Matt asks: "The big question remains: why did this happen?" I think the first aspect, as Matt says, is the enormous chasm that has opened up between the elite ruling class and the rest of the country (which may be at a similar level as the chasm between nobles and plebes in pre-Revolutionary France): our globalist elites are almost entir…
Matt asks: "The big question remains: why did this happen?"
I think the first aspect, as Matt says, is the enormous chasm that has opened up between the elite ruling class and the rest of the country (which may be at a similar level as the chasm between nobles and plebes in pre-Revolutionary France): our globalist elites are almost entirely postnational and have walled themselves off from the rest of us and have zero loyalty to America and its citizens, culture, history, traditions (in fact, more than no loyalty they have deep hostility toward all these things). Also, upscale white liberals absolutely despise downscale white conservatives, have no interest in sharing a country with them, and would rather silence and impoverish them than compromise. Trump 2016 hit our progressive oligarchy like a declaration of war, a total psychological assault, and instead of pausing to ask why America elected a cheesy and sleazy game-show host as president, they went straight into permanent tantrum mode aka The Resistance.
And secondly, the fact that we all live on the internet now presents just too juicy a target for any aspiring tyrants to resist.
The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at. Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could get their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth of our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the most useless bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood (and it even made them more $$).
To mix my Roman metaphors, aiming for total social control is their Rubicon, and they've crossed it and are not turning back.
People for the most part only care about their status and money needs in the moment, people see which way the tide is flowing and flow with it, and nothing matters but the present and its urgency. (and if the urgency of the moment, what the press is saying, what your colleagues are saying, has always been vital, that's only massively magnified now that we all live inside the digital panopticon.)
i think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault...so as for the upscale American liberals who rule us, they truly believe all evil emanates from their political opponents (Trump made me do it!), and no matter what the future holds, even a civil war, they will absolutely blame it all on the other side and sleep easily knowing they've always been on the RIght Side of History.
As absurd as it sounds the millionaire next door will not join the 1% - and that used not to be the case. They are feeling vulnerable, especially if they lose their political and cultural clout. The billionaires have locked the gate to the aspirational class and Trump was like a series of electrical shock treatments. It’s as if they all have brain injuries Democracysplaining to us.
The roots of the New Left are both in post-Marxist Crit Theory and also Self-esteem Self-help psychology...they traded the redistribution of wealth and assets for the redistribution of stigma and esteem..."Self-esteem" seems to be one of the great sacred myths of our time, no matter how many times it fails, it is never abandoned.
it is kinda funny in a twisted way...the Marxists said that liberated man would want to fish in the morning and write poetry at night, various other utopias posit a race of unleashed ubermenschen taking us to space as we all sing "Imagine" together...none of them could have guessed that when the needs of survival were met what people would most want would be to attend a permanent group therapy session and talk about their suffering Selves and how much they've been victimized....LOL!
They’re too stuck in their bubble. What they don’t understand is that people will take only so much abuse. Especially people here in the USA. Let’s not forget, we are the descendants of those uppity peasants who left the Old World so they could own land and forge their own destiny.
We have a history, society and culture that will not be beholden to anyone who forces it upon us.
This is an excellent post. One thing that’s been odd for me to observe is that my high school-educated working class conservative friends are smarter and better informed on most political and social issues than my wealthy and highly credentialed liberal friends. And my conservative friends aren’t just regurgitating talking points that might happen to be correct. They understand their positions and can logically defend them.
yeah, i also come from a working-class background but was educated at a private liberal arts college (where i sat behind some crazy kid named Matt Taibbi one class) and for me the major difference bw my working-class friends and my upscale/suburban friends more or less comes down to bullshit detection...my working-class friends can't be played as easily by gauzy moral appeals or intellectual/philosophical trends. they are not as status conscious and also don't have the same desperate need my friends in the Blue Bubble do to appear morally righteous. they are much more refreshing to talk to, and also i don't have to walk on eggshells and worry that one wrong word will cause a denunciation.
Not all of us! We're not in Kansas anymore; we're well beyond the old school binaries of Right and Left. Critical thinking has not left the building for many of us on the Left; it's that the Democrats have abandoned the Left, along with critical thinking. As others have written, it's now more about the Establishment versus the rest of us. When we drop into simplistic adversarial binaries, we give them exactly what they want - a distracted bunch of drama creators and perpetuators who are easily manipulated and unwittingly captured. Gotta stay awake and be open to new associations.
Taibbi was supported by a rep-Jim Jordan-from the practical equivalent of District 12-he lives in a village where it isn’t uncommon to get stuck behind a combine-I’ve had it happen personally there.
I believe Matt has mentioned Jersey? Maybe stuck behind horse vans. His partner may have a profession there. Crazy high taxes. Don’t see politics lol. Even Bon Jovi’s ‘bee farming’ tax dodge grift made him move out
Non-affiliation-D vs R, and shared general values/principles are a very different thing. If a place completely gives up on the later, I would not want to live there.
Matt asks: "The big question remains: why did this happen?"
