British academic Neema Parvini, whom I believe is a Shakespeare scholar, is a dissident right writer under the name “Academic Agent.” He recently published a Substack post arguing that Anglo-American elites are getting ready to
Their motte-and-bailey approach has reaped great dividends in the last decade. Their relentless bailey-laden Progressive lines of action have positioned normies in the Negative World. Their beginning to relent on grotesque child mutilation bailey is for us a thin victory at best. The new baseline will still be grotesque, though just shy of child mutilation.
First, you should also look at this internationally. The American Managerial Elite are essentially global these days, and are just as much interested in London, Paris, and Berlin as they are in New York and Los Angeles. The failure to Regime Change Syria and the collapse of Afghanistan were much more of a system shock than they're letting on, and they are in an absolute panic that the 2014 coup in Ukraine is going to be reversed by, of all things, Russian military action. What's at risk is not merely American neoliberalism, but the entire liberal international order. The notion that Western corporations and NGOs can act with impunity throughout the world, apart from a handful of rogue states like Iran and Syria, is no longer unshakeable. The Western elites satisfied themselves with the notion that if they couldn't have Syria, they would at least ensure that it was destroyed beyond use by anyone else. And while that's basically the strategy with Ukraine right now, if we can't have it neither can the Russians, rolling back a Color Revolution is a bridge too far. People who made a living by sneering at Huntington are terrified that there really will be a rollback of Third Wave Democratization, and a rival world order that could plausibly challenge the [Neo]Liberal International System.
Second, Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried already war-gamed out the scenario where the establishment bipartisan center tries to reign in the far-left, and neither of them were particularly optimistic. Gottfried argues that, by and large, the center-left honestly believes that the far-left is morally correct, if tactically short-sighted, and lacks the spine to bring a halt to it, out of honest belief that they would be on the wrong side of history. Nobody wants to be the Bull Connor of the 21st Century, and so nobody is going to do anything when the far-left pushes back.
Francis, who thinks that the elites are amoral opportunists, didn't think that the center still had the institutional power to forcibly eject the far-left the way that they did in 1968. The far-left now owns the institutional apparati which are necessary to Democratic electoral success. Unlike 1968, the Democrats no longer have the ability to pivot away from BLM and LGBT+ without losing everything. It would be Nixon plus ultra, if even a tenth of these constituencies failed to show up on election day. Not to mention the extent to which the Democratic political machines on the ground are entirely enthralled to the far-left, who provide nearly all the manpower for their ground game. Democratic election strategies are now entirely dependent on their network of election non-profits who register left-wing voters, organize mail-in voting campaigns, and manage the logistics of getting maximum numbers of their voters to the polls on election day. I used to work in the same office building as ACORN back in the day, and I don't think most people know to what extent the Democrats are entirely dependent on organizations like that for their turnout machine.
I don't have the hands-on experience with your last paragraph, but it makes sense to me. In particular, it helps explain what's going on with the Biden Administration. I believe that Biden is an old-school politician who made promises to the coalition he needed to make promises to in order to deliver the votes to secure the election. Yes, he's somewhat senile, but I believe it was still the old Joe Biden who made those deals.
For the Democrats to actually find the motivation to reign in the far left, then, they'd have to start losing elections and therefore to be open to the possibility of replacing some of their electoral machinery.
A world in which the Democrats win the Presidential popular vote every single election without fail, and in which the younger generations continue to trend in their direction, is not a world in which they can find any motivation to pivot right.
Yes, the widely rejected Bloomberg 2020 campaign was most likely an elite driven effort at the consolidation Aaron wrote about. It was a total disaster rejected by Democrat voters. If Jamie Dimon or some other corporate elite ran, his results would be even worse.
Helen Andrews points out how far South Africa has fallen in a relatively short amount of time. The response of liberal elites isn't to figure out how to reverse the insanity that caused basic services to collapse in less than 30 years, it is to make sure whites get blamed for it all. Not exactly a leading indicator to get optimistic about.
I do think the US isn't South Africa. A populist reaction against the chaos was partly what brought the US back from the precipice last time. The median American is still much less comfortable with chaos than the median South African.
My longstanding thought has been that if there is to be another reaction in the US, crime will have to be the trigger. Crime is something that gets normal, apolitical people to get politically active and say "enough is enough." And most Americans still value safety. Even immigrants who came from dangerous countries tend to value the better safety in the US, almost as much as they value the higher incomes, and they don't necessarily want to give it up.
