For well over a year now, I have been talking about the Trump Effect™ and how it may be the single most important part of this election. Don’t get me wrong, Clinton winning is most certainly the end of America as an on-going concern. She will invite in 50 million foreigners, confiscate guns, auction off everything that is not nailed down in exchange for cash to her slush fund. She will weaponize the court by packing it with coreligionists. America will have become a banana republic and there is no peaceful way of returning from it.
That may be the end result, even if Trump wins the election, but what comes next will include a whole lot of people who are now fully aware of the reality of the political class. There are exponentially more people “fully woke” now than a year ago. Official Conservatism™ is circling the bowl, largely because the grassroots have looked around and decided guys like Jonah Goldberg are just low-tax liberals who hold them in contempt.
For a long time, the Cloud People have told the Dirt People that the great divide in America is between Liberals, who want to expand government and create a socialist utopia, and Conservatives that wish to restore limited government and a constitutional republic. The Bush administration put the lie to the latter and the mobilization of Wall Street behind someone’s wife in order to block Trump puts the lie to the former. Old school Progressive like Bernie Sanders are now outsiders on the Left.
In fact, among the Cloud People there is no divide. They unanimously agree that class solidarity comes before everything else. That’s made clear in this editorial from the Arizona Republic endorsing someone’s wife.
The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified.
That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.
This is the new team chant of Official Conservatism™. The logic here is akin to saying “They don’t have my favorite ice cream so I’m going to have rat poison instead.”
Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.
That’s beneath our national dignity.
By “our dignity” they are not speaking for you. You are not “our” and you better get that through your thick head.
Trump’s long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good-old-boy gaffes.
They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern.
These are not the words of serious people thinking seriously about the country. These are the words of teenage girls gossiping about one another in the bathroom. That’s what is dawning on many Dirt People. These feckless airheads allegedly carrying the people’s banner in the media are more concerned with their status among the beautiful people than anything else. There is no divide among the Cloud People. They think the Dirt People are revolting.
And increasingly the Dirt People are revolting. Even people like Ace of Spades are moving toward a break with Official Conservatism™ and the GOP.
The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.
They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.
Guys like Jim Geraghty, and other NR-types, used to quote Ace all the time, but now they don’t know his name. The reason is class loyalty. Ace has his ideas and loyalty to the managerial class is simply not a concern. Given the choice between Trump and Clinton, he rationally picks Trump. For the National Review types, this is treason. Class loyalty trumps everything or else, so Ace is now dead to them.
The sadness and frustration you see in that Ace post turns up all over as people begin to see the reality of their condition. More than a few look back at their support for Bush, for example, and wonder how all those big shots in conservative media were so wrong. They wonder why they never talk about it, much less admit it. The conclusion many are making is that it was just a scam, a con, a way to turn the virtue of conservative voters into a vice in support of the Progressive project.
Eric Hoffer wrote “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s what happened with the conservative movement. By the 1980’s they had their charismatics, Reagan and Buckley. Next came the money making opportunities in talk radio and book selling. By the time Bush came along it was a racket, a bust out, where the only real concern was how much money these people could stuff into their pockets before the game was up.
The game is up now and the Dirt People are waking up to it.
The left has worked for decades to undermine the personal qualities necessary to sustain a free republic: self-reliance, self-restraint, industry, and thrift and has largely succeeded. Hillary has said she intends to diminish our liberties and she has an organized cadre stashed at the Clinton Foundation to immediately begin work. In a recent WSJ editorial, Mark Helprin describes Trump as “….Rather like the crazy boy-emperors after the fall of the Roman Republic, …” an apt description. So what is one to do? One could argue that voting for the boy emperor will result in less long-term damage because it will take him at least a couple of years to get organized and he will have concerted opposition from the bureaucracy, many in Congress (even his own party), and the press. Hillary, on the other hand, will have a clear field.
The primary objection to Sarah Palin by the Party Elites was that she was low Class.
This should have been a clue to us that Ideology really wasn’t important to them.
The worst thing to come out of this campaign is the betrayal of the Bush family. First President (Presidents?) I’ve had to be ashamed of voting for.
Lost in all this is the Constitution. Either candidate will govern-by-lynch-mob. One will lynch our friends and one will lynch our enemies. But the lists are fluid…
We need a new nation with new borders. Will we ever fight for one?
” Next came the money making opportunities in talk radio and book selling.”
You mean people like Shawn Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, the Breitbary site in its entrirety, etc. – these are all cloud people? But they’re all Trump apologists, so how could this be? Or maybe your entire premise is so half-baked and convuluted and is really nothing more than an excuse to throw a temper tantrum against the “ruling class.” You know, the same ruling class people like Ace and the other “burn it down” folks have been railing against for over a decade for being establishment ninnies ready to sell-out the cause of limited government. Ah, but now this group has been magically transformed into “cloud people” and ideological purists to mask the fact that it’s people like Ace who are now the party hacks,
Z: In case you read these comments, I derived a reply from this piece directed to a DC, Insider Atty, David Post, in response to his WaPo article “An Open Letter to Volokh Conspiracy Readers Who are Trump Supporters.” The man is aghast that any sane person would support Trump as not one person he knows or any acquaintance support him. He lives in the DC Bubble.
He asked Trump supporters to reply how they could possibly be so. I received 4 “WOW” responses & thought it might interest you:
***
Hillary will most likely be our overlord weaponizing both the IRS & the Court to persecute & prosecute to submission. Obama’s IRS delayed opposition 501c’s for years. Hillary’s IRS will forever or reject them out of hand.
The Establishment tells us the great divide is between Liberals wanting a socialist utopia & Conservatives wanting limited gov & a constitutional republic. Bush put a lie to the latter & the mobilization of Wall Street to block Trump puts the lie to the former. Progressive like Bernie Sanders are now outsiders on the Left.
Among the Establishment there is no divide. The R-Establishment says:
“Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.
That’s beneath our national dignity.”
“Our dignity” is not speaking to you. You are not “our” & you better get that through your thick head.
The Establishment is unanimous, they consider the rest of us revolting.
Increasingly we are revolting. The journalists who are supposed to have truth as their first mission have become nonstop liars decrying Trump as a liar himself. They’ve declared war on all beneath their station, those not in The Media who should not have much of a say in things.
The game is up & the Dirt People are waking. What comes next will be exponentially more people “fully woke.”
[Largely drawn from Z-man, “Friends & Enemies,” 10/16]
Shesh tex.
Think about the progression of this.
A WaPo article-
An Open Letter
to Volokh Conspiracy Readers
Who are Trump Supporters.
But I admire your Moxie for going there!
” 4 “WOW” responses”? Are those “good” at WaPo?
When I leave them in response to a post (or piece), it’s usually a preface for SOME polite transposition of “THAT was a gob smacking, mind numbing, Dunning-Kreuger, feigned ignorance, bit of stupidity!”
Of course you may be right & I considered that. There are idiots everywhere & if you happened to read David Post’s article you’d see it first hand & in your parlance, the article itself would deserve several “Wows.”
Without contrary evidence I initially assume the best in people & assumed the “wows” were normal “wows” = good.
Regardless, if my readers were bright & knowledgeable enough the Wows = normal, good wows & if not it speaks to the Wowers, not me.
Since I’m no longer on a college campus I don’t think it takes much Moxie to go anywhere.
Trump is a traitor to his class and that’s why us “dirt people ” support him.
It is a grim picture considering the worst could go down. As voting was never meant to get us out of anything, it was for keeping us out of having to vote our way out of bad things to begin with. It will be a close thing wether or not a functioning culture of self determination and individualism survives and sustains a long term stay behind operation preserving the western Christian traditions and history of a free people born into liberty.
The corporate slaves of the left and right charade, and their dark skinned helot counterparts, the American’s so inured to the government matrix of a state slave plantation, lack the audacity and courage of free men, because they gain nothing when they either win or lose, whereas the freemen have everything to gain from conflict and everything to lose from surrender.
Yet it goes deeper than that. They are totalitarians in their own right. The will, and do, sacrifice everything to the comforts of being afraid and avoiding responsibilities, and joys, of self determination and individualism, choosing to remain under the embrace of state corporate totalitarianism, terrified of the first two things which make a man totally free. Many will end up dying instead of standing up for their primal God given freedoms before this is over.
That being free begins with themselves is such a foreign idea as to be like an alien invasion come to exterminate their way of life. But it goes even deeper than that still, they will do nothing to upset their apple cart, the hard truths all around notwithstanding, in spite of the truths, even if it is death staring them in their eye, and by doing nothing, it is their way of enabling and perpetuating the soft embrace of the chains of slavery that they find such illusion of safety wearing. And by doing nothing it is their way to assure the threat of freedom and liberty does not raise it’s head to remind them of what willing slaves and dupes they are.
The only thing a blessing in all this is they make for terrible warriors, as are their masters, for they know nothing of the natural rights of arms and defense those arms are for. But they make dandy cannon fodder for the political elite. And in the end, if God forbid it happens, that is all they will be good for.
Their masters will fold like a cheap suit and pull back to their sanctums of statism to try and survive once their Praetorian Mercenary’s cross back over the Rubicon and discover they are faced with free men who can not be shocked and awed into surrendering, those mercenary’s having no dog in that kind of fight, and realistically not the hearts and minds to sustain such a defense against righteous defiance and redress, but a payroll check, fancy weapons, and a position in an oligarchy crumbling, they will eventually quietly drift off in ones and small numbers to tend to their lands and family leaving nothing but the most ardent sociopaths and bloody psychopaths.
Huma: “Hillary, the peasants are revolting!”
Hillary: “They certainly are.”
