Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics
James Monroe.
And, yes, we're still not on to the Agrarian finale in this series. That's because we have one more important topic to consider first.
Politics.
If you read distributists' social media, and you probably don't, you'll see that some people have the namby pamby idea that if we all just act locally everything will fall in line. While people should act locally, that's a bunch of crap.
What these people don't realize is that politically, we're a corporate capitalist society, and we are where we are right now, in large part due to that. Corporations are a creature of the state, not of nature, and exists as a legal fiction because the state says they do. This is deemed, in our imaginations, to be necessarily because, . . . well it is.
Or rather, it's deemed to be necessary as we believe we need every more consolidation and economies of scale.
We really don't, and in the end, it serves just itself. We do need some large entities, particularly in manufacturing, which would actually bring us back to the original allowance for corporate structure, which was quite limited. Early in US history, most corporations were banned from being created.
Legally, they would not need to be banned now, but simply not allowed to form except for actual needs. And when very large, the Theodore Roosevelt proposal that they be treated like public utilities, or alternatively some percentage of their stock or membership would vest in their employees, would result in remedying much of the ills that they've created.
Likewise, eliminating the absurd idea that they can use their money for influence in politics could and should be addressed.
Which would require changes in the law.
And that takes us back to politics.
Nearly every living American, and Canadian for that matter, would agree that a major portion of the problems their nations face today are ones manufactured by politics. The current economic order, as noted, is politically vested.
The United States has slid into a political decline of epic proportions, and its noteworthy that this came about after Ronald Reagan attacked and destroyed the post 1932 economic order which provided for an amplified type of American System in which there was, in fact, a great deal of involvement in the economy and the affairs of corporations, as well as a hefty income tax on the wealth following the country's entry into World War Two. It's never been the case, of course, that there was a trouble free political era although interestingly, there was a political era which is recalled as The Era of Good Feelings due to its lack of political strife.
That era lasted a mere decade, from 1815 to 1825, but it's instructive.
The Era of Good Feelings came about after the War of 1812, which was a war that not only caused internal strife, but which risked the dissolution of the nation. Following the war the Federalist Party collapsed thereby ending the bitter disputes that had characterized its fights with the more dominant Democratic-Republican Party.. . . . huh. . .
Anyhow, President James Monroe downplayed partisan affiliation in his nominations, with the ultimate goal of affecting national unity and eliminating political parties altogether.
Borrowing a line from the Those Were the Days theme song of All In the Family, "Mister we could use a man like James Monroe again".
Political parties have had a long and honorable history in politics. They've also had a long and destructive one. Much of their role depends upon the era. In our era, for a variety of reasons, they are now at the hyper destructive level.
They are, we would note, uniquely subject to the influence of money, and the fringe, which itself is savvy to the influence of money. And money, now matter where it originates from, tends to concentrate uphill if allowed to, and it ultimately tends to disregard the local.
"All politics is local" is the phrase that's famously attached to U.S. politics, but as early as 1968, according to Andrew Gelman, that's declined, and I agree with his observation. Nowhere is that more evident than Wyoming.
In Wyoming both the Republican and the Democratic Party used to be focused on matters that were very local, which is why both parties embraced in varying degrees, The Land Ethic, and both parties, in varying degrees, embraced agriculture. It explains why in the politics of the 70s and 80s the major economic driver of the state, the oil and gas industry, actually had much less influence than it does now.
Things were definitely changing by the 1980s, with money, the love of which is the root of all evil, being a primary driver. Beyond that, however, technology played a role. The consolidation of industry meant that employers once headquartered in Casper, for instance, moved first to Denver, then to Houston, or were even located in Norway. As the love of money is the root of all evil, and the fear of being poor a major personal motivator, concern for much that was local was increasingly lost.
The increasing broad scope of the economy, moreover, meant that there were economic relocations of people who had very little connection with the land and their state. Today's local Freedom Caucus in the legislature, heavily represented by those whose formative years were out of state, is a primary example in the state. Malevolent politics out of the south and the Rust Belt entered the state and are battled out in our legislature even though they have little to do with local culture, lands or ethics.
