Commodus Americanus

Posted on January 24, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not related to the topic of the day, but a topic that is I pray Allah will make more important every day. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the moral crisis of this age.

There is an old expression, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”, that has haunted powerful people since forever. A variation on this is “The first generation makes it. The second generation maintains it and the third generation blows it”. While not an iron law of the universe, it is an observation that has held up over time. Whether it is business empires or political empires, the work of the great man somehow turns into a curse that plagues the lives of his descendents.

The funny thing about this bit of reality is that it is well known and many very smart people have tried to come up with a solution, but the problem remains. In the business world, expert planners work with business owners to help them mitigate this disaster, but only about 10% of family business make it to the grandchildren. The trust system was designed with this in mind. The grandchildren will never amount to much, but at least they will have an allowance to sustain them.

It is fair to say that popular forms of government were invented to address the problem of private rule going sour by the third generation. Caesar Augustus was the great founder of the empire. Tiberius Caesar Augustus was solid, but he suffered from the predictable maladies of every second generation ruler. Caligula is arguably Rome’s most famous lunatic. Of course, we have Claudius, an interregnum of sorts, before we get to Nero, who was literally the end of the line.

The promise of popular government is the elites are in a competition with one another to run the society. The people get to pick the winner, based on their interests. This way the great man does not hand control over to his disinterested son and his disinterested son does not leave things to a maniac. Every generation gets to figure out who is the most fit to rule society. The theory takes the natural hierarchy of society and allows it to keep renewing itself through merit. That is the theory.

Reality seems to be that old adage at the start. We see this with the current ruling classes of the West. They are looking like Commodus, the heir to the great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors. Unlike his father, Commodus was much more interested in spectacle and what we would today call bourgeoise degeneracy. It was his excessive self-indulgences and reckless disregard for order that brought an end to the Pax Romana.

Commodus is a good emperor to study when thinking about what is happening with the managerial elite of the American empire. When you look around at this elite, you see a lot of people like Commodus. They were born into privilege, dotted on by parents who dreamed big dreams for them. They came into the world expecting the world to comport to their desires. Most important, you see that appropriation of authority that was never earned, but passed down from the prior generation.

The news currently tells us that we are on the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine and one of the best minds on the job for the Biden team is Jake Sullivan. There is nothing in his resume that says he should be running a hot dog stand, but he has been told his whole life he is fit to rule, so he believes it. Victoria Nulland is another member of the foreign policy brain trust. Her career is best described as one disaster after another, but she was born for the role in every sense.

Look around at the elected class and you see the same pattern. There are no men who went from the middle class to elected office on their own merit. In fact, it is hard to find anyone in national politics who has ever had a job. No one in the leadership of both parties has a line for “private sector” in his resume. The reason for that is they have never done productive work. Instead, like our old friend Commodus, they were groomed from birth to take up positions in the ruling class.

Taken as a whole, the Commodus comparison becomes clear. Marcus Aurelius never would have set foot in the Coliseum, but his feckless son thought himself as Rome’s first entertainer, so he spent a lot of time performing. Our current ruling class looks more like carny folk than the men who built the empire. This is where you see the other comparison to Commodus. Like the doomed emperor, our ruling class cannot stop indulging its increasingly deranged whims.

Historical analogies are never perfect. They only serve as a starting point for understanding the present or the past. One is the fixed understanding while the other side of the analogy is the thing you want to analyze. We know what we need to know about Commodus and many other men like him. He is a familiar type in history because he was part of that long observed phenomenon at the start. This observation was famously applied to civilizations by Oswald Spengler.

What this suggest about the current age is that there is not much that can be done to arrest this cycle once it has begun. The transformation of the American republic into an empire in the 19th century, despite maintaining the republican pretentions, meant that this period was as inevitable as the seasons. That old republican competition was replaced by an imperial selection system, which inevitably results in a generation more interested in being elite than doing the work of an elite.

The question, of course, is what comes next. Rome never returned to its republican nature, but centuries of empire erased it from the collective memory. Depending upon how you mark the beginning, the American empire has been around for no more than a century and less than half that if you use the Cold War as the beginning. Further, most people in the empire think popular government is the only moral choice. In this way, America is more like Athens than Rome.

Again, Commodus may provide some short term answers. Once he proclaimed himself a living god and renamed the city Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana, it became clear he had to go, so he was assassinated. This set off a power struggle, a period known as the Year of Five Emperors. Septimius Severus was eventually able to defeat the various factions and claim control of the empire. The Severin dynasty was short-lived, however, and was followed by The Crisis of the Third Century.

In other words, the correction to the generational decline was a housecleaning of the elite in a period of turmoil. If you date the start of the American empire to Gettysburg, then this means a series of crisis until North American returns to its natural divisions that have been there since the Founding. If you date the empire to the middle of the last century, then maybe the end is a return to mid-century normalcy. Regardless of your preferred future, all paths lead through a crisis.

