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Democracy Bypassed
Americans have not ended democracy as such. We have instead allowed powerful persons and institutions to simply ignore it. The FBI, EPA, Twitter, universities, large corporations, and your local county school board increasingly follow their own ideological ends even if (or maybe especially if) it contradicts popular will and culture. The tiresome and obligatory comparisons to the fall of the Roman Empire miss the mark in many ways. Perhaps the better comparison is to Florence under the Medicis.
From Wikipedia:
Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) was the first Medici family member to govern the city from behind the scenes. Although the city was technically a democracy of sorts, his power came from a vast network of patronage and a political alliance to new immigrants to the city, the gente nuova. The fact that the Medici were bankers to the pope also contributed to their prominence.
Replace “the pope” with “politicians, media, and academics” and we are pretty close. In addition to illegal aliens, our gentle nuova are uneducated college grads with computer terminal jobs, desperate to be certified as elite.
Like Cosimo, the new power brokers don’t need and are not limited to use of official political power. What we are allowed to debate, what comprises news and approved information can now be sufficiently controlled that party politics becomes just noise or kabuki, unrelated to actual policy or law. Politics for the elite is about a longer-term project of suppressing annoying rhetorical opposition to what is happening anyway. No one lifted a finger when Mark Zuckerberg literally bought local government election agencies. We were all expressly forbidden from noticing much less mentioning the utter corruption of the Biden family. Is there any reason to expect that sort of thing to stop?
[A week ago, on Facebook for a tiny select group of family and friends I repeated a joke about the letters of “omicron” also spelling “moronic”. The post was instantly blocked and is allegedly still under “review.” ]
For the last two years, the entire western world has suspended democracy. Closures, lockdowns, various mandates, and even internment camps(!?) have been imposed under dubious legal authority and even less scientific justification. Authorities have been spectacularly wrong and openly disingenuous and it does not seem to matter. We are being trained to submit not to Science and Reason as properly understood by qualified experts but to a shallow credentialism in which some are anointed as authoritative merely for echoing elite sensibilities.
Unlike our modern Medicis, Cosimo and his rivals shared and celebrated the faith, values, and culture of the common people. They funded the Renaissance. Our Medicis fund woke hucksters, sexual confusion, incredibly ugly art and architecture, and “green” fantasies. Other than absurdity and irrationality the common theme is an attack on the very humanity fostered and celebrated in our western Judeo-Christian heritage.
The infections of Nazism, fascism, and especially Communism ripped through peoples who as a matter of culture, education, technological advancement, and experience all should have known better. Will we finally develop the antibodies to prevent these variants from doing it to western peoples again? Can we finally see the real enemy clearly and in time?
Not to stretch the comparison to the breaking point but Piero the Unfortunate (Cosmo’s great-grandson) lost control of Florence by making too many concessions to a rising foreign power (France) to the dismay of his people. Weak feckless leadership ended the family dynasty and the independence of Florence. Joe the Unfortunate, anyone?
Published in General
That’s moronic on the part of Facebook.
Conservatives have for the most part taken the position that money in politics equals free speech. They did this when they thought they had an edge on the money. Now it’s lefties who have the edge, yet they seem to hold on to what I think is a ludicrous position.
It is all about the money and translating it into power. Antitrust, taxes and political reforms can probably shift things back.
I’m making a habit of this. Below is a copy of an earlier comment today on @philo post about “organized corruption” infecting the Senate:
I’m going to quote me from an earlier post today by @seawriter, QOTD, Importance:
“There is so much money in the hands of relatively few people that those few, including some really bad apples, can corrupt almost any individual or institution on the planet. This is mostly a novel scenario, I think, for those of us who have spent our lives fighting the Communist threat. Most of us have dealt mostly with propaganda and intolerable acts of tyranny. Todays Communist influence is more subtle.”
The above permeates our entire society and takes slightly different forms depending on the institutional situation and the individual in that setting. After one gets past the oligarchs and some others who have accumulated enough wealth that they basically don’t answer to anyone, the next level is the well-to-do who are always looking for a little more security to beef up their financial backstop. This includes wealthy corporatists who yet work for a living as well as the politicians such as those in the topic of this post. Finally, we have government bureaucrats at all levels, about whom I have commented on other posts using the descriptive term “biological Leninism” to describe how their government position holds them and exercises control through corrupted influence.