Moreover, since 1968 the Democratic Party has gone increasingly leftward, driven at first by the impacts of the 1960s and then by its left leaning elements. It in turn became anti-democratic, relying on the Supreme Court to force upon the nation unwanted social change, until it suddenly couldn't rely on the Court anymore, at which time it rediscovered democracy. At the same time Southern and Rust Belt Populists, brought into the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, eventually took it over and are now fanatically devoted to anti-democratic mogul, Donald Trump, whose real values, other than the love of money and a certain sort of female appearance, is unknown, none of which maters to his fanatic base as they apply the Führerprinzip to his imagined wishes and he responds.
Distributism by design, and Agrarianism by social reference, both apply Catholic Social Teaching, one intentionally and one essentially as it was already doing that before Catholic Social Teaching was defined. As we've discussed elsewhere, Catholic Social Teaching applies the doctrines of Human Dignity, Solidarity and Subsidiarity. Solidarity, as Pope John Paul II describe it In Sollicitudo rei socialis, is not “a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of others. It is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”. Subsidiarity provides that that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.
We are a long ways from all of that, right now.
Politically, we're in a national political era that is violently opposed to solidarity and subsidiarity. Supposed national issues and imagined remote conspiracies, dreamt up by political parties, swamp real local issues. Global issues, in contract, which require a competent national authority, or even international authority, to deal with, cannot get attention as the masses are distracted by buffoons acting like Howler Monkeys.
Destroying the parties would serve all of this. And that's a lot easier to do than might be supposed.
And more difficult.
Money makes it quite difficult, in fact. But it can be done.
The easiest way to attack this problem is to remove political parties as quasi official state agencies, which right now the GOP and Democratic Party are. Both parties have secured, in many states, state funded elections which masquerade as "primary elections" but which are actually party elections. There's utterly no reason whatsoever that the State of Wyoming, for example, should fund an internal Republican election, or a Democratic one.
Primary elections are quite useful, but not in the fashion that most state's have them. A useful example is Alaska's, whose system was recently proposed for Wyoming, but which was not accepted (no surprise). Interestingly, given as the state's two actual political parties right now are the Trumpites and the Republican remnants, this a particularly good, and perhaps uniquely opportune, time to go to this system. And that system disregard party affiliations.
Basically, in that type of election, the top two vote getters in the primary go on to the general election irrespective of party. There doesn't need to be any voter party affiliation. The public just weeds the number of candidates down.
That is in fact how the system works here already, and in many places for local elections. But it should be adopted for all elections. If it was, the system would be much different.
For example, in the last House Race, Harriet Hageman defeated Lynette Grey Bull, taking 132,206 votes to Gray Bull's 47,250. Given the nature of the race, FWIW, Gray Bull did much better than people like to imagine, taking 25% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Republican state. Incumbent Lynn Cheney was knocked out of the race in the primary, being punished for telling the truth about Дональд "The Insurrectionist" Trump. But an interesting thing happens if you look at the GOP primary.
In that race, Harriet Hageman took 113,079 votes, for 66% of the vote, and Cheney took 49,339, for 29%. Some hard right candidates took the minor balance. Grey Bull won in the primary with just 4,500 votes, however.
I'd also note here that Distributism in and of itself would have an impact on elections, as it would have a levelling effect on the money aspect of politics. Consider this article by former Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau:
Tom Lubnau: Analyzing The Anonymous Mailers Attacking Chuck Gray
A person could ask, I suppose, of how this is an example, but it is.
Back to the Gray v. Nethercott race, Ms. Nethercott is a lawyer in a regional law firm. That's not distributist as I'd have it, as I'd provide that firms really ought to be local, as I discussed in yesterday's riveting installment. But it is a regional law firm and depending upon its business model, she's likely responsible for what she brings in individually. Indeed, the claim made during the race that she wanted the job of Secretary of State for a raise income was likely absurd.
But the thing here is that Nethercott, as explained by Lubnau, raised a total of $369,933, of which $304,503 were from individual donations. That's a lot to spend for that office, but it was mostly donated by her supporters.
In contrast, Jan Charles Gray, Chuck Gray's father donated a total of $700,000 to Chuck Gray’s campaign, Chuck Gray donated $10,000 to his own campaign and others donated $25,994.