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The World State II

Posted on January 21, 2022 by thezman

This week’s show is a continuation of last week’s show. The point of the effort is to describe the various aspects of the ruling regime. We don’t have a good name for this form of rule and one reason for it is it just sort of happened. Unlike various forms of socialism, there is no one guy at the center of it. It is the combination of historical and economic events over the last two centuries. The great contribution of Karl Marx was having a last name that made for a pithy label.

In last week’s show, I thought the segment on managerialism was the best, but it is also the most studied aspect of the system. We have 80 years of writing on the growth of the administrative state. This week I think the two segments that are most important are Custodialism and Quadripartism. This growing sense by our rulers that they need to take care of us is rising from and encouraging this blending together of the power centers of the American empire.

There is a feudal aspect to this arrangement. People think of feudalism as knights saving damsels in distress. That makes for good story telling, but it was really a fully integrated social control system. The reciprocal relationships between the warrior elites evolved into a set of customs governing all of society. The duties and responsibilities the warrior elite had with one another became a model for society. The life of every person was defined by his duties and responsibilities.

Something similar is happening with the power centers of the empire. They are working out the rules with which they regulate behavior towards one another. At the same time, they are working out rules to govern those within their domain. Instead of a code of chivalry it is terms of service. Like life in feudal Europe, people are either compliant or non-compliant. The compliant get the privileges and protection of the system while the non-compliant are fair game.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Quadripartism
18:00: Custodialism
33:00: Universalism
48:00: Revolutionary

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The Last Stop

Posted on January 20, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the 1980’s, it was popular for members of the conservative movement to claim that the Left had run out of ideas. It was true to the extent that the Left had run out of policy ideas, having used them up in the preceding four decades. Conservatives were brimming with ideas on how to fix those policies. The big talk of rolling them back was really just a politically astute way of making reform look radical. The Right was always about fixing what the Left had broken.

The truth is though, those old progressive ideas from the early part of the century had run their course, but a new set of ideas were percolating in the academy. What we think of today as cultural Marxism and “wokeness” was coming together in the flophouses and brothels of left-wing politics. After the Cold War ended, these ideas started to take over the Left until we reached the present crisis. This crisis, however, seems to be the end of the line for radical thinking.

You see it with the obsession with Trump. Stable minded people with an agenda, even a nutty agenda, would have erased their old foe from the history books after dispatching him in the 2020 election. Instead, they cannot stop thinking about him and the army of imaginary bogeymen they think he leads. The Democrats have now hatched a plot to charge him with sedition so he cannot run for office in 2024. In reality, it is just a way to keep him alive as an adversary.

To normal people, this looks like madness. The truth is, Trump is old news and by the time 2024 rolls around he will probably not be a lock to win the nomination. This Ann Coulter column is a good indication that many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 are ready for someone new. Coulter’s judgement on these things is not always the best, she was a fan of Mitt Romney, but she speaks for Populist Inc. They are ready to move on and the Democrats would be wise to let them.

That said, Trump is a master marketer and he could very well retool his act as a revenge tour in 2024. Given the state of things right now and the chaos that looms on the horizon, the public could be ready to burn it all down. The GOP will surely win both house this fall then set about finking on their voters. The next presidential election could be a battle to win over factions in a purple-faced rage at the politicians. In that environment, Trump could look like the sober choice.

Still, the Left won the revolution and should be busy enjoying the fruits of victory but instead they long to return to the battle. The reason is the ideology that fueled the revolution is turning out to be nothing but clever words with no truth content. There is no end of history, no promised land of equality. Rather than being a strength, diversity has turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by corporate communists who live like white nationalist while lecturing everyone about race.

What the Left has quickly become is a glaring example of negative identity. They are not for anything that exists. Instead, they are a laundry list of things they oppose, with the claim that these things stand in the way of paradise. The fact that many of the things they rage against do not, in fact, exist, makes the agony all the more severe. It turns out that bellowing about white supremacy, something that does not exist, is not as fulfilling as screaming in the face of someone wearing a red hat.

In the movie Conspiracy about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, one of the actors tells another a story about a man who hated his father and loved his mother. When his mother died, he did not weep at her grave. When his father died, he was inconsolable, crying like a baby. The lesson of the story was that the man had defined his life by his hatred of his father. When his father was gone, he lost that which gave meaning and purpose to his life. That was why he was crying.

The American Left and their political party are now that man weeping at the grave of Donald Trump’s presidential career. This is, in part, why they cannot let go of the Covid madness, despite their party’s efforts. The mask is a reminder of better times when they had a reason to get up every morning. It is why their party is putting on the insurrection show for them. It is a bit of nostalgia for better times. It is why they hope to reanimate the Trump movement with an indictment.

That is the trouble with negative identity. A political movement organized around it can only end in sorrow. If it wins, it loses the reason to exist. If it fails, it runs the risk of retribution from the people it assaulted and it runs the risk of internal dissention over not having defeated the enemy. Negative identity becomes a self-made Alamo, a desperate last stand by people afraid of the future. It is why these movements attract so many weirdos and degenerates.

