In modern America, the mass media is controlled by adherents of the technocratic, neo-puritan religion we call modern liberalism. The simplest way to think of modern liberalism is as an identity cult where a relatively small group of whites look out at the rest of the country with contempt. As a result, public debate and public opinion exist within the context of liberalism. The terms, assumption, premises and boundaries of public discussion are determined by liberals in the media.
The point of bringing this up is to underline how easy it is to come away with a very warped view of what is happening in the world. In the recent Austrian election, for example, the Freedom Party was described as crypto-Nazi, despite being the opposite of National Socialists. If you read their party platform, they are more like the guys at Reason Magazine than anyone from Der Stürmer. From the perspective of the people writing the news stories, however, these rather bland libertarians of the Freedom Party feel like extremists.
The result of ceding control of public discourse to the cult of modern liberalism is that there is not a lot of discussion about what is happening to the Left. The coverage of the Austrian election is a great example. The press carried on like civilization just escaped an attack from Godzilla but breezed past the fact that Alexander Van der Bellen is a complete loon. The Austrian Green Party is nuts even by the standards of Austrian politics, which is no small thing.
Granted, the election was symbolic in many ways and that tends to result in weirdos doing well. Small town mayors are often eccentric because they have so little power. Voters are free to indulge in the entertainment side of politics when there is little at risk. Still, a complete crackpot won a nationwide election in a modern Western country. The reason for it is the political Left in the West has snapped free of its connections to normal society and is now rocketing out to the fringe.
Another useful example of this is the British Labour Party. It was not so long ago that the party was led by dreary technocrats like Tony Blair. Despite all the rhetoric, Labour was not a bunch of communists. They were always a left of center party that was just as happy to curry favor with the rich and powerful as the Tories. Today they are led by a madman who thinks Stalin was a trimmer. Jeremy Corbyn is a lunatic who has spent his life in fringe politics. Today he is one election away from being Prime Minister.
In America, the Democrats have been drifting into lunacy for a while under Obama as they desperately try to hold their coalition of weirdos together. Bernie Sanders is an old communist in a competitive race with Hillary Clinton. Sanders is not just an academic commie. He deeply admired the Soviets and thought Albania was a good model for the world. Just a decade ago a guy like Sanders running as anything other than a no-hope third candidate was laughable.
The dynamic in America has always been that the Progressives yank the window toward some fringe issue. The normals would grudgingly go along, kicking and screaming, so that the Overton Window gradually shifted in the direction of the loonies. All of a sudden, the normals appear to have simply let go of it. Set loose of that tether, the American Left is rocketing off into madness. There’s really no other way to describe the trannies in the bathroom business. It is madness.
Comparing American politics to European politics is not always sound because Europe has lived in a consequence free bubble since World War II. The economic and territorial safety of Europe has been America’s problem for 70 years, leaving the Euros to indulge is a more provincial brand of politics. Still, the events in Greece last year and what we are starting to see in more stable countries like Austria, suggests a global trend. At least a trend in the Western world.
The old order is breaking down and our politics are pulling apart. The old Center-Left coalition that has dominated Western politics is collapsing. On one side we have crackpots and lunatics trying to fill the void. On the other side we have traditionalists and nationalists, long marginalized, trying to organize in order to get into the fight. The Austrian Freedom Party had that “happy to be invited” vibe to it because none of them expected to be competitive.
Austria is a good lesson. We live in uncertain times and it is not always clear to voters who is wearing the black hat and who is wearing the white hat. People tend to go for the safe choice, and the safe choice is more often than not the familiar choice. Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate since Mike Dukakis, but she is familiar, like that hairy wart on Aunt Zelda’s chin. It is gross and disgusting, but you are used to it. That is what keeps her in the race, despite her many defects.
In the larger context, citizens in the West have been familiarized with Lefty for generations. Even the crazy ones like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn are stock figures on the political stage. The traditionalists and nationalists still feel alien and weird to many people and therefore face a bigger challenge. The result will be a period of derangement in politics where the fate of countries is placed in the hands of feckless nitwits like Justin Trudeau.
In short, things are probably going to get much worse before they get better.
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“The Australian Green Party is nuts even by the standards of Austrian politics, which is no small thing”
Your Aussie readership agree with that one.
Ha. For some reason, my spell checker keeps changing Austrian to Australian for some reason. I thought I caught all of them.
The irony here is palpable and wonderful. Thanks for the chuckle.
Note how in this controlled media environment, there is always a “far”, “hard”, or “extreme” Right – but these modifiers are never applied to the Left, the presumption being that everyone else is Left.
Yes. The political media are always talking about “right wing” this, and “right wing” that. But the only time you ever hear of a “left wing”, the story is about an airplane.
This is partly because people are so illiterate about history. They don’t have anything to compare to the present. When you hear people babble on about how scary things are now, it seems sort of odd if you lived through the late 60s. People have been brainwashed into thinking of the 50s as a terrible time, without understanding what a wonderful time it was compared to now. They can’t see how far Left the Dems have gone, because they have no understanding about how centrist the old Dems were.
We are headed back to total illiteracy in a big way. We don’t even want to deal with text any more. Just show us some pictures and we are good. In the past, we educated people to be aware of the historical timeline, so that they could compare that with the present point in time. I sometimes think we could get rid of all schools and kids would be educated about as well as they are now.
Education isn’t the point, indoctrination is.