Now Obama wants to categorize Middle Eastern people as a separate race. We all know why: so they can become a sacred group like blacks, gays and trans-whatevers. He is rubbing our faces in the slop of progressivism as he leaves office. He hates white America more than Farakhan. I agree a sea change has occurred. The Dirt People didn’t know they were dirt people and now they do and they now know they’ve been scammed by the left and the right for the last 60 years. It may be too late though. Even if Trump wins and even with this new awakening, I don’t see how we can stop the tsunami of liberalism. Despair is a mortal sin. I am resisting it, but when everyone in power lies to you all the time and yet are winning all the time, it gets harder every day.
James-agree with every point you made.How to stop the tsunami? You can’t,we can’t,but we can never,ever,ever give up.There’s a reason POTUS hates Sir Winston Churchill,and it’s not “colonialism”.Churchill learned the true nature of Islam as a young man,and wrote of it.Truth is anathema to damn near everything on the left.Never,ever,ever give up.
Ever. I will die standing.
The Dirt People and their allies in the Clouds (they exist) should simply take a leaf from the Alinsky playbook and call a general strike. That includes serving military, leos, all the Dirts who operate and do the heavy lifting in infrastructure (utilities, transport, etc.), hospitals and so on. They could shut down the media in under 24 hrs and for all practical purposes bring about a coup d’etat that is long overdue. Such a notion has always seemed extremely far-fetched to me, given the complacency in the US, but it now seems to me that the fetchin’ distance has grown shorter.
It starts in the schools. We start by taking back the curriculum and allowing choice. We demand college and the universities support different points of view. And we will need new ways to get our viewpoint out.
Like meema, I’m in that small grouping of women who are not just the opposite of the avg emotionally driven, overly sensitive feminists, we are militant. I can’t speak for meema, or any other woman that falls in this category, but I am for drastic and revolutionary moves. If everyone in the elite academia were dragged out and lined up against the wall, the media, showbiz elites, along w/ James Comey and his ratfuck weasel gang, along w/ those IRS traiters, Lois Lerner, Koskinnen, etc., I’d gladly volunteer for the dispatch team.
At the urging of an email friend, I watched a video yesterday (I don’t recommend). It was largely a pro Trump message but couched in a nutcase ‘prophetic’ delivery. But it’s an ill wind that blows no good, as my daddy used to say, thus I did get something out of it.
Sprinkled in among the craziness, were clips of Trump speeches in which he made sense, was articulate and presented a good case for real change. It dawned on me, since most of us never get to see a whole speech, how easy it has been for the complicit MSM to cherry pick the worst of Trump’s campaign words and stitch them together then toss them out as representative as the real ‘unpresidential’ Trump.
I’m not saying he is presidential. Who can define that anymore, when presidents perform on late night teevee shows? I’m saying I don’t care. If the Hitlery supporters can rationalize her lies and criminal activities, then I can overlook Trump’s tongue blunders.
Is this a sign of desperation?
It doesn’t start in the schools. That is where the Republic ended. It starts by ending the school systems, district by district.
vive la resistance! Resist we must! If Hillary and the left win in November… well… then we buy a big sailboat and whiskey and live day to day.
How big is that boat?
Big Sailboat and Whiskey, or Sailboat and Whiskey; song title if I ever heard one.
Then we buy a big sailboat and whiskey
And just live this life day to day
You heard Jimmy Buffett singing, didn’t you?
Lyle Lovett – If I Had A Boat – YouTube
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=if+i+had+a+boat
Boat drinks! You made me smile, thanks.
The lying and still winning thingy – says to me that we are officially in the Matrix.
They win with lies because people are gullible and generally dull-witted. I blame many of the distractions for the dullness of the American mind. Spending too much time staring at small screens all day and night, including mindless TV, makes the zombie apocalypse a reality.
I think we are past the point of no return. It will take a lot of bloodshed to right America … I don’t know if there enough left to save at this point. Our numbers are shrinking and their are growing… we may be heading into a very long period of global misery and slavery..
USA Today reported that “Conservative Arizona Republic to endorse Hillary Clinton”. Got a good laugh out of that,AZ Republic began shedding their conservative writers at least 2 decades ago,when media giant Gannett bought them from the Pulliam family after the patriarch passed.The majority of good writers,from editorial page to sports,slipped away to greener pastures or retired.I’m sure they’re mightily pleased with themselves these days,being all diverse and pro-illegal immigrant,and pro-everything-gay-on-earth,and virulently anti-gun,or anything hinting of a gun,like an artfully chewed pop-tart.The Special Edition they published when Clusterfuck the 1st was elected was so full of airy nonsense it floated.Their website is worse.This paper once upon a time employes real investigative journalists,the most famous being Don Bolles,who was doggedly following a corruption story that sniffed the drawers of prominent Phoenix families.He was rewarded with 6 sticks of dynamite under the driver’s seat of his car on June 2nd,1976,someabout the how survived the horrific injuries,but succumbed on June 13.There isn’t one current employee fit to walk in Don Bolles’ shadow.I know this because of their abysmal “reporting” of Eric Holder’s Fast and Furious gun-running scheme,designed to heap fecal matter on selected AZ gun dealers.Oh,they were ecstatic when it looked like “rogue” FFL’s were running guns,and printed breathless stories of the “rotten apples” in the gun stores.Their interest in the story dried up faster than spit on a hot Phoenix sidewalk when the DOJ’s own Inspector General proved ATF lied about what the actual purpose was in order to get their cooperation.Holder Perjured himself testifying before House Oversight Committee,and was held in contempt of Congress.Big deal.POTUS had to declare Executive Privilege over his communications with Holder during that critical time period.About a story neither one of them knew anything about til they read it in the newspapers.Like AZ Republic.We’ve seen this same scenario repeated over and over,lie,rinse,cover up,repeat.Oh,and did any AZ Republic reporter ask then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton if she signed an arms export waiver to allow those weapons to cross an international border? The corruption of this administration and it’s Human Centipede media is so high,you need wings to stay above it.
