Gary Gerstle defines a political order as a state of affairs
when the opposition acquiesces to an order’s ideological and policy imperatives.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
By this measure – and I think it’s a correct one – we are already living in a woke political order.
“already living in a woke political order”
If anyone had any lingering doubts, last week should remove them….
In 2020 Biden said the BLM riots were a “battle for the soul of the nation” supporting thugs who were destroying businesses and killing people (he was supporting the thugs).
Last week a trаsn fraеk killеd 6 people in cold blood (including thrеe childrеn) and left a manifesto…. and Biden says тraиs people “shape the soul of the nation”
(мieхd characters are too fоol saеrhс egnieпs)
As someone once said…. you are who you make excuses for…..
I don’t think it’s that simple.
I think half of the United States is hanging on, waiting to see if peaceful political reform is still by some miracle possible.
The day that that 50% well and truly decides that peaceful reform is impossible, is not the day that we all quietly go into the woke night.
It is the day that America becomes the Bloodlands.
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I am deeply anxious about this scenario. Still hoping it doesn’t come to that, but it feels almost inevitable.
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“America becomes the Bloodlands”
No. The geographical lines are too… diffuse and Americans no longer have anything approaching the discipline and willpower to carry out a civil war.
Things will just keep getting crappier and crappier and some will console themselves with thoughts of future rebellion that won’t happen…
The view from outside the US, things might look a bit different there…
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The diffuse geographical lines are part of what make it scary. I don’t see an organized civil war being possible. But that absolutely doesn’t rule out an extended politically-infused murderous family feud with a heaping helping of increasingly-organized crime.
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These poor bastards, lining up to protest Trump’s indictment when they never protested the fact that he didn’t build the wall. These people aren’t going to stand up for themselves. It’s all a fantasy.
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The way things go in SA, change only happens when the problems start affecting rich people. The US has a long way to go before it reaches this point though.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/at-last-big-business-starts-to-bark
“These people aren’t going to stand up for themselves. It’s all a fantasy.”
That’s what the current regime wants to believe: that they can just keep ratcheting up the regime-y behavior forever, and things will always work out as placidly as they have so far.
They might make it work if they wanted to do what the Chinese did from 1989 to 2019 — make a de facto bargain with their population like this: “You will not in any way debate politics or try to change who is in power; in exchange, we will see to it that you experience a steady rise of your prosperity of a kind you have never seen in 2,500 years.” That bargain did work. On a smaller scale, that’s what Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and the military governments of South Korea and Taiwan were able to do in the late 20th century; and those all worked out.
Our regime, however, is not that bright, or at all interested in offering that kind of bargain. What they’ve made very clear they intend to do is slowly but endlessly diminish not merely the freedoms, and not merely the affluence, but the basic economic viability of the lower-ranked 95-99% of the inhabitants of the United States.
The signs that this can’t go on aren’t conspicuous — our regime-approved media aren’t anxious to broadcast them — but they’re quite visible if you look at, for instance, aggregate credit card debt in the U.S., or the recent near-disasters at banks whose huge holdings in low-interest rate U.S. Treasuries suddenly lost 20% of their market value because of the Fed raising its baseline interest rate, that in turn being motivated by inflation rates that are officially at 8%/year and in real-world terms are 15%/year. Folks: no matter how torpid you think Americans are, they cannot withstand another 2-3 years of having the real-world value of their incomes drop by one-sixth every year. They just can’t. Most of the U.S. was living paycheck-to-paycheck even in 2019, back in what now feels like a lost Atlantis of prosperity. They are not going to remain calm if their incomes are still shrinking by fall 2024.
Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, the regime has started making its move to outlaw the 2024 political candidacy of the one political opponent it truly fears. They will not go into reverse gear on this. They can’t; psychologically, these people have no reverse gear. They’ll keep ratcheting things up until they succeed in making Orange Man Bad “commit suicide” like Jeffrey Epstein, with all the video cameras malfunctioning at once in a maximum-security federal prison cell.
Sneer all you want at the political torpor around us. I myself find myself cursing out the great herd of people in the U.S. with the muttered imprecation, “Normie is a potato.” But even potatoes have a threshold of pain that will wake them up, and we’re clearly headed for that threshold.
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A completely serious question: why would the establishment fear a Trump presidency? Did he build the wall? Stand up to BLMers during the riots of 2020? Stand up to Big Pharma during COVID? Fire Fauci? What did he actually do other than serve as an escape valve for people to feel (without any tangible proof) that somebody was on their side?
I voted for Trump but I will not do so again until I hear a clear explanation from him as to why the wall wasn’t built and how the obstacle preventing him to build it the last time will now be removed.
“No. The geographical lines are too… diffuse…”
North-central Eurasia [1] consists of a gigantic soccer field [2] stretching from the Carpathians to Mongolia. That’s why about a dozen waves of invaders from the northern frontiers of China could and did ride on horseback all the way to the eastern borders of, first, the Roman Empire, and (a bit later) Christian medieval Europe. The place has rivers, and some of those rivers are among the largest in the world, but it doesn’t really have what one would call “natural borders”.
