They still want to control your thoughts.

Tags

#buzzfeed, #free speech, le pen, populism, thought control, trump

The Establishment is in full retreat — at least in the political sphere.

The shocking passage of Brexit led to the fall of David Cameron’s government. Marine Le Pen and her National Front continue to grow in influence in France. Similar movements grow in Austria, Italy, Finland, even Sweden, that beating heart of open-borders liberal globalism. And, of course, you may have heard about the recent elections in America.

The reason: our Establishment rulers simply suck at their jobs. And their subjects know it. This is why this is happening. As with most populist revolutions — French, Russian, Iranian, Chinese, National Socialist, and so forth — what comes after the fall of the old regime will be even worse. Trump and his Trumpkins just want to make their own crude new Establishment, no less controlling than the last one. But that does not alter the fact that the old regimes before each revolution, including our current one, had become too decadent, too incompetent, too out of touch, too selfish, and really did deserve to get kicked off the stage of world history.

And despite the drubbing they’re getting at the polls across the globe, our elites, our Davos set, our ruling class have learned nothing.

A big component of the various populist uprisings is social media. After all, it’s not like the National Front could ever get positive coverage in the normal French media. So, Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump rely on their followers (and paid trolls) sharing memes, news, half-truths, outright disinformation, whatever it takes, to their friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Neutral voters may get their interest piqued by such shares, follow the rabbit hole to anti-establishment websites, and soon find themselves converted.

Unauthorized meme detected in sector K-492! Deploy the explainer drones now!

The Establishment notices this, and tellingly: They blame Facebook and other platforms for allowing such speech and not controlling their users. This top-down view of how the world works is precisely what got them in trouble to begin with — that our insular coastal elites are actually smart and wise enough to know what’s best, and that you rubes out in Ohio will always get yourselves in trouble without the gentle guiding hand of Matt Yglesias to control your thinking.

For instance, it is Facebook that drew the ire of Buzzfeed today for letting their fellow Establishmentarians down. Ryan Broderick, who’s been with Buzzfeed for years and has shown up on shows such as the Today Show, blames pro-Trump Facebook memes not on the people who create them, but on Mark Zuckerberg for allowing them to happen.

“But their memes have appeal and the most viral ones go mainstream,” Broderick writes. “Their Facebook pages get bigger. Algorithms identify that a user likes one particular page and suggest others, creating an echo-chamber effect that can lead to some pretty scary places.”

In other words, it’s Facebook’s fault for its industry-standard “similar things you may like” algorithm not steering its users like cattle away from anti-establishment content. As if a typical Breitbart pro-Trump propaganda piece should then be matched with a Vox explainer and a page where you can donate to the Hillary campaign to get wayward thought criminals back on the reservation.

Broderick then includes this astonishing paragraph:

Thought control. He is talking about flat-out thought control.

My own opinion of Trump and his alt.right trolls may be readily surmised with a brief perusal of this blog. But at the same time, I know exactly where the anti-establishment rage that propelled him into office is coming from. It’s from university presidents treating themselves to ever-more-extravagant salaries and bonuses while tuition continues to outpace inflation. It’s about the university’s education quality continuing to erode in favor of establishment interests such as political correctness, the cult of diversity, and, often, the football team. (The latter because it’s not like having a strong English Lit curriculum is something that lends itself to bragging rights for members of the Board of Regents.)

It’s about feckless politicians and their cheerleaders in the NYC and London-based media pushing for ever-more immigration — and without any arguments as to why, other than calling all immigration opponents racist. It’s about said immigrants competing for working class jobs while the elite still live in majority-white neighborhoods with majority-white schools, all while tut-tutting about just how much more diverse and inclusive they are than you hicks in flyover country. It’s about the global economy increasingly benefiting the top 0.1% — mere one-percenters are pikers these days — while everyone else’s buying power seems to stagnate. It’s about blue-collar jobs getting outsourced to Mexico while the company executives still retain their plush corner offices, and writers for both the New York Times and National Review saying that’s just how the world works. It’s about plum jobs such as NBC News reporting gigs going to Jenna Bush and Chelsea Clinton purely on account of their parentage, while young plebians without the last names or without the connections can never break out. It’s about the Democratic Party floating trial balloons for Chelsea for Congress mere days after her mother’s crushing defeat, proving they’re trying for a repeat of 2016 in 2018.

