Study Finds Connection Between Getting Your Way And Calling For Unity https://t.co/aISRFJMyTW

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 4, 2020

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation, 1836, The New York Historical Society.

Pedro Gonzalez pessimistically describes the inexorable advance of the credentialed class of sophisters, calculators, and economists whose interests inevitably coincide with the cause of collectivist statism.

Before the storm of steel that was World War I, Robert Nisbet wrote that the federal government, for most Americans, was a stranger—something they mainly encountered only on visits to the post office. This may be hard for us to fathom now, we who have been born and raised long after the chains of industrial and technological conglomeration crushed the social, cultural, and political independence middle America knew just a few generations ago.

Different thinkers gave different names to this revolution of mass and scale in virtually all areas of organized human activity. James Burnham heralded its rise, as a system that would replace capitalism not with socialism but “managerialism.”

Burnham defined managerialism as the centralization of society in which the distinction between the state and the economy is eliminated, the separation of ownership and control is effected, and, most importantly, power—real power—rests in the hands of “managers.”

If it seems there is little room for republicanism or constitutionalism in this scheme, that’s because there isn’t. “America still has a written constitution, but it is nearly impossible, theoretically or politically, to comprehend the distinction between the government and the Constitution,” John Marini writes. “The theoretical foundations of social compact theory have been so undermined as to make constitutionalism obsolete as a political theory.”

Demystified, the “managers” of our post-constitutional cruise through the truculent waters at the end of history are business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, journalists, administrators; the whole host of technically trained experts who constitute the credentialed class which produces nothing and owns little but without whom mass society would not function.

“Agricultural and industrial societies always had their unhappy intellectuals—lawyers, clerks, teachers, radical journalists—men whose profits lay in ideas rather than things, and who were thus in the vanguard of upheavals and demands for reform,” Kevin P. Phillips wrote in Mediacracy. “But the intelligentsia was always a small subclass, influential at times when it could channel public unrest, otherwise subordinate.” Now the managers throttle their enemies with the levers of power and, to a large extent, manage unrest while overseeing the managed deconstruction of the civilization they did not build but inherited.

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They are winning because they have accomplished the Gramscian Long March and control the institutions that define the Culture.

Salena Zito points out that, if he wins, Biden won’t be healing anything and that the era of nation-wide division is not really about Trump.

Many voters going into this election next month believe if Biden wins the presidency, the constant disruption, chaos, and social unrest will recede because Trump will no longer be president. Some of them are actually hinging their vote on that. Those exasperated voters and every reporter who spins that reasoning are as wrong about that as they were in their belief that the 2016 election was all about Trump. It never was.

Trump was never the cause of the conservative populist coalition that put him in office. He was the result of it. After decades of voters’ dissatisfaction with both political parties, institutions, government, and culture, they voted for themselves and their communities over both party’s establishments. It wasn’t about voting for Trump.

A lot of very smart people keep missing that critical nuance.

If Trump’s opponents, or those who cover him, spent any time listening to voters and not making fun of them, categorizing them as a cult, racists, stupid, or whatever word of the day they are using to describe them, they would understand that.

I don’t mean parachuting in for a day at a diner and calling that understanding of a community. But walking in their shoes and their community’s streets to see how government has either failed them or passed their communities by. It wouldn’t hurt to stay in town for a couple of days, attend church with people, go to work with them, or watch them coach little league.

Look someone in the eyes on the very ground they walk on, and not from the bubble of your life experiences, and you might experience a little empathy.

As for Biden, despite his wistful assertion that he is going to bring this country together, anyone with a smidgen of understanding of the Democratic Party knows he will be hard-pressed to bring his own party together, let alone an entire country.

The hard and very vocal Left will demand climate change legislation, defunding or deep restructuring of our nation’s police forces, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for all,” and a restructuring of our education system to include radical lessons like the 1619 Project as part of the curriculum.

They will take their demands to social media, the streets, and to Washington until they get what they want. That is not a threat; that is just a reality. Biden is not the far-Left’s candidate, but he is the means to an end of Trump. Once elected, there is a valid expectation of a far-left reward for voting for Biden.

The moderate Democrats, independents, and suburban Republicans who may put Biden into office won’t go willingly along with sweeping government changes to satisfy activists, nor the higher taxes needed to support them. They won’t take to the streets, but they will silently move away from the coalition they decided to dip their toe in. The result will be an instantaneous shift back toward Republican candidates for the 2022 midterm elections, and the wildly swinging wave elections we’ve been experiencing since 2006 will continue.