So I finally just had to have my say. Shouting at the TV is not helping my blood pressure. I guess what I really want is for Trump to stand up and deliver the kind of speech that Bill Pullman’s president character delivered in the first Independence Day. You know, the kind of speech that tells it like it is.
Anyway – here’s the speech I wish Trump would deliver.
http://bagsallpacked.blogspot.com/2016/10/dear-mr-trump.html
Good speech meema.
What frustrates me most is that as off the rails as Trump has been this entire time, no one in his steering committee has realized that the most winning speech Trump could give would be just him being real, acknowledging that we are real.
“Shouting at the TV”
There’s your problem. Throw it away; you’ll never regret it.
(Seriously, take it down from the wall and to the garbage bin where it belongs. Tear down the altar to Hollywood.)
That was a special kind of hipster virtue signalling a few years ago.
Seriously though, if you’ve never seen “How It’s Made” you’re missing out.
We do like How It’s Made. 🙂
Oh, I used to watch “how it’s made”, but I dropped the “bundle” that had CSpan.
I STILL love sausage though.
The REAL “How it’s made” was freakin’ hypnotizing to me.
We’re almost there, actually. We are weaned down to the last fifteen minutes of The Five as we eat our evening meal, (this is where the shouting occurs mostly) then a couple hours of recorded shows before bed. Though we are running out of patience with the new normal of the ‘gay’ twist. We’ve come to the point of saying as a show begins- ‘wait for it – and there it is’. Could they be more transparent with their social engineering techniques?
The local news (from Portland OR) has a black guy and two white women. I don’t begrudge the spot to the black guy as he’s been on the air a long time. I just see so much of this on tv these days. Is the goal to purge white men from society?
The simple answer is ‘yes’. They are indeed trying to remove white guys, in fact, all things masculine from society. A direct result of the feminization of the world. And the Whore rides the beast until it turns and devours her. It won’t end well, I have it on good authority.
I can’t. My husband loves it. He likes to watch CBS news every morning. I have converted him from the dark side, so am making some progress. I just can’t see why anyone wants to watch that crap.
I wonder if you’ve read Hillbilly Elegy yet. That’s the book that is supposed to explain the Dirt People to the Cloud People. The guy has an interesting story and he clearly wants to honor his roots. But he keeps having to stop and virtue signal along the way and it gets in the way of his story. I also wondered how his Yale buddies would have gotten on with his grandmother. (And for the record, I think Rick Bragg does a better job of describing the culture. He didn’t go to Yale or work for Peter Thiel).
When you think about it, it’s odd that we should need a book to explain who the Dirt People are. Separation of classes has gotten much worse in my lifetime. WWII did force intermingling of the classes. I am afraid it won’t go well if there is another great leveling event.
Will have to read Bragg. Just finished Elegy. Thought it explained quite a lot about the Kentucky sides of both my parents families, including my g-grandmother, a widow raising four children who did, with an old cavalry pistol to make her point, threaten to kill a man she thought had ill intentions towards my grandmother. But you are right. I spent a good part of my childhood with these relations, my children have had almost zero exposure to the “other side of the tracks”. I don’t think they are better for it.
Bragg has a deep affection for these folks. He has a book about the textile mill his brother worked at. You can tell how criminal it was to take jobs away from these folks.
There’s a story about a worker at the mill that was told to work on some lines. They wouldn’t shut down the mill and he was electrocuted by the live lines. His wife sued the company for compensation, since he was doing what they told him to do. She lost. They told her he should have known better and refused to do the job.
Just bought Hillbilly Elegy on Amazon….sounds great…
Z Man; Bingo on the female adolescent tone of elite discourse of late. Middle School Mean Girls Rules(TM) now in effect: Vapid hormone-charges emotionalism and status competition entirely too much in evidence.
Hard to see where this came from other than Academic Feminism. I remember thinking in 1966, “What the hell do these over-privileged rich-bitches actually have to be so angry about_?” But the real question is not why they railed against ‘daddy’ but how was it that they succeeded_?
Well written. I wonder too about all the newspaper endorsements if that isn’t more of who’s been buying up papers and radio stations. They didn’t flex their muscles so blatenly before, but it’s kinda out in the open now., ie, the am radio news blurbs during talk radio are written by cloud folks… usually heavy in PC/MSM agitprop. ( they frame the stories on the news the way they want to etc ).