And yes, it’s about the media elite believing, despite all evidence, that they know what’s best for you people. It’s about John Oliver and Amy Schumer and the above Ryan Broderick and Vox’s Ezra Klein actually believing more in the system than in the people who are failed daily by the system. And when the people go anti-establishment? It’s the system’s own fault for allowing improper meme-sharing!

You have to buy into the party orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker to even be considered for a position with Buzzfeed or some other NYC or London media outfit, or for a late-night comedy gig. And that’s on top of the connections and Ivy League degree required to even get an interview. It’s why John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah and Steven Colbert are all basically interchangeable. It’s why the staffers of Buzzfeed are so politically in lockstep with one another that even Bolsheviks have to be impressed. They’ve created this echo chamber, with the writers of the sites and the shows writing more for each other than their actual readers or viewers, seeing each other all the time on the L-train, never rubbing shoulders with Trump voters other than with the occasional Jane Goodall-esque, “Trump Voters in the Mist” piece looking at them like a different species. It’s no surprise that Broderick’s answer for Trump voters’ thoughtcrimes is the same one that Buzzfeed itself relies on for its employees: enforced ideological conformity. Unfortunately for Broderick, though: his editor Ben Smith can’t fire John Q. MAGA out in Iowa for wearing the wrong red hat. Therefore, his proposed solution is “safeguards” — quite the Orwellian word — for those that pursue Trump memes, or who are in his word, “radicalized.”

Broderick uses this word “radicalized” intentionally. There are already rules and procedures with social media companies to deal with ISIS and other terrorists who attempt to use their services. It would take little effort to expand these rules to include followers of Trump or Le Pen too, right? Buzzfeed can’t fire these voters from their jobs for their political heresies — so perhaps they can shame Zuckerberg to fire, or at least shadowban, them off Facebook instead.

The coastal media elite’s prescription after the Hillary loss is more of the same. I won’t ever like the clown fascism of the Trump Administration or the nonzero chance Cheeto Jesus will get us in a nuclear war because the Chinese president said something mean on Twitter. But I do like snotty, conformist writers in Brooklyn and London with breathtakingly easy lives and parents paying for their rent getting their metaphorical teeth kicked in. It’s just a shame they learned absolutely nothing from the experience.

The peasants are revolting!

Tags

#politics, boomerist, boomers, elites, globalism, neoliberal, populism, tom friedman

I can’t let this July 4th weekend pass without touching on Ross Douthat’s remarkable column on the theme of populism vs. globalism — remarkable mainly for where it was published, the New York Times itself, that ancient home of the aristocratic worldview that makes Ezra Klein look like Father Coughlin by comparison. Let’s face it: all the Vox’s and Buzzfeed’s are just young imitators desperate to copy the style — and connections — of Davos’ Mouth of Sauron himself, Douthat’s colleague Tom Friedman. I doubt Douthat’s column (or any force on the planet, for that matter) could cause Klein or Friedman or Jeff Zucker or Andrew Hamilton to have a moment’s introspection, let alone even a shred of humility, which is a shame. Elites before them have had similar attitudes, and with rather untoward results for themselves.

Douthat details the self-congratulatory attitude of the elite class that he himself calls home, or as he puts it: “It [the word “cosmopolitan”] gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.” That is, the globalists are not actually open-minded citizens of the world; they just belong to their own tribe, one no less insular and closed-minded than that of the flyover-country nationalists that they so despise.

I’ve been hammering on this point since even before the rise of the various populist movements: the Trumpkins, the Brexiteers, the Five Star crowd of Italy, the True Finns, the Sweden Democrats, the National Front. The globalist media likes to paint all of these as “far-right” fascist parties, but really, Brexit actually had more support with Labour rank-and-file voters than Tories — Jeremy Corbyn lost a vote of no-confidence from his fellow Labour MPs because he famously paid the Remain side mere lip service, arguing until the moment of his ascendancy to party leadership for Leave. This isn’t like the debates over the environment; this isn’t left vs. right. This is about the people wanting nothing less than to stick it to the Man.

