The thing about a war in progress is that nobody really knows nothing. Do you know what is going on in Ukraine right now? Are the Ukrainians being artilleried into dust, or are the Russians bogged down? Ask me when it’s over.
Of course, I cannot divulge what I have learned from my secret links to the nation’s magnificent intelligence community. Because I cannot betray the sacred trust of my contacts, who risk everything to drop me a hint or two. Haha.
Whatabout our own political situation here in the good old US and A as we celebrate Independence Day?
Some people like the Zman are all discouraged. They wonder how to unite the nation
The only way to arrive at something close to a civil society again is by first removing the people in charge of the political and cultural institutions.
But the rulers aren’t fools. They know the natives are restless.
This is why the regime is so desperate to break up anything that looks like self-organizing by normal people.
Then there is Dan Gelernter at American Greatness telling us that the J6 Committee plan is working; it is convincing independent voters:
My middle-left friend, in admitting to me that he had supported Trump in the last election, quickly added that he was now embarrassed by his support because of January 6[.]
Well, yeah. I remember believing the Watergate rap against Richard Nixon back in the day. But I still voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Then, over at ConservativeTreeHouse Sundance is noting Brian Deese at the White House Economic Council declaring Full Speed Ahead on the Green New Deal. He is saying that the rulers don’t care; they are going to make the energy transition irregardless.
Well.
On the other hand I’m reading this curious book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld, a Harvard professor. She’s mining dictionaries and state documents — going back to 1400 in England — to see what was going on under the covers. All she’s covered so far is England under the Tudors. But the point is that the general social experience of “who we are” underwent a remarkable change in those years. The upper middle class clearly started to experience itself as a community, and its coming-together created the idea of a commonwealth and a nation that was clearly different from the old understanding of England as the estate of the top dog feudatories.
What I am getting from Nationalism is that while the ideology and the power of the ruling class is important, it is like a ship in the ocean of the larger human community. The rulers are all about “we’re in charge here” and yet they have to trim the sails of the ship of state to take account of the winds and the waves and the currents of the ocean.
Yes, the power of the rulers is important. But if gas prices are shooting into the sky, or the store shelves are empty, then something has to give.
Because every ruling class floats upon the idea that it is the beneficent Oz that makes things work and keeps the enemy at bay. Things have to seem to be working. If things do not seem to be working, then look out, rulers.
But what if they are not working? What if people, ordinary people, have an uncomfortable feeling that things just aren’t working?
I maintain that things are not working, that things are falling apart at several levels, from the despair of the white working class, to the failure of blacks to thrive in the 50 years since civil rights, to the feeling among ordinary commoners that the rulers don’t care about people like them. Then there are Hispanics that seem to be losing faith in the Democrats.
And then we have the cultish craziness of the war on climate change and the war on systemic racism.
I think that despite the ranting and the posturing of the ruling class, there is a structural, organic change in progress. And there is nothing the rulers can do about it, except make it harder to get there, and mark the road with mountains of skulls.