Re: Ace. .. read that site daily from 2003 till this last May, and since then no more. Ace finally pushed me away with his non-stop #nevertrump and dumping on the few Trump supporters in the comments. Yes, it was mainly all in snark initially, but as Cruz started failing in the late spring, it got untenable.., it became an chore to sift through the anti-Trump stuff to find a funny or good post, only to have even those posts take a jab at us stoopid Trump supporters, etc. His site, no problem, but he lost me. And before I left I was noticing how many names I’d seen in comments over the years were no longer posting comments… and many of the cobs were gone… and I think it’s the politics of this election cycle took a heavy toll on his blog,( and many others).
Folks that could get along and debate stuff slowly were told to pick a side, and if that side was Trump or Trump friendly, then, well, if you remain you will be ridiculed.. incessantly. It’s a different election , .. a precipice, a turning point… in many areas. Ace isn’t the only blog or site I stopped reading… the list, including NRO, is in the dozens. I can take snark or opposite opinion, but the degree to which the virtue signaling and othering has been fascinating.
The thing that killed Ace for me was the Idaho primary. Ace kept saying Trump would win, because Idaho is full of white supremacists. Those of us that had actually been to Idaho kept trying to tell him that it’s not like that. He stopped talking about it when Cruz won.
Still visit Ace of Spades daily,longtime commenter MP4 wrote an excellent story of early Hollywood a couple of days ago,well worth the read.Ace can be a cantankerous fellow,step out of line and he’ll drag you into the public square,flay you with a cat o’ 9 tails,and leave your skeletal remains as a warning for all to see.It is his site,and his logo is a fair warning.Ace is a thinking man,well aware of the godawful mess this world is in. His Flaming Skulls are brilliant. Not a criticism of other comments,all are fair. Just sayin’,don’t give up on Ace.
Fukk Ace, the blubbery cuck
Good summation on Ace. Yeah, he became completely unreadable when he went full NeverTrump last spring. The sad part was, he was always a hanger-on to the “elite”, the professional pundits. You could tell he was never quite part of the club, but he desperately wanted to be. He carried their water for them and pushed away a great deal of his viewership.
By the time the general rolled around, he at least showed some principle in backing the nominee, but his elite friends were nowhere to be found.
Your experience with Ace mimics mine almost entirely. I saw that piece he put up the other day linked elsewhere and that was the first time I’d visited his site in months. And to tell the truth, my reaction to it was a tad less than charitable. He acted like a complete d**k to anyone who had dared to say anything similar all summer long. And mind you, I never really posted anything there other than a quip or two but a big reason to go there in first place was to read the comments. After he started going after people, I quickly grew to dislike the man as much as any NRO or Weekly Standard contributor.
And now with this new lament of his, he’s seen the light?? Congratulations Ace! Here’s a cookie, a-hole! Frankly, I’ve gotten so burned out on these “right wing” phonies and poseurs this year that at this point I don’t really care what he thinks or who he votes for. If there’s any justice, his site will go the way of Little Green Goofballs.
RDittmar…. he went LGF… the irony was not lost on me.
Ace has always just tried too hard to be some sort of “voice”.
Instead he outed himself as the douchebag he truly was.
I deleted his bookmark as soon as he went full Cruzer.
That was a part of it as well. I was never a fan of his snarkiness and douchebag behavior. He was a genuinely funny guy though who had his moments, and the moron-horde was fantastic itself. Even Andrew Breitbart would peruse it back in the day.
But man, the shrill pettiness and nastiness that came out when he went nuts was too much. Also what’s the deal with him claiming he’s 29? Give me a break, he hasn’t seen 29 in over 15 years.
Ace – I love the site and read every post. This is the internet folks – your skin is way too thin – I get insights – my brain is bigger for reading the stuff posted and the comments there. Join in the fray and quit your whining. Sheesh – hyper-sensitive people lose, always.
In all western politics today the desire to drive the responsible voter away (and in some cases bring in lots of irresponsible voters to replace them) will be recognised in time as one of the fractures in the keystone of our society’s triumphal arch that eventually brought the gate and the wall tumbling down.
I find it odd that the Right are of the same mind as the Left in this. I had hoped conservatives might see the pitfalls and errors that the unthinking socialists and ‘progressives’ continually make and try to avoid them, but apparently they are so alluring that sheep of all colours and wool quality will follow happily.
There is and can be no responsible voting under universal suffrage. The most important issues of our age cannot be voted upon because they cannot even be spoken about. It took a buffoon to do that, and now he is the nominee. We are reduced to defining progress in this way under universal suffrage. I will take it.
Superciliousness. Goldberg drips it.
Didn’t Geraghty used to be the class clown at NRO, the guy who was never supposed to write about anything serious (unsaid: because he just wasn’t equipped to handle that stuff)?