And these movements rise because voters know damn well how our leadership class is in equal measures selfish, incompetent, and myopic. They vote for Donald Trump because there is literally nobody else who lets them vent their spleen at these globalists, these neoliberals, these Boomerists, and thus we get to the true danger of failed aristocracy: the horror of what replaces them. Failed monarch Louis XVI is only remembered, after all, as the king who was replaced by the Terror. It turns out he couldn’t just studiously ignore his way out of the rage of the Third Estate after all, a lesson that our current world-city class would do well to learn.

But they won’t, will they? Take any example you want. Politicians, corporate honchos, university heads, hospital CEOs, NGO chairs, bureaucratic chiefs — they all come from the same tribe of people and are interchangable. David Petraus went from four-star general to CIA chief to boutique banker. Jon Corzine went from Goldman Sachs head to Senator to NJ Governor to, yes, that’s right, boutique banker. Larry Summers went from Harvard academic to World Bank mucky-muck to high-ranking bureaucrat under Bill Clinton to Harvard president to — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — boutique banker. The same tiny tribe has their hands on every lever, and the only ones who think they’re doing a good job at it are each other.

“One moment, my dear. I’m finishing up my Slate thinkpiece on a revolutionary new food that could fill in for the lack of bread. You won’t believe what it is!”

And none of them rise from nowhere anymore, do they? Sure, the Clintons did, many decades ago, but the next generation is more like Chelsea, right? They all have had the right hookups since basically birth, didn’t they? Even tech, supposedly the last field where a commoner can pull himself up by his bootstraps a la Jeff Bezos, is increasingly dominated by Zuckerbergs with their Ivy League credentials and connections, as we all know from that movie. I’d more expect the next explosive app or device to come from a collaboration of Jack Dorsey, Larry Page, and Larry Summers’ boutique bank, than from a couple spunky college dropouts from San Jose.

Wanna write for Vox? You better be Ivy League. Wanna run a site like Vox? You not only better be Ivy League. You, or your parents, better be good friends with the people who matter. Otherwise, off with ye!

Shut out. Voiceless. In debt. Most likely living in a town the new economy has passed by. Laughed at by the Davos set. Is it any wonder regular plebians across the industrialized world vote for the populist option, no matter how crazy or horrifying? Even if they privately think Trump is a clown or Brexit is terrifying or Marine Le Pen is racist as all get out: how else can they send a message?, they’ll ask you plaintively.

And how do elites respond to populist, democratic results? By looking at themselves? Oh, my goodness, that is a quaint notion. No, they respond by questioning the need for democracy itself!

Populist revolts throughout history end terribly, as opposed to the American Revolution which was ably shepherded by our aristocracy of that era. Pick any example you want — the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of National Socialism in the early 1930s, any Communist uprising in East Asia, the fall of the Iranian Shah. All exerted a horrible cost on the commoners they were supposed to serve, as would the presidency of a Donald Trump.

And yet, all were triggered by evil times, and a leadership that was incompetent, uncaring, malevolent, or all three. The people don’t rise up in rebellion just to pass the time (well, outside of soccer venues anyway). The people rise up because they have no choice. This is why the blame for the Terror is more correctly placed on Louis XVI than Robespierre. It was the incompetent Czar that subjected the Russians to Bolshevik tyranny more than the Bolsheviks themselves. After all, there are always people ready to take over with false promises, violence and atrocities. They only can if a decayed or absent leadership class allows them to.

I’m no anarchist. I know there will always be a leadership class in some form, and there should be. There always has been an elite class in America from the signing of the Declaration on. In fact, it was excellent leadership that steered America from a fledgling backwater fighting for its life to the superpower it is today, though crises and wars great and small. And, other than brief interludes such as the Warren Harding administration (a rot which did not really affect leadership outside of Washington), we have never been afflicted with an elite class so insular, so in awe of itself, so walled-off, so short-sighted, so enormously greedy, so monumentally selfish as the one we have today.

Tom Friedman will blame Trump on showmanship, on flyover country ignorance, on nativism, on democracy itself; yet he will never, ever blame the one force he should — Tom Friedman.