Unlike in the 1980’s, the sputtering of the prevailing radicalism is unlikely to give way to a new radicalism, at least not from the Left. Cultural Marxism was a reaction to the failing of economic Marxism. There is no next step in the underlying theory of history that animated both ideologies. This really is the end of the road for the theoretical framework that gave birth to Utopian radicalism. What comes next will probably be outside the old model of Left and Right.

The Crisis Of Doubt

Posted on January 19, 2022 by thezman

A basic requirement of every human society is that it must have a set of rules that define the society and the people in it. It is this shared understanding of what defines the society that keeps the thing together. “Who we are” is defined by “what we do” and it is the commonsense of the people. People living in a monarchy take the king and the nobility for granted. To question the legitimacy of the king is to question the very nature of society and the rules that define it.

In modern America, the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts. For example, the head of the Federal Reserve runs the banking system and controls the money supply. Since Alan Greenspan made the job famous, Americans have just accepted that the person in this job is responsible for keeping the economy from danger. He does not set taxes or control spending, but he makes sure the economy avoids catastrophe.

This general assumption is not without merit. It was the Federal Reserve that pulled the country out of stagflation in the 1980’s. They kept the Savings & Loan crisis from creating a bank run. In the 1990’s, they organized the bailout of Long Term Capital Management and then navigated the Dot-Com bust. They came to the rescue of the global economy in the mortgage crisis. So far, they have managed to prevent the Covid panic from cratering the economy.

There is a lot one can quibble with in that list and many will say that those crises were the fault of the bankers, including the Fed. To most people though, the mysterious group of people who run the economy are one thing you can trust. Even though trust in government at all levels has declined sharply over the last few decades, the Federal Reserve remains the most trusted institution. Most years, the Fed chairman has better approval than the president.

In a world where people assume there is an answer to every problem and an expert able to find the answer, there is an assumption that whatever problems crop up, the people in charge will find the solution. This is what makes managerialism both possible and tolerable. If the experts keep getting things wrong, what is the point of having a society run by experts? People put up with the metastasizing set of rules because there is a general trust that there is logic behind them.

This trust in experts is not new. It has been a defining characteristic of American society since at least the 19th century. Taylorism was the attempt to use science to improve management of companies in the 1880’s. That gave birth to the Efficiency Movement, which sought to apply engineering principles to social policy. What we think of as the Left in America grew out of this belief that social reform could be achieved by experts changing the rules of society to achieve the desired outcome.

The fact is the strength of the American system over the last century has been this faith in the experts to find the right answer. When things go wrong, the current experts are fired and new experts are brought in to solve the problem. Elections have been an indirect review of the experts class. If the people are not happy, they vote for the other party who come in with new experts. If things go well, then the party is rewarded with a good election the next time.

That is what makes the current crisis so serious. Most people think the experts badly bungled the Covid problem. The experts said we had two weeks to bend the curve and two years into it the curve is not bent. The vaccine was supposed to be the great triumph of science and technology and it is looking like it is not only not working but possibly a billion dollar boondoggle. The last two years have been a massive blow to the credibility of science in modern America.

Then you have the economic troubles. Most people assumed there would be some trouble from the Covid panic. You cannot close down the economy for months and not have consequences. Unlike those prior economic crises, the Fed is not skillfully navigating this one. Empty shelves and spirally prices are not what people expect from the expert class. Things that could be acquired in days now take months because the supply chain is a chaotic mess.

The deeper problem is the old habit of just voting for the out-party when things are not doing well has not been working either. People voted for Obama to close the books on the history of race. Instead, race relations got sharply worse. Obama was supposed to end the forever wars and he expanded them. Trump was the shot across the bow by the people and the system responded with a four year tantrum. Biden was supposed to be the return to normal and we have chaos instead.

This is why 70% of Americans think the country is in a serious crisis. They are not puzzling it out like this, but they just sense that the system has broken and there is no one around with an understanding of how to fix it. One of the paradoxes of the current age is the people in charge say we are in the middle of a crisis, but then wage jihad against anyone proposing a way out of the crisis. Their solution to “save democracy” is to eliminate any trace of it from society.

The core of the current crisis is that no one can honestly answer the question that is the basis of all human organization, who are we? It is no longer easy to say what it means to be an American. The commonsense that are the rules of society are no longer making sense, which calls into question the basics of society. We used to be a people who assumed the experts would eventually get it right. Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all.

Little Revolutions

Posted on January 18, 2022 by thezman

Revolutions come when people suddenly realize that everyone else is privately thinking the same things about the current arrangements. Most people tend to keep their grievances private. Complaining is boring and considered bad form even in the worst of times, so people tend to keep their grievances to themselves. It is when they begin to notice that everyone else has similar complaints that the cascading effect turns complaints into demands and then into rebellion.