In short, there is no exit from the roller coaster anytime soon.

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The Left isn’t going to change, and neither are the Americans who refuse to be swept along by the whims and caprices of the community of fashion.

Social media platforms are all petty little left-wing dictatorships featuring censorship systems administered by deviants and neurotics.

There are bitter jokes going around all the time about Facebook’s “Community Standards” enforcers resembling the cast of Portlandia.

The Blaze reports on a classic case illustrating just who is in charge around here. This particular example pertains to Twitch, “a video live streaming service operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon. Introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv, the site primarily focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competition.”

[There is] a new member of the Twitch moderation team: a transgender who identifies as a deer and who openly threatened to ban Twitch users with less “diverse” opinions.

“I have power, they can’t take it away from me,” bragged Steph Loehr, also known as FerociouslySteph. “And honestly there are some people that should be afraid of me, and they are because I represent moderation and diversity and I’m gonna come for harmful people. If you’re a really sh**ty person – I’m gonna stand up against you. Period. And Twitch is endorsing me to do that.” …

Loehr [has] explain[ed] how she likes to “prance around and eat grass,” as well as having a “deergasm.”

Ann Coulter hits the nail on the head:

why are antifa boys scrawny beta males?

White men who go around denouncing other white men as “fascists” are wimpy losers who think they’ll attract women with suck-up speeches about racism. But even stupid left-wing girls prefer alpha males. Sissy boys should drop the left-wing politics and try lifting weights and making money. Freud was a fool and reductionist, but sexual strategizing by losers is the source of nearly all left-wing ideology.”

Peter Savodnick recognizes alarming literary parallels.

The metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing. The parallels between them then and us now, political and social but mostly characterological, are becoming sharper, more unavoidable.

We can reassure ourselves by repeating obvious truths: The United States is not czarist Russia. The present is not the past. History does not repeat itself. But those facts are not immutable laws so much as observations, and even though they are built on solid foundations, those foundations are not impervious to shifting sands. We can go backward. We can descend into a primal state we thought we had escaped forever. That is the lesson of the 20th century.

The similarities between past and present are legion: The coarsening of the culture, our economic woes, our political logjams, the opportunism and fecklessness of our so-called elites, the corruption of our institutions, the ease with which we talk about “revolution” (as in Bernie Sanders’ romanticization of “political revolution”), the anger, the polarization, the anti-Semitism.

But the most important thing is the new characters, who are not that dissimilar to the old ones.

Consider Yevgeny Bazarov. To Bazarov, one of the sons in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the whole of Russia is rotten, and anyone who can’t see that is an idiot or a knave, and the only solution is to raze everything. There is a logic to his thinking. Russia was ruled by a backward-looking monarchy. The nobility was complicit in perpetuating grotesque inequality. The Orthodox Church was allied with the ruling classes. And the ruling classes moved glacially to liberalize. (In Western Europe, the feudal system started to collapse nearly four centuries before it did in Russia.)

One can imagine arriving at the conclusion that Russia would never reform itself, that the only way to liberate it from its medievalism was to start over. Bazarov, a doctor whose empirical nature, we are led to understand, informs his nihilism, is convinced that Russia must start over, and everything about him—his sarcasm, his lack of empathy—is meant to convey disdain, destruction, a sweeping away of the old. He is openly disrespectful of the fathers in the novel—Nikolai Petrovich and Vasily Ivanovich—because they’re old. They’re fathers. They come before, so they are necessarily less developed. To Bazarov, those who do not see the world exactly as he does—most people—are simply roadblocks or enemies. They are not really people. They are not wholly human.

One wonders if Bazarov is that different from today’s protesters and statue-topplers, the 20-somethings sowing discord in our newsrooms, the cancellers, the uber-woke, the sociopaths who police our social media feeds, those who would massage or rewrite history in the service of a glorious future. Like Bazarov, they are incapable of empathizing with those who do not view the world the way they do. Like Bazarov, they assume that the place they come from (America) is cancerous to the core—regressive, hateful, an affront to right-thinking people everywhere. Like Bazarov, there is about them a crude sarcasm (or snark). Like Bazarov, there is a logic to their outrage: Today, we are witnessing Americans revolting against the vestiges of a barbaric, racial hierarchy that was constructed four centuries ago. That hierarchy continues to be felt. It is not unreasonable to wonder, When will we finally transcend the past?

