We’ve known for at least a decade or so that the so-called “ruling class” here in the US (and possibly in formerly great Britain and Western Europe as well) look down snobbishly on the middle and working class, the regular joes, the residents of flyover country. Those who roost in the higher levels in academia, the media, in the entertainment and intellectual world, in the national bureaucracy, those who are part of the upper caste have made their contempt for the ordinary citizen pretty darned obvious by their words and actions, to the point where it’s no secret to most of us who have been paying attention. That this contempt is returned is not immediately obvious; after all, the media (with a few honorable exceptions) has little interest in the opinions of the ruled class, or in reporting them with any degree of understanding or sympathy. Still, we in the ruled class have made our displeasure known in small ways eschewing shopping at Target, watching NFL games, dropping ESPN, and skipping over award shows like the Oscars which likely the ruling class feels as mere irritating pin-pricks. (They are TWANLOC, in Subotai Bahadur’s elegant phrase.) And if they are being seriously inconvenienced by recalcitrance on the part of the ruled class we won’t know for certain, for a good while. Possibly in the history books, if we in the ruled class get a chance to write them.
A comment on another blog, a couple of days ago where the ghastly new fires in Northern California were being discussed suggested a new thought to me, regarding the rulers and the ruled. The Ruling Class, as the commenter posited, was all about the environment, preserving the forests and the wilderness, and those darling wild creatures … but when all that effort put into maintaining a pristine wildlife environment turns around and kills people actually living on the edge of those areas … well, just too bad. A shocking thought, at first but after a moment, I had to agree. Not only do the ruling class despise us … but they don’t much care if we live or die. Preferably die, as long as we don’t make too much fuss about it.
Oh, they make a big show of concern if some legislation or virtuous cause saves only one life, if it saves a child, if it … one lovely ambition, one good intention then whatever it is will be good and true and worthy, and they who promulgate it are of course good and true and worthy, because their intentions are pure. the securely-in-power ruling class are dressing themselves in the shining garments of righteousness, decorated with festoons of smug. It’s a pose, an opportunity to preen to each other. They actually care nothing for the ruled, except perhaps at election times, and the votes can always be manufactured, no need to involve the electorate. I surmise that to the ruling class that those of us in the ruled category are interchangeable characters with blurred features and a couple of easily-mocked tag-lines, as disposable as used Kleenex. Our lives and concerns are less than of no interest, really next to the theatrical show of properly-progressive and approved causes. Too many of us remain stiff-necked and independent, too unwilling to bow to the dictates of the ruling class, vote for the ruling class candidates or measures, or to indulge their feelings … We have disappointed the Ruling Class, and so we are disposable.
Worse than indifference, though sour malignant intent is what the commenter suggested. Various instruments of death are being scattered willy-nilly among us, just because. Send hundreds, thousands of illegal immigrants to live among us? Flout the laws regarding identity theft, drunk driving, possession of illegal firearms … come over the border afflicted with exotic diseases that no one in this country has seen in decades? No problem, for the ruling class. Doesn’t affect anyone we know; only those proles in the low-rent neighborhoods, and they don’t matter. Environmentalists blocking efforts by forestry management experts, and property owners to thin out new growth, cut and remove dead wood? When the forests go up in a town-killing inferno and houses with their elderly owners and pets are trapped in them well, that’s just a meaningless statistic. Relocate manufacturing jobs over the national borders or overseas? Gut formerly self-sufficient communities? Well, those stupid proles should have learned to code, and move their insignificant lives to some other place, and who in the Ruling Class really cares about epidemic opioid abuse? Concern about Islamic militants, or deeply mentally-disturbed young men with access to firearms? Well, that’s Islamophobia in the first case, and a violation of civil rights in the second, until it’s time for the obligatory gun-control pose, never mind the silent pool of blood spreading around the bodies of the unlucky Ruled.
For all the nice words and posing the Ruling Class would just as well not have to bother with the icky and disobedient ruled class at all. Discuss, as you wish and if your blood pressure can stand it.
the Ruling Class would just as well not have to bother with the icky and disobedient ruled class at all. Discuss, as you wish and if your blood pressure can stand it.