Meanwhile the leftist activist class just can't help itself when it comes to being ridiculously soft on crime, especially (but not exclusively) black crime. It can never think rationally or pursue a happy medium when it comes to this issue.
The problem for the right is that crime is still much lower than at the previous peak. And honestly it will probably have to hit a new peak to trigger a new reaction, because it's coming from a higher post-1950s baseline, and also the flight to the suburbs has already happened.
It isn't going to look exactly like South Africa, we have some demographic difference as well as other cultural factors. The trend in places like San Francisco and Seattle is not encouraging. It is hard to deny we are headed for a place with high rates of crime while the elites try to isolate themselves from with rapidly declining infrastructure due to graft/incompetence. The Democrats have also started electing Cori Bush type politicians who think that crime against whites is a punishment we deserve. As I said in my other comment who has the political will, ability and power to stop this?
I agree the trend isn't encouraging. My point is just that if things actually get as bad or (especially) worse than they were in the previous era of urban breakdown, circa 1965-1995, I would still expect changed behavior, a reactionary anti-crime movement. It happened last time and I just think most people aren't stupidly ideological enough to enter into a suicide pact over it.
So far, it hasn't gotten bad enough to change behavior. Largely because the crime wave hasn't actually affected the middle class in most places.
In order for a consolidation phase to happen someone is going to have to deliver some very bad news to the activist classes across the left. Most of these CEOs are too cowardly to do this even within their own organizations. The "I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but you are going too far message" is not going to be considered acceptable among the activists. Reparations activists have made it clear they want a massive up front payment followed by payments in perpetuity. I'm sure Jamie Dimon and some others are in exactly the position you describe. Most are still funding non profits the activists run with huge donations. These donations drying up would be a leading indicator you are right, but it hasn't happened yet. Frankly, no one in the elite class has the skills it would take to exert control over what they have unleashed. Now we all get to reap the whirlwind.
Thanks for this, Barnard. I think you're right on target.
The Woke movement is not fundamentally political, although it has political manifestations and implications. It's cultural in the basic sense of that word, i.e. 'cult'. Its power is generated in the heretical hearts of its true believers, who are, as you've well noted, now widespread in academia, corporations, and of course NGOs and other influence groups. The left-center sceptics who don't really believe in wokism and who thought they were being clever by harnessing dark activist energy by mouthing woke liturgies with their fingers crossed behind their backs have lost control, if they ever had it in the first place.
Auron MacIntyre has a good video up today on how wokeness is a religion. Paul Gottfried has made similar points pushing back against people who call it Marxism. How are center-left skeptics going to get people who now have an elevated status in society enshrined into the Civil Rights regime going to get those people to accept something less than what they fully want for the good of society? This would first require them to accept that what they want isn't good for society, something virtually no one on the center left will even float trial balloons about up until now. Geriatric members of Congress and corporate board members are not going to put the brakes on this. The only solution is overturning the whole thing.
A consolidation phase would be welcome because it would delay further decline, but where is the force for this to come from? Unlike other periods in history, where one segment of a country (or at most a limited number of countries acting in concert) temporarily pursued some evil, there aren't any powerful counterbalancing forces that can tamp wokeism down, as in no middle American to quell the hippie movement or democratic countries to enervate the French revolution. All the developed countries of the world have bought into the woke agenda. There is no sufficiently powerful block that's out-of-phase with it to act as a corrective. As you put it, no one in the elite class is able to exert control over what they've unleashed. All they can do is watch the destruction of the world from a safe distance (for now). The sad thing is that those responsible for the country's decline don't even recognize their complicity in it.
Besides the whole world largely moving in lock-step, which doesn't augur well for a turn-around, the sheer inanity of the woke movement argues that the control is spiritual. I wouldn't go so far as to say that all the woke leaders and elites are demon-possessed, but I believe some are. The rest are under some kind of extended (country wide/world-wide) mass mind control which is part tribal affiliation and part demonic influence. Personally, I think we are less than a lifetime away from the Great Tribulation.
The only thing which might have the capacity to drive us back to reason would be a world war, but that is obviously not something to wish for.
I think you may be correct Barnard. There is something fundamentally different at work here I think. We will be proven wrong perhaps if we follow Europe's lead and begin to curtail the child mutilation in our so called "hospitals."
Regardless if this burns out so much damage is already done and the genie is not going back into the bottle. I pray that we can somehow see public education..er..indoctrination ended or at least become the minority form of education and that might get us a long way toward healing and recovery, but I am not optimistic.
Their motte-and-bailey approach has reaped great dividends in the last decade. Their relentless bailey-laden Progressive lines of action have positioned normies in the Negative World. Their beginning to relent on grotesque child mutilation bailey is for us a thin victory at best. The new baseline will still be grotesque, though just shy of child mutilation.
I have two basic comments to make:
First, you should also look at this internationally. The American Managerial Elite are essentially global these days, and are just as much interested in London, Paris, and Berlin as they are in New York and Los Angeles. The failure to Regime Change Syria and the collapse of Afghanistan were much more of a system shock than they're letting on, and they are in an absolute panic that the 2014 coup in Ukraine is going to be reversed by, of all things, Russian military action. What's at risk is not merely American neoliberalism, but the entire liberal international order. The notion that Western corporations and NGOs can act with impunity throughout the world, apart from a handful of rogue states like Iran and Syria, is no longer unshakeable. The Western elites satisfied themselves with the notion that if they couldn't have Syria, they would at least ensure that it was destroyed beyond use by anyone else. And while that's basically the strategy with Ukraine right now, if we can't have it neither can the Russians, rolling back a Color Revolution is a bridge too far. People who made a living by sneering at Huntington are terrified that there really will be a rollback of Third Wave Democratization, and a rival world order that could plausibly challenge the [Neo]Liberal International System.
Second, Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried already war-gamed out the scenario where the establishment bipartisan center tries to reign in the far-left, and neither of them were particularly optimistic. Gottfried argues that, by and large, the center-left honestly believes that the far-left is morally correct, if tactically short-sighted, and lacks the spine to bring a halt to it, out of honest belief that they would be on the wrong side of history. Nobody wants to be the Bull Connor of the 21st Century, and so nobody is going to do anything when the far-left pushes back.
Francis, who thinks that the elites are amoral opportunists, didn't think that the center still had the institutional power to forcibly eject the far-left the way that they did in 1968. The far-left now owns the institutional apparati which are necessary to Democratic electoral success. Unlike 1968, the Democrats no longer have the ability to pivot away from BLM and LGBT+ without losing everything. It would be Nixon plus ultra, if even a tenth of these constituencies failed to show up on election day. Not to mention the extent to which the Democratic political machines on the ground are entirely enthralled to the far-left, who provide nearly all the manpower for their ground game. Democratic election strategies are now entirely dependent on their network of election non-profits who register left-wing voters, organize mail-in voting campaigns, and manage the logistics of getting maximum numbers of their voters to the polls on election day. I used to work in the same office building as ACORN back in the day, and I don't think most people know to what extent the Democrats are entirely dependent on organizations like that for their turnout machine.
I don't have the hands-on experience with your last paragraph, but it makes sense to me. In particular, it helps explain what's going on with the Biden Administration. I believe that Biden is an old-school politician who made promises to the coalition he needed to make promises to in order to deliver the votes to secure the election. Yes, he's somewhat senile, but I believe it was still the old Joe Biden who made those deals.
For the Democrats to actually find the motivation to reign in the far left, then, they'd have to start losing elections and therefore to be open to the possibility of replacing some of their electoral machinery.
A world in which the Democrats win the Presidential popular vote every single election without fail, and in which the younger generations continue to trend in their direction, is not a world in which they can find any motivation to pivot right.
Yes, the widely rejected Bloomberg 2020 campaign was most likely an elite driven effort at the consolidation Aaron wrote about. It was a total disaster rejected by Democrat voters. If Jamie Dimon or some other corporate elite ran, his results would be even worse.
Helen Andrews points out how far South Africa has fallen in a relatively short amount of time. The response of liberal elites isn't to figure out how to reverse the insanity that caused basic services to collapse in less than 30 years, it is to make sure whites get blamed for it all. Not exactly a leading indicator to get optimistic about.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/look-back-in-anger/
I do think the US isn't South Africa. A populist reaction against the chaos was partly what brought the US back from the precipice last time. The median American is still much less comfortable with chaos than the median South African.
My longstanding thought has been that if there is to be another reaction in the US, crime will have to be the trigger. Crime is something that gets normal, apolitical people to get politically active and say "enough is enough." And most Americans still value safety. Even immigrants who came from dangerous countries tend to value the better safety in the US, almost as much as they value the higher incomes, and they don't necessarily want to give it up.
Meanwhile the leftist activist class just can't help itself when it comes to being ridiculously soft on crime, especially (but not exclusively) black crime. It can never think rationally or pursue a happy medium when it comes to this issue.
