Ever since the French Revolution “we” have believed in a politics of Left and Right. Because the supporters of the French king in the National Assembly in 1789 sat to the right of the president and the opponents to his left.
Thus the Right came to be identified with the old order, with privilege, with feudal hierarchy, and the Left with reform, with ideas, and with the common man.
It is the saving faith of the Left that it stands for the worker, the oppressed, the victim, against the powers of privilege, of oppression, and stasis.
I have been reading today a couple of pieces by the Zman proposing that the Old Order is ending, that the West is out of time.
The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born.
On the other hand, he writes at Taki’s, the West’s utter folly in Ukraine marks the end of Russia trying to be a part of Europe from the East and the end of the Global American Empire trying to be a part of Europe from the West.
A question that I have is: what on Earth does our ruling class think it is doing? Here’s a piece by Leighton Akira Woodhouse about the homeless scene in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in which the homeless demand for drugs leads to shoplifting and the whole thing run by an industry feeding money for drugs to the Mexican drug cartels.
Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly.
Then there are the “victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans.” Their pharmacies and grocery stores get shut down, etc.
And yet our rulers do nothing about the whole operation, from homeless to drugs to petty crime to criminal gangs. Their philosophy is that criminals are victims, that police are thugs, that accused criminals should be released with no bail and society doesn’t care about oppressed peoples.
I am in the middle of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed in which he notes that the rulers’ approach to problems doesn’t change and doesn’t respond to results on the ground.
War on Poverty. The idea back in the early Sixties was “to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves” and to effect a “decline in dependecy.” The record is that the War on Poverty has increased dependency, but our rulers have not changed their approach to poverty.
Sex Education. The idea back in the early Sixties was that sex education in the schools would help reduced venereal disease and pregnancies before marriage. In the event, STDs increased, pregancy outside marriage increased and marriage decreased. But our rulers have amped up the sex education to include celebration of LGBT.
Criminal Justice. In the Sixties the idea was promulgated from on high that the criminal justice system was primitive, vindictive, and a “deeply childish fear” without punishment crime “would run amok.” Why not turn jails into rehabilitation centers? In the event, crime, including murder, has increased, but fifty years later our rulers still think we are being too punitive, as in Soros prosecutors.
The point is that, despite the results of these policies being failures, our ruling class has not changed its approach to these issues over the past 50 years. If anything it has increased its commitment.
Now Sowell has a Five Point analysis of the ruling class’s approach to the world.
Social problems exist because people other than the rulers “lack the virtue or wisdom of the anointed.”
Social beliefs are “socially constructed” rather than an adaption to reality, so that problems should be solved by ruler rationality rather than “evolved traditions” or social adaptation.
When things go wrong it is intentional rather than “systemic.” Someone is to blame.
Great social dangers can only be averted by “imposition” of ruling class vision.
Opposition to the rulers issues not from a valid difference of opinion but from intellectual or moral faults in the lower orders.
What, you may ask, is wrong with these people? I think the answer is that, in politics, you can never be wrong. The whole point of politics is to lead the people to war against an enemy that threatens to annihilate us. If our gloroius leader fails to lead us to victory, he is outta here. So, he can never say: gee, fellas, I guess I screwed up that one.
The lesson, then, is that anything short of a war to the death against annihilation should not be a political issue, but assigned to other social institutions, from economic to social to religious.
But for our ruling class it’s too late for that.
So what do we do? I say that we work on a new narrative to replace the old narrative of our present ruling class, that the Zman says is “something not yet born.”
Only I think that its outline is pretty clear. The new narrative will say that the wisdom of the ages is in the semi-conscious evolution of the culture of the middling sort of person, that lives engaged in the sinews and the day-to-day social and economic relationships of society. As opposed to the vision from on high of our present educated evolved ruling class.
And I say that the day will come when the whole superstructure of our present ruling class, represented by the analysis of Thomas Sowell above, will come crashing down. Rather like the whole structure of late-feudal/absolute monarchy came crashing down in France in 1789.
Why did it come crashing down in 1789, and lost the Mandate of Heaven in that year of all years? Good question. But come crashing down it did.
Understanding our Ruling Class
Some idea on what happened in 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- Possible regime change, as previously noted in https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-cult-deficit-analysis-and-speculation/comment/4564950 https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/
- A change in post-religion capitalism https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-cult-deficit-analysis-and-speculation https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-cult-deficit-analysis-and-speculation-0aa/comment/7082719
- Change in wages and the workplace https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/against-all-applications https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/some-depressing-graphs-on-real-wages
- "A Theory of Justice" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep/comment/5562998
- Other ideas relating to diet and dating/marriage