I wouldn’t mind so much of they were at least competent. Look at the Obamacare rollout. A fiasco.
It finally occurred to somebody, probably Trump, to audit the Pentagon.
Guess what? It failed.
The Defense Department failed its first full-scale audit, the results of which are expected to be released later today, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters in a news briefing Thursday that the Pentagon had failed the audit. Some of the agency’s accounting issues could take years to fix.
Shanahan cautioned, though, that the agency never expected to pass.
“We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” Shanahan told reporters at a briefing.
“We never thought we were going to pass an audit, everyone was betting against us that we wouldn’t even do the audit,” he added.
But Shanahan also made it clear the agency intended to take the audit seriously, saying he was concerned about the effect on future Pentagon funding if the agency was unable to resolve the issues identified.
I’d actually like to see the numbers. How much for pensions ? Maybe a pie chart,
It’s all about the pose, Mike. As long as you look good, you are doing good.
Never mind the pile of bodies resulting.
Their distain is partially camouflaged in their big shows of concern for every real, exaggerated, or imagined issue always accompanied by a recommended ceding of more authority and power to the ruling class, as in the political/crony capitalist symbiotic eco-system.
There is no realistic expectation that their progressive remedies will address the issues effectively. Any hope that they will is mostly based on the emotionally held belief that they know better and can compel compliance through government power. Should the results exacerbate that is no problem, double down. It must be that those deplorables lack the proper progressive motivation to conform their behavior to our intended outcomes.
Their calculated work-arounds for being exempt from their intended, prescribed behavior is testimony that it is about the ruled carrying the water for their wishful thinking. Algore’s energy use in the pursuit of saving the planet from climate change. Congressional and corporate health care exemptions from Obamacare. Corporate bailouts from financial failure (“too big to fail”).
Death6
There was a bizarre exchange on Twitter today between California Congressman Eric Swalwell and a gun owner. Swalwell wants to confiscate all rifles with pistol grips, which is silly in the first place, but here he appears to threaten that the government will gladly engage in a war of annihilation with Americans in order to take their guns away. The sad thing is that I think he’s probably correct.
Arguably, the situation today is in some was worse than in feudal times. The feudal lord certainly considered himself a cut above the serfs who worked the estates — but the Lord knew that his fortune was tied to that land and his life depended on those serfs. The kitchen maid who cooked the food could easily slip poison into his meals, and when he led his vassals into battle, his survival depended on their skill and loyalty. The Lord had to look after his people; there were mutual obligations.
No more! Our modern Political Class (which includes media, academia, the crony kind of capitalist, and senior bureaucrats as well as elected and appointed officials) really has only minimal ties to their country or to the people. The South of France is so nice at this time of year! And we meet all those nice people from Davos!
One of the mistakes (from our point of view, not theirs) was eliminating National Service. Even Elvis had to serve — and that was within a human lifetime. There is nothing like fixing a truck in the field on a rainy night to make the future graduate in Lesbian Dance recognize her place in a functioning society.
One sign that they are losing their grip is the proliferation of schemes to “manufacture consent”. It is clear that they do not have the consent of the governed, but they wish for it to appear that they do — so they use schemes like California’s “jungle primary” to manufacture situations where the two candidates on the final ballot are both Democrats. Or they use “ranked voting” to manufacture consent by algorithm. They wouldn’t have to do this if they were actually popular.
Likewise, they have to manipulate what constitutes their electorate — allowing felons to vote in FL, for instance. They are giving up on law-abiding citizens. The various frauds in AZ, FL, and GA are an open declaration that they are abandoning actual voters in favor of the fraudulent.
For all the nice words and posing – the Ruling Class would just as well not have to bother with the icky and disobedient ruled class at all. Discuss…
“To know who rules you, ask who you are not allowed to criticize.”–Voltaire
Just look around you. Try criticizing a top-dog feminist and see how the New York and Hollywood media axis treats you. You’re not allowed to criticize them. Also, notice that feminists act as if men aren’t even people. That’s a nasty ruling class.