It is why the corporate communists who dominate the official social media platforms like Twitter are more deluded than they seem. Their entire public life is nothing but a litany of complaints, shared with other miserable wrecks on-line. They literally know everyone who shares their grievances, as they are all in the same groups. The only awakening that will happen from their endless griping is that the rest of society will realize that these people are nuts and need to be pushed back to the fringe.

A version of that took place a couple of weeks ago when Douglas Murray was assigned the task of purging Pedro Gonzalez. Murray took issue with Gonzalez making sport of various internationalist types on Twitter. Gonzalez was doing the “physiognomy is real” thing where he posted pics of the people he was mocking. Murray responded with, “Mr. Gonzalez spent his holiday weekend bringing what many have worked hard to relegate to the gutter into respectable conservative circles.”

This is an old stand-by for the neocons. Starting in the 1980’s they have slandered anyone who opposed their sociopathic agenda as anti-Semites or racists. The fact that the favorite tool of neoconservatism has always been the favorite tool of the far-left is not an accident. Despite their claims, the neocons were never conservative. Theirs is an ideology of the Left. They imagine a new world order where they sit atop as the moral arbiters, using extreme force to impose their will.

That incident was not all that interesting, but what is interesting is that few people bother to notice and those who did mocked Douglas Murray. His own comment section reads like satire cooked up by the anti-Semites. Many had to be trolls having a laugh at the expense of the geezers. On Twitter, Murray was mocked as a relic from an age in which people were still fooled by neoconservatives. Gonzalez just laughed the whole thing off as the rantings of an old man.

While a tempest in a teapot, there was a time when a bigfoot chattering skull like Murray could have someone thrown into the void this way. Bill Buckley was used this way back in the 1990’s when Bill Kristol forced him to denounce Buchanan. This trick worked thirty years ago but today it gets little more than a shrug. What people did notice is that it did not work. The ad hominem and guilt by association stuff is no longer the super weapon it was thirty years ago. The world has changed.

It is not just that these tactics do not work it is that they increasingly sound like the rantings of old people complaining about the world changing. This column from George Will before Christmas is a good example. His quill pen act was effective into the Bush years, but now it seems anachronistic and a bit ridiculous, like a man wearing a denim jacket with “disco forever” spelled out in rhinestones on the back. It reads like something that should have been written 40 years ago.

The tattered look of these old tactics also reveals the general shabbiness of the arguments behind the name calling. Will’s claims about individualism are pure nonsense and his claim that nationalism is collectivism is ridiculous. How did this man get through high school with such nonsense in his head? In other words, the datedness makes it easier to see that these people were never smart. Neoconservatism, like so-called conservatism, was a tactic, not a set of ideas.

It is not just among the chattering skulls that we are seeing a change. All of sudden, without anyone noticing, Gab is no longer the bogeyman. Hundreds of right-wing pols have joined and legitimate political players like Rasmussen have joined because they see that is where the crowd is going, the crowd they need to survive. People have noticed that the biggest players on the planet tried to destroy Torba and his company, but he simply refused to buckle to them.

Of course, this change in attitudes reflects the growing divide in society. Half of the people who voted for Joe Biden support internment camps for dissidents and house arrest for the non-complaint. Behind every double mask is someone who would volunteer to be a camp guard. One of the causes of revolution is that there is always some portion of society willing to support the regime. Disordered minds seek the order of the bloody fist imposing its will on society.

Those people, the fringe crazies who have been allowed to run free in the public square, are a fixture in human society. A central part of every human society is maintaining the rules that define the society. This means keeping the crazies under control and away from the levers of power. That is, perhaps, what we are beginning to see with these recent events. People are rejecting the moral claims of these people and living their lives in spite of them.

There is a great scene in the movie Braveheart in which the main character captures the leader of the kings guard. He looks down at first, as was required when addressing a superior man, but then he looks up into the man’s eyes as an equal. It is a great scene, because it reflects how control is exercised and broken. It seems that many are now willing to look moral scoundrels like Murray in the eyes and give them the treatment they so richly deserve.

The Myth Of Meritocracy

Posted on January 17, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not related to the topic of the day, but a topic that is becoming more important every day. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the struggles of Mumbly Joe and his crew.

Marilyn Mosby has been the State’s Attorney for Baltimore since 2015, despite the fact she has been under federal investigation for years. A federal grand jury indicted her last week on two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements on loan applications for two Florida vacation homes. Mosby applied for loans against her retirement account, exploiting a CARES Act provision for those hurt financially by the Covid-19 panic, despite never having been affected.

These may seem like petty charges, but as is often the case with public corruption investigations, this is the opening gambit in a broader investigation. Mosby’s husband has also been living under a dark cloud for years. He is the current President of the Baltimore City Council. The two of them owe the IRS over $45,000 in back taxes, despite making close to half a million a year from the city. Their lifestyle does not comport with what their financials indicate.

