We Had it Coming, We Respectables

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag:

When I saw the line, "We had it coming, we Respectables", my jaw dropped. This was published on May 2, long before Hillary's "basket of deplorables" remark.

The article is excruciatingly long (for most). The key points are that Plato (among many including our Founders) recognized the stark danger of the tyranny of the masses millennia ago -- it is the antithesis of "new news". When we had a culture, EVERYONE that was educated understood this, but as I've covered MANY times before ( "Closing of the American Mind", "Trapped on Ancient Starship"), we threw away any semblance of knowledge of culture and history as a requirement to be "educated". We replaced Western Civilization with "The holy politically correct word of The Party (D)".

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen. 

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

In some cases, (Sullivan doesn't seem to realize it), even a leader of such a rabble will declare himself "a citizen of the world" as opposed to the country he is ostensibly "leading" (maybe from behind).

And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional nominating system is rigged.

This was written before WikiLeaks exposed the fact that the Democrat nominating process WAS rigged, as were almost certainly the Republican and the general election -- sometimes, in a storm, even the rigging fails!

Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism.

Well, "the respectables" lucked out -- the "bitter clingers" and the "basket of deplorables", not so much. Ferguson, a member of the elite doesn't realize that Obama's constant rhetoric imploring the nation to "not generalize" on each act of Islamic violence, but to sternly wag his finger at Americans with guns and say things like "the NRA and and Americans that own firearms and are not in favor of "common sense gun controls" need to accept their responsibility for this tragedy". Indeed -- and the difference is the elites like Islamists a whole lot better than "deplorable bitter clingers". And it is a surprise that the deplorables  didn't like their new name -- nor their lot in life?

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically. 

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.

Take their church, their community, their jobs, largely their families (by divorce on demand, welfare, and telling their kids their parents are idiots to be maligned rather than respected) ... then call them all manner of names, and ... well, they maybe don't like the elites very much.

Is Trump dangerous? Sure, we just had the "Flight 93 election", and put a non-pilot in control of the plane rather than a terrorist bent on flying it into some monument or sporting event. So now, there is a chance -- with the Hildebeast, there was no chance. Do we fly on, or crash? Unlike under Hildebeast, there is a decent chance here that a major part of that question might be up to us -- now get busy trying to be as much help as you can keeping this heavily damaged bird of BOistan flying, and let's see if we can go find America somewhere!


'via Blog this'