I fear that the time is coming when the only reasonable course of action is to do unto the Swalwells of the nation before they can do unto us. Sadly, that probably won’t happen until it’s too late, but I suspect that there are going to be a lot of creatures like Swalwell coming forward with their crypto-fascist plans for the rest of us, and nobody will take them seriously until it’s past the time for reasonable action.
In a healthy nation, a Swalwell would never arise–Because the sort of creature represented by that cretinous clot would never rise to public office in the first place, being identified as a small-time tyrant with delusions of grandeur. His neighbors would laugh at him, and effectively bar him from any civic responsibilities out of a sense of self-preservation. Only in our times could Swalwell thrive as a member of the political class.
Where this ends is going to be an ugly, ugly place; I don’t see any real hope of avoiding armed conflict at this point. It is only a question of when they decide to abandon all pretense of civilized conduct and tolerance–You can already see the outlines of things to come, with what has been going on in the paradise of Seattle, where merely attending a semi-conservative meeting is enough to drive a decent man from seeking public office, and elicit death threats against his Asian wife and his children.
You can’t reason with the left; we learned that with the Nazis and the Communists. All you can do is kill them before they kill you, and we are rapidly reaching a point where that necessary sanitary action must either take place, or we wind up like Venezuela or Cambodia.
At the moment, I suspect that these cretins we’ve allowed to breed up in our universities would get up to things that even Pol Pot would have gagged at.
The fact that congress people can even think of applying the economics of Marx/socialism and the culture of the sixties proves they either don’t care about others (or themselves) or that they have accepted the nihilism they have also romanticized. 9/11 made me aware of the beauty and power of our particular brand of nationalism, but it also revealed how hateful and miserable a strain of American thought was. It has just gotten worse each year. Yes, surely anyone who pays Iran the big bucks or wants open borders or the police as targets is not very interested in the longevity of my children and grandchildren. (Or with national health care, mine.)
I won’t defend The Weekly Standard’s never Trumpism but “Dagger and Swagger” describes the elitist romanticization of murder and the desire for chaos – a drive the Che Gueveras share with the Charles Starkweathers and one suspects the George Soroses of the world (even though perhaps only the last has the long experience to know what a justice system that doesn’t assume and protect innocence and an investigation that begins with the subject and not the crime, where compromised elections and identity politics and open borders are likely to end.) (I don’t read much anymore and the article took me days to finish – but that’s also because it is so damn depressing. It seems to me that the last lines are meant to wake up the never Trumpers but that may just be my perspective:
Dostoyevsky’s Possessed had suggested that terrorist success depends on support from polite liberal society, and that proved accurate. The division of people into friends and enemies, the celebration of righteous anger, and the romanticization of violence eventually led to a state based on sheer terror. In the name of the many, the radical intelligentsia and their liberal defenders made possible the rule of the chosen few.
I don’t really think of them as a “ruling class”, but buffoons. And I suppose they are just as disdainful of me.
In other words, they to whom power is all that matters are behaving as if power is all that matters to them.
And this surprises you?
but the Lord knew that his fortune was tied to that land and his life depended on those serfs. The kitchen maid who cooked the food could easily slip poison into his meals, and when he led his vassals into battle, his survival depended on their skill and loyalty. The Lord had to look after his people; there were mutual obligations.
This is largely the message of “The Revolt of the Elites,” in which the author points out that, at one time, those with wealth and power felt an obligation to serve and to make the society better, Now, it is all about conspicuous consumption and self aggrandizement.
It’s interesting that this book was written 20 years ago and almost predicts Trump.
Relocate manufacturing jobs over the national borders or overseas? Gut formerly self-sufficient communities? Well, those stupid proles should have learned to code, and move their insignificant lives to some other place.
Ah, another subtle dig at Keven Williamson and his take on Garbutt, NY a while back.