The only important obvious difference between the fictional, Russian nihilist and his nonfictional, American counterpart is the lens through which they view history. Bazarov’s radicalism, descending directly from Marx, amounts to a typical economic determinism—a conviction that the entire human story can be boiled down to those with the means of production exploiting those without it. Today, the radicals have mostly abandoned economic determinism in favor of a race-gender, or identitarian, determinism that also claims to explain the whole of us—our etiology, our political and economic development, our moral worth. This appears to be the animating force, for example, behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which squeezes the entire American story into the Procrustean bed of race relations.

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Derek Hunter suggests letting the lefties have their own People’s Republic on the Left Coast. Maybe more of them will flock there and leave the rest of us alone.

Be honest, if we let the mutant mob have Seattle, would you really miss it? We’ve already gotten all the good music out of it, coffee is everywhere, so what else do they bring to the table? If you feel as though you missed your chance to visit the Space Needle, they have a similar enough tower in Toronto. And you can catch scabies in any number of third world countries with much better climates. So I say, let them have it.

For that matter, give them the whole state. They inflicted Microsoft on the country, so think of leaving them to the wolves as revenge for whatever version of Windows last crashed on you, which is to say whatever the latest version of Windows there is. Toss in Oregon, too, because what good has ever come from Oregon?

That’s an honest question. I’m sure they’ve added something besides trees, I just have no idea what it is. Nor do I care. Whatever it is (beaver pelts, maybe?), I’ll happily forego to create whatever they end up calling a country that will undoubtedly be a magnet for like-minded leftists, thereby ridding this country of a significant percentage of those carcinogens known as progressives.

Let them create Utopia, or at least see how it goes.

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Not ordinary white Americans! notes Matt Walsh.

where are the police while these vandals destroy public property and tear down priceless works of art that have stood, in some cases, for a century or more? You almost have to remind yourself that the people tearing down the property actually do not have the legal right to do what they’re doing. You’d be excused for thinking otherwise – does the term “public property” mean that the public can do whatever it wants with it? – however, destruction of property worth more than $500 is a felony in most states. These statues are worth many thousands of dollars, making these mob-led “removals” felony crimes. They are also dangerous crimes, as the man who had his skull cracked open in Virginia convincingly discovered.

But this has been the theme in recent weeks. The police standby while leftist radicals do, quite literally, whatever they want.

In Seattle, a group of radicals have seized control of several city blocks and declared it a sovereign state. They have set up checkpoints and barricades, and uniformed police are barred entry. The police, in fact, were nice enough to abandon their precinct at the rioters’ behest. This is a repeat of what we witnessed in Minneapolis, except in that case the precinct was then ransacked and torched. Somehow, in a civilized country once ruled by law, this has all become a familiar sight. Mobs rampage through our cities, set buildings on fire, destroy police cars, destroy public property, destroy private property, throw bricks, invade government buildings, loot, assault, and murder. And very little effort is made to stop any of these crimes from occurring, or to punish those who commit them.

There is much discussion about “privilege” in our culture. Indeed, the concept of privilege is one of the things fueling these mobs. They would say that privilege is bestowed based on race and gender, and that I, as a white man, have the most privilege of all. Yet I’m fairly sure that if I drove into town right now and threw a brick in a window, or set a retail outlet on fire, or looted a convenience store, or invaded a police precinct, or tried to set up my own “autonomous zone,” or yanked down any statues or monuments I found personally displeasing, I would be arrested on the spot, with little fanfare. And if I resisted arrest and was beaten or killed by police in the process – even if my death was unjust and the result of excessive force – there would be no CNN headlines about it, no riots in my honor, no elaborate displays of performative grief from our elected officials in Washington. Whatever my white privilege gets me, it doesn’t get me that. And it doesn’t provide me a pass that allows me to tear through the city, stealing, destroying, looting, and burning, either.

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Mainstream Christianity in today’s West has become a dead letter and a joke. But our elites are not irreligious. Their real clerisy is the rancid radical Left. And their religious observance consists of submission, self-abasement, and virtue-signalling in response to whatever the Left demands.

John Hinderaker finds it hilarious that community of fashion bouzhie poseurs will root enthusiastically for the Revolution, not realizing in the least that it’s coming for them, too, in the end.

There is nothing good about rioting, looting and burning, but these evils sometimes provide clarifying moments. Such as when progressives realize that the looters are coming for them, too. It shouldn’t be a news flash, but progressives are often surprised to learn that their support for left-wing causes, including criminal activity, doesn’t accord them any special status.

A case in point, from North Carolina’s Post Millenial: “Editor of progressive newspaper celebrated protestors—then they stormed and trashed her office.” The editor is named Leigh Tauss. She initially cheered on anti-police protesters.

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