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A long, but good read.
Don't dismiss the major points because "Orange Man Bad".
A Tyranny Perpetual and Universal?
https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/28/a-tyranny-perpetual-and-universal/
Is the leftist dream now within reach? If President Trump loses, we will find out.
By Michael Anton • August 28, 2020
After “Is 2020 another ‘Flight 93 election?’” the question I most often hear is “What happens if Trump loses?”
The answer to the first question, unfortunately, is yes, but more so.
The tl;dr summary of the answer to the second is: much more of the same. More of all the trends, policies, and practices that revolutionized American life in the 1960s, that enrich the ruling class and its foot soldiers at middle America’s expense, erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties, degrade our culture and its people, and dishonor our heritage and history. The war on those who self-identify as Americans, and only as Americans, who love their country despite its flaws—who are certain in their bones that its strengths and glories vastly outweigh its historic and present shortcomings—waged by those who hate America and Americans, who want to destroy the former and crush the latter, will go on.
Two important questions are whether that war will intensify or abate and whether it might abate overtly but intensify covertly. Those questions will be explored in what follows.
First, though, a necessary caveat. A tiresome, sophistic, bad-faith, and inevitable rejoinder to my argument will go something like this: “Trump is the president; therefore, you guys are in charge; this ‘ruling class’ of whom you speak includes him, and you. So you’re lying and contradicting yourself when you criticize an alleged ‘ruling class’ running the country in ways you don’t like.”
No. The only accurate statement in the above summary is “Trump is the president.” And thank God for that; we’d be much worse off if he weren’t.
But the experience of Trump’s first term reveals how weak the presidency really is—not just constitutionally and historically, but, above all, currently. We know the enumerated powers the president is supposed to have, and also those the other branches of government are supposed to have, and not have. The Constitution and other fundamental charters of our liberties—the “parchment”—spell all that out. We also know what the “org chart” of the federal government looks like on paper: a “unitary executive” with an alphabet soup of agencies reporting to the president and therefore, in theory, responsive to his directives.
But the reality, by now, should be obvious to everyone. Our government in no way functions according to the elevated words on the parchment, and President Trump does not control the executive branch. I say this not to disparage the president but only to state a plain fact. No doubt, he has done his best. I doubt that anyone else could have done better. But while facing a near-universal rebellion from every power center in our society, emphatically including the agencies he was elected to lead, naturally he has found it very difficult to make the federal bureaucracy do what he tells it to do.
That difficulty has astonished even me. I worked in the federal bureaucracy for the first four years of the first George W. Bush Administration. I saw from the inside how the permanent government or administrative state or “deep state” or whatever you want to call it undermined a president with whom they mostly agreed. I knew in advance that, were Donald Trump to win the 2016 election, the effort to undercut him from within would dwarf what happened to Bush. For unlike the 43rd president, who merely held a few opinions unpopular with the deep state, the 45th ran on a program of almost complete repudiation of ruling class dogma and practice.
And yet I vastly underestimated how bad the “resistance” would be. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies would try to frame the president with a phony “crime,” launch a pointless two-year investigation over a fraud, then impeach him over the timing of foreign aid payments, all the while lying daily to the American public.
I also saw, again, the beast from the inside during my brief tenure in President Trump’s White House. Given classification and nondisclosure requirements, I can’t say much about that. But I can say this: if anything changed from my time in the Bush Administration, it is that the deep state is vastly more powerful today than it was then, and vastly more willing to use its power—overtly—to flout, undermine, circumvent, and disobey presidential orders. Even, in many cases, to do the precise opposite of what they’ve been ordered.
So we should not gripe about the things not done in President Trump’s first term. We should rather be grateful for all the things he got done—and hope he can do more in a second term.
Neoliberalism Forever?
But this essay is about what might happen should he lose.
The most plausible outcome would be a return to the “neoliberal” consensus and trajectory circa 2015. A more precise name might be “managerial leftist-libertarianism,” for this governing ideology is top-down, bureaucratic, and anti-democratic, committed to social engineering and grievance politics, while undermining virtue and promoting vice. But that’s something of a mouthful, and “neoliberal,” for better or worse, has gained widespread acceptance.
Neoliberalism elevates as a matter of “principle” the international over the national; it rejects the latter as narrow, particular, cramped, even bigoted, and celebrates the former as cosmopolitan and enlightened. Neoliberalism is (for now) forced to tolerate nations and borders as unfortunate and unhelpful obstacles but it looks forward to a time when such nuisances finally are behind mankind forever.
Until that time, neoliberalism works to warp state power into instruments whose primary mission is not to secure the well-being or interests of individual peoples or nations but instead to enforce the international neoliberal order—in particular the movement of capital, goods, and labor across borders in ways that benefit the transnational neoliberal ruling class. In practice, this amounts to widespread, close-knit cooperation between business and government—or what neoliberals euphemistically refer to as “public-private partnership.”
This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to “cooperation,” to government and business “solving problems” together?—masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Its proponents always leave out the little detail that big business is the senior partner.
Hence, for instance, without Trump, foreign policy—that quintessentially public function, to “provide for the common defense”—will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor (“migration”) patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business. American conservatives, still fighting “government regulation” as if America were stuck in Groundhog Day 1981, have yet to grasp the reality that the majority of this country’s policies are oriented around securing trade, tax, and labor (“migration”) regimes that benefit finance and big business.