The problem is, he was right … and this is a blind spot for many of us.
Why do we in the Ruled Class think that we should get a pass on protecting ourselves, through preparation and wise choices that keep our options open, and keep us less dependent on others – employers, unions, government?
Why do so many of us believe that we have a RIGHT to work the same job, in the same place, in the same way for a lifetime, expecting others to assure that we will prosper under such a system … or that our kids should be able to turn a “fulfilling” degree in Whatever Studies into a prosperous life, because “a degree” is the be-all-end-all key to success?
When the attitude is that all you have to do is punch in, do what you’re told, and punch out to keep a job … and that doing anything beyond that to do it better is being played for a sucker … is it no wonder that the jobs left for places that at least will work harder, even though we have the capability to work harder AND smarter and surpass them IF WE WOULD JUST USE IT?
The Ruling Class has promoted this way of thinking for seventy-five years, in their “bless your heart” condescension as our perceived “betters”. Another indictment against them, to add to the long list in the post and comments.
But many in the Ruled Class have WILLINGLY accepted their role as serfs in this high-tech feudalism, as The Way Things Are and without question … outsourcing the responsible exercise of individual initiative to the “experts” and “leaders” who Know Betterâ„¢ than us ordinary folks how to solve the problems we face, as individuals and as a nation, FOR us. (The irony is that usually, those who do not accept this way of thinking keep themselves in a better position to handle the troubles life gives them.)
Is responsibility and initiative only for those with credentials? High position? Cultural/political popularity? Wealth?
Are we adults, or children that must be led by the hand?
Meet the enemy … he is us.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ritchie-the-riveter/outsourcing-is-the-problem-but-not-the-way-you-might-think/416571378389947
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ritchie-the-riveter/the-seven-assumptions-that-are-killing-our-society/1918369764876760/
Groucho: Either this man is dead, or my watch has stopped.
Great article. I’ll add another point that’s also critical. The fact that many of these elitist causes are illogical, irrational, or make no sense misses the reason why they exist.
They exist because we’re likely to protest the impositions they impose and in protesting we “prove” to that elite their virtue. “We love the environment so much,” they can claim, “that we want to ban plastic straws.” It matters not whether our straws cause any problems or whether almost all the plastic pollution comes from China and a few other countries without efficient garbage collection. What matters is their ability to virtue-signal at our expense.
Michael W. Perry … such virtue-signalling is indicative of a fundamentalist mindset, whose adherents need the reassurance of such signalling to prove to themselves that they are still part of the flock.
Progressives: the new fundamentalists of the 21st century.
And one form of this is particularly irritating: in response to a real problem, officials take half-measures to “solve” a real problem – measures that so often create more problems than they actually solve – then pat themselves on the back for “doing something” and move on to the next crisis-not-to-waste.
Case in point: the current response to opioid abuse … which subjects responsible patients to TSA-level hassles, discourages pharmacies from providing such patients the meds they need, all to interdict the few who actually abuse them … because those officials don’t want to deal with the real problem behind this: the wink-wink/nod-nod tolerance of recreational drug use within our culture, as long as you don’t get caught.
Another example: imposing cigarette taxes to “curb smoking”, but not enough to deny our officials a lot of money from those taxes to fill the slush funds … while encouraging black-market sales that, among other things, created the conditions that killed Eric Garner in Staten Island.
Nothing in the last couple of decades better revealed the corrupt, hypocritical subversion organized by the Elite Ruling Class, AKA “The SWAMP”, than the unmasking of Jonathan Gruber’s cynical message manipulations finely tuned the pitch the lies of the Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare”.
No American should ever again doubt the worst intentions of their betters!
There is nothing to discuss, every word is true, and the only worthwhile reply is “À la lanterne!” The only remaining question is when.
those of us in the ruled category are interchangeable characters with blurred features
In other words, to them, we’re NPCs.
But somehow that meme is offensive.