I think the first aspect, as Matt says, is the enormous chasm that has opened up between the elite ruling class and the rest of the country (which may be at a similar level as the chasm between nobles and plebes in pre-Revolutionary France): our globalist elites are almost entirely postnational and have walled themselves off from the rest of us and have zero loyalty to America and its citizens, culture, history, traditions (in fact, more than no loyalty they have deep hostility toward all these things). Also, upscale white liberals absolutely despise downscale white conservatives, have no interest in sharing a country with them, and would rather silence and impoverish them than compromise. Trump 2016 hit our progressive oligarchy like a declaration of war, a total psychological assault, and instead of pausing to ask why America elected a cheesy and sleazy game-show host as president, they went straight into permanent tantrum mode aka The Resistance.
And secondly, the fact that we all live on the internet now presents just too juicy a target for any aspiring tyrants to resist.
The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at. Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could get their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth of our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the most useless bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood (and it even made them more $$).
To mix my Roman metaphors, aiming for total social control is their Rubicon, and they've crossed it and are not turning back.
Do you think they have any idea what forces they risk unleashing or are they just too stuck in their bubble to notice?
People for the most part only care about their status and money needs in the moment, people see which way the tide is flowing and flow with it, and nothing matters but the present and its urgency. (and if the urgency of the moment, what the press is saying, what your colleagues are saying, has always been vital, that's only massively magnified now that we all live inside the digital panopticon.)
i think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault...so as for the upscale American liberals who rule us, they truly believe all evil emanates from their political opponents (Trump made me do it!), and no matter what the future holds, even a civil war, they will absolutely blame it all on the other side and sleep easily knowing they've always been on the RIght Side of History.
As absurd as it sounds the millionaire next door will not join the 1% - and that used not to be the case. They are feeling vulnerable, especially if they lose their political and cultural clout. The billionaires have locked the gate to the aspirational class and Trump was like a series of electrical shock treatments. It’s as if they all have brain injuries Democracysplaining to us.
A million ain't what it used to be.
Perfectly put.
The roots of the New Left are both in post-Marxist Crit Theory and also Self-esteem Self-help psychology...they traded the redistribution of wealth and assets for the redistribution of stigma and esteem..."Self-esteem" seems to be one of the great sacred myths of our time, no matter how many times it fails, it is never abandoned.
it is kinda funny in a twisted way...the Marxists said that liberated man would want to fish in the morning and write poetry at night, various other utopias posit a race of unleashed ubermenschen taking us to space as we all sing "Imagine" together...none of them could have guessed that when the needs of survival were met what people would most want would be to attend a permanent group therapy session and talk about their suffering Selves and how much they've been victimized....LOL!
Some understand. They're all too frightened to change course. They know there's hell to pay.
They’re too stuck in their bubble. What they don’t understand is that people will take only so much abuse. Especially people here in the USA. Let’s not forget, we are the descendants of those uppity peasants who left the Old World so they could own land and forge their own destiny.
We have a history, society and culture that will not be beholden to anyone who forces it upon us.
I hope you’re right about us. I’m not convinced, but I am more hopeful than I’ve been for a while.
Not me anyhow.
they would scream alt right and double down on repression, listening is no longer an option
They are so insulated from reality, they think their security details are omnipotent. Lol.
I am glowing in the gloriousness of this post. Cleverly written, Clever Pseudonym. Well said.
thanks!
Thank you for writing it. Loved it.
This is an excellent post. One thing that’s been odd for me to observe is that my high school-educated working class conservative friends are smarter and better informed on most political and social issues than my wealthy and highly credentialed liberal friends. And my conservative friends aren’t just regurgitating talking points that might happen to be correct. They understand their positions and can logically defend them.
yeah, i also come from a working-class background but was educated at a private liberal arts college (where i sat behind some crazy kid named Matt Taibbi one class) and for me the major difference bw my working-class friends and my upscale/suburban friends more or less comes down to bullshit detection...my working-class friends can't be played as easily by gauzy moral appeals or intellectual/philosophical trends. they are not as status conscious and also don't have the same desperate need my friends in the Blue Bubble do to appear morally righteous. they are much more refreshing to talk to, and also i don't have to walk on eggshells and worry that one wrong word will cause a denunciation.
Same here. Logic is a foreign concept that causes fight or flight in Leftist brains.
Not all of us! We're not in Kansas anymore; we're well beyond the old school binaries of Right and Left. Critical thinking has not left the building for many of us on the Left; it's that the Democrats have abandoned the Left, along with critical thinking. As others have written, it's now more about the Establishment versus the rest of us. When we drop into simplistic adversarial binaries, we give them exactly what they want - a distracted bunch of drama creators and perpetuators who are easily manipulated and unwittingly captured. Gotta stay awake and be open to new associations.
True dat. 👊 Well said.
100 percent
Taibbi was supported by a rep-Jim Jordan-from the practical equivalent of District 12-he lives in a village where it isn’t uncommon to get stuck behind a combine-I’ve had it happen personally there.
I believe Matt has mentioned Jersey? Maybe stuck behind horse vans. His partner may have a profession there. Crazy high taxes. Don’t see politics lol. Even Bon Jovi’s ‘bee farming’ tax dodge grift made him move out
I left nys 14 years ago for its poison, I mean politics. I found myself in Florida. And wish I had done it fifty years earlier.
Non-affiliation-D vs R, and shared general values/principles are a very different thing. If a place completely gives up on the later, I would not want to live there.
Icky. Love it.
thanks!