Back in the old days rulers mainly concerned themselves with adjusting the borders with the neighboring states in the summer campaigning season. And, when some monarch died they might get involved in a war of succession.
Back in those days the job of the rulers was the same as the job of the male chimpanzees: defend the border.
OK, I know it’s not that simple. There were also religious wars, as when the Muslims swept over the Middle East, North Africa, and up into Hispania, with the high tide mark in France at the Battle of Tours. Then there were the Crusades, trying to roll back the Muslim tide.
Then there was the Thirty Years War, which was at least in part a religious war.
At least World War I was just about some damn thing in the Balkans.
Fact is, all politics is about a war against the enemy, and usually an evil enemy. Our liberal friends, who have been ruling the world for the last century, wage what are more accurately called ideological wars. But now that nuclear weapons make full-scale war a bit iffy, our rulers have preferred wars on climate, wars on hate, wars on cars, and wars on suburbs.
But what will the Next Regime do, once it has defeated the unjust woke-ocracy from sea to shining sea?
Here’s the problem. If you are an ordinary middle class person, with a job, a house, a family and an SUV, you really don’t have any enemies. You don’t believe the climate is crashing; you don’t believe that the oppressed peoples are all that oppressed — at least if they could bring themselves to get a job. What you’d like to do is start chopping away at big government, from 35 percent of GDP down to 20 percent. And you wouldn’t really object to an inexpensive flying car. In foreign policy you would do a Nixon / Kissinger and create division among the nations that are presently united against the US. Or maybe you would try to set the UN and the World Bank and the World Economic Forum at each others’ throats.
OK, so Job One of the Next Regime would be to end systemic racism against whites. And East Asians, I’d say. But hey, you could do that in five minutes after you had defunded all the woke universities and fired all the DEI administrators.
And then we would stop the climate change scam. And the administrative state scam. And the Lawfare scam. But then what?
See, my Narrative about how we got here is that after the 18th century revolutions the new educated-class elite came up with the over-under political formula, that the rulers were the advocates of the underclass in their battle against the oppressors. It’s a great narrative and it has been the ideology of regimes all over the world. The enemy was the old landed elite, then robber barons, then white racists, then male patriarchs, then homophobes, etc.
But the ordinary middle class doesn’t really have any enemies.
So, that means it will have to invent them. Maybe we should make our liberal friends into enemies: that they are the enemies of the workers, who have not experienced increased wages for decades; enemies of women, who are hurt by the sexual revolution and the destruction of the family; enemies of blacks who have self-destructed since the civil-rights era; enemies of “gender affirming care.”
Fine. But whatabout long term? Who is the enemy? Because you gotta have an enemy in politics. And I really can’t think of any enemies.