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Without a Middle Class, Democracy Becomes Irrelevant. Which Is the Whole Point.
A recent post included the old Turkish Proverb, “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.“ In that post it was being used to make a point about President Biden, but I think the true wisdom of that proverb is best seen from a more generalized point of view.
A palace is the seat of power. Like our Oval Office. But the palace doesn’t matter. The office doesn’t matter. What matters is the people. Ronald Reagan viewed the Oval Office with such reverence that he refused to remove his suit jacket in such a hallowed place. Bill Clinton got blow jobs from young interns in that same office. Which one was right? Neither. They were both wrong. The place doesn’t matter. There’s no difference between the Oval Office and any other office. But there’s a big difference between Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And that is a difference that matters.
This next quote is not a Turkish Proverb, but it does come from Turkish President Erdogan: “Democracy is like a train ride. When you reach your stop, you get off.” His point is that democracy is a convenient way to change the people in charge. But once you get the right people in charge, you stop. You no longer need democracy. You’re where you want to be, so you get off the train. You might think that this is sort of missing the point of democracy, but Putin, Castro, Hitler, and many other tyrants would tend to agree with Mr. Erdogan.
It turns out that democracy doesn’t matter any more than palaces or fancy offices do. It’s the people that matter.
American leftists understand this, and have spent the past several decades working tirelessly to convert the American citizenry from freedom-loving independent thinkers to fearful sheep willing to trade freedom for security.
They have done this in many and varied ways, including converting government schools into indoctrination centers for the left, and even up to importing a massive new voting block for Democrats via open borders.
But their most dangerous technique may be the left’s intentional destruction of the middle class. These are people who are neither poor nor rich, and are capable of taking care of themselves. Which means they are also capable of thinking for themselves. Which means they are dangerous to leftists who view elections and independent thinkers as threats. Leftists need sheep, and they fear everyone else. Rightly so, obviously.
The destruction of the middle-class results in a society of only the rich and the poor. Such societies are inherently unstable, and the politics of such societies becomes a simple power struggle, managed by those who redistribute wealth.
Those who want to keep what they earn through their own labor – those people are less dangerous than those who want to take what others have earned.
Venezuela.
A dominant middle class tends to enhance domestic peace and prosperity. The lack of a middle class tends to lead to … well, to Venezuela. Or North Korea or Cuba or some other socialist paradise.
As California’s middle class has either been destroyed or simply left the state, California is starting to look like those countries that destroyed their middle classes. Imagine what California would look like right now without the financial, infrastructure, and military support of the United States federal government. It would look a lot like Mexico, and possibly even worse.
And the Democrats are intentionally destroying our middle class in the other 49 states, simply so they can get to their stop, and get off the democracy train. Then everything will be under control.
No, it won’t. American leftists are making the same mistake that leftists have made around the world for generations. Their efforts to gain government power by taking power from the citizens inevitably leads to instability. They are destroying that which stabilizes society, and are building something that they cannot possibly control.
Again.
And again and again and again.
America was a very nice place for a very long time. Not because there was anything unusual about America. It’s because there was something unusual about Americans. Specifically, the American middle class.
Los Angeles.
The left understands that you don’t destroy America by burning the forests or salting the fields. You destroy America by destroying the American middle class. So that’s what they’re doing. California is leading the way, giving us a preview of what is to come, which may be of interest to those who are unfamiliar with the history of leftism. For example, those who were indoctrinated in American government schools. Watching California implode might be disconcerting for the sheep among us.
For the rest of us, it’s like watching a train crash in slow motion.
Leftists are destroying that which stabilizes society, and are building something they can’t possibly control.
Again.
Published in General
Well said . . .
Another grand slam re: California. Just got another jolt today. Taking the dog to Pet Express for her monthly bath and the place was closed. In a great neighborhood. That was always crowded with young folks in line to bathe their dogs. WTF? Knew the businesses in the downtown area were clearing out. Now hitting Pacific Heights. Way to go Gov. French Laundry!
The Republican corporation wishes to do the same thing . Let’s not forget that.
Are you sure? They need customers to make money and people to pay taxes. The GOPe model is optimized government and maximum economic production. Things like moral values and nationalism get in the way of maximum income.
Maximum income for THEM, perhaps, but not necessarily for us.
They are for open boarders for a reason
From the OP: “California is leading the way, giving us a preview of what is to come …”
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps it’s on the opposite end of the country where we find “what is to come”: Florida. To wit:
“Below is a list featuring some of the higher-profile priorities pursued by the state’s leadership, either having already been signed into law by the governor or having been passed by the state legislature, awaiting DeSantis’ signature.
Six-week abortion ban
Permitless carry
Illegal immigration crackdown
Penalties on businesses that admit kids to “adult live performances”
Death penalty for child rapists
A “digital bill of rights”
Enhanced penalties for fentanyl dealing
Fining credit card companies for tracking gun purchases
Removal of automatic teachers union paycheck deductions
Affordable housing
Outlawing social credit scores, crackdown on environmental, social and corporate governance investment
Ban on sex reassignment surgeries, other operations for minors
Outlawing central bank digital currency
Lowering the jury threshold for the death penalty
Parental rights law expansion to PreK-8
Eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion departments from public universities:
Separate bathrooms by sex
Requiring “wide diversity of perspectives” in campus lectures or debates, banning political loyalty tests in higher education …”
Additional factoids:
More than 1,000 LEOs from other states have taken advantage of the $5,000 signing bonus currently offered. Florida’s crime rate is at a 50 year low.
The state is running record budget surpluses, and has been returning notable amounts to taxpayers in various ways.
The state’s population has been growing at the rate of 1 Orlando/year lately. It gained an additional congressional seat on the heels of the last Census. Meanwhile California lost one, and U-Haul recently ran out of vans/trucks for people moving out of there.
Etc., etc., etc..
Conclusion:
Which “laboratory of democracy”, California or Florida, is the one that portends our country’s overall future remains to be seen. My money’s on the latter.
In a business as slimy as politics, those two are exceptionally oleaginous.
One does wonder how much longer one will be able to get a plumber in California.
They apparently think they’ll be better off if they create the world of “Brazil” (the 1985 Terry Gilliam movie).
@occupantcdn just posted this on another thread:
Wonderful movie. Flawed, but that’s for another time.
Trick question. Issue is how long Californian’s will take to get out of Dodge? May move my escape date up a few or more months.
So far no problem there. But asked my plumber guy who was here Friday how much longer he could take it. He said he could make it until after I was gone. Felt much better.
I pointed out some time ago – maybe 2 years or more, now – on the Conservative Migration group, that a lot of people in the People’s Republic of California could easily end up stuck/trapped there if they wait too long and so are unable to sell their home, either at the huge profit they were expecting, or possibly at all if it becomes too difficult for a buyer to get a mortgage.
Après moi, le déluge.
Not that I can blame you, especially regarding something like the PRC.
Woah dude, next thing you know it’s Good Woman of Szechuan time, which of course is also party time but maybe not so excellent? [I would like my medal for familiarity with trash 1980s culture now please, and if you’re not sure which referencer was relevant, well neither am I entirely.]
Often people seem to consider America’s growth and its internal social dynamics outside of the global context.
We have no problem recognising that globalisation put the squeeze on “low skill” jobs in the developed world (the quotes are because I do not like the term), so that particular class (let’s call it the working class?) in the West suffered at the same time as that class in the non-West really started to get ahead (by which I mean eating more than one meal a day, living in a house with more than one room, buying two (2!!!!!) pairs of shoes, etc.). So you could say that global well being increased, but that was scant comfort to people in the US who lost their jobs because China was making it cheaper and the US was importing it without hindrance – “it” being T Shirts or Cars.
Is that the kind of thing that is happening to the Western middle class now? Prices have risen in the past, but this time salaries aren’t matching them because lower priced competition overseas becomes increasingly relevant in this age of the internet? Have they outsourced newspaper editing to that team of English PhDs in Manila? Is CHATGPT suddenly doing my job for free? Is free trade really such a good thing if this time I’m the one that’s inconvenienced in the ‘everybody does not benefit equally at first’ pablum thing?
Got the message KE. Real estate folks think I have another year. Will find out. Weather still a little cool.
I had to look this up. Good Woman of Szechuan is a 1943 play by Berthold Brecht.
In David Mamet’s magnificent The Secret Knowledge, he describes an epiphany he had as a young Socialist, realizing that arch-communist Brecht’s plays were copyrighted, and performed for capital.
Ikr?
Omgomg, Bertolt’s the GWOS!
oooh I have to lie down for a moment here….
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States too.
Power to the people! Royalties to the Zinn estate!
Hey, as long as we’re engaging in Bertolt Brecht references, I think I’d be sorely remiss in not pointing to the short poem he wrote in order to express, satirically/sarcastically, his belated epiphany that the East German government’s response to the workers’ uprising in 1953 was not quite in keeping with the kind of worker-empowering approach that Marxist governments are supposed to be pursuing/implementing/enforcing, dontcha know.
The English title of the poem is “The Solution”, and it goes like this (bolding mine):
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bringing things back to current-day America context/dynamics, …
Nearly-nonexistent borders across which the equivalent of the population of Houston or Chicago (about 2.5 million) streams across year in and year out would, at some point, achieve the functional equivalent of “dissolv[ing]” the current American people and “elect[ing]”” its replacement.
Cui bono?
If that’s their plan, they might find the “replacement” they think they want, will be even harder to control.
Please elaborate on your “even harder to control” point.
Well they’ve been letting in MS-13 and other gangs, etc, why do they think those types would suddenly settle down and be easily controlled once they get into the US? And that’s not even counting “regular” people who already know about corrupt central government from growing up in Mexico and other places.
I regret that I have but one like to give. I never knew that the bolded portion (as well as the rest) was Brecht.
The narcocracy which emerges to govern itself will accommodate the Federal government just as it has in good ol’ Mexico. They’ll get along quite well, minus the occasional beheaded honest prosecutor.
That’s the problem, the feds think they’re the ones who should be in charge.
If they think they were dealing with an armed citizenry before, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Let me ask you this — how much discomfort are they having with armed inner-city culture? They co-opt it and use it against the rest of us. Cops caught in the middle, too.
That’s political parties gerrymandering for you. Less lurid than other examples, I’ll grant, but much more of an impact.