For her part, Mosby is promising to fight. She claims the charges are a plot by her political opponents and, of course, the invisible army of white supremacists that secretly control this racist society. The fact that Baltimore is 70% black and the political establishment in the city is 100% black does not matter. Mosby has been doing the rounds, claiming she is innocent and playing the race card. It is the usual theater of the absurd that has come to define city politics.

Public corruption is part of politics and it seems to be much more common in democratic politics. The salary for elected officials is low relative to the people who underwrite their political careers. Unlike all the other entertainment businesses, the stars of politics do not make the majority of the box office. It is the wealthy donors and lobbyists who benefit the most, so there is a natural resentment and a temptation to take a little more than what is allowed.

Compounding this arrangement is the fact that corruption is often permitted, if you are in the right part of the business. The Congressman who represents Mosby in Washington is allowed to trade on insider information, for example. He can take information known only to members of Congress, use it to front run the stock market. From the perspective of local politicians, this must seem terribly unfair, which only adds to the culture of corruption and the temptation to steal.

All that aside, Mosby is a good example of how the concept of a meritocracy does not hold up in a multicultural society. She is not in the job because of her sterling legal career or because she has done important things for the community. She was placed in the job because it looked good for her benefactors. In fact, this is the story of her life from grammar school to now. Mosby has been pushed along by the desire for salivation by members of the managerial elite.

Mosby was born and raised in Boston. Both of her parents were police officers and her grandfather was a policeman. He was one of the first black cops in the city, part of a program to boost the fortunes of black people in the city. She was sent to nice public schools as part of a program to boost the fortunes of black students. The METCO program is designed to get black students into college by placing them in predominantly white high schools outside the city.

Even though Boston has many colleges that love METCO students and New England is full of well-regarded liberal arts colleges, Mosby wound up at Tuskegee, a private historically black college in Alabama. Then by some miracle she wound up at Boston College Law. Despite graduating from one of the better law schools in the country, she could not find a paid position. Then by another miracle, she hooked on as Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a city with which she has no connections.

Mosby’s tenure as State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a position she has held since 2015, is charitably described as amusingly inept. During the Freddy Gray crisis, she often appeared disoriented at press conferences. She then declared jihad against the police department and over-charged the cops involved. The police department stopped arresting bad guys, crime shot up and the case against the cops collapsed. In time it may be seen as the peak of her political career.

The fact is Mosby should never have been put in this position. She is not qualified for the job and has no connection to the city. She was placed here because her sponsors thought she ticked certain boxes and she did not ask too many questions. Like Mortimer and Randolph from Trading Places, they thought they could make her a national political figure for reasons that had nothing to do with the public good. Merit had nothing to do with her getting placed in this position.

Defenders of this system will say that lots of white males benefit from connections and favors in their career. Private colleges, for example, give special consideration to legacy applicants, which is often affirmative for rich white people. Politics has always been a game of connections. You make the right friends who then help you along the way on the promise you will help them when the time comes. Mosby, some would argue, is just what is to be expected in a diverse democracy.

While true, it is not a defense of meritocracy or even diversity. In fact, it acknowledges that objective merit has no role in a liberal democracy. Instead, it is about the spring of democracy, which is morality. Those who champion the prevailing orthodoxy are rewarded while those who do not are excluded from the halls of power. Mosby was good for the new religion of diversity and inclusion, so she was handed the winning lottery ticket in the game of life.

In fairness, the ruling class of America does concede this. They are always going on about how success is the result of privilege. If you are born with the right characteristics, you get opportunities denied to others. The problem, of course, is this puts the lie to the foundation of managerialism. Rule by expert does not make any sense if the experts are just the product of random chance. If Mosby is the legal expert for the city, then what is the point of having rule by expert?

Mosby is just a minor figure in the provinces, but the entire political structure is built on this feeder system. Managerialism is supposed to select for and promote the very best, but instead it selects and promotes the most fashionable at the moment. Such a system cannot survive contact with reality for very long. When rule by expert becomes rule by bourgeoise social fashion, disaster is waiting to happen. It is why the future of managerialism is a city like Baltimore.

The World State I

Posted on January 14, 2022 by thezman

One of the things that plagues opposition to the ruling regime is a poverty of language to label what is happening. The bad guys have a million ways to label their enemies, but the good guys are lacking a language to categorize the other side. The paleocons got close when they coined the term managerialism. This is both accurate and simple, but it only describes one aspect of the current system. Managerialism is one result of an ideology that has evolved over the last century.

When people hear the word “Marxism” or “communism” they immediately think of a set of economic arrangements. They may not know much about Marx or Marxism, but they know that it means the end of property and the rule by a party of ideologues. It is a simple and effective label. The same is true of communism or socialism. These words have connotations that make for effective shorthand. Even capitalism, a thing that may not actually exist, carries meaning for people.

We don’t have a label like that for the current political regime. Liberal democracy is probably accurate, but it has positive connotations. Democracy is supposed to be a good thing and liberal government is peaceful and accommodating. There are examples of things that are good separately but horrible together, like fish ice cream, but that is not really the same thing. When people in the public square use the term liberal democracy, they tend to use it in a positive way.