So for a long time, pushing a century at least, the working middle class and small business entrepreneurs, Americans who measure their life value through personal tangible accomplishments rather than the monetary value of their wealth, have been losing ground to the increasingly subtle strategies employed by the Marxists to takeover America and the world. It has become very overtly evident in the actions of the Biden Administration that they are in accord with the global Marxist collective initiatives
This is where we are, folks. We still have a chance to set this right.
Conservatives always pushed liberal economic policy as freedom and largely the answer to most problems. This has left us with a deracinated culture and degraded national life. It has also propelled an enemy such as China into global power status. Americans now live with powerful institutions that don’t hesitate to assault our nation’s traditions, culture, and national character but these same institutions don’t dare say a word about China. China is perfect. Everything they do is wholesome and above critique. This is the prison we are in thanks to surrender largely in the culture war and the full throttle push to turn America into nothing more than a shopping mall/economic zone/dumping ground for the world. We need to pass common good policies that help the overwhelming majority of our citizens and restore our national life. Any institution that attacks our way of life should be assailed to the point of decimation if need be. And we need to end the corrupting Chinese influence on this country by completely splitting our economy from theirs. Immigration needs to be heavily reduced as well and citizenship/green cards should not be handed out like candy. They should be very exclusive rewards to those who deserve them.
I think there is a lot to take away from this comment. I have often paid a lot of attention to the economy and economic policy. I made a major change in my life’s work trajectory in 1971 when the economic recession influenced me to move from a privately owned small business into a federal bureaucracy executive position. I’ve wondered why it was always thought necessary to grow the GDP no matter what else might be going on. Why did free trade often appear to damage our national self-sufficiency and security? Why did every corporate CEO focus almost completely on next quarter’s revenue growth and earnings? Why were we almost always in military conflict but never enough to win. And in the last two decades the Fed’s actions have really gone weird and I have never understood why the local neighborhood banking system has been destroyed. When I say I haven’t understood, I mean in the context of the American ideal. I understand now how all this fits well with Marxism.
I don’t think it is Marxism. I think it is neo-feudalism. Elites around the world believe in international institutions, international trade, and international politics/action. They have no loyalty to the common people of their nations. They believe in getting together at the G20 or G7 and signing big climate pacts, economic pacts, women’s rights pacts, immigration pacts etc. We suffer under their grand plans and they will push increased taxes, mouth platitudes about redistribution, free healthcare, and socialist benefits as a salve to the little people for all their grand plans and dislocation.
They think it is a small price to pay to be the masters of the world. They will give us a universal basic income or some free government run trash healthcare where you need to wait 8 months to get your CAT scan. They’ll regulate what kind of car you can get, what you can consume, what kind of energy you’ll use to heat yourself in the winter and they will make the big decisions. You will have little ownership over your country and your life. You live in an economic zone where 2 to 4 major corporations run every major industry and rent seek for ever more consolidation of their market dominance. This is the new world. And the right defended it every step of the way by saying it is free trade. It doesn’t matter if China dominates global supply chains and manufacturing. You get cheaper crap at Wal Mart. The invisible hand! Meanwhile you lost control, competitive markets, national sovereignty and decision making over vital resources. And you’ll take your peanuts and like it. Be a serf. The leaders of China, the EU, and American elites will get together at the UN or G7 and make your decisions for you. No thanks. The right in this country needs to wake up and I am optimistic that they are and that they are understanding they have been at least 50% of the problem.
I don’t disagree, but the little people are more receptive to the Marxism label and the historic description of its utopian objectives.
In mid October, Glenn Greenwald put up his video on a similar topic: Mountain of Data Shows Democrats Have Become Authoritarians:
https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-authoritarian-democrats-have-become.html
It is lengthy, but listening to even just the first 10 minutes will give you proof that what you might be suspecting about the Liberal Side of Things is true. The “liberals” want the Big Beautiful Nanny State to protect the sanctity and hygiene of their minds, by letting both Big Tech and Big Government block any videos, commentary, graphics and jokes that might expand their world of knowledge and information. They are all for this, even if by doing so, Free Speech and methods of exchanging ideas are quashed.
According to the same Pew Research team that asked the first series of questions, in the second series, the public’s attitudes regarding the FBI were queried. While currently only 12% of all republicans and right-leaning people want to trust the FBI, over 75% of all dems and left-leaning people have trust and faith in the FBI.
I don’t know that neo-feudalism is right… maybe I have a romantic view of it, but feudalism, to work well and benefit the land holder, required something of him to the peasants that worked the land. Not perfect, but how frequently were the peons totally treated as replaceable widgets?
It seems that there were more chances in feudalism to get someone who cared about those under him then our current system does.
These lords are sucking out everything and leaving it for dead.
Nvm. You are correct.
Want to tweet, $1 tax. Want to post on Facebook, $1 tax. Wealth taxes on foundations. Want to give to political campaigns or other political groups, pay a tax.
I remember that I was told in grammar school (by one of my two or three favorite teachers) that the US was moving — was being moved — from a industrial manufacturing economy to a “service” economy. Even as a kid I thought this was wrong: Who would the US serve, and what would be their service? That was in 1967. What we are seeing today was planned a long, long time ago.
Yup, and the reason it is wrong is because there is no end limit to industrial innovation. What we have done is taken the ability to make complex things and handed that opportunity for our country and fellow citizens/future generations to China. Why should China get to take all the innovation we produced and have it handed to them so they can control it and move forward with it as our skills in manufacturing atrophy? And the people who said it was great policy. We are getting cheaper stuff were moronic. It is a threat to our economy. It is a threat to national security. And we should not be buying China’s slave labor. If China wants to compete then they should have built their own factories and companies from the ground up with their own investment. We spend 140 years industrializing so greedy corporate fat cats could ship it away to an enemy. And they did it because they could pay the Chinese people a pittance and get rid of all those pesky costs like payed vacation, workers comp, etc. China would make sure they wouldn’t have to deal with any of those issues if they were handed the keys to the kingdom. It was a dirty deal from the start and never should have been allowed. Time to bring it back. If it isn’t built on our soil then you shouldn’t sell it on our soil either. Especially when it is built with virtual slave labor. The US worker should not be competing with Chinese slaves. End of story.
Is it an oversimplification: are we more or less a victim of our own successes? Maybe victim isn’t the right word. It is self-inflicted. From the 50’s on, the US ‘made’ everything. That generation prided itself on production from a self-sufficient, independent disposition. They clearly remembered the depression and wartime rationing and the attitude ‘to never want again’ become nearly pathological. This isn’t about waxing nostalgic since many became workaholics but most found a sense of fulfillment in that pursuit.
After lifting several successive generations from poverty to abundance, today ‘to never want again’ has morphed into the desire for comfort and lifestyle. It seems to have replaced, again nearly pathologically, any yearning to be/feel productive. It has created an entire nation of consumers instead of producers.
This mentality might also begin to explain the shift by so many citizens for safety over freedom; for amenity over industry; fame over accomplishment. COVID policies in particular have laid bare this indulgent tendency of risk-aversion over risk-assessment. Yes the greedy overlords are in many ways to blame but it is also the bastardization of the American dream. Today’s US worker/citizen seems to be driven by an impetus that is eventually self-destructive.
I consider Marxism a tactic and not a form a government. The tactic is used to divide the people to the point that society fails and a revolution is fomented. What follows would be some form of tyrannical government (Communist, Fascist, Fuedal) where elites (haves) extract from the commoners (have-nots/serfs). It was the Italians that gave us that “fascist” term for government bundled with corporations to create an iron rule of the people.
I don’t think it is the factory workers fault. There are plenty of tough hard-working people in the industrial belt and places like West Virginia who have been living in a virtual depression since their jobs were handed to Red China. These people have sunk into alcoholism, drug dependence, and suicide and skyrocketed. That is what America’s politicians and business leaders have done to many small towns and even some cities like Detroit in our fair nation. These people never wanted this outcome. We have a mediocre elite who were handed control of these businesses after the W2 generation left the workforce. These people decided instead of innovating in new materials or new more efficient processes which reduces costs and prices and enriches society, they would instead utilize cheap foreign labor they could abuse and their governments would allow the abuse. So what we got was higher margins for them and not much innovation or reduced costs for us. China grew and got the industry and business. We shrunk and got increased rates of family violence and domestic dysfunction. Look at pictures of Detroit in the 1960s and look at it today. If that doesn’t radicalize you then I don’t know what will. And it all happened because corrupt mediocre elites stopped caring about their fellow citizens and nation.
We got endless propaganda about the wonders of globalization. How we will all profit. Endless magazine covers since the 90s and books from pseudo-intellectuals like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman about the wonders that are coming from this global enterprise system. Turns out it really wasn’t global anything. It was just centralization in China mostly. And did we get new and improved processes? Cheaper prices? Innovation? No, we got Chinese workers being forced to live in industrial camps to make the same stuff we were making for a pittance and sending much lower quality crap to our shores. And we were told this is the wonder of the free market. All of this is a disgrace. It is way past time to reverse it and get serious.
