They Still Don't Get It

our liberal friends -- all over the world

I read a few pieces today from — let’s just call them regime supporters.

The first is at Quillette from Matt Johnson. He is using Karl Popper and his book The Open Society and Its Enemies to write about the threat facing democracies today. Back in the day Popper criticized the Marxists who believed in the “historical inevitability [of]… the collapse of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Says Matt:

For Popper, the closed society is a world of tribalism, mysticism, and authoritarianism, while the open society elevates individual rights, reason, and democracy.

Hey Matt! Can you spell: DEI = tribalism; wokism = mysticism; administrative state = authoritarianism? Didn’t think so.

Then Brit Terry Eagleton — influenced by “Karl Marx, F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Herbert McCabe — tells us that “Trump’s American utopia doesn’t exist.”

See, Eagleton is pretty upset about “The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration”. For instance, declaring that there are only two genders: imagine!

Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change color.

Hair color, you say? Hmm.

Says Eagleton about the man who has been pursued by deep-state lawfare for the last eight years and was grazed by an assassin’s bullet less than a year ago:

Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.

Terry, old chap: Trump may pretend that all that lawfare and attempted assassination was nothing, but that’s the job of a true leader. He needs to project courage under fire. By the way, when Trump emerged, bloodied, from the attempted assassination last year and roared “Fight, Fight, Fight,” every red-blooded American rallied to his side.

Here is another one. Alexander Nazaryan worries that Democrats are too lawyerly in “How lawfare destroyed liberalism.”

Tangled in legal arguments, mentalities, and procedures, Democrats have forgotten how to fight…

It was that lawyerly frame of mind that compelled Democrats to expend an enormous amount of time and energy over the past decade trying to get Donald Trump through various avenues of lawfare[.]

Compared with all this lawyerly stuff from the Democrats there is Steve Bannon:

Everything was war with him, every day a battle.

No, Alex; you don’t have a clue. Here’s what really went down.

After Trump — inconceivably! — won the election in 2016 Democrats went after him with everything they dared to use. In other words, everything is war with them. But what sort of war? They didn’t dare to just arrest him and put him in jail, so they used just about every other means they could think of, from activating 51 former intelligence officers on Hunter’s laptop to indicting him on everything short of a ham sandwich. And then there is the question of the two attempted assassinations…

I tell you. I am surprised. I would have thought that the best and brightest would have a better grasp of what Trump represents: quite simply a revolt of the ordinary middle class against the corrupt and incompetent rule of the Pooh Bahs of the administrative state. Nothing fancy, really. No need to invoke Karl Popper. No need to worry about hair color. No point in talking about lawyers. Just a simple rebellion of the ordinary middle class against the unjust rule of the educated class.

But they obviously don’t get it. Well, why would they? They know they are the good guys, the intelligent guys, the guys on the side of justice and progress, and they know that their opponents are bitter clingers, deplorables, armed insurrectionists and Nazi saluters.

All I can say is to quote Sun Tzu:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Italics added to help our liberal friends get a clue.

By the way, Pooh Bah’s title in The Mikado was “Lord High Everything Else.”

Say what you like about the Brit Victorians. They were allowed to make fun of the ruling class.