This conundrum is the inspiration for the show. Instead of trying to come up with a clever label for the current political order, maybe the better starting place is to just describe some of the big attributes. After all, the word “Marxism” did not come into use until the thing itself existed in some form. Once we can come up with a description for what we are experiencing, then maybe a label comes into focus. At the minimum, it starts the process of thinking about it beyond platitudes.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Managerialism
23:00: Pluralism
43:00: Democracy

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The Praetorian Psyop

Posted on January 13, 2022 by thezman

The Pentagon announced that it will be conducting guerilla warfare training in North Carolina in the coming weeks. The point of the exercise is to train American soldiers to battle “seasoned freedom fighters”, according to the Army. They say they made the announcement so that the public would not be shocked by the sound of weapons or the sight of the soldiers conducting war games. The exercises are going to be conducted on private lands in the western part of the state

This announcement coincides with the Department of Justice announcing the formation of a specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism. According to the DOJ, “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” What they are saying is the hysterical reaction to the January 6 protests is entirely justified as there is an invisible army out there making bombs.

Many assume this is about the ongoing shift toward treating all opposition to the regime as domestic terrorism. The color revolution they orchestrated against Trump will become a full-time revolution. Politicians will go on about the threat to our democracy while agents of the secret police drag people off for made up crimes. Liberal democracy is in its terror phase. The gross violation of rights is justified by the perpetual state of emergency over the alleged threat to the system.

There is some of that, for sure, but the FBI has been framing people as domestic terrorists for generations. They used to work with organized crime to frame people for murders committed by gangsters. That made the FBI look good and they did not have to do any real work. They orchestrated antiwar protests in the 1960’s and racial crimes in the South during the civil rights era. They framed too many people to count during the Bush years in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism.

In other words, the FBI and the rest of the intelligence agencies have never needed a reason to abuse the rights of Americans. The reason these organizations came into existence at the same time the American empire went global is every empire needs a secret police to prevent domestic enemies. Empires do not treat the core population very well, so they have to worry that the core population will get tired of sharing the wealth and revolt against their rulers.

There is another reason for these announcements. The intelligence agencies have broken free of civilian oversight. We saw this in the Trump years when they spied on his campaign and tried to frame any number of people in order to perpetuate the cover-up now known as the Russian collusion hoax. Chuck Schumer told Trump in public that he better not take on these agencies as they have a six million ways to get him. The politicians fear the intelligence community.

A big part of their power is the ability of these agencies to perpetuate fear among the people in the political class. It is why they tried to frame Congressman Matt Gaetz for sex trafficking early last year. Every member of Congress looked at what was happening and thought about their younger days. If they could ring up a sitting member of Congress for being a party boy in his youth, they will do anything. Also note how the media did not report on the disposition of the case.

That is what is going on with these ostentatious displays over the alleged domestic terrorism threat. The FBI and DOJ looked at the way the political class reacted to the January 6 protests and realized they could use their fear as a tool of control. A few times a year they will arrest some patsies for trying to attack a politician and then use these as examples at public hearings. The FBI will never have to answer another difficult question from Congress.

This is also a nice bit of insurance in case the people screw up again and vote Trump back into office. The FBI and DOJ assume that Trump will do what they would do if the roles were reversed and that is seek revenge. Any digging around in the FBI or DOJ will be met with howling about Trump’s links to domestic terrorism. The Russian collusion hoax will be replaced by the insurrection hoax. The media, of course, already knows the drill so they will be all over this too.

There is another aspect to this. Orwell noted how authoritarian regimes needed an enemy to rally the people against. He was a socialist so he naturally thought a traitor to the cause made for the best villain. Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 and Snowball from Animal Farm were both modeled after Trotsky. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, just needs non-democratic enemies. They do not have to be from the ruling class to be a useful villain to rally support.

In the last thirty years, the empire has had many types of Muslim baddies to use as the designated threat to democracy. The American police state was built as a defense against this alleged threat. Russia has been conjured into a global threat to democracy for the same reason. Now they are manufacturing all sorts of domestic baddies to be the great threat to the system. The intelligence agencies are always right there to confirm the regimes worst fears.

It is not that people are sitting around saying, “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen.” This fear of what lies outside the snow globe that is imperial politics just comes naturally to people who have to no real purpose. Politics in a managerial state is ceremonial, having no real impact on life. Despite their lofty titles, the people in the political system feel utterly helpless. Fear and paranoia are the natural consequences of their impotence.

In the end, nothing much will change for the Dirt People. When the FBI needs some trophies to display to Congress, they will round up the usual suspects. Sure, many now wriggle through the net as even the dumbest have caught on to how this works, but there is always at least one idiot willing to play along. Otherwise, the domestic terrorism unit will be creating security theater for the political class. They will be the narrator telling them to fear what lies outside the Capital Beltway.