The real power in the neoliberal order resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. True power resides with their donors: the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.
This consensus and the people who profit from it are still very much in charge of America today. They control everything: corporations, banks, tech firms, media (legacy and social), universities, primary and secondary schools, foundations, mainline religious organizations, and of course the entire federal bureaucracy. They also control, in all but the very reddest counties and municipalities, local governments and agencies. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s so hard for the president to govern against the neoliberal consensus?
The only top-tier power center the ruling class currently doesn’t have is the White House itself. If (or when) they get it back, the basic contours of the back-to-normal regime will look much as they did at the height of the Obama Administration—or, in hindsight, the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama Imperium: a high-low coalition against the middle in service of big tech, high finance, and woke capital. The sanctification of immigration, the glorification of “free” trade, jingoistic celebration of constabulary use of force in parts of the world most Americans can’t even name: expect lots more of all that.
“Getting back to normal” will also require the ruling class’ propaganda apparatus to amp into overdrive on all the alleged “failures” of the Trump interregnum. Getting out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which even Hillary Clinton had disavowed by 2016)? Disaster! Played right into the hands of China and alienated our allies! Blaming China for the coronavirus? Another disaster! Racist and xenophobic and alienated a key trading partner!
Surface consistency is not a strong suit of America’s contemporary propagandists. There is, however, an underlying consistency: any statement that serves the interests of the ruling class and hurts Trump and his supporters is good. Period.
Hence expect to hear endless denunciations of Trump’s renegotiated trade deals as catastrophic—and inconsequential. Similarly, on immigration, the narrative will be: Trump’s racist xenophobia was a racist overreaction to a nonproblem—that crippled our economy by depriving it of desperately needed workers . . . when the unemployment rate was over 15 percent. On foreign policy, the line already is: Trump’s recklessness risked calamitous war—while he recklessly pulled American troops out of combat zones in Syria and Afghanistan and tried to negotiate a peace deal with North Korea.
Only More So
All of the “post-Cold War era” trends that Trump ran against and has opposed or sought to moderate will be intensified. The ruling class will get right back to elevating the international over the national while tolerating the national only insofar as state power is used to bolster the international neoliberal order and enforce its edicts to facilitate the movement of capital, goods, and labor across borders in ways that benefit themselves.
The economy will become even more artificial and jury-rigged. We shall test supposed iron laws of economic gravity—for instance, whether it’s possible to maintain a fiat currency indefinitely with endless money printing and whether the dollar can long maintain its global reserve status. The longer the rigging goes on, the more rigging will be required.
Overall, the economy will become more techified, more financialized, more concentrated at the coasts, and more unequal. Expect the rich to get a lot richer and the middle class to disappear. Wages will fall.
COVID-19 has been a godsend to the oligarchs, who are licking their chops as one small business after another fails, leaving Americans with no choice but to spend whatever money they have with corporate behemoths.
Since small businesses are one of the last redoubts of the middle class (owing to the disappearance, via outsourcing and immigration, of middle-income American jobs at big companies), expect what’s left of the middle class to shrink further. If it seems incredible—as it should—that financial markets are at or near all-time highs when GDP has plunged, unemployment reached levels not seen since the Great Depression, and our cities and towns have been repeatedly sacked, looted, and burned for three straight months, the biggest reason is the consolidation of corporate control over the economy.
Don’t expect big firms’ vastly increased power and wealth to trickle down to the little guy. Corporate America loves the so-called “gig economy,” a euphemism for “We don’t have to pay benefits!” Employer-provided healthcare will disappear for all but the most senior executives, a trend that, in turn, will make some form of socialized medicine inevitable. Quality of care will fall for all but the people at the very top who can buy out of the government system. Eventually, however, even their care will decline, since there will no longer be enough money in the system to keep medical innovation going.
On Trump’s big three—immigration, trade, and war—America will be back to the status quo ante, and then well beyond.
Biden has already promised to amnesty every illegal immigrant currently in the country. According to a 2018 Yale study, that’s at least 22 million people—all of whom, under America’s idiotic immigration laws, immediately would be eligible to bring over relatives in the name of “family reunification.” If each newly minted American brings over just one relative, that’s another 20 million new immigrants in Biden’s first term alone. And nothing in the law would stop people from bringing over more than one. Most sponsor several.
Such an amnesty, once the Democratic machine got everyone registered to vote, would tip many purple states permanently blue. That’s the whole point. After that, the electoral map would become impossible for Republicans ever to win the presidency again. Which is also the point.
The fundamental right of self-defense—the bedrock foundation of all our other rights—increasingly is not honored if you’re a member of a disfavored group and your attacker is not.
Beyond amnesty, there would be no pretense of enforcing any of our immigration laws. We’ve already seen entire communities become demographically overwhelmed in the space of a decade or two. That will keep happening, but on a much wider scale.
It will also become much more difficult and more expensive to wall oneself off from the consequences, which means that the number, or at least the share, of “regime winners” who can afford “good” suburbs or private schools will shrink while the share of “losers” increases. As a result, native birthrates are likely to drop further, while pathologies such as addiction will increase and life expectancy will fall.
On trade, the government will revert to its customary practice of enacting policy to further enrich the rich, no matter the consequences for the middle and working classes. On war, the particulars are harder to foresee since it’s never been clear (at least not to me) what the ruling class gets out of endless, pointless, winless conflict. But they certainly have an affinity for it, which means we should expect more, with all the attendant negative consequences: more death, more of the nation’s wealth sunk in wasteful adventures, the continued erosion of the military, and the further squandering of our national pride, international prestige, and many of our best young men.