Steve Sailer likes to troll the elite who secretly read him (especially the liberal Jewish elite) by mentioning that Israel is a society that is worth seriously studying but the reality is that they had an era of total elite madness too, back in the 1990s. When the Oslo Peace Process broke out, the right there kept asking serious questions about national interest that nobody wanted to listen to them. Peace was around the corner! Hadn’t they heard? It was this era when Israel got itself an African refugee problem too. (The twitter slogan of Open Boarders for Israel is good trolling but not historically accurate; the Israelis had wide open borders until ten years ago and got a lot of refugees from it. The only difference is they had a debate about it and were able to muster the political will to do something about it.) Then when Rabin was assassinated it looked like there would be a full blown purge (not gulags but casting anyone outside of the far left into the outer darkness of polite opinion). What kept things from going up in smoke for them? What saved Israel from its off the rocker elite? Reality.
A bunch of bus bombs went off right before the elections in 1996 and Shimon Peres lost to Bibi Netanyahu. The elites hated him and did everything to make his life miserable until they managed to chase him out of office in 1999. If you want to see a picture of how the elite will deal with a Trump victory, you only have to look at Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister. And what happened afterwards? The elite got what they wanted, good and hard. Open war basically. Things got so bad that Ariel Sharon was able to get elected; that’s like Nixon being able to win another term as president in 1996 in American terms. Or like Lyndon Johnson rising from the dead and winning another landslide. The elites hated Sharon too but they were scared by that point and he moved his positions slightly so they didn’t have much trouble coming on board.
Elites go crazy from time to time; they forget that they aren’t the only ones in the country and in fact that they might not be anything other than a powerful minority. And they hate to be reminded of that; but you can’t escape reality. And for us in 2016 in the current election, the reality is that a vote for Hillary is a vote to ignore the world unfolding around us. I don’t have an illusions about Trump; he isn’t the second coming. But for a man who’s spent so much time on TV, he’s the only candidate grounded in reality.
Their elites may have had their moments, but looking at what they have done for their people over the last 50 years brings up:
– Negotiated a country-sized land of their preference to build their nation;
– Obtained modern Western weapons, including tanks, jet fighters, and the nukes;
– Led the military defence of their land and the expansion of it at the expense of their enemies;
– Secured the nation through constitutional and physical (walls) means;
– Got the most powerful country in the world to support them financially, politically, and militarily via unfriendly government replacements in the region (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, possibly Iran next);
– Restricted the critique of their nation abroad in the Western media and via the anti-hate laws.
That’s some stellar performance if you ask me.
Now, let’s give the American elites twice as much time – 100 years – and see what they’ve accomplished in the same regard. New Deal? The GI bill? Cheap imported goods for two generations? You tell me.
I didn’t say that the elite in Israel was always mad or that it is currently mad; only that they had a run of crazy in the late 1990s that is worth examining in light of our own situation. (I could have put up something about the elite in another country like South Africa but since Shimon Peres being buried was in the news, this was on my mind.) Many of the points that you list were carried out by the founding father generation of that country, a type of elite that is much more inclined to seek success because they after all have skin in the game.
The elites in Israel started to go off the rails in 1977 when the first rightwing government under Menachem Begin came to power. When you read about that election, most of the higher ups aren’t ashamed to openly admit that they felt like the country had betrayed them, that being in power was their right and that the country had gone mad by turning them out. And when Begin got a peace treaty with Egypt, it drove them into even bigger fits. It all came to a head in the 1990s; the Oslo Peace Process was how the elite was going to claw the country back and if Arafat had been really interested in becoming President of a West Bank state it might have worked out for them. But he liked being a revolutionary more and would have liked to be a conqueror, not a negotiator. (To be fair, its more fun to be a revolutionary than a bureaucrat; and its more romantic to be a conqueror than to work out details in long negotiations.) And once the bus bombings started, nobody wanted to hear for a bunch of leftist peaceniks.
“– Secured the nation through constitutional and physical (walls) means;”
The Israelis have put up walls everywhere but an important thing to remember is that the only reason they have it now is that they started out on the issue long before we did. The right side of the Internet likes to bring up Israels wall (again its a good troll method) but it took a long time and a lot of active terrorism before it got build. Even in the south of the Israel, the wall that now keeps the whole of Africa out isn’t officially there because of immigration but because of the threat of terrorism. It does double duty but even there, even with half of Eritrea trying to get into Israel between 1995-2010, they could only get it financed in their budget because its a terrorism deterrent.
“– Restricted the critique of their nation abroad in the Western media and via the anti-hate laws.”
Israel and Diaspora Jewry are two different things even if they are related. The Israelis make a lot of attempts to spin their situation but they aren’t actually financing or sponsoring hate crimes laws as far as I know. Their position in the media isn’t exactly great either; every time they fight anywhere the press practically accuses them of war crimes. I’d believe that they “restricted critique of their nation” if they hardly appeared in the papers at all. Actually I think they’d rather they didn’t appear in the press as much as they do.
“Now, let’s give the American elites twice as much time – 100 years – and see what they’ve accomplished in the same regard. New Deal? The GI bill? Cheap imported goods for two generations? You tell me.”