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The Crisis of Gerontocracy

Posted on January 12, 2022 by thezman

Anyone who has had to plan for the departure of a long time employee or co-worker knows that it is more than just replacing their work product. People who have been in an organization for a long time have a gravity to them. Their personal style, their way of going about their business, changes the work habits of those around them, so when they leave lots of things will change. There are unknown unknowns that you can never account for, but you can anticipate to some degree.

This is something indirectly raised in this Wall Street Journal story about the possible return of Hillary Clinton. The authors are long-serving political operatives tied to the Clinton political machine, so it is not unreasonable to assume they were instructed to write this and get it posted in regime media. They picked the Wall Street Journal because it speaks to the right-wing of the political elite. The idea is to position Hillary Clinton, of all people, as a unifier of sorts.

There is a bit of the old Clinton triangulation going on here. The way this works is the left-side of the political class led the charge to get rid of Trump, but they are fumbling badly and upsetting the right side of the political class. The threat of Trump running in 2024 rustles them even more than a demented Biden staggering on for another term, but it is a close call. The answer, so the theory goes, is the old familiar Hillary Clinton, who will play ball with both sides.

The problem, of course, is Clinton is 74, which may be the springtime of youth compared to the rest of the political elite, but it is still old. People forget that Clinton was in rough shape when she ran in 2016. She mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for a while and had the incident where she collapsed on the street. She was also wearing some sort of contraption that was never explained. Time heals all wounds, but only in the emotional sense, not the physical sense.

In fairness, Donald Trump is 75, so he is not exactly the youthful alternative to the gerontocracy that currently runs the country. The thing is though, he is a vigorous man for his age and has shown no signs of slowing down. One thing that went unnoticed is unlike other presidents, Trump did not suddenly get old while in office. He seemed to grow stronger off the endless battling. His father was supposedly quite vigorous into his 90’s and Trump appears to have inherited those genes.

Again, the authors of that post are attached to the Clinton machine so they did not just dream that up for the fun of it. They make clear that Clinton is beginning the process of mounting a campaign. It could mean running against Biden in the primary, which would not go over well with the Obama wing or the Sanders wing, so they are beginning the process of normalizing the idea so it is not an issue. Clinton will position herself as the moderate trying to save the party from Biden.

Of course, this is another example of how the political class is unwilling to look forward so it instead tries to reboot old ideas. They Republicans plan to run their midterm campaign as a reboot of the Newt Gingrich show from the 1990’s and now Hillary Clinton is imagining herself as Ted Kennedy in 1980. Forty years ago, the left-wing of the party was sure that the reason Reagan won in 1980 is the old guard of the party refused to jettison Carter in favor of Kennedy.

It speaks to the bankruptcy of the political class that they keep indulging in these weird walks down memory lane. Within living memory politicians would run on specific agendas, tied closely to things that were important to people. Biden ran on not being Trump and now Hillary plans to run on not being Trump or Biden. Elections have always been beauty contents, but now they have been stripped of their talent portion, leaving us with the terrifying image of geezers in swimsuits.

The actuarial tables are immutable. Whoever is calling the shots in both parties will eventually have to move on from the geezers. If Trump runs and wins in 2024, he serves one term. Who is the next man up? If Hillary runs and wins, she could serve two terms, but that means living to 84. It also means not getting the Joe Biden treatment after one term. Who is being prepared on the Democrat side to take over for the collection of geezers now in charge?

The fact is the empire is facing the same problem the Soviets faced in the mid-70’s when Brezhnev’s health rapidly deteriorated. The party knew he was not long for the world, but there was no clear plan to replace him. When he died in 1982, the 70-year-old Andropov served for two years then died. He was followed by the 73-year-old Chernenko who promptly died. Gorbachev was next in line and he proved to be incapable of maintaining the empire.

The reason the Soviets did not have a competent new generation of leaders ready to supplant the Brezhnev crew is they had never been developed. We see the same thing with the current generation in Washington. The next generation does not exist as they have been boiled off for fear they would be too ambitious. What is left is a collection of dull-witted time servers and youthful morons like Sandy Cortez. No wonder no one wants to see the geezers carried off the political stage.

Getting back to where we started, it is prudent to think about the knock-on effects of the current generation of political leaders shedding this mortal coil. The political system has been warped by their long time in office and that will change as well. The old Soviet system had evolved for men like Brezhnev and his henchmen. Our political system has evolved for this long serving generation of politicians. When they are gone, the system around them will change radically and perhaps violently.

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Another Reboot

Posted on January 11, 2022 by thezman

Hollywood figured out a long time ago that they could make a lot of money on a sequel to a popular movie. They could count on attracting most of the original audience without having to think too hard or spend a lot of money. If the sequel was just the original with a couple new twists, then it was easy money. The reboot is a similar concept, except it relies on nostalgia to sell the concept. Fans of the original Star Wars movies could take their kids to the reboot of the franchise.

