling over. Lord Keynes was brilliantly on point at the very beginning of his career, until his narcissistic faggotry took him over, but he found himself again at the very end–” We repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom…As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own.” The “we” were his own the Bloomsbury group and all their kind.
In ’96 I was very obsessed with the proposition that we were becoming a “brokeracracy.” The financial types had a spigot in the money pipe and they we doing everything possible to make the pipe wider and pump more money through it at ever higher velocities. Anything they could do to create more financial transactions and increase their skim was going to get enacted through law, through bribery, or through ignorance (mostly in the case of very complicated derivative securities that were very difficult for legislators and regulators to understand).
Strangely, as time wore on and my hypothesis was increasingly supported by events, I lost all passion for my idea… I think because almost no one else seemed to get it and certainly no sane politician was discussing it. Low interest mortgages, ballooning 401k’s, and for a few, insanely lucrative stock options kept mouths shut.
Here we are 20 years later and people are starting to talk about it. The out of sight rich, like so many who have seized power over the years, are now casting about how to hold it. Whether by design or evolution, they seem to be wedded to Burnham’s ideas with themselves as a very small “inner party,” about five percent of the population as clerks and specialists to keep things running, and the rest of us as proles to make fat on junk food, junk entertainment, and junk knowledge.
I agree with El Polacko that they are in the process of some sort of population cull. As he points out, the elites have long believed that there are too many of us. I would call it a soft cull with mostly psychological weapons being used to convince the weaker-willed among us to stop having children, though in the inner cities, it is far from peaceful.
I’m not sure what that portends. Usually, tyrants go after the small freeholder class first (de-kulakization, various dispossessions from the Plebs to the Scots). In the here and now, the first targets seem to be the weak-willed and unintelligent. Lately, the information campaign seems to have re-doubled its energy, spewing out cultural FUD at a feverish pace. The target seems to be (but I am far from certain of this) the remaining values of the small freeholders themselves.
Finally, as an aside, the tactical goals supporting the plutocrats’ strategic goal (stay in power, keep the mob at bay) don’t seem very different than those Marx laid down in 1848: destruction of nations, religion, civil society, the family; the creation of the “community of women” (and in today’s world, the community of gays, and transsexuals, and…); and destruction of the small freeholder class (he calls it the “petty bourgeoisie”). Read it for yourselves if you don’t believe me. The fun starts in Section II.
“As an aside, the obsession over young people is a strange psychosis that you don’t see in the history books.”
Good point, but the reason I think is that people began to shun age and start to worship youth, starting with the realisation that the kids have money (or perhaps more accurately, could persuade their elders to buy things for them.)
When I taught a few years ago, I was astonished how many of my teenage students may occasionally say revolutionary things but in every other way they were firmly materialistic. They would get excited by the prospect of ‘savings’ at the local store, and they all knew the price of everything.
I accept though that wanting to see only young people on television, say, is understandable in that some of the untidy, decrepit old fools who used to be wheeled out were of no interest to anyone. Youth came to equal desire, so TV stations turned to younger anchors and presenters. The old were another country, or about to be, so the excitable and spendaholic yoof was the way forward.
Every so often the Liebore party in the UK proposes that even younger people should get the vote, because the younger the voters are, the less they know and can be whipped into giddiness by the offer of a few bright and shiny things. The giddier they are means a smoother path to power.
Its a weird world, the rootless cosmopolitans are in fact the kingmakers in America and everybody loves them for different reasons.
This particular iteration of the ruling class has matriculated through the same educational establishment that is now turing out garden variety neo-bolsheviks without marketable skills, slow to marry and reproduce.
They promote and endorse socially dysfunctional behaviors that they would never consider allowing in their own families or peer group.
It’s difficult to determine why they feel it so important to endorse and promote the trendiest of alternative lifestyles, unless you take the pronouncements of the human exterminationists like John Holdren,Ted Turner, Prince Charles and the Club of Rome seriously.
If the goal really is to reduce the human footprint, it is easy to see the current manufactured cultural preoccupation with homos and trannys, the canonization of the supremely dysfunctional and geno-suicidal black race and unrestricted international immigration as several elements of a internationally co-ordinated plan to set the global population at each others throats.
The cloud people are preparing their deluxe underground shelters, already live lives surrounded by armed security completely separate from the rabble, and in the words of Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould, if things really get out of hand, they would simply “hire one half of the population to kill off the other half”.