It was part of the dream we embraced at the end of the Cold War. We assumed, arrogantly, that everyone now understood that the classical liberal model (rights, rule of law, free markets) was the only way forward. We considered it a given that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were entering into a new age where this was universally understood. This got us into our interminable wars in the Levant and South Asia. (Surely if we topple the regime, the people will spontaneously install a constitutional republic. How could they even think to do otherwise?) It led us to grant China most favored trade status. (Surely if we integrate them into our economy and institutions they’ll abandon authoritarian socialism and rename their country Aynrandlandia any day now!) So much for globalization.
Didn’t George H.W. Bush refer to it as “the new world order”?
He states in the speech: “there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …’ A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”
There is a sort of Free Trade religiosity that a pillar of which is that a corporation’s chief and only purpose is to return the largest dividend and highest stock price that it can. And this return was measured quarterly and incentivized short-term strategizing. This incentivized leveraging and debt and disincentivized building better more expensive products and using higher quality raw materials, building local parts networks, warehousing supplies and materials, and paying a local workforce. This is the best answer I have seen that argues against “money first” business practices and off-shoring manufacturing, and the best answer for why we’re in the short-supply situation we’re in today.
Is there a material difference between these two statements: 1) “Democracy is dead.” and 2) “Democracy exists but it is routinely and intentionally ignored.”?
The difference? Life support.
Yup. I used to be pretty libertarian myself when it came to economics. Upon watching the results one has to just simply stop when reality doesn’t match the theories. Conservatives also need to stop the government can’t do anything shtick. If it couldn’t do anything then China would not have jumped to being the 2nd economy in the world on its way to being the 1st. Meanwhile our hands off approach where we let every corporation off-shore has shot us in the foot and hasn’t returned any benefits except to corporate and Chinese butt kissers. Conservatives need to start promoting ideas on why they should be in charge of the government and what they plan to do with it instead of running on vote for us and all we will do is cut some regulations and taxes at the top. People want a government that works for them and protects their interests and nation. Not one run by idiots who are on an international crusade to build democracy or spread LGBT rights all over the world. And Americans are certainly tired of the pick yourself up by your own bootstraps talk by Republicans who fight for socialism for Afghanis we brought over here. Why don’t the Afghanis get the pick yourselves up by your own bootstraps and learn to code speeches? They get $7 billion dollars in a 3 month funding bill dedicated to their needs. The American single mothers trying to get health insurance for their kids get the invisible hand of the market speech. Sorry your factory job left. Learn some new skills so we can tax you and pay for roads in the Middle East and the needs of Afghanis and illegal aliens children. What a crock this all is.
Glen: I don’t think it is Marxism. I think it is neo-feudalism.
In some ways that is correct. The elites want to enslave the vast majority of the population to be used as their ne0-serfs at their beck and call. But it is just not the elites, many among the Left have been brainwashed into believing that some sort of Marxist nirvana will elevate the common people. These foolish bimbos have just be sold a scam.
There are really several threads of disorder happening all at once.
Bathos: We have instead allowed powerful persons and institutions to simply ignore it. The FBI, EPA, Twitter, universities, large corporations, and your local county school board increasingly follow their own ideological ends even if (or maybe especially if) it contradicts popular will and culture.
Yep. At all levels of government, the Left’s attack on our Constitution has eliminated in our legal system of any sort of checks and balances on the abuse and corruption of government power to the point that our civil servants no longer feel the need to even go through the motions of following the law, instead they use their powers behind the scenes to grotesquely enrich themselves at our expense, seemingly without the worry that they will ever get caught or punished. We are simply now a Kleptocracy where those in government simply enrich themselves without any qualms of the great hurt they cause.
DonG:
I consider Marxism a tactic and not a form a government. The tactic is used to divide the people to the point that society fails and a revolution is fomented. What follows would be some form of tyrannical government (Communist, Fascist, Fuedal) where elites (haves) extract from the commoners (have-nots/serfs). It was the Italians that gave us that “fascist” term for government bundled with corporations to create an iron rule of the people.
Many of our young have been taught that “monkey wrenching” with the goal of bringing down most of our most cherished civil institutions is the highest form of patriotism without ever considering what happens next or what they are really creating. These people are simply illiterate but trendy bimbos who have been led down the garden path of fashionable revolution that will lead to untold, incredible suffering and perhaps an end to civilization as we know it as well as along with the death of billions in the process.