American elites haven’t been perfect in the last hundred years but they used to not be openly corrupt and were at least concerned with the well being of the country. It hasn’t all be one long dirge since 1916. Most people lament the decline in the country from the 1970s, not the 1910s. The problem of our current elites, basically since 1960 but especially since 1989 is that they are losers without direction. They don’t win; they only know how to patch things over with appeals to authority, to government power and government financing. And worst of all, they do all this why expecting everyone to believe they are obvious geniuses who deserve to be deferred to.
@Brooklyn Thank you for the reply. Clearly you know much more about their history and their situation, while I just look on and think “damn, I wish our elites had that much of noblesse oblige”.
If their founding elites felt betrayed back in the 70s it must have been the reverse of the our predicament. After all, some of them actually put their lives on the line for the nation. When was the last time an American president did the same?
“but an important thing to remember is that the only reason they have it now is that they started out on the issue long before we did” – I think the really important thing is that they did it while they still had the time to solve it.
“Most people lament the decline in the country from the 1970s, not the 1910s.” – They way I see it the 70s were when the chickens really came home to roost, while the groundwork for the issues was laid down long before, starting with the 1910s. I read some books on sociology and immigration written in the late 1910s, and there clearly was a sense of a separate and distinct American nation back then. Not so much now.
To add on the 1910s: consider that this is the period when they abandoned the isolationist stance sending the citizens to die in a foreign war, abandoned the sovereign money, and adopted the wide open immigration. Three monumentally disastrous policies in just one decade – they must have worked overtime to accomplish that.
Immigration was restricted from 1921 to 1965. The Hart Celler act of 1965 focused on flooding America with third world parasites by mean of “family reunification”. The prime movers behind this treason were (((Emanuel Celler))) of NYC and of course Teddy Kennedy. May all good men curse their names forever.
There was a lull over those years, that’s true, and quite possibly in recoil to the speed with which the fabric of society was being transformed in the 1910s. But it was only a matter of time: the idea of the melting pot was already in existence.
“To add on the 1910s: consider that this is the period when they abandoned the isolationist stance sending the citizens to die in a foreign war, abandoned the sovereign money, and adopted the wide open immigration.”
The US fought the Spanish-American war long before the 1910s plus had a bunch of military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. The US also pretty much had unrestrained immigration for the whole of the 19th century.
I don’t disagree that a series of problems can trace some groundwork to the Progressive era but I suppose you could say that then the elites either had a sense of shame or an understanding that at the very least the appearance of law and loyalty had to be maintained.
Caroline Glick has written a brilliant article, The Twilight of American Jewry, outlining the collective decision of the Republican Jewish establishment to, in her words, “commit political suicide” this election year, and expresses her doubts that they will ever recover from it:
http://carolineglick.com/twilight-of-american-jewry/
Well worth reading.
I still for the life of me can’t understand Bill Kristol and the Jewish Republicans of NeverTrump. The only thing I can figure is that they imagine that Trump was going to be a bigger wipeout than Goldwater but making a bet with no retreat to it is just politically crazy.
As for Jewish Republicans, I think that its probably healthier for the current crop of “leaders” to be put out to pasture. Part of it is demographics; they Jews who are going to be the future Jewish community don’t come from the non-Orthodox who currently dominate the “leadership”. With this wipeout, there is room for a new generation to grow into positions. (Its not like its the end for Jews in government if Trump wins; he’s just more likely to choose from people who he knows which means probably more outer-borough Orthodox types who are a bit more right wing than the rest of the mainstream Jewish community.)
His daughter and son in law are on the leftmost fringe of Orthodox Judaism, which has become much more stringent in the last couple decades. On the whole it’s a very right wing bunch, and they’re the ones having kids these days. That said, most of the very secular Jews I know had observant grandparents or great grandparents. Some share of children raised in Orthodox homes have long dropped into more liberal streams, though there are signs that’s abating.
I posted in the comments on Ace, multiple times, that this is about class. Then I got tired of beating my head against that wall. One of the worst moments for me was when I realized that folks on the Right looked down on me, just like folks on the Left. I wonder if this is why Trump is winning some support from blacks and Hispanics.
He and I have been friendly for about 8-9 yrs now, he’s a great guy, introspective thinker, but he’s very caught up in the class status apparatus among his peer group in his IRL in NYC. I find it so frustrating, I’d love to see him turn off the never ending navel gazing & garment rendering & just feel the hot burn of righteous indignation. It’s impossible for me to understand this kind of thinking, of Ace’s. I like to think it’s my dogged insistence to be independently minded w/ some old school rebellious punkness held over from the 70s, or maybe just immature actions never resolved, who knows. I just do not care one whit what anyone here, there, or anywhere thinks of me, or doesn’t. There is literally no name, insult, slight, or epithet you can hurl at me, that would even make a ding & I rarely talk to people outside of my home, other than briefly exchanged neighborly pleasantries. This need for an adult man or woman, to belong to some clique or fraternity, or to use Ace’s own favorite, the “SmartSet,” seems insanely needy & childish in that sense of helpless dependency of the group, and in the sense of it being exclusionary to any heretics, only makes me wonder- just which Mean Girls’ character is Jonah Goldberg?!?