Globalism vs. Populism: A Textbook Example

Tags

#buzzfeed, #nyc, bernie sanders, breitbart, donald trump, elites, elitism, globalism, media, news, populism

You may have seen that heartbreaking video of 1,400 blue-collar workers in Indianapolis learning their jobs are being shipped out to Mexico. Or you may not have! It all depends on which kinds of news sites you frequent.

News, opinion and “explainer” sites tend to break in one of two ways — either globalist, or populist. This divide is independent of, and perhaps more important than, the old left vs. right divide, and this story is a great example of what I am talking about. (My last post on the subject is here.)

The outsourcing story was picked up by outlets with a populist bent, including both the New York Daily News and the New York Post. The latter is conservative and the former is more moderate, but both compete equally hard for the middle- and low-brow readers that are ignored by the town’s more elitist dailies. The layoff story also featured on Breitbart and Raw Story, two sites that could not be further apart on left vs. right issues — but which are both equally populist. The story was already seized on by Donald Trump, and it’s only a matter of time before it shows up in Bernie Sanders’ stump speeches too. Guess which way both these guys lean in their respective parties?

“Heh, does anyone actually live in Indianapolis?” — BF editor-in-chief Ben Smith, probably

Meanwhile, if you restrict your online viewing habits to Buzzfeed, Slate, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Daily Beast, Financial Times, and Vox, then this is the first you’ve heard of this video. You will note that there are no links over any of these names. That is because, as of this writing, not one of these organizations has breathed a single word of this story. There’s no mention on any of their front pages; searching “Indianapolis” on each of these sites gave results such as shown. Guess which way they lean on globalist vs. populist?

To ask the question is to answer it. A bunch of undereducated blue-collar stiffs in flyover country getting their jobs outsourced just makes economic sense to the editors of these esteemed sites. It’s just how the world works. Why, none of their friends at their last dinner party at Lucky Bee would even consider this news.

As mentioned, the split also goes to politics. While this story is custom-made for both Trump and Sanders, it will probably get ignored by Clinton; other GOP candidates might only try and fail to mimic Trump on a story they truly do not have sympathy for. Trump and Sanders are the only two who speak to the economic anxieties of workers, as opposed to Clinton and Bush and as opposed to the Ivy League-educated coastal elites who run globalist-oriented content providers. But don’t take my word for it — here’s The Donald himself:

“We’re being ripped off by everybody. And I guess that’s the thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common. We know about the trade. But unfortunately he can’t do anything to fix it, whereas I will. I have the best people in the world. We’re losing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And we will fix it. And we’ll make it good. And we’ll bring our jobs back. Bernie Sanders can’t even think in terms of that. The only thing he does know, and he’s right about, is that we’re being ripped off; he says that constantly; and I guess he and I are the only two that really say that.”

And really. How is this surprising, when the globalist media hates talking about these stories either? If candidates want to win elections, they and their advisors need to read less Vox and start reading more Raw Story and Breitbart.

My glorious MS Paint collage of what I’m talking about. Things on a line are neutral: LGBT and abortion rights are important to all liberals, just as gun rights, evangelical Christianity and Obama Derangement Syndrome are universally appreciated on the Right.

The morality scale in politics far more important than left-vs-right

Tags

#politics, boomerist, bureaucracy, deep state, globalism, government, neoliberal, populism, sanders, trump

A running theme in this blog is just how illusory the traditional conservative vs. liberal, red vs. blue, Republican vs. Democrat divide in this country really is. It’s like they intentionally divide us over trifles.

That’s not to say there is literally no such thing as conservative or liberal, of course. But that is far less important than another scale in politics: elite, or globalist, vs. proletariat, or populist. It’s the interests of the Davos set, the 0.1%, the Beltway establishment, vs. the interests of the rest of us. And you can bet that these interests are no less diametrically opposed than those of pro-lifers vs. pro-choicers.

Where liberal vs conservative and globalist vs populist fits on this scale, I’ll leave the reader to decide.

