The Current Political Formula is Failing

three articles in one day

Obviously everyone with half a brain is observing that our current rulers are failing big time on the Wildfire front down in Los Angeles.

And now I have got to read three pieces in one day that are blaming the combination of the administrative state and “politics with everything.”

At National Review Ian Tuttle talks about the two facets of the progressive project.

The older is progressivism’s century-old commitment to administration… The newer project, distinct from this, is the revisionist social-justice movement[.]

Sorry, I don’t think the social-justice movement is new, merely a new version of the old one.

At American Greatness Edward Ring writes about the double failure of bureaucratic administration and DEI.

[T]he people running California have politicized the management of everything[.]

And then there’s DEI hire LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley.

[She] was scoring points in the liberal press for excluding white men from hiring and promotion opportunities in the name of diversity and irrespective of their qualifications.

Yay for politics with everything.

Finally, Jeffrey Tucker at Epoch Times writes about the scales falling from our eyes and becoming fully aware of “intellectuals working within a ruling-class apparatus.”

[Their ideas] were sold to the population as methods of empowering the marginalized, caring for exploited workers, bolstering the trod-upon poor, helping victimized populations[.]

No. Just about all the ideas and programs of the last 100 years have come from the tippy top, from “intellectuals working within a ruling-class apparatus.” And they benefit the intellectuals and the ruling class.

And most of the time, of course, they don’t work. But we never knew, or never got to push back because of the way the elite media worked. The narrative always told us that everyone was down for the new idea. What else could we think: the experts were all agreed. And we never knew how much it was all narrative, pushed from the top. Tucker references Hayek.

Intellectuals and their benefactors typically lack all practical experience in industry or economics and routinely overestimate the glories of their own rationality, while disparaging the dispersed knowledge embedded in social institutions.

But the way the human world works, the way it has always worked, is through “the dispersed knowledge embedded in social institutions.”

And that’s what I was trying to understand better yesterday in my piece on community membership and the notion of a felt obligation rather than just obedience to the orders from on high. We have got so used to the supremacy of the administrative state and the moral framework of everything-for-the-oppressed that we have forgotten the ways of the middle, of people working together without the compulsion of the overseer’s whip or the severity of market prices and buying and selling.

Shall we suggest that the populist nationalist movements all over Europe and North America represent an inchoate rebellion against the hegemony of the educated class? And shall we go even further, as I have done, and suggest that there is a direct line from Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority to Ronald Reagan’s Reagan Democrats to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement?

The point is, I suppose, that the new Independent Media has enabled the rising leaders of the ordinary middle class to create a narrative space where they can develop notions and beliefs independent from the regime’s Mass Media.

And that makes a difference, as the current Political Formula crumbles and creates a space for something new.