Government collusion with big business, especially tech and finance, and the ceding to corporations of vast swaths of territory that the state used to occupy exclusively will intensify and expand. The “unpersoning” of dissenters will mimic what the government of China does through its “social credit system”: ranking people based on their opinions—and wokerati opinion of them—and then granting or limiting access to basic freedoms and services. This will be, and already is being, justified because it is done primarily by the private sector, whether by for-profit businesses that lock people out of entire sectors or “nonprofits” such as the odious Southern Poverty Law Center that identify targets.
If you think we have mass surveillance already, just wait. The government and the tech companies already work hand-in-glove, the latter helping the former in exchange for favorable tax, regulatory, and immigration treatment. More of that is coming, and on a bigger scale.
When the last checks on such collusion from the Trump Administration are gone, expect this joint censorship and oppression of dissent to increase by orders of magnitude. The Left finally has found a way around the First Amendment: consolidate all “speech” and public expression onto a handful of private-sector platforms run by oligarchs and staffed by wokerati; let them do whatever they want and when anyone complains, reply that “these are private companies that can run their businesses however they want; you don’t have to use their platforms and if you don’t like it, start your own.” The Left knows it can count on the moronic, friendly-fire-spraying libertarians to sing that tune the loudest. Free speech as we have known it—as our Founders insisted was the natural bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule.
The playbook is already being expanded to banking and credit. To be on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion increasingly is to find yourself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan, or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a “cashless society”—purely to prevent drug lords and Russian spies from laundering money, you understand—will obviate that option right quick.
There’s no reason to assume the oligarchs will limit these types of actions to speech and money. Why would they? Especially when the woke vanguard consistently will clamor for more action and insist that any company that does business with “racists” is complicit in evil—“racist” being defined as anyone who hasn’t bent the knee. China already restricts travel for the disfavored. Why wouldn’t U.S. airlines? Car rental companies? Dealerships are independent, but they also depend on the big automakers for their stock. And, anyway, who can possibly buy a car if he can’t get a job or a bank account?
Britain’s nationalized healthcare service now denies medical care to those deemed “racist, sexist, or homophobic.” What’s to stop the wokerati from pressuring America’s patchwork of public and private healthcare providers to do the same? And why stop there? Why should “racists” even be allowed to buy food? That is, assuming they can even earn the money to pay for it. But that problem can probably be taken care of by denying the bad guys credit or debit cards and phasing out cash.
Isolation, loneliness, desperation, addiction, and suicide all will increase as ostracization condemns heretic after heretic to a sort of internal exile. The most vocally strident among the Left will call the resulting deaths just deserts; the rest will brush them off as perhaps sad, but the direct consequence of bad choices or bad natures. “That racist had it coming.”
(That is the "Liberty Movement's" future, if we don't wake the hell up and start playing twice as mean and nasty as the Bolshies and Jacobin Marxists - AF)
And every step of the way, the narrative’s reply to those who raise the alarm will be: That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is. You’re a paranoid lunatic for even suggesting that censorship, de-platforming, or un-personing are problems—and also a racist who deserves it.
Not long ago, I thought the point of all this—aside from being punitive to enemies for the sheer pleasure of it—was to find the sweet spot between too much overt oppression, which might provoke a backlash, and too little, which might allow opposition to gather strength. To expand firings, un-personings, bank lockouts, and the like too rapidly might raise alarms; kept at the creeping level, they serve to keep most of red America locked into the blue system and thus dependent. A bit of caution thus would seem to serve ruling-class interests.
Reigning in the Mobs?
But signs of moderation, of magnanimity, of any recognition that “we won” and so can ease off are, to say the least, not common among the woke Left. And the extent to which the ruling class can control its foot soldiers has been very much called into question by the events of 2020.
Consider that New York City—the global neoliberal oligarchy’s unquestioned capital and home to, by far, the largest concentration of America’s elites—was sacked by mobs several times in the same week. The NYPD—the largest, best-equipped, and most competent police force in the country—stood by and did nothing. Granted, they likely were ordered to stand down by the mayor or had no confidence that if they took necessary action, the political leadership would back them up. But the result is the same.
The rescue, reordering, and rebuilding of New York City since the early 1990s arguably is the greatest political and public policy success story of the last generation. Beginning with the feckless John Lindsay, who became mayor in 1965, cynical and/or deluded elites decided to make the city a Petri dish for all their idiotic social experiments including but not limited to: extreme leniency, reduced policing, neglect of basic services and public spaces, and steadfast refusal to do anything about quality of life. All while punishing taxpaying and order-supporting citizens and businesses. Crime soared, the city crumbled, decent people fled.
It took 30 years to raise New York back from that hell—and then the fools who run it, tacitly backed by the grandees who live in the world’s most expensive apartments, gave it all back to the forces of evil in a matter of months. As Machiavelli said of the Venetians, at the battle of Vailà, they “lost in one day what they had acquired with such toil and trouble over eight hundred years.”
The only difference is that this time the city appears to be worse. As businesses have remained closed, crime, disorder, and filth have surged. People have left and not returned. And not just from New York but from other ruling class citadels such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington. Chicago seems to be sacked every other week. Minneapolis was sacked yet again just this week. That’s before you even mention the dramatic surge in shootings and killings in all these cities. In all such cases—and many others—the political leadership in these places eggs on the mob, refuses to enforce the law or even call for calm, and immediately release without bail the few people caught committing crimes.
What does the ruling class gain from destroying its own cities? I’ve asked myself this a thousand times. I can’t come up with an answer. Is it that they want all this to happen or that they lack the will or ability to stop it?
The former possibility seems preposterous. But the fact that it’s not out of the question is suggested by the following data point. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, owns the Washington Post outright. He can, with a single phone call, make it publish, or not publish, anything he wants. The Post has always been a liberal rag. But it was never so brazenly anti-American, so shamelessly dishonest, so unreservedly dedicated to racial grievance-mongering. It used to be able to call a riot a riot and not resort to ridiculous euphemisms like “mostly peaceful” to describe rampant street violence.
Above all, the Post used to care about its home town. It doesn’t anymore. The District of Columbia, into which I must occasionally (and reluctantly) venture, is a shell of what it was just months ago. For the span of several weeks, there was a riot roughly every night. Businesses everywhere are now closed—and not just from COVID-19. Windows everywhere are boarded up. Graffiti, much of if revolutionary, covers seemingly every square inch of vertical space. The streets are deserted. To the extent that you see anyone, chances are above 50 percent it’s a vagrant. At the few restaurants that remain open, thanks to outdoor seating, diners are as likely as not to be accosted by bullhorn-wielding anarchists. The town has a post-apocalyptic feel. (As, I am reliably informed, do Manhattan and San Francisco.)
The newspaper founded in Washington in 1877 speaks of all this out of three sides of its mouth: none of it is happening; all the protests are peaceful and justified; it’s good that America is finally getting the thrashing she deserves. Bezos could instantly turn off this endless destructive propaganda if he wanted to. Does he not want to? Or is he not paying attention? Maybe not living in the District, he hasn’t noticed the extent of the Post’s recklessness and dishonesty. Has he also not noticed the similar destruction of his own home town of Seattle, and the role played in that destruction by the national media, of which he is one of the topmost moguls? Bezos did not become the world’s richest man by being stupid. Does he somehow believe that all this is good—for him?
Whatever the answer, the fact that all this mayhem is happening now, and the ruling class can’t or won’t control it, more than suggests that a lot more of it will happen if Trump loses.
A Dark Age of White Noise
The ruling class has built a well-honed apparatus to inculcate docility in the people. Components include cheap, puerile mass entertainment, ubiquitous smartphones and social media, video games, porn, drugs, sportsball, and so on across the whole dreary panoply of lowest-common-denominator “culture” in the current year.
We should expect all this to increase. The ruling class’ recent and ongoing enthusiasm for marijuana legalization and its total indifference to the opioid epidemic suggest that they’re seeking to drug as many non-elites as they can out of any potential resistance. Combine these factors with leftism’s top-down, total control of thought, and the picture becomes bleak indeed. The times are already quite vapid; very little (if anything) of lasting merit has been produced in literature, philosophy, music, film, or the other arts in several decades. The trend seems to be getting worse.
But at least we still have that older stuff to fall back on, right? Not necessarily. The cherished and iconic works of our past are also threatened, in two ways. First, the movement that originated on campus more than a generation ago to get rid of core curricula and reinterpret in light of leftist orthodoxy those bits allowed to remain has borne fruit. We’ve now “educated” generations of students—even (especially) elite students—either 1) to have no familiarity with the Western canon; and/or 2) to despise it as inherently evil; or 3) to see it only through leftist lenses that make it seem as if it merely confirms current orthodoxy; or 4) to believe it was all “stolen” from other cultures. That last one, of course, is a bald-faced lie, but one that at least implicitly concedes there’s something valuable in the tradition. But the point is never made to spur anyone to actually read the books, rather only to validate in-group confidence. My people, and not yours, did that, hence we are great and you are not. The result is that the whole Western tradition is at risk of atrophy, and even death, simply from ignorance and neglect.
As if that were not enough, the Left is starting to get even more actively hostile to the tradition. Certain elite intellectuals, led by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna, have noticed that some young autodidacts have taken to reading the great books and listening to classical music. The elites see this as a threat. There are serious calls not merely to police how the canon is taught but to attack and even censor its “misuse” by “bad actors” who use it to challenge the narrative.
It may not be long before Amazon, which has virtual control of the entire book market, stops selling the classics altogether. Or perhaps a new industry will arise to bowdlerize them of all non-woke teachings. The worst-case scenario, which doesn’t yet feel imminent but which cannot be ruled out, is that eventually such books get banned.
Far more likely—and quite imminent in a world where Elizabeth Warren’s nine-year-old trans friend gets to pick the Secretary of Education—is a time in which all the institutions that teach the canon, and the scholars who write about it seriously, will be attacked over petty and invented infractions. The real purpose of those attacks will be to silence those scholars and eventually shutter their institutions.
The climate of acceptable opinion in this country—already very narrow—will constrict further still. The necessity for self-censorship will increase dramatically. The core function of the narrative will remain telling you what to think—and more important what not to think—but its message will get even more tendentious, hateful, omnipresent, and so, so much louder. Imagine TV screens playing CNN, volume cranked to 11, not just in airport waiting areas, but everywhere—forever.