*smh*
I thought it was hilariously revealing that Dem rep Swallwell thinks that “we have nukes.” With which team does he think the armed forces would side if push came to shove? And–oh by the way–does he really think that his protection is adequate to guard against a good deer hunter (with wrong think) from, say, 400 yards out?
You don’t have to believe in Q to realize that, truly, “these people are stupid.”
A fellow, having returned a few months earlier from an overseas posting, was asked how it felt to live in the land of liberty and freedom. He said “It was great and I sure miss it.”
“in response to a real problem, officials take half-measures to “solve” a real problem – measures that so often create more problems than they actually solve – then pat themselves on the back for “doing something” and move on to the next crisis-not-to-waste.”
This is the crux of it. And the reason they persist is partly virtue signaling, but especially the accumulation power to control the deplorables who just want to be left alone. In order to make this work, it is necessary to convince a large proportion of the ruled class to believe that the political system holds the answers to all of our problems, that all of our problems are much more serious than they are, and much more beyond our immediate responsibility and means.
The spread of this attitude relies on control of the cultural levers: academia, media, religion and entertainment. Dominance of those domains yields the popular acceptance that government, directly or indirectly, is the first option for any issue or concern.
Such an ineffective and costly expansion of the state’s power is costly. In a pay now to play system, there would be a major brake on such a process. Given that we have little concern for our descendants, we accept or ignore the shifting of the massive cost burden into the indefinite future. By the time this proves unsupportable, it will be too late to salvage much. After all, only the rulers can keep the sky from falling.
Death6
Another example: imposing cigarette taxes to “curb smoking”, but not enough to deny our officials a lot of money from those taxes to fill the slush funds
What is interesting is to see the mountains being moved to ban “vaping,” which allows nicotine use without the harmful tars and smoke that caused emphysema and cancer. The argument to reduce or even ban cigarette smoking began with the recognition, through epidemiology methods, that cigarette smoking caused illness and death. The arguments against cigarettes were based on health, not morality, and the methods, which began with the Doll and Hill study of smoking and lung cancer, which showed the association. It was science, not emotion and it was health not morality.
Now, there may be valid concerns about addicting children to nicotine but marijuana legalization pressures have no such concerns.
As a matter of fact, there is some evidence that vaping assists in transitioning from cigarettes to the less harmful use of nicotine.
The campaign against vaping is all about morality, not health.
Let’s perform a thought experiment: Suppose a major meteor suddenly crashed onto Washington DC, digging a crater 50 miles across and completely eliminating the nastiest part of the Swamp. Tragic, of course, but we will get over it. And then suppose that through the Grace of God, many Washingtons arise from flyover country and lead the grieving US back onto the straight & narrow: honest elections, secure borders, sensible regulation, the restoration of an equitable legal system, the transformation of Political Correctness into the butt of every joke.
The US would still be stuck with a dysfunctional educational system, a National Debt that is too big to be paid off, unfunded commitments for pensions and health care that will never be honored, and an economy that has been hollowed out by outsourcing. Even the elimination of the Swamp and its replacement with sensible government would still leave us with problems that would make a grown man cry.
There was a reason the Israelites had to spend 40 years in the wilderness after the escape from slavery in Egypt — it took two generations for the attitudes engendered during slavery to die out. Even under the best circumstances, there is a long road ahead of us.
but the Lord knew that his fortune was tied to that land and his life depended on those serfs
But the new ruling elite *has* serfs upon which it can rely (or so it thinks) – the coastal and urban populaces. Replace the other places with appropriately-minded serfs, and, voila! you have a completely pliant under-population. Because none of them study history or believe in it.
As the establishment’s, and not just the Left’s big government dependency, top down control politics drives away more and more of the unsophisticated rubes who do the dry cleaning, fill the prescriptions, repair the vehicles, unclog the pipes and make and deliver the pizza, a larger underclass has to be imported. And the spread between wealth and poverty widens, as this self-inflicted malignancy metastasizes.
The real problem is voters. We get the government we deserve. The fact you think of politicians as a “ruling class” IS the problem. The president, congress, the judiciary, DO NOT RULE US. Their purpose is clear and short: to protect our unalienable rights. That’s it. Nowhere in the constitution does it authorize them to “rule” us, to “run the country”, or any of the other stupid things people say about politicians. Our constitution designs an institution designed to protect our rights so WE can run our own lives and hence the country.
Voters got it into their head we should be ruled, though. As a result, voters ceded control over vast chunks of our lives, liberty, and money. Why wouldn’t politicians and their enablers see themselves as our ruling class and holding us in contempt? We are contemptible. Any who would cede control over retirement, healthcare, education, how we work, when and where we can work, etc. DESERVE to be thought of contemptibly.
Instead of being free men, loving the gift of liberty our forefathers paid for in blood to give us, Americans WANT social security, WANT Medicare, WANT medicaid, WANT government controlled schools, WANT government controlled healthcare, WANT labor laws, WANT minimum wage laws, etc. We couldn’t be bothered with revering the gift given us, choosing, instead, what we thought was an easy life with little to no responsibility, especially none for our own personal decisions. Europeans want similar things. Only the contemptible would want such things.
“Oh, they make a big show of concern”
Because, despite 10,000 years of recorded political history, you believe these people and never vote them out of office. There are no victims in politics. Only suckers. You are a sucker.
It is fun to blame the very people we put into office to do exactly what we wanted them to do, though. After all, you can’t be held responsible for the people you voted for. Politicians should save us from ourselves. That thought process is the sole cause of all our political problems.
Ken: “There are no victims in politics. Only suckers. You are a sucker.”
Ken, you are obviously not taken in by the charade. The chances are there may be others who similarly are not taken in. What action plan would you propose to the non-suckers? Here are some alternatives; what is your recommendation?
The obvious option with universal suffrage would be to persuade one’s fellow voters to change their ways. It can be tough to do that, especially when key numbers of those voters are non-citizens, or even dead.
Another option would be to take a lesson from history and restrict the voting privilege in some way — maybe only ex-military (per Heinlein’s Starship Troopers) or only those who are net tax-payers. Of course, there would be others who would be screaming for denying the vote to whites (however they define it that day), males (unless they prefer to use female bathrooms), NRA members, etc. Tough to see how there would ever be agreement to limit the suffrage in a constructive way.
Or we could consider separation in some form, into the Makers Country and the Takers Country. Tough to do that because the populations are pretty well mixed. Apart from those constituencies where 110% of the voters reliably turn up to vote for Obama, even politically polarized areas are mostly 60/40 or 70/30. It would be traumatic to move millions of people to the other Country. Remember that although the Brits’ parting gift to India was to separate the Empire along religious lines, there are still more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.
All of which may bring us back to the practical option — sit back, have a beer, and wait for the inevitable collapse of the unsustainable monstrosity that we (or the Political Class) have created; and, in the meantime, teach the children well.
Or we could consider separation in some form, into the Makers Country and the Takers Country. Tough to do that because the populations are pretty well mixed.
I’m not so sure. The LA Times made a big deal out of the fact that Republicans are pretty much extinct on Orange County.
The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election ”” again, in blowout fashion ”” but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit
I see no recognition that Republican voters, like me and my wife, left. After 60 years for me and three generations for her, we left.
I still have kids there, and grandkids, but several of my children are thinking about where they will move once they retire. My son is a fireman and will retire in several years. His wife runs a very successful marketing business from home. She can live anywhere,
One daughter is definitely a leftie but she bought 5 acres in northern Idaho to build a house.
The Republicans are quietly leaving and the Times doesn’t see it.
in the meantime, teach the children well.
I’m reading , once agent, William Shirer’s “the Collapse of the Turd Republic. In it, I have been reading about the Dreyfus case.
After that affair finally resolved, the government decided to curtail Catholic Schools, which they considered a source of virulent anti-Semitism.
Shirer is a bit of a lefty but the concept of school reform, based on reducing the Marxism being taught, is not outside the realm of possibility.
“Or we could consider separation in some form, into the Makers Country and the Takers Country. Tough to do that because the populations are pretty well mixed.”
