Hanania on the Deep State

just change the regs, he says

A couple days ago Amazon emailed to tell me I had a book on the way. I did? I turns out to be Richard Hanania’s book The Origins of Woke that I ordered back in August when it appeared he was being canceled for being a far-right conspiracy theorist Richard Hoste back when he was a teenager.

Yep, the Deep State doesn’t like Hanania. They had negative reviews out before the book was published yesterday. And look at the search results: all lefty takedowns!

Hanania argues that “woke” was baked in the cake decades ago when, after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, our noble leaders — including President Nixon — decided to give the whole thing a little push instead of just saying: “discrimination is illegal; get over it.”

Once the federal bureaucracies in the Department of Labor and the EEOC and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice got cranked up they naturally regulated more and more. And so corporations and universities built up their own bureaucracies so that they could report to the federal bureaucracies how they were in compliance with the cranked up regulations of the cranked up federal bureaucracies.

Hanania disagrees that politics is downstream from culture; for him the culture of woke is just a natural response to the regulatory push of the government. There’s gold in them thar woke hills.

Early on Hanania says that all that needs to happen is for the next brave leader to cut the regulatory thicket off at the knees. And the culture will follow the politics.

We’ll see; I’ll report as I get further into the book.

But I have my doubts.

That’s because my world view says that all politics is a fight against the enemy. So if you are an educated-class degree holder you naturally find meaning in your life at the EEOC or the Department of Labor or the Civil Rights Division by believing in a world view that says that racist-sexist-homophobe white males are to blame for everything. And that nice feminist women and helpless blacks need to be protected from the white patriarchs. You say: where do I start?

And the fact is that the other side of politics, helping your friends, means that our Democratic friends would go through Hell before they agreed to reduce the benefits that they hand out to the traditionally marginalized people that traditionally vote for them.

To change things we need more than just a Republican administration that went to work on the EEOC and the Department of Labor and the Civil Rights Division. We would need an America in which women and black voters were screaming that they couldn’t afford groceries and it was Time for a Change. And then have a Republican president with an Electoral College landslide with at least a 55-45 popular vote, and a 60-40 GOP Senate and a big GOP majority in the House.

That is what they call a mandate.

To put it another way, I think it is very difficult to do anything that would provoke the opposition of the educated class, because the educated class owns the public square.

The first requirement for Real Change would be for the educated class to be completely discredited. And that means something like the Great Depression in which ordinary people are screaming for someone, anyone, to save them.

The obvious candidate for Great Depression Version 2.0 would be an economic meltdown issuing from the Green New Deal / Net Zero / Clean Energy program of the educated class.

But really, who wants that?