Anyone that is able to red pill Ace w/ JQ, has my undying gratitude, but I firmly do not see it ever occurring, ever. *sigh*
The elites haven’t been able to win increasingly at anything and they are running out of money to paper things over. Victory and wealth would probably cover over the issues we are all complaining about. If we’d won in Iraq nobody would have cared about how fair or unfair going into that war was. If the money was still flowing no one would care about colleges becoming insane asylums or mass immigration because you could afford to skip it or move away from it. Thats the reason more people are waking up to the situation now; nothing focuses the mind like crisis, poverty, and defeat.
Its also clearer to people that the people in charge seem to have gone soft; insanity or a death wish or just plain becoming too inbred (figuratively more than literally) to keep things running smoothly. A sane elite would never have let someone like Hillary Clinton get this far; things would have gone down like in Casino – the bosses lay down the law and either move you to the small time (how De Niro’s character ended up) or wipe you out (basically everyone else in that movie). Instead it looks like the elites are coming around to the idea that the only way out of the current mess is WW3 but without nukes or the bodycount. World War Z for real (the book, not the movie; in the book the bi-partisan elites basically turn America into a socialist squat in the name of winning their war against the zombies; somehow that includes unleashing tanks against everyone left alive in the Dakotas). Anyone think this bunch can pull that (the no bodycount thing, not the getting us in a war thing) off?
A minor point… If we’d won in Iraq nobody…. The O declared that we won and then HE shipped out.
He declared that we won but nobody sane believed that; real victory would have buried criticism. Declaring victory without winning is just political word games.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
For the first time I empathize with French peasants of 1789.
The final NO to relativism’s blessing on barbarity will only come with the Christian mind.
Karl Marx, that bastard, was right after all –it’s class uber alles. The Cloud People are just the willing idiots of the capitalists, a.k.a. the bourgeoisie. As irony is the social disease which will finally kill us, it’s fitting that the Gramscian long march through the institutions ends up with the bolshevik utopians frantically stuffing their pockets with cash one step ahead of the firing squad. Think I’ll go drink Drano now.
It’s the way of least resistance for the “elites,” it’s their choice to sell out their dirty fellow countrymen, not a law of nature like gravity. Meaning that they are still guilty if they do it, and worthy of eventual retribution.
I think James Burnham’s riff on Marx was closer. The upper 5% will stick together to maintain their power. The next15% is the greatest threat to the 5%. The bottom 80% will never develop class consciousness so the 5% will buy them off with bread and circuses in a freeish society. The greatest threat to the 5% is always the middle 15%.
My analysis based on Burnham’s model is that meritocracy and upward mobility were supposed to be the mechanisms to placate the middle 15%. These have broken down so the 5% has resorted to trying to co-opt the middle with government jobs for them and their children and to dilute their power by importing large numbers of immigrants, especially in clerical and STEM fields.
The middle 15% has awoken to how badly they are being screwed. Sides are being chosen. Forces are mobilizing. This will not end well.
The media strikes me as the modern equivalent of minor barons. They have higher status, if not means, than the average peasant or merchant or tradesman, but they serve entirely at the pleasure of king. Unlike the English dukes of old, who had extensive land, private armies and often powerful blood claims to the throne, the minor barons have little of value on their own. They are desperate to maintain position, or else they have nothing.
The 5% is the Inner Party, the 15% is the Outer Party and the rest is the Proles. Orwell got it right when he wrote 1984 in 1948.
Define “capitalists”. Because I have to say : the use of term is a trigger word as far as I am concerned because it CONSTANTLY gets used by Marxists to push their agenda.
I was born with nothing – so all I have in the end ….. is my own human capital to exchange with others to accumulate wealth. The difference between true capitalists and socialists/marxists – is that they believe that capital belongs to ME, not to somebody else (my “better”) , and I am therefore able to do with that capital what I wish.
That is the core of the founding principles of this country IMHO. And in the end THAT was a true revolution – because it completely blew apart the paradigm that had existed for centuries – where the “cloud people” (to use a term in common use here) – seemed to think they owned by divine right all the dirt people.
You can call it individual rights , you can call it capitalism – whatever. In the end these terms are diametrically opposed to the collectivist mind (by whatever current name you prefer to call it )
I’m using it in Marx’s sense, i.e. the dirty bastards that control everything that everyone hates (Soros, the Koch brothers, et al). The ur-example being Faceberg – he runs a company that literally makes **nothing**, yet he has a presidential candidate in his pocket. I hope it’s clear that I’m not offering a closely reasoned discourse on Dialectical Materialism here — Marx was right about the big picture, while getting all the details comically wrong.
Faceburg makes nothing?
Oh my. Don’t be silly.
He “makes” …the bakeries and the circus arena.
He makes the illusion of mattering…um…matter.
(Where they “overcharge” for a bread hot dog roll.)