Not only mixed in the same geographies, but sometimes mixed even within the same individual. There are people who have done and are doing hard, economically-productive work but who are politically aligned generally with the Left.
“… sometimes mixed even within the same individual.”
Surely there is no problem with the hard-working individual who wants the government to provide bike paths or extra bathrooms for the gender-confused or Medicare-For-All, and tells the government: “Send the bill to me. I want to pay my full share.”
The problem is with the individual who wants the government to provide those things, and tells the government: “Make that other sucker over there pay for it”. Even worse is the individual who points to the unborn baby and says: “Send the bill to her”.
The sad thing is that we are all that worst kind of individual. We all know that our Political Class is spending money they do not have and leaving the bill with those who have not yet even been conceived. The worst kind of taxation without representation.
We can blame the individuals in the Ruling Class who make those immoral spending decisions. And I have to agree with Ken above, we all have to take the blame — we know what the politicians are doing, and we let them do it. There is lots of blame to go round.
There never was a governing majority in favor of liberty, compared to security. The latter always wins. What has changed is the guardrails that gave those segments of society a check on the power of the majority have all been torn down. It’s not at all clear there’s a way back.
Oh, it is much worse than you imagine. The Globalists have essentially won/lost the next war without trying. The US will not survive if they have to fight. Now you know the Hildabeast wanted war with Russia, Russia, Russia!
https://thesaker.is/the-pentagon-realised-what-it-has-done-the-chinese-put-the-us-army-on-its-knees/
“Or we could consider separation in some form, into the Makers Country and the Takers Country. Tough to do that because the populations are pretty well mixed.”
Not only mixed in the same geographies, but sometimes mixed even within the same individual. There are people who have done and are doing hard, economically-productive work but who are politically aligned generally with the Left.
It was a reminder for me on the news when they were interviewinkg someone and he said that because his cancer treatment is $9,000/year he was voting for the Democrat to keep Obamacare.
Thank you John McCain.
As far as Makers and Takers of course the Takers want to move where the money is.
The campaign against vaping is all about morality, not health.
Nope. It’s about control. Tin pot dictators run amok these days, enabled by the Perpetual Indignance movement.
In other words, they to whom power is all that matters are behaving as if power is all that matters to them.
That’s PostModern Liberalism for you. Harry Truman spotted it in his old age, noted it in his career as a liberal democrat.
Eight Days With Harry Truman
https://www.americanheritage.com/content/eight-days-harry-truman
My higher education predates 1970, so I was lead to believe that during feudalism there was at least a modest quid pro quo between the peasants and the Lords. I don’t know if that can be said of todays’ Makers and today’s skimming class.
I do genealogy. I believe I must have seen nearly every episode of “Who Do You think You Are”, UK. My take is that I would not have liked to be a poor person in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Though there were a few bright spots, the indifference to the poor was really quite appalling and the treatment of children was shocking, given that the sudden death or the illness of the breadwinner hung over most of the population. The contempt for the poor and for the middle was palpable. This disdain is where I see the overlap between the Industrial Revolution elites, of that day, to today’s global elites.
I’m reading , once agent, William Shirer’s “the Collapse of the Turd Republic. In it, I have been reading about the Dreyfus case.
Autocorrect really did a number on that comment of mine.
I’m reading , once again, William Shirer’s “the Collapse of the Third Republic.
Autocorrect may not have been too far off.
Exasperated…re life under feudalism vs during the time of the Industrial Revolution, here’s C P Snow from 1959:
I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. He was a good specimen of a nineteenth- century artisan. He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. He had all his class’s passionate faith in education. Yet,he had never had the luck-or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity-to go very far. In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. But it didn’t seem to him quite like that. He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn’t been adequately used: he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour: he was disappointed that he had not done more-and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot.
His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. I don’t so much as know his Christian name. He was one of the ‘dark people’, as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.
The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.