(Continued...)
Don't dismiss the major points because "Orange Man Bad".
A Tyranny Perpetual and Universal?
https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/28/a-tyranny-perpetual-and-universal/
Is the leftist dream now within reach? If President Trump loses, we will find out.
By Michael Anton • August 28, 2020
After “Is 2020 another ‘Flight 93 election?’” the question I most often hear is “What happens if Trump loses?”
The answer to the first question, unfortunately, is yes, but more so.
The tl;dr summary of the answer to the second is: much more of the same. More of all the trends, policies, and practices that revolutionized American life in the 1960s, that enrich the ruling class and its foot soldiers at middle America’s expense, erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties, degrade our culture and its people, and dishonor our heritage and history. The war on those who self-identify as Americans, and only as Americans, who love their country despite its flaws—who are certain in their bones that its strengths and glories vastly outweigh its historic and present shortcomings—waged by those who hate America and Americans, who want to destroy the former and crush the latter, will go on.
Two important questions are whether that war will intensify or abate and whether it might abate overtly but intensify covertly. Those questions will be explored in what follows.
First, though, a necessary caveat. A tiresome, sophistic, bad-faith, and inevitable rejoinder to my argument will go something like this: “Trump is the president; therefore, you guys are in charge; this ‘ruling class’ of whom you speak includes him, and you. So you’re lying and contradicting yourself when you criticize an alleged ‘ruling class’ running the country in ways you don’t like.”
No. The only accurate statement in the above summary is “Trump is the president.” And thank God for that; we’d be much worse off if he weren’t.
But the experience of Trump’s first term reveals how weak the presidency really is—not just constitutionally and historically, but, above all, currently. We know the enumerated powers the president is supposed to have, and also those the other branches of government are supposed to have, and not have. The Constitution and other fundamental charters of our liberties—the “parchment”—spell all that out. We also know what the “org chart” of the federal government looks like on paper: a “unitary executive” with an alphabet soup of agencies reporting to the president and therefore, in theory, responsive to his directives.
But the reality, by now, should be obvious to everyone. Our government in no way functions according to the elevated words on the parchment, and President Trump does not control the executive branch. I say this not to disparage the president but only to state a plain fact. No doubt, he has done his best. I doubt that anyone else could have done better. But while facing a near-universal rebellion from every power center in our society, emphatically including the agencies he was elected to lead, naturally he has found it very difficult to make the federal bureaucracy do what he tells it to do.
That difficulty has astonished even me. I worked in the federal bureaucracy for the first four years of the first George W. Bush Administration. I saw from the inside how the permanent government or administrative state or “deep state” or whatever you want to call it undermined a president with whom they mostly agreed. I knew in advance that, were Donald Trump to win the 2016 election, the effort to undercut him from within would dwarf what happened to Bush. For unlike the 43rd president, who merely held a few opinions unpopular with the deep state, the 45th ran on a program of almost complete repudiation of ruling class dogma and practice.
And yet I vastly underestimated how bad the “resistance” would be. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies would try to frame the president with a phony “crime,” launch a pointless two-year investigation over a fraud, then impeach him over the timing of foreign aid payments, all the while lying daily to the American public.
I also saw, again, the beast from the inside during my brief tenure in President Trump’s White House. Given classification and nondisclosure requirements, I can’t say much about that. But I can say this: if anything changed from my time in the Bush Administration, it is that the deep state is vastly more powerful today than it was then, and vastly more willing to use its power—overtly—to flout, undermine, circumvent, and disobey presidential orders. Even, in many cases, to do the precise opposite of what they’ve been ordered.
So we should not gripe about the things not done in President Trump’s first term. We should rather be grateful for all the things he got done—and hope he can do more in a second term.
Neoliberalism Forever?
But this essay is about what might happen should he lose.
The most plausible outcome would be a return to the “neoliberal” consensus and trajectory circa 2015. A more precise name might be “managerial leftist-libertarianism,” for this governing ideology is top-down, bureaucratic, and anti-democratic, committed to social engineering and grievance politics, while undermining virtue and promoting vice. But that’s something of a mouthful, and “neoliberal,” for better or worse, has gained widespread acceptance.
Neoliberalism elevates as a matter of “principle” the international over the national; it rejects the latter as narrow, particular, cramped, even bigoted, and celebrates the former as cosmopolitan and enlightened. Neoliberalism is (for now) forced to tolerate nations and borders as unfortunate and unhelpful obstacles but it looks forward to a time when such nuisances finally are behind mankind forever.
Until that time, neoliberalism works to warp state power into instruments whose primary mission is not to secure the well-being or interests of individual peoples or nations but instead to enforce the international neoliberal order—in particular the movement of capital, goods, and labor across borders in ways that benefit the transnational neoliberal ruling class. In practice, this amounts to widespread, close-knit cooperation between business and government—or what neoliberals euphemistically refer to as “public-private partnership.”
This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to “cooperation,” to government and business “solving problems” together?—masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Its proponents always leave out the little detail that big business is the senior partner.
Hence, for instance, without Trump, foreign policy—that quintessentially public function, to “provide for the common defense”—will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor (“migration”) patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business. American conservatives, still fighting “government regulation” as if America were stuck in Groundhog Day 1981, have yet to grasp the reality that the majority of this country’s policies are oriented around securing trade, tax, and labor (“migration”) regimes that benefit finance and big business.