And, that’s exactly where the human race had centuries of wars even before Stalin and Hitler made “the Bloodlands” infamous. Giant borderless soccer fields, it turns out, are bad for Jeffersonian democracy but make excellent battlefields.
I predict that the ‘diffuse’ geographical lines of the United States will have no effect at all on what happens if we continue on our current political and economic path.
[1] The now-traditional border between Europe and Asia is the Urals, but they don’t resemble the Caucasus, the Alps, or the Pyrenees. Europe’s western end is really different from Asia’s eastern end, but they’re separated by a long gradient rather than a sharp barrier. So, “Eurasia”.
[2] I joke slightly. Still, if you’ve grown up in the western United States, the geographical maps going from Poland to Mongolia are remarkably homogeneous, grassy, and flat. Nor is this merely an illusion of mapmakers. There is genetic evidence that Huns living north of China relocated to eastern Europe en masse in two generations, conveyed by nothing but horses, wagons, and their own feet.
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“But that absolutely doesn’t rule out an extended politically-infused murderous family feud with a heaping helping of increasingly-organized crime.”
The population of the United States owns some amazing quantity of personal firearms. I don’t even know what it is. Call it roughly 150 million guns.
Whack at that bee’s nest with a “family feud” of “increasingly-organized crime” — and, I might add, increasingly useless ‘official law enforcement’ — and what will you get?
The military writer Tom Kratman suggests that it will be “Beirut on steroids”. Maybe that isn’t exactly like the First Civil War reenactments and documentaries we’re all used to seeing, but, I submit that it will be much more like a ‘real’ civil war than anything else.
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“A completely serious question: why would the establishment fear a Trump presidency?”
That’s a fair question. Generally, Trump’s been an ineffectual and weak Boomer. It hardly seems reasonable that the U.S. should be lurching to its second civil war over this goofus.
However, my imperfect guess is that Trump was not totally as clueless and weak-willed as he’s generally looked, and that he was a very serious threat to some corrupt interests. One of Trump’s threats was to the continued control and secrecy of what has become a permanent unelected government by our own American KGB-type agencies. Another of Trump’s threats was to the corruption of our government by bribery from such people as the Sinaloa drug cartel of Mexico.
One of the first things Trump did was to appoint Gen. Michael Flynn as his head of national intelligence. Flynn had previously served as head of the DIA, and had developed a reputation for being much more interested in doing effective battlefield intelligence in Iraq than in respecting the traditional way of doing things in “the intelligence community”. In other words, he was an honest man who knew the spy agencies very well and could find where there bodies were buried. Moreover, Flynn had openly said that what he wanted to do was reform the way that the U.S.’s spy agencies were doing their jobs.
So, literally the first thing the regime did was to concoct putative reasons why Flynn needed to be fired, and then to have Pence talk Trump into having Flynn fired. After that, Flynn went through four straight years of politically motivated prosecutions which did not end when his second lawyer made the Department of Justice formally admit that the case against Flynn was terrible and ask Judge Sullivan to drop the case, but instead only when Trump pardoned Flynn (Sullivan literally started demanding that he be allowed to take over as the prosecutor in Flynn’s case, something that had happened exactly zero times in the previous history of the United States).
That’s how the Deep State dealt with the threat of Trump picking a competent subordinate who might have reformed the spy agencies.
About Sinaloa and the cartels: you may have noticed that, while Trump failed to build the wall, he did make a serious effort to enforce the southern border, and after the installation of Biden, that enforcement has entirely collapsed. It is perhaps not a random coincidence that the drug cartels of Mexico make a lot of money smuggling human beings, drugs, and child slaves into the U.S. via its southern border, and that places like Arizona in particular are portals for such smuggling. It is quite possible that the reason it has proven impossible to, for instance, run an honest mid-term election in Arizona is that the cartels and the U.S. clients can not afford to allow honest people to be installed in the state offices of Arizona, both because this would permanently disrupt a key election-fraud state and because it would put an abrupt end to their happy arrangement where the cartels deal in human misery and certain Arizona politicans get remarkably favorable real-estate deals financed by obscure sources.
So, our KGB-like agencies can’t risk having Trump back in the Presidency, and our cartel-bought politicians can’t risk having either a President or a governor of Arizona who will get serious about even trying to enforce the southern border — wall or no wall.
That’s my guess why I’m sitting here writing about “bloodlands” by 2025. It’s just a guess; I could be wrong; but I do think my guess fits the publicly visible data.
Trump is often a clown. But he’s become the flash point for an issue in American political life that is not funny or trivial at all. The issue is whether we are even going to try to be a genuinely free, honest, and self-governing people — and, if we are going to try, how we are going to rid ourselves of vermin ‘elites’ who want no such thing. Trump’s merely the lightning rod, but he is not the lightning itself.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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