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Hannah Arendt famously coined “the banality of evil” to describe how Germans became inured to injustice and atrocities by gradual then forceful suppression of natural human impulses and reactions. In the US we are working on establishing the “banality of corruption.”
Federal law enforcement no longer pretends to be honorable, professional, and patriotic. Political enemies are targeted. Political allies are protected. Social media is pressured to censor and lie. Outrageous misuses of the judiciary are done openly. The border is unprotected but we still obediently take off our shoes in security kabuki before boarding a plane.
Congress locks up over trivialities while larger issues are ignored. Our diplomats and spooks work on DEI guidelines (the word “father” must now be avoided in memos and letters because it may be offensive to the otherly “gendered”) but are too ashamed of Amerika to fight for American interests. Universities steal from their students and their families to issue increasingly worthless degrees at outrageous prices. Fact-checkers issue disinformation. Clerics surrender to ideologues who openly hate religion. Criminals run free, especially if they are illegal aliens.
And no one seems to think there is anything we can do about it. The world watches while the Biden crime family runs free while their political rival Donald Trump is wrongfully punished in court. We may be worse than a third-world banana republic because at least those regimes don’t pretend to be principled stewards of a great political heritage.
The Gramscians have won. Every institution is now severed from and/or openly hostile to our cultural and moral heritage. As that same thing was only beginning in Weimar, the Soviet puppet faction (the original Antifa) became arrogant and violently crushed competing leftists much the same way that campus nutballs have driven out conventional liberal professors and ideas. The problem with that strategy is that it made a violent anti-communist group the only viable alternative for a lot of people.
If we do despair of ever fixing and changing sick institutions and a sick society and if elections no longer matter, and if we really are inured to the prevalence of corruption, injustice, and incompetence, I suspect that America will not become a climate-friendly, antiracist nirvana with free healthcare and abundant housing but something quite different.
Helplessness is a precarious mental state.
Discussion (30)
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It's going to get lonely, inside the razor wire perimeter.
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I suspect that after arrest, you will have lots of company. On the upside, friendships forged in gulags, concentration camps and campus re-education centers can be lasting.
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Perhaps a minor point but you left out that professional organizations have turned their licensing from competence to skin color and sexual schemas.
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The weird symbiosis between corruption and incompetence would make for a separate post. For example, what could be more racist than gutting the quality of inner-city schools so that black kids do not own fundamental skills but become entirely dependent on a racial spoils system for what those skills would have otherwise provided (and much more) and forever dependent on white liberal politicians? In broader terms, it is not an accident that the Biden administration is staffed by morons. Idiots will be more loyal to the narrative instead of a system that rewards competence.
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