It is heartening to see Americans slowly dawn on them that our real fight was never with our drunk conservative uncle, or our whippersnapper liberal nephew, at the Thanksgiving table. Both parties are getting equally screwed by the establishment. Thus, we get articles like this at Salon where no less an orthodox liberal than Elias Isquith, who has never met a social-justice cause he didn’t like, heaps praise on conservative Republican Mike Lofgren’s description of one of the tools they use to oppress us: the “deep state.”

Under traditional rules, liberals like me and Isquith are supposed to always be for big government, without exception. But this blind faith has slowly been eroded by recent scandals. Snowden and the NSA. Dick Cheney’s official torture program. On that note, Dick Cheney’s wars. And on a local level: racist cops who can’t ever seem to be prosecuted for murder. Hell, they often aren’t even fired, as Eric Garner’s killer is still employed by the NYPD.

The problem: progressivism depends on good governance as a bulwark against the power of the aristocracy. And that word “good” there is the most important part of that sentence. Bad government just becomes another tool of oppression.

As Lofgren explains, the key to the deep state’s power is also what makes it so antithetical to the interests of the people: its unaccountability, its secrecy. The biggest powers of the military-industrial complex aren’t its guns or tanks or drones. Their biggest powers are their anonymity and their unresponsiveness. Think about one of those “released” government documents so heavily redacted that it’s nothing but lines of black marker: that’s what we mean by the deep state.

Government bureaucrats at all levels of government basically cannot be fired. They do not have to ever face judgment for doing a bad, or indifferent job. Sure, on paper, they are supposed to face oversight from Congress, but in reality? Congresspeople come and go with every election. The average tenure of a representative is 9.1 years; senator, 10.2 years. For federal non-postal bureaucrats? 13.9 years. And unlike their supposed overseers on Capitol Hill, they are unionized and are almost impossible to be fired. They do not face elections every two years.

These bureaucrats — again, using the government’s own statistics — earn an average base salary of almost $80k. This does not include their exceedingly generous health and vacation benefits and, above all, their defined-benefit pensions that allow them to draw from the taxpayer till death. How does that compare to your private-sector company?

But even more malign than these ground troops, are the elites who are truly the bosses of the deep state, as opposed to those obstreperous elected congressmen. The heads of the departments, the CIA, the US Attorney’s offices, the EPA, and all the rest of the alphabet soup hold sway that not even J. Edgar Hoover would have dreamed of. And this class of individual is one and the same with the heads of the private sector, including Wall Street and Silicon Valley, as well as of academia. Consider David Petraeus: after a sex scandal made it too inconvenient for him to remain head of the CIA, a high-paying boutique bank position magically opened up for him. Because, obviously, running counterinsurgencies and drone strikes made him an obvious choice for the world of finance.

The one thing these all  have in common — the federal bureaucracy, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, elite media — is the vast supply of money always running through each. And that is the one thing our elites care about. Want to find a 0.1%’er? It’s no different than The Wire: follow the money. And it’s why they really have no major preference between the Clintons and the Bushes. Both dynasties are equally committed to the globalist, pro-0.1%, anti-proletariat worldview.

And the blurring of public vs. private does extend to the rank-and-file as well, according to Lofgren:

“All these guys simply go through the revolving door to the point where you can hardly distinguish [government employees from private sector workers]. A good percentage of the people sitting at their desks right now in the Pentagon are private sector contractors. They are literally in the Pentagon, in the NSA building, in all these organizations.”

As he further details, they don’t all share the same left-vs-right politics. (Or libertarian vs authoritarian; that’s yet another scale in American politics I won’t touch on here.) I’m sure the voting pattern of the average EPA bureaucrat is markedly different than that of the average FBI agent. But remember: left-vs-right does not matter very much anymore. On the far more important globalist-vs-populist scale, members of the deep state are more in lockstep than in Maoist China:

“I think it’s an ideology that dare not speak its name. They claim it is not an ideology, that it is simply their technocratic expertise giving you the benefit of their knowledge. However, their knowledge is always based on a neoconservative view of foreign policy, [and] in domestic policy, it enforces neoliberalism.”

Ah yes, and we return to our old friend “neoliberalism.” Or what I call “Boomerism.” These are both imperfect words that are also synonyms for “globalism.” That uniting ideology of the masters of our universities, our bureaucracy, our banks, our tech firms, our media conglomerates. They are words that try to sum up the worldview of the Mouth of Sauron for these people: Tom Friedman.