And we let them do it right in front of us.
illiteracy crossed with amnesia. I grew up among many first gen kids of Cuban exiles. Most of the men in my family had been to war against truly evil people (Nazis, N. Koreans, VC). Working in a quantitative business, had a lot of Brezhnev era Russian emigres as colleagues. Current next door neighbor was a member of the first post Communist Albanian government. These folks were (are) always good for a reminder of just how evil and soul crushing these regimes were. Try to describe that to a 20 year old and you might well be talking about the Cretaceous period. They simply have no clue that transgender bathrooms is not a human rights issue on par with the Soviet Gulag. So Uncle Bernie just seems like a great guy…
The loonie left took over the education industry and dumbed everyone down.
Pretty sure you mean, “Overton window.”
Which, ironically, is the title of one of Mr. Nutjob Beck’s books.
“All of a sudden, the normals appear to have simply let go of it.”
This. 30 years ago it was possible to be a working-class union type Democrat and ignore some of the party leaders flirting with the loony fringe. In the past decade that loony fringe completely took over the national DNC and essentially told the working class types to get lost. They have better victims to champion so white men need not apply.
Of course they let go, nobody in national leadership identifies with the working class (besides Jim Webb who would have been a mainline Dem 30 years ago and is now a dinosaur on their fringe). What is a blue-collar guy worried about his job supposed to think of a political party who’s main concern is getting trannies into ladies room and importing poor Muslims?
Politicians are now coming to the realization that they don’t quite have the influence they once did which may be why we are seeing a sudden change in behaviour. As global corporations continue to expand and disengage from their home-countries (Ford, GE, VW, Siemens, Shell, etc.) they also disengage from local politics. Where giants like Ford in the US and Krupps in Germany once held sway over their indigenous politicians, that is less and less the case. When they move operations from the US to China, they reduce the local workforce and effectively cut the legs out from under the local unions who had a lot of influence on local and national politicians.
Western leadership everywhere is simply unable to deal with the shifting sand beneath their feet. The foundations they grew up with and relied upon as a power base have shifted and they are trying to repair their broken ox carts with technology they can’t even comprehend. The same thing happened when the Romans pulled out of Britain. They left behind technology the locals could no longer maintain or even understand and it wasn’t long until villas were turned into pig stalls.
I don’t know about Austria and Britain, but I think Sanders’s success in America comes from simply having a vision. Sure, “party like it’s 1909” is ridiculous, but at least he has a clear idea of what he wants the country to look like and can articulate it. (Hillary, meanwhile, answers the question “why do you want to be President?” with either “because it’s my turn!” or “shut up, peasant!” depending on the audience). Trump can also tap into a clear vision. The NASCAR-watchin’, beer-chuggin’, gun-totin’, flag-wavin’ redneck is the standard American caricature all over the world… but since the Left has controlled the culture for half a century now, they can no longer articulate why that’s bad. Nor can they articulate just why it’s so great to be a latte-sipping metrosexual with an ironic hipster tattoo. Trump simply says “those are your choices; pick.” It completely fries the Left’s circuits, so they run to the only clear options on offer — either Bernie’s Gilded Age lunacy or the transsexual nonsense.
The re-election of obama told us all we need to know about the mental state of the American voter. The sad fact is that many many people who should know better, have bought into the progressive mindset. So I will hunker down and wait for the system reboot to finish.
2012 is instructive for a different reason. Obama was a known quantity and therefore the “safe choice” for most voters. My back of the envelop math says Democrats should top out at 48% of the vote in a typical election. That’s assuming they run an amiable black guy thus goosing up the black vote. But, Obama was the easy choice if you had doubts about Romney or you just did not care a whole lot about Romney or Obama. That was enough to tilt the election for Obama.
There’s little doubt that Romney would have done less damage than Obama, but that’s not always obvious to voters who don’t pay a lot of attention to details.
It’s also why I suspect Trump gets 52-53% of the vote in November. Hillary is top limited at 48% and is the high risk choice.
Romney kept a lot of conservative voters home on Election Day in 2012. When the guy who invented ObamaCare is going up against the guy who implemented ObamaCare, there pretty much isn’t any reason to bother voting. Never mind the fact you had a Mormon going up against a Muslim. Mormons might not blow you up like a Muslim would, but they give most normal people the creeps because their religion is a retarded mishmash of ridiculous bullshit. All in all a perfect storm that ensured Obama’s re-election.
Hillary is despised by a good fraction of the liberal voters, and every single conservative voter. Independents who don’t like Trump will just stay home, or maybe waste their vote on Gary Johnson. I’d be surprised if Hillary even gets to 48%. That’s why I think the democrats are going to throw her under the bus before the convention and try to pull the old switcheroo.
I know more than a few Evangelicals who would not vote for a Mormon. They call it a cult. Some estimates put the number of white not voting over the last election at 6 million, but that’s in dispute. Still, I know a lot of white guys who threw in the towel in the Bush reign.
The electing of part-time drama teacher and full-time feckless nitwit Justin Trudeau tells you all you need to know abut the mental state of the Canadian voter. Unfortunately for Canada, there are no term limits for the prime minister, so the feckless nitwit Justin Trudeau may have enough time to finish the job of destroying Canada that his jackass father Pierre started. A system reboot in Canada could be a long way off, and possibly too little too late. Trump might have to build a northern wall to keep the Canadians out if Justin gets more than one term in office!
https://youtu.be/-haG_qRjEtc
I have seen Justin referred to as ‘a Justin Bieber wanna-be that runs Canada like a yoga class at Berkley”.
We could not agree more. The fact that memories are sooooo short in this country sometimes drives us to distraction.
Now we are treated to the spectacle of our PM sticking his tongue out at the Opposition during Question Period. Marvellous, isn’t it?
What the world must think of us, I cannot imagine.