The real power in the neoliberal order resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. True power resides with their donors: the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.
This consensus and the people who profit from it are still very much in charge of America today. They control everything: corporations, banks, tech firms, media (legacy and social), universities, primary and secondary schools, foundations, mainline religious organizations, and of course the entire federal bureaucracy. They also control, in all but the very reddest counties and municipalities, local governments and agencies. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s so hard for the president to govern against the neoliberal consensus?
The only top-tier power center the ruling class currently doesn’t have is the White House itself. If (or when) they get it back, the basic contours of the back-to-normal regime will look much as they did at the height of the Obama Administration—or, in hindsight, the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama Imperium: a high-low coalition against the middle in service of big tech, high finance, and woke capital. The sanctification of immigration, the glorification of “free” trade, jingoistic celebration of constabulary use of force in parts of the world most Americans can’t even name: expect lots more of all that.
“Getting back to normal” will also require the ruling class’ propaganda apparatus to amp into overdrive on all the alleged “failures” of the Trump interregnum. Getting out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which even Hillary Clinton had disavowed by 2016)? Disaster! Played right into the hands of China and alienated our allies! Blaming China for the coronavirus? Another disaster! Racist and xenophobic and alienated a key trading partner!
Surface consistency is not a strong suit of America’s contemporary propagandists. There is, however, an underlying consistency: any statement that serves the interests of the ruling class and hurts Trump and his supporters is good. Period.
Hence expect to hear endless denunciations of Trump’s renegotiated trade deals as catastrophic—and inconsequential. Similarly, on immigration, the narrative will be: Trump’s racist xenophobia was a racist overreaction to a nonproblem—that crippled our economy by depriving it of desperately needed workers . . . when the unemployment rate was over 15 percent. On foreign policy, the line already is: Trump’s recklessness risked calamitous war—while he recklessly pulled American troops out of combat zones in Syria and Afghanistan and tried to negotiate a peace deal with North Korea.
Only More So
All of the “post-Cold War era” trends that Trump ran against and has opposed or sought to moderate will be intensified. The ruling class will get right back to elevating the international over the national while tolerating the national only insofar as state power is used to bolster the international neoliberal order and enforce its edicts to facilitate the movement of capital, goods, and labor across borders in ways that benefit themselves.
The economy will become even more artificial and jury-rigged. We shall test supposed iron laws of economic gravity—for instance, whether it’s possible to maintain a fiat currency indefinitely with endless money printing and whether the dollar can long maintain its global reserve status. The longer the rigging goes on, the more rigging will be required.
Overall, the economy will become more techified, more financialized, more concentrated at the coasts, and more unequal. Expect the rich to get a lot richer and the middle class to disappear. Wages will fall.
COVID-19 has been a godsend to the oligarchs, who are licking their chops as one small business after another fails, leaving Americans with no choice but to spend whatever money they have with corporate behemoths.
Since small businesses are one of the last redoubts of the middle class (owing to the disappearance, via outsourcing and immigration, of middle-income American jobs at big companies), expect what’s left of the middle class to shrink further. If it seems incredible—as it should—that financial markets are at or near all-time highs when GDP has plunged, unemployment reached levels not seen since the Great Depression, and our cities and towns have been repeatedly sacked, looted, and burned for three straight months, the biggest reason is the consolidation of corporate control over the economy.
Don’t expect big firms’ vastly increased power and wealth to trickle down to the little guy. Corporate America loves the so-called “gig economy,” a euphemism for “We don’t have to pay benefits!” Employer-provided healthcare will disappear for all but the most senior executives, a trend that, in turn, will make some form of socialized medicine inevitable. Quality of care will fall for all but the people at the very top who can buy out of the government system. Eventually, however, even their care will decline, since there will no longer be enough money in the system to keep medical innovation going.
On Trump’s big three—immigration, trade, and war—America will be back to the status quo ante, and then well beyond.
Biden has already promised to amnesty every illegal immigrant currently in the country. According to a 2018 Yale study, that’s at least 22 million people—all of whom, under America’s idiotic immigration laws, immediately would be eligible to bring over relatives in the name of “family reunification.” If each newly minted American brings over just one relative, that’s another 20 million new immigrants in Biden’s first term alone. And nothing in the law would stop people from bringing over more than one. Most sponsor several.
Such an amnesty, once the Democratic machine got everyone registered to vote, would tip many purple states permanently blue. That’s the whole point. After that, the electoral map would become impossible for Republicans ever to win the presidency again. Which is also the point.
The fundamental right of self-defense—the bedrock foundation of all our other rights—increasingly is not honored if you’re a member of a disfavored group and your attacker is not.
Beyond amnesty, there would be no pretense of enforcing any of our immigration laws. We’ve already seen entire communities become demographically overwhelmed in the space of a decade or two. That will keep happening, but on a much wider scale.
It will also become much more difficult and more expensive to wall oneself off from the consequences, which means that the number, or at least the share, of “regime winners” who can afford “good” suburbs or private schools will shrink while the share of “losers” increases. As a result, native birthrates are likely to drop further, while pathologies such as addiction will increase and life expectancy will fall.
On trade, the government will revert to its customary practice of enacting policy to further enrich the rich, no matter the consequences for the middle and working classes. On war, the particulars are harder to foresee since it’s never been clear (at least not to me) what the ruling class gets out of endless, pointless, winless conflict. But they certainly have an affinity for it, which means we should expect more, with all the attendant negative consequences: more death, more of the nation’s wealth sunk in wasteful adventures, the continued erosion of the military, and the further squandering of our national pride, international prestige, and many of our best young men.