And they are why we have the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Both draw from a discontent that is agnostic of red-vs-blue. Trump’s detractors note his multiple heresies from GOP orthodoxy, while forgetting that his base could not care less. It is no accident that a lot of Trump’s backers are registered Dems; similarly, Sanders is right when he states he can poach some of Trump’s base. Hell, these two could serve in the same administration, despite how opposed their personalities and their (other) politics are, despite their disagreements on specifics. Voters for both sense the deep rot in our system, of these Rubins and Petrauses and Dimons and Zuckerbergs and Ezra Kleins who all imagine themselves as Übermenschen to your Untermenschen, as born masters and superiors to you of the Great Unwashed. Trump and Sanders voters know how these people are forever working to impoverish, disenfranchise, and weaken the average middle- and working-class person.

I love this awakening of the plebians. But we must be careful. Revolutions have a tendency to go a tad too far. I hope we don’t trade Louis XVI for Robespierre (or Napoleon), or the Czars for Stalin (or Putin!).

“The deep state has created so many contradictions in this country. You have this enormous disparity of rich and poor; and you have this perpetual war, even though we’re braying the bell of freedom. We have a surveillance state, and we talk about freedom. We have internal contradictions. Who knows what this will fly into? It may collapse like the Soviet Union; or it might go into fascism with a populist camouflage — like Trump is selling us.”

Is there really no anti-Establishment Right?

Tags

#conservative, #establishment, populism

Kevin Drum and Ed Kilgore share a laugh over the idea of a populist, anti-Establishment Right that actually believes in what the Tea Party supposedly once stood for.

…and [Kilgore’s] responding to the suggestion that the real divide in American politics isn’t between left and right, it’s between pro-corporate and anti-corporate. Spare me. Sure, the tea partiers opposed TARP and were hazily in favor of just letting all the banks collapse in 2008, but that was little more than a fleeting morsel of emotional outrage. As Kilgore says, tea partiers may say they oppose corporate power, but when it comes time to vote, they can be counted on to support the folks who oppose any and all regulations that might actually rein in the power of corporations generally and Wall Street in particular.

Call me a wide-eyed optimist, but I’m not so sure. I mean, I know where Drum and Kilgore are coming from: the Tea Party as an institution was indeed co-opted by the usual suspects on the right, turning its members into just another pack of frothing-at-the-mouth attack dogs against liberals. By channeling their anti-Establishment rage into anti-liberal and anti-Obama rage, the GOP machine effectively neutralized the Tea Party as a threat to their precious donor class.

But there’s more going on here. For instance, by mocking the very real proletarian vs. elite divide in America, Drum and Kilgore are just buying into the same narrative as the Tea Party they mock: the only battle is Red vs. Blue, and don’t worry about the actual ruling class of this country, nothing to worry about there. I don’t get why they are so dismissive when the Tea Party’s counterpart, Occupy Wall Street, was also focused on our country’s plutocrats instead of the endless and often pointless GOP vs. Dem battle. OWS’ers didn’t just go away just because the movement was destroyed by the lunatic communist/anarchist fringe. They are looking for an anti-Establishment movement again that they can support.

And I really feel that some on the Right are, as well. Not as many as there could be, as conservative economist Veronique de Ruby ruefully admits (while also remind us how pro-corporate the Dems are too), but they’re there. They were the ones moneybombing Ron Paul last go-around because they are sick and tired of our degenerate Establishment and their piss-poor stewardship of this country compared to Establishments of bygone eras. They are as sick of their Bushes as OWS’ers are of our Clintons and are sick of the same pro-elite assholes getting nominated on both sides every four years.

Why is Hillary being coronated? Why is Jeb a shoo-in? If anyone on either side really is serious about reining in entitlements and handouts for the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, those are the questions they need to be asking. They may find the answers are awfully similar for either side. I honestly believe the answer, if there is one, is a candidate or movement that can recruit populists on both sides of the divide — those that agree that the greatest problem really is the problem of our elites that Drum and Kilgore scoff at.