"It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe
the idea that everything in nature and human experience was fluid, or fast
becoming so; that the crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its
whole surface portentously upheaving…No sagacious man will long retain his
sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without
periodically returning into the settled system of things…It was time for me
now, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with the conservatives…all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and mistiness of
affairs, kept a death grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
since yesterday morning."
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, “Mosses from an Old Manse”
The breakdown of the breakdown continues…
THE
SELF-HATRED OF ELITES
In Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart,” he describes
Western elites living industrious lives of Protestant asceticism while pouring
scorn on the very idea the poor should do the same. George W. Bush called this
“the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Former spy for the Soviets, Whittaker
Chambers, said that in America, it is the rich, who are the communists, not the
workers, and the algal bloom of Marxist thought has produced a parallel guilt
over their own success. To expiate this guilt, they remove Western Civilization
from educational curriculums, and dismiss the history of modernity itself as the
study of old, racist white men. Even the corporate world has embraced this
self-flagellation. However, actual policies that would pull them from their
perches are mysteriously absent. One tenet of Critical Race Theory is that
whatever policies are passed to help oppressed minorities, they always end in maintaining
elites’ exalted status. Seems kinda true. Murray’s solution for the
ever-widening bifurcation of America is for elites to simply “preach what they
practice.”
INSTITUTIONAL
THUGGERY
Partly due to the influence of Antonio Gramsci, the
American left has engaged in a long
march through the institutions. Leftism dominates
Education, Journalism, Hollywood, Music, banking and finance, Big Tech, and
increasingly, the military. The American Medical Association is now inserting
overtly Marxist language into their literature. The fusion of
government and corporations is the cornerstone of fascism. Yet, while they weep and gnash their teeth about the specter of right wing fascism, Democrats and corporations are practically
sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. As much of our elite class banishes intellectual diversity
from its ranks, increasingly pressuring its members into a pseudo-Marxist Borg,
what have they done with their power? They censor news, cancel accounts, shadow
ban, manipulate information, destroy businesses through litigation and protest,
and coordinate with the government to run a Ministry of Information-like regime
to purge traditionalists from society. The Biden administration admitted
recently to flagging “misinformation” for Facebook to censor. California and
other officials have been caught as well. Ben Shapiro, in “Our Authoritarian
Moment”, describes how an intransigent minority bullies the complacent
majority, creating a tipping point of submission. While conservatives find the
idea disgusting, his solution is for the reasonable majority to start
implementing the same nasty techniques of boycott and cancellation.
DECLINING
TRUST IN INSTUTIONS
Lo, the conspiracy nuts
will always be with us, but if you have never read about QAnon, you might be
surprised just how unhinged they really are. Dr. Fauci is the son of Mother
Teresa, who was a child sex trafficker, you see. Despite our ever-present paranoiacs,
true social capital is dwindling. The Pew research graphic below shows a meaningful
drop in institutional trust over the last 20 years.
The sharp divide politically
is especially troubling, with a 45% divide regarding police and a 19% and 29%
divide for TV journalism and newspapers. The worst category is Republicans’
mistrust of the media, which is somewhere in the Marianas Trench at 7%. The presidency is more politicized than ever. There are always suspicions by partisans
when their candidate loses, but the “Not my President” phenomenon is growing. When
Bush defeated Gore in 2000, and the Supreme Court discussed hanging chads and
other ballot minutiae, only 18% of Democrats thought the outcome was fair. A full
30% thought the election was stolen. 37% percent of Democrats said Bush stole
Ohio in 2004. 36 percent of Republicans felt cheated in 2012. After 2016, 52% of Democrats believed Russia hacked voting
machines. However, weeks after the 2020 election, despite media and many
establishment Republicans saying there was no evidence, up to 30% of Democrats and
75% of Republicans thought the election was stolen. Without rehashing the
voluminous complaints both petty and significant, there was something different
about this one. This tweet heard round the world (worth
reading) outlined the many reasons for Republicans’ complete mistrust even
before the election. For one, Democrats’ rage over Trump resulted in, to make a
very long story short, the federal government using sexed-up oppositional
research from the DNC to lie to judges so they could spy on Trump and initiate
a years-long investigation they knew was total horse crap after one year. Former
high-level government officials would testify to congress the government had no
evidence of Russian Collusion, and days later, would go on TV to proclaim
smoking gun evidence would come out aaany day now. And after the media’s
corrupt lynching of the Covington High School boys and Judge Kavanaugh,
Republican’s eyes were practically twitching. Then came the long list of 2020 election
chicanery in partisan counties in swing states, including blatantly illegal “emergency”
changes due to Covid. TIME magazine ran “The Secret History of the Shadow
Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The article was celebratory in tone,
but in it were shocking admissions causing the right to call it a secret cabal
to steal the election. Was the election stolen? I don’t know. With all the
outright fraud that was alleged, where’s the beef? Evidence has not
materialized. But the other improprieties might have made a difference. We’ll
probably never know. Not content with just a win, Democrats framed the Jan 6th
riots as an insurrection, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. This is complete
twaddle, of course, and it puts Republicans’ belief that Democrats will do literally
anything to get power at a fever pitch. And then came Covid. With the constant
diet of terror and lies fed to us, is it any wonder how
vaccines, which are safe IMO, got so unforgivably politicized?
HISTORICAL
IGNORANCE
Embracing the Marxism of Herbert Marcuse and the
Frankfurt school, leftists understand that to transform the nation, our
connection to our history must be severed. The 1619 Project is only the most
obvious and clumsy example of this intentional perversion of history. The great
irony is the Progressive view history by definition: It is an important guide on what
to dismiss. It is a pick axe for undermining the foundation. Progressivism, by
definition, is contempt for the old, crusty ideas of old, crusty people. To the
conservative, history is an antidote to all kinds of error, and I can’t help
but think a mandatory course of American History that is simply true and
honest, would end this revolution in a short time. What is the proper view
of American history? I believe former slave Frederick Douglass, in his famous 4th
of July speech, has it right. Savage in his attack on America for accepting
slavery, in the end, he proclaims his faith in and love for the Constitution. Confident
in the eventual end of slavery, he defied critics to find a single pro-slavery
clause in it, declaring that no soil on earth was more fertile for equality and
change than America’s. William McClay wrote
of British historian Herbert Butterfield, who railed against Lord Acton’s
approach to the past, “that makes its meaning and its lessons subservient to
the demands of the present and to the present’s reigning idea of what
constitutes ‘progress.’” Butterfield felt such historical writing “was likely
to be simplistic and one-sided, reducible to white hats and black hats.” The
complexity of history shows the men of history to be suspiciously like the men
of today, full of brilliance and greatness and sin and folly. However, to rustle
the cattle into greener pastures, utopian levelers like Hanna Nikole-Jones must break off bits of the past until they get the shape they like.
Next week, I dive into some of the social elements
of America’s decline.
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