Government collusion with big business, especially tech and finance, and the ceding to corporations of vast swaths of territory that the state used to occupy exclusively will intensify and expand. The “unpersoning” of dissenters will mimic what the government of China does through its “social credit system”: ranking people based on their opinions—and wokerati opinion of them—and then granting or limiting access to basic freedoms and services. This will be, and already is being, justified because it is done primarily by the private sector, whether by for-profit businesses that lock people out of entire sectors or “nonprofits” such as the odious Southern Poverty Law Center that identify targets.
If you think we have mass surveillance already, just wait. The government and the tech companies already work hand-in-glove, the latter helping the former in exchange for favorable tax, regulatory, and immigration treatment. More of that is coming, and on a bigger scale.
When the last checks on such collusion from the Trump Administration are gone, expect this joint censorship and oppression of dissent to increase by orders of magnitude. The Left finally has found a way around the First Amendment: consolidate all “speech” and public expression onto a handful of private-sector platforms run by oligarchs and staffed by wokerati; let them do whatever they want and when anyone complains, reply that “these are private companies that can run their businesses however they want; you don’t have to use their platforms and if you don’t like it, start your own.” The Left knows it can count on the moronic, friendly-fire-spraying libertarians to sing that tune the loudest. Free speech as we have known it—as our Founders insisted was the natural bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule.
The playbook is already being expanded to banking and credit. To be on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion increasingly is to find yourself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan, or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a “cashless society”—purely to prevent drug lords and Russian spies from laundering money, you understand—will obviate that option right quick.
There’s no reason to assume the oligarchs will limit these types of actions to speech and money. Why would they? Especially when the woke vanguard consistently will clamor for more action and insist that any company that does business with “racists” is complicit in evil—“racist” being defined as anyone who hasn’t bent the knee. China already restricts travel for the disfavored. Why wouldn’t U.S. airlines? Car rental companies? Dealerships are independent, but they also depend on the big automakers for their stock. And, anyway, who can possibly buy a car if he can’t get a job or a bank account?
Britain’s nationalized healthcare service now denies medical care to those deemed “racist, sexist, or homophobic.” What’s to stop the wokerati from pressuring America’s patchwork of public and private healthcare providers to do the same? And why stop there? Why should “racists” even be allowed to buy food? That is, assuming they can even earn the money to pay for it. But that problem can probably be taken care of by denying the bad guys credit or debit cards and phasing out cash.
Isolation, loneliness, desperation, addiction, and suicide all will increase as ostracization condemns heretic after heretic to a sort of internal exile. The most vocally strident among the Left will call the resulting deaths just deserts; the rest will brush them off as perhaps sad, but the direct consequence of bad choices or bad natures. “That racist had it coming.”
(That is the "Liberty Movement's" future, if we don't wake the hell up and start playing twice as mean and nasty as the Bolshies and Jacobin Marxists - AF)
And every step of the way, the narrative’s reply to those who raise the alarm will be: That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is. You’re a paranoid lunatic for even suggesting that censorship, de-platforming, or un-personing are problems—and also a racist who deserves it.
Not long ago, I thought the point of all this—aside from being punitive to enemies for the sheer pleasure of it—was to find the sweet spot between too much overt oppression, which might provoke a backlash, and too little, which might allow opposition to gather strength. To expand firings, un-personings, bank lockouts, and the like too rapidly might raise alarms; kept at the creeping level, they serve to keep most of red America locked into the blue system and thus dependent. A bit of caution thus would seem to serve ruling-class interests.
Reigning in the Mobs?
But signs of moderation, of magnanimity, of any recognition that “we won” and so can ease off are, to say the least, not common among the woke Left. And the extent to which the ruling class can control its foot soldiers has been very much called into question by the events of 2020.
Consider that New York City—the global neoliberal oligarchy’s unquestioned capital and home to, by far, the largest concentration of America’s elites—was sacked by mobs several times in the same week. The NYPD—the largest, best-equipped, and most competent police force in the country—stood by and did nothing. Granted, they likely were ordered to stand down by the mayor or had no confidence that if they took necessary action, the political leadership would back them up. But the result is the same.
The rescue, reordering, and rebuilding of New York City since the early 1990s arguably is the greatest political and public policy success story of the last generation. Beginning with the feckless John Lindsay, who became mayor in 1965, cynical and/or deluded elites decided to make the city a Petri dish for all their idiotic social experiments including but not limited to: extreme leniency, reduced policing, neglect of basic services and public spaces, and steadfast refusal to do anything about quality of life. All while punishing taxpaying and order-supporting citizens and businesses. Crime soared, the city crumbled, decent people fled.
It took 30 years to raise New York back from that hell—and then the fools who run it, tacitly backed by the grandees who live in the world’s most expensive apartments, gave it all back to the forces of evil in a matter of months. As Machiavelli said of the Venetians, at the battle of Vailà, they “lost in one day what they had acquired with such toil and trouble over eight hundred years.”
The only difference is that this time the city appears to be worse. As businesses have remained closed, crime, disorder, and filth have surged. People have left and not returned. And not just from New York but from other ruling class citadels such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington. Chicago seems to be sacked every other week. Minneapolis was sacked yet again just this week. That’s before you even mention the dramatic surge in shootings and killings in all these cities. In all such cases—and many others—the political leadership in these places eggs on the mob, refuses to enforce the law or even call for calm, and immediately release without bail the few people caught committing crimes.
What does the ruling class gain from destroying its own cities? I’ve asked myself this a thousand times. I can’t come up with an answer. Is it that they want all this to happen or that they lack the will or ability to stop it?
The former possibility seems preposterous. But the fact that it’s not out of the question is suggested by the following data point. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, owns the Washington Post outright. He can, with a single phone call, make it publish, or not publish, anything he wants. The Post has always been a liberal rag. But it was never so brazenly anti-American, so shamelessly dishonest, so unreservedly dedicated to racial grievance-mongering. It used to be able to call a riot a riot and not resort to ridiculous euphemisms like “mostly peaceful” to describe rampant street violence.
Above all, the Post used to care about its home town. It doesn’t anymore. The District of Columbia, into which I must occasionally (and reluctantly) venture, is a shell of what it was just months ago. For the span of several weeks, there was a riot roughly every night. Businesses everywhere are now closed—and not just from COVID-19. Windows everywhere are boarded up. Graffiti, much of if revolutionary, covers seemingly every square inch of vertical space. The streets are deserted. To the extent that you see anyone, chances are above 50 percent it’s a vagrant. At the few restaurants that remain open, thanks to outdoor seating, diners are as likely as not to be accosted by bullhorn-wielding anarchists. The town has a post-apocalyptic feel. (As, I am reliably informed, do Manhattan and San Francisco.)
The newspaper founded in Washington in 1877 speaks of all this out of three sides of its mouth: none of it is happening; all the protests are peaceful and justified; it’s good that America is finally getting the thrashing she deserves. Bezos could instantly turn off this endless destructive propaganda if he wanted to. Does he not want to? Or is he not paying attention? Maybe not living in the District, he hasn’t noticed the extent of the Post’s recklessness and dishonesty. Has he also not noticed the similar destruction of his own home town of Seattle, and the role played in that destruction by the national media, of which he is one of the topmost moguls? Bezos did not become the world’s richest man by being stupid. Does he somehow believe that all this is good—for him?
Whatever the answer, the fact that all this mayhem is happening now, and the ruling class can’t or won’t control it, more than suggests that a lot more of it will happen if Trump loses.
A Dark Age of White Noise
The ruling class has built a well-honed apparatus to inculcate docility in the people. Components include cheap, puerile mass entertainment, ubiquitous smartphones and social media, video games, porn, drugs, sportsball, and so on across the whole dreary panoply of lowest-common-denominator “culture” in the current year.
We should expect all this to increase. The ruling class’ recent and ongoing enthusiasm for marijuana legalization and its total indifference to the opioid epidemic suggest that they’re seeking to drug as many non-elites as they can out of any potential resistance. Combine these factors with leftism’s top-down, total control of thought, and the picture becomes bleak indeed. The times are already quite vapid; very little (if anything) of lasting merit has been produced in literature, philosophy, music, film, or the other arts in several decades. The trend seems to be getting worse.
But at least we still have that older stuff to fall back on, right? Not necessarily. The cherished and iconic works of our past are also threatened, in two ways. First, the movement that originated on campus more than a generation ago to get rid of core curricula and reinterpret in light of leftist orthodoxy those bits allowed to remain has borne fruit. We’ve now “educated” generations of students—even (especially) elite students—either 1) to have no familiarity with the Western canon; and/or 2) to despise it as inherently evil; or 3) to see it only through leftist lenses that make it seem as if it merely confirms current orthodoxy; or 4) to believe it was all “stolen” from other cultures. That last one, of course, is a bald-faced lie, but one that at least implicitly concedes there’s something valuable in the tradition. But the point is never made to spur anyone to actually read the books, rather only to validate in-group confidence. My people, and not yours, did that, hence we are great and you are not. The result is that the whole Western tradition is at risk of atrophy, and even death, simply from ignorance and neglect.
As if that were not enough, the Left is starting to get even more actively hostile to the tradition. Certain elite intellectuals, led by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna, have noticed that some young autodidacts have taken to reading the great books and listening to classical music. The elites see this as a threat. There are serious calls not merely to police how the canon is taught but to attack and even censor its “misuse” by “bad actors” who use it to challenge the narrative.
It may not be long before Amazon, which has virtual control of the entire book market, stops selling the classics altogether. Or perhaps a new industry will arise to bowdlerize them of all non-woke teachings. The worst-case scenario, which doesn’t yet feel imminent but which cannot be ruled out, is that eventually such books get banned.
Far more likely—and quite imminent in a world where Elizabeth Warren’s nine-year-old trans friend gets to pick the Secretary of Education—is a time in which all the institutions that teach the canon, and the scholars who write about it seriously, will be attacked over petty and invented infractions. The real purpose of those attacks will be to silence those scholars and eventually shutter their institutions.
The climate of acceptable opinion in this country—already very narrow—will constrict further still. The necessity for self-censorship will increase dramatically. The core function of the narrative will remain telling you what to think—and more important what not to think—but its message will get even more tendentious, hateful, omnipresent, and so, so much louder. Imagine TV screens playing CNN, volume cranked to 11, not just in airport waiting areas, but everywhere—forever.
(Continued...)