For the other view, see Peter Gaskell’s 1836 book Artisans and Machinery, which I reviewed here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56406.html
The election, and its attendant mass fraud that will go totally unpunished, will probably have been the last chance to pull back from the brink. If confidence in the mechanics of electoral democracy in this country could be maintained, it would mean that there was also hope for the rule of law. Such is not to be. A key point is that the fraud was all on the Democrat side, and except for some few rare individuals, the Republican party was and is more than eager to go along with the fraud. You saw individual candidates going to court, and the Republican party at the state and national levels kept a very deliberate silence. If there are elections in 2020, they will make 2018 look like a Platonic ideal.
Since the election, we have heard an elected Democrat congressman from California openly threaten confiscation of legally and Constitutionally owned firearms, declare that anything the government does is not to be feared or resisted, and that killing men, women and children who either resist the government or who are in proximity to those who resist is a proper function of government. He literally threatened “to nuke” any who refused to surrender their weapons to the government.
There is an implication that he believes that he, and his, are immune from any counteraction. That assumption may be found to be unwarranted, and be as indiscriminate as their own actions.
That assumption may well be shared by those who have previously had the support of those who believe in the Constitution. The silence for the last several days and absolute lack of criticism of California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell for threatening strategic nuclear attack on Americans means that we have no substantial number of allies in the government.
I am reminded of two things. The first is a well known quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
”• Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
And a “filk” song by Leslie Fish based on a campaign song used by Thomas Jefferson’s supporters:
Jefferson and Liberty.
it starts,
“The Night of Fire is yet to come.
The Tyrant’s shadow down the years,
Demands we kneel or take the gun,
And go shed blood instead of our tears.”
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai,
3 decades since first read Gulag. Can still remember reading the words you quoted, and identifying with the agony expressed. But also realized that, at root, the answer to question of why action did not take place was straightforward. Even in situations such as Solzhenitsyn described, where the coming sequence has almost physically tangible undeniable clarity, people will hope someone else will pay the price. What, then, can we expect when the development has significantly less clarity, where instead of months, or even days for the transitions to take place, those changes happen over decades? And, when, indeed, part of the change includes persuading people that resisting the change equates to bad behavior? The Gramscian March sort of thing.
Of course one could insist that we interpret this observed reality as no more than merely what it takes to develop a revolution against that March. Things simply have to get so rotten that people finally resist. And, because as Adam Smith opined, “There is a lot of ruin in a nation”, getting to that degree of rottenness may take quite a while (generations) and mean really bad experiences before people say, “Enough.”
But I think a the words of Romans 1:19ff provide a far more accurate, devastating analysis. Folks who reject God will get god instead. Note well the results of “gave them over” in its three occurrences before the end of the chapter.
What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
Eric Swalwell has done us all a favor by pulling the curtain back. What he thinks might happen will not happen. He seems confident that the professional military that the volunteer system has produced will assist in disarming the population. The old motto has been “Trust no one over 0 6.”
Generals are all politicians. Fragging might even come back into the repertoire. There are now 15 million AR 15s.
I have one. Obama tried to regulate ammunition. Maybe I should buy some more. We went out to the outdoor range in Tucson so she could shoot the AR i5. Her arthritis interferes with her use of a pistol. She can’t work the slide on a semi-auto, like a Colt 1911 or a Walther P 38.
She should be able to fire an AR 15.
Thank you David for the reading tip. However, my comment was directed at the quality of the elites at different periods. I was in no way decrying the Industrial revolution, and I am not nostalgic for the period preceding it.
My take is that I would not have liked to be a poor person in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Though there were a few bright spots, the indifference to the poor was really quite appalling and the treatment of children was shocking, given that the sudden death or the illness of the breadwinner hung over most of the population.
Even worse, being a poor person in Britain before the Industrial Revolution:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
“We’ve known for at least a decade or so that the so-called “ruling class” here in the US (and possibly in formerly great Britain and Western Europe as well) look down snobbishly on the middle and working class . . .”
And yet every alection “liberals” with crocodile tears wail “Lo, the Poor Middle Class.”