The problem for the right is that crime is still much lower than at the previous peak. And honestly it will probably have to hit a new peak to trigger a new reaction, because it's coming from a higher post-1950s baseline, and also the flight to the suburbs has already happened.
It isn't going to look exactly like South Africa, we have some demographic difference as well as other cultural factors. The trend in places like San Francisco and Seattle is not encouraging. It is hard to deny we are headed for a place with high rates of crime while the elites try to isolate themselves from with rapidly declining infrastructure due to graft/incompetence. The Democrats have also started electing Cori Bush type politicians who think that crime against whites is a punishment we deserve. As I said in my other comment who has the political will, ability and power to stop this?
I agree the trend isn't encouraging. My point is just that if things actually get as bad or (especially) worse than they were in the previous era of urban breakdown, circa 1965-1995, I would still expect changed behavior, a reactionary anti-crime movement. It happened last time and I just think most people aren't stupidly ideological enough to enter into a suicide pact over it.
So far, it hasn't gotten bad enough to change behavior. Largely because the crime wave hasn't actually affected the middle class in most places.
In order for a consolidation phase to happen someone is going to have to deliver some very bad news to the activist classes across the left. Most of these CEOs are too cowardly to do this even within their own organizations. The "I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but you are going too far message" is not going to be considered acceptable among the activists. Reparations activists have made it clear they want a massive up front payment followed by payments in perpetuity. I'm sure Jamie Dimon and some others are in exactly the position you describe. Most are still funding non profits the activists run with huge donations. These donations drying up would be a leading indicator you are right, but it hasn't happened yet. Frankly, no one in the elite class has the skills it would take to exert control over what they have unleashed. Now we all get to reap the whirlwind.
Thanks for this, Barnard. I think you're right on target.
The Woke movement is not fundamentally political, although it has political manifestations and implications. It's cultural in the basic sense of that word, i.e. 'cult'. Its power is generated in the heretical hearts of its true believers, who are, as you've well noted, now widespread in academia, corporations, and of course NGOs and other influence groups. The left-center sceptics who don't really believe in wokism and who thought they were being clever by harnessing dark activist energy by mouthing woke liturgies with their fingers crossed behind their backs have lost control, if they ever had it in the first place.
Auron MacIntyre has a good video up today on how wokeness is a religion. Paul Gottfried has made similar points pushing back against people who call it Marxism. How are center-left skeptics going to get people who now have an elevated status in society enshrined into the Civil Rights regime going to get those people to accept something less than what they fully want for the good of society? This would first require them to accept that what they want isn't good for society, something virtually no one on the center left will even float trial balloons about up until now. Geriatric members of Congress and corporate board members are not going to put the brakes on this. The only solution is overturning the whole thing.
I think you're right.
A consolidation phase would be welcome because it would delay further decline, but where is the force for this to come from? Unlike other periods in history, where one segment of a country (or at most a limited number of countries acting in concert) temporarily pursued some evil, there aren't any powerful counterbalancing forces that can tamp wokeism down, as in no middle American to quell the hippie movement or democratic countries to enervate the French revolution. All the developed countries of the world have bought into the woke agenda. There is no sufficiently powerful block that's out-of-phase with it to act as a corrective. As you put it, no one in the elite class is able to exert control over what they've unleashed. All they can do is watch the destruction of the world from a safe distance (for now). The sad thing is that those responsible for the country's decline don't even recognize their complicity in it.
Besides the whole world largely moving in lock-step, which doesn't augur well for a turn-around, the sheer inanity of the woke movement argues that the control is spiritual. I wouldn't go so far as to say that all the woke leaders and elites are demon-possessed, but I believe some are. The rest are under some kind of extended (country wide/world-wide) mass mind control which is part tribal affiliation and part demonic influence. Personally, I think we are less than a lifetime away from the Great Tribulation.
The only thing which might have the capacity to drive us back to reason would be a world war, but that is obviously not something to wish for.
I agree about the demonic influence. Powers and principalities, indeed.
I think you may be correct Barnard. There is something fundamentally different at work here I think. We will be proven wrong perhaps if we follow Europe's lead and begin to curtail the child mutilation in our so called "hospitals."
Regardless if this burns out so much damage is already done and the genie is not going back into the bottle. I pray that we can somehow see public education..er..indoctrination ended or at least become the minority form of education and that might get us a long way toward healing and recovery, but I am not optimistic.