Yearning for Ordinary Life

that's how to understand the "hard right"

The odd thing about the middle-class populist nationalist movement all across the world is the attitude of the educated ruling class.

Because what ruling class with half a brain would decide that the domestic enemy is the whole community of middling sorts of people in the nation? Really?

But that has been the logic of the century-long rule of the educated class. It has been based on the conceit that the educated class cares for the lower class. But that means that the middle class must be the enemy. “In any politics there must be an enemy.”

So, the middle class has been slowly processing the fact that, as a result of the political formula of the ruling educated class, it don’t get no respect.

The dilemma of the middle class is that it really doesn’t care that much about politics, its “issues” and its enemies. The middle class lives a world of work and responsibility and family, not fighting the enemy.

This week I wrote my American Thinker piece about politics and pejoratives, the insults that the political activists hurl at the enemy as a matter of course. Of course, everyone else has been writing about that this week, including Victor Davis Hanson in “Remembering Hate Speech.” Call it the far right group mind.

And the ZMan is writing about how democracy actually reduces the public square.

You can be banned from Twitter, despite never having posted on it, for the crime of holding a contrary opinion on some other platform. The dynamic of democracy is the same with all mobs in that it becomes us versus them, with the us becoming very narrow.

Actually, I think that is characteristic, not of democracy, but any political unit under threat. If the government is conducting a world war it needs to keep the nation onside for its glorious battle against Nazis and Japs. If the government is heroically battling a dread disease, then it can’t have people on social media proposing that its heroic measures aren’t going to work. You can’t have people second-guessing the leaders, not in a war.

And if the government is battling to stay alive in a midterm election and it looks like it might get blown out, because inflation, recession, etc., well, it seems pretty clear to me that anyone questioning the narrative is a semi-fascist — at the minimum.

The thing about the last six years is that we’ve had two pretty close elections. Whether or not the Russians intervened in 2016 and the Zuckerbucks won it in 2020, close elections get everyone riled up. On the other hand, 60-40 elections really send a message and keep the haters quiet for a while.

Oh, and economic ruin really makes a difference. In 1932 in the Great Depression and in 2008 in the Great Recession. Ordinary people come out of their quiet lives and decide it is time for a change, time to elect someone that cares about people like them.

I dare say that over the next two years as America struggles with the aftermath of COVID and Ukraine and crazy-cakes spending and the war against fossil fuels, that the ordinary middle class will really be in the lookout for someone to “make it stop.”

Clearly, the Italians, in electing Gloria Meloni, leader of the “hard right Brothers of Italy” as the NYTimes puts it — who didn’t go to college — are asking for a return to ordinary life, of work and families and and end to endless immigration.

Expect more of the same, and liberals frothing at the mouth with hate. Bless their hearts.

Because creative people don’t yearn for an ordinary life. They demand a creative life.