The general consensus is that the reboot and remake are a sign that Hollywood has run out of creative writers. The wrinkly brains are now in the technical end, making cool graphics and special effects. The writers arrive in a short bus. This cultural dead end where they just keep rebooting prior ideas has reached a point where they are rebooting reboots of reboots now. The only novelty is they are stripping away anything of interest and replacing it with ideology.

The same process has been happening with politics. The first little hint of it happened with Bill Clinton who was sold as his generation’s JFK. This played on Baby Boomer nostalgia, which has been powerful juju since the 1980’s. The first genuine political reboot was Obama. He was pitched as the black JFK, which was a foreshadowing of what has been happening in popular culture. Just as the role of JFK was being played by a black guy, everything on TV is now played by nonwhites.

The thing that was interesting about Obama was that despite all the talk about the future, they were obsessed with the past. His signature program, health care, was a re-do of the failed health care fight in the 1990’s. His Russian reset was a rebuke of Reagan’s tough approach to the Soviets. His Iran policy was a re-do of what happened in the late 1970’s under Carter. The Obama years were a series of remakes of old defeats by the Left, but this time they were the winners.

Of course, the Trump years had a strong undertone of nostalgia for the 1980’s and Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme. It was clear Trump planned to run a similar reelection campaign until Covid. The crazies, of course, relived the Nixon years, replaying the fantasy version where they got to actually impeach their foe, rather than have him resign. The Trump era was a very weird nostalgia trip for an aging political class unable to contemplate what comes next for them.

It appears that this election season, the Republicans are planning to release a reboot of one of their old franchises, the Contract with America. To great fanfare, Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, has unleashed the Commitment to America, which is a remake of the New Gingrich program. According to the poster, “Republicans helped build the greatest economy in a generation and the American way of life was thriving. We are ready to do it again. This is our commitment to you.”

The problem with the sequel was always that the original successfully followed the woman’s swimsuit model. It was long enough to cover the important bits and short enough to keep everyone interested. In other words, the original addressed all the important plot points and the characters had finished their arc. Reboots offer the chance to retell the original story with a slightly new angle. Today, of course, that means replacing the white males with strong diverse females.

The problem for the Republicans trying to reboot the Gingrich franchise is that most people recall that it was not a scintillating success. It was a clever marketing strategy that got Gingrich the speaker’s gavel, but exactly no one is romantic for the early 1990’s or has warm thoughts about Newt Gingrich. If anything, Newt Gingrich is a reminder that managerial conservatism was a disaster. It led directly to the “Big Government Conservatism” of the Bush years.

Looking at the site, it is clear that the Republicans went to Hollywood and snatched a few writers off the short bus. “Restore. Rebuild. Renew” is the answer to “Build Back Better” which is itself a hollow slogan. Under each word is a list of “promises” that are so vague and meaningless, you wonder if this is a deliberate insult. The top item under “Restore” is a promise to do the same things for Covid that the government has been doing for two years now. “What do we want? More of the same!”

Perhaps the most amusing and ridiculous claim under the “Restore” tab is the promise to address tech censorship. Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP is so mobbed up with Silicon Valley cash they should be forced to wear corporates logos on their suits like race car drivers. They have opposed every effort to do something about the gross abuse of civil rights by these firms. This is also true of Conservative Inc., which is bought and paid for by big tech money as well.

What is most remarkable about the plan is that it manages to avoid every issue of interest to the typical Republican voter. The Gingrich strategy was to sound like radical reformers, while not threatening anything important like entitlements. McCarthy’s strategy is to sound completely harmless while promising to let the crazies continue smashing the civic life of the country. You get the sense this is a promise to the oligarchs that they will have no trouble with the Republicans.

Notably, there is nothing in this plan on immigration. That is because the GOP is not just the party of open borders, but the party of aggressive importation of the least desirable people into your neighborhood. When you vote Republican, you are voting for your children and grandchildren to live as hated minorities. The GOP is the other side of the turd sandwich with regards to immigration. One side wants open borders and the other side wants to build massive welcome signs.

Getting back to the reboot topic, what this plan suggests is that the critics of Hollywood are correct about the lack of ideas. The Republicans have nothing to offer, so they are rebooting old campaigns. McCarthy has never had a job or met a normal American, so he has no idea who he is pitching with this slop. It sounds good to the feckless airheads in marketing, so he just assumes it will work. It will not get him in trouble with his handlers, which is what really matters to him.

Finally, what is shaping up in the 2022 midterms is a replay of the Biden strategy in the 2020 election. The Democrats hid Biden away and made the election about Trump being Hitler. McCarthy and the Republicans will hide under their beds and hope the public is sick of the Democrats. In other words, it is another election in which one side wins by default. The political class has nothing to offer, because from their perspective, everything is going great and you need to shut up.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Commodus Americanus

The World State II

The Last Stop

The Crisis Of Doubt

Little Revolutions

The Myth Of Meritocracy

The World State I

The Praetorian Psyop

The Crisis of Gerontocracy

Another Reboot