I originally posted this as a comment on Tarheel Dem’s fine article The Postliberal Era. Go read it if you have not done so already. Read the links, too. On further consideration I decided to post my comment as a standalone article.
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From a link in Tarheel’s article:
Over the decades ahead…we can expect the emergence of a postliberal politics in the United States, England, and quite possibly some other countries as well. The shape of the political landscape in the short term is fairly easy to guess. Watch the way the professional politicians in the Republican Party have flocked to Hillary Clinton’s banner, and you can see the genesis of a party of the affluent demanding the prolongation of free trade, American intervention in the Middle East, and the rest of the waning bipartisan consensus that supports its interests. Listen to the roars of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump–or better still, talk to the not inconsiderable number of Sanders supporters who will be voting for Trump this November–and you can sense the emergence of a populist party seeking the abandonment of that consensus in defense of its very different interests.
What names those parties will have is by no means certain yet, and a vast number of other details still have to be worked out. One way or another, though, it’s going to be a wild ride.
I only have one question about all of this:
If this sort of movement actually begins to threaten the status quo in any sort of serious way, will the owners of that status quo…the Permanent Government, for short, the Permanent Government and its prime beneficiaries/controllers/owners/call them what you will…allow it to happen?
I seriously doubt it, myself. They are not seriously “devoted” to what we laughingly call democracy here in the U.S., it’s just a convenient…and so far quite effective…control mechanism. Suppose that said control mechanism works once again, Clinton II is elected and when the next real chance for a contested election arises some coalition of the dissatisfied appears under a strong and qualified leader. A coalition that cannot be media-ed away as was Bernie Sanders and as is now apparently happening to Mr. Trumph. (Finally!!!)
What mechanisms are truly in place to stop the controllers from dropping the pretense of “democracy” for some other sort of control mechanism? Given the ongoing proliferation of quasi-military police agencies at the national and local levels, why not just stage some sort of Kristallnacht event and crack down on all remnants of a democracy?
I am quite serious here.
Do y’all really think that the public is in a state of readiness to resist such a thing?
I don’t.
Read on.
Those with arms are no match whatsoever for the professional military. Hell, they’re not even a match for small groups of federal/local police, witness the several confrontations in the west over the past year or so. The only even partially serious threats to resist are rural working class people and armed criminal gangs in the cities. The rural folk are outnumbered and outgunned and the city gangs are a for-profit system. They can be bought off. Those that can’t be bought off can be eliminated, Iraq style. Door to door and damn the consequences.
I live 4 blocks away from where that Bronx marijuana grow house/meth lab/whatever blew up a couple of days ago. One probably quite extraordinary young fire chief died in the explosion…a 2nd generation Irish fireman w/a law degree from NYU. That neighborhood is now essentially a war zone…a quiet, working class/middle class, multi-ethnic neighborhood of mostly three-story brick private homes/apartments only three blocks from the usually sleepy and generally incompetent local police precinct. I’ve been in the immediate neighborhood several times recently…either driving through or shopping at a great local non-chain grocery store on Broadway owned and run by ex-Eastern Europeans…and I am seeing a huge influx of police agencies of all kinds. In the stores, walking the streets, wailing sirens/flashing through the streets, blockading one street in every direction, etc.
All of this because of some stupid drug dealer’s murderous fuckup…or at least that’s what we have been told.
Whatever…
Imagine if some really serious shit went down!!!
Just sayin’…
Tarheel says in an above comment:
…the very notion of “civics” that has been common in public schools is now contested and…folks are tired of the educated liberals lording over them.
But…all of these lovely “postliberal” prognostications were written by members in good standing of the “educated liberal’ class…those wonderful “reality-based” folks of whom people are plainly getting tired!!!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Always keep the following 2002 Rovian tidbit…only 14 years ago, folks…in mind. (Ron Suskind, NY Times Magazine, 2004.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
There it is, folks.
This is what is really going down. We are always a step behind…”A day late and a dollar short” in NYC street language…because “they” are capable of producing new paradigms faster than we can figure out what they are, let alone how to deal with them.
I have no solutions to offer to you for this except to say:
Trust not the spokespeople of the controller class.
None of them.
They all speak with virtual tongues.
This current problem will work out as it must. The controllers are only succeeding in deceiving themselves if they think that they can successfully defy the universal laws of karma.
Ain’t happening.
Never has; never will.
Eventually they all meet a Nero fiddling while Rome burns/Hitler in the bunker/Marie Antoinette on the guillotine moment.
Bet on it.
Our job?
To survive the karmic winds while they blow.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG