Reality Check on Trump, MAGA, Far Right, etc.

rulers still don't get it

It’s becoming a commonplace that our ruling class was taken by surprise by the Trump phenomenon. To them Trump as president was “inconceivable,” if you know what I mean.

But here is @wretchardthecat, Richard Fernandez.

https://twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1637110540236627974

Until tweets can appear on Substack here is the text:

The strategy of going back to the old days by destroying DJT is doomed to failure because **even if it succeeds** the factors which stoked the 2016 rebellion still obtain and even more so. Restoring the economy, cooling the ideology and limiting corruption are all that can work.

There’s a Trump meme on this:

They're Not After Me, They're After You. I'm Just In The Way.

But what does it all mean? It is really pretty simple. It all issues from the fact that our ruling class, the educated class, rules as the Allies of the Oppressed. But who are the Oppressors?

Good question. Back in the day, at the turn of the 20th century, the Oppressors were industrialists, monopolists, railroad barons, malefactors of great wealth, because they were the scourge of the working man.

True? Not really. The biggest industrialists were Rockefeller, who reduced the price of illuminating oil from 80 cents to 8 cents a gallon; Carnegie, who reduced the price of steel by 65 percent. Railroads? Well, if you were a farmer you had to persuade a railroad to build a spur so you could get your grain on a railroad car and across the world. Railroads were a necessity, but also a chaotic mess. That’s why J.P. Morgan was the world’s expert in railroad bankruptcies.

But whenever times were tough, everyone blamed the businessmen: during the deflation after the Civil War and the associated Long Depression; in the 1907 Crash after the bubble inflated by the Alaska Gold Rush; in the Great Depression when the Federal Reserve did not act as “lender of last resort.”

Anyway, that all changed in about 1965 when the ruling class decided that they were the Allies of Oppressed blacks and women, and the Oppressors were white racists.

True? Well, maybe prior to 1965. But once you have declared with a Civil Rights Act that racists and sexists cannot discriminate on the basis of race or sex then any discrimination is the fault of the government not the white racists.

Anyway, who are the white racists? They can’t be elite white businessmen, they are all on board with ESG. They can’t be the educated class; they are all Democrat voters. They can’t be educated women, because they are part of the Oppressed. So it ends up that the target of the ruling class is the ordinary white middle class male.

Gosh. You think that, eventually, the average white middle-class male might get a bit pissed off by all this and, eventually, participate in a “2016 rebellion?” Inconceivable!

Look, I think that the political formula of our ruling class, to be the voice and the allies of the oppressed, is brilliant, especially back in the day when the working class was the majority of the people. But, of course, once the working class had graduated into the middle class, the formula lost its brilliance. That’s why it had to be replaced by new versions of the oppressed.

But there is a problem. Feminism has never been about the lower class; it has always been a movement of educated women. So the notion that women are helpless lower-class victims is fake — although there are plenty of lower-class women that have been sorely harmed by feminism.

And then we have LGBT. Earth to ruling class: LGBT is an educated-class thing. If you find yourself discussing the gay or trans grandchild of your liberal acquaintance we are not talking about the lower orders. I would guess that it takes a college degree to get a handle on LGBT.

And there’s an additional problem with trans. Women expected to be protected, particularly in the bathroom. Just sayin’.

So I would interpret the “2016 rebellion” as the ordinary middle class rebelling against the fake assertion of Allyship by the educated class when the supposed Oppressed are in fact members of the educated class.

When @wretchardthecat mentions the “2016 rebellion” agenda of “Restoring the economy, cooling the ideology and limiting corruption are all that can work” he is telling us that the 2016 Rebels are ordinary middle class people that rely on the economy working, that get nothing from leftist ideology, and that don’t get a share of government hand-outs.

My feeling is that our ruling class has not yet got anywhere close to understanding what the Trump phenomenon is about. Maybe there are cunning operatives deep within the Deep State that do understand, but I haven’t detected any signal, and believe me I am tuning my ideological receptors to detecting precisely that.

So things are going to get worse before they get better.