$700,000 is a shocking amount for that office, but beyond that, what it shows is that Nethercott's supporters vastly out contributed Gray's, except for Gray's father. In a distributist society, it certainly wouldn't be impossible to amass $700,000 in surplus cash for such an endeavor, but it would frankly be much more difficult.
To conclude, no political system is going to convert people into saints. But it's hard to whip people into a frenzy who are your friends and neighbors than it does people who are remote. And its harder to serve the interest of money if the money is more widely distributed. Put another way, it's harder to tell 50 small business owners that that Bobo down in Colorado knows what she's talking about, than 50 people who depend on somebody else for a livelihood a myth.
Last prior:
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 1. How the barbarians took over the city.
As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.
Robert Cardinal Sarah
Alaric entering Athens, 395.
On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill. The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone". I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue. I would have been about fifteen.
That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.
Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context. I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier. And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.
I do recall his answer. He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".
It was an interesting answer. He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not. He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.
I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.
When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was. It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.
Conservation was the reason why. Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism. While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican. The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel. It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.
It wasn't a facade, however. I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing. Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat. It was rural issues that did it. The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down. The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted. The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.
Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely. I wasn't alone. Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians. The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP. It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so. It was a Wyoming Party.
Those days are dead and gone.
It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally. The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature. It's been a long time in the making.
Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York. He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.
At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation. In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.
I'm not certain that I think that now. But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.
Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump. How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?
The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.
Why Americans, irrespective of position, ought to cringe over Obergefell
Yes, we warned what was in store:
And we warned about it more than once.
We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it. To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.
Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning. And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.
The Supreme Court tries a bit to mop up a dog's breakfast. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell
The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic. But it didn't start in 2015. It started well before, with major events marking the path. May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973. What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures. We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.
What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.
For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
1 Timothy, Chapter 6.
At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent. Ignorance had combined with greed.
People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that. People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows. Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue. It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves. Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.
There's really no two ways about it.
Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.
They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.
The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.
We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977. Those laws were geared towards that end. And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were. Laws on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.
And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way. The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.
A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.
Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well. It made some sense, until you thought it out. And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is. But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed. Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.
Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education. The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else. World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common. But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering. University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion. Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.
Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money. It was not a combined intentional attack. The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect. This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success. Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.
Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians. The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome. When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not. As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation. And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.
This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion. That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent. What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners. Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.
And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must. It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist. In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.
This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.
It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide. That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.
There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.
But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.
It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought. Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.
The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature. Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it. Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.
National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer. C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also a little disturbing in some ways as well. Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".
What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order. He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting. What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness. Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.
Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The sw...: T
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.
- Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.
This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.
It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew. Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.
Everything about this is wrong on an existential level. AI, frankly, is wrong.
And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest.
- There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift
I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing. She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.
I suppose that's the root of it.
Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift. This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.
Swift is dating some football player. I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me. Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting. Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers). Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy. There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.
And so now we have this total weirdness:
Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec:
People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly:
They’re elevating her to an idol.
Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!
Far right activist Laura Loomer:
The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.
Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …
And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion.
This is insane.
Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics. What more evidence of this is required than this?
- Celebrity endorsements.
Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden. I read something that claimed she had in 2020.
I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.
There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump. Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it. So why the concern.
Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of. I.e, she's young and an independent female.
Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?
I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow. I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything. Freaking out about it is just silly.
- Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.
This is a tragedy.
It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight. We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news. Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.
But this serves as a warning. Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps. And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not. Most families find this out.
But what about when they're running for office?
- The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park. Heart attack.
This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?
- A concluding thought. We're getting scary stupid.
Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.
Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this. It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.
That's not happening in the country now at all. Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness. This is out of hand.
Last Prior Edition:
The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.
Lex Anteinternet: Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XVI. And then the day arrived.
Lex Anteinternet: Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less loc...:
Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XVI. And then the day arrived.
Our lifestyle, our wildlife, our land and our water remain critical to our definition of Wyoming and to our economic future.
Dave Freudenthal, former Governor of Wyoming/
December 3, 2023
Oil field, Grass Creek, Wyo, April 9, 1916
Snippets of news articles from this morning:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Fifty oil companies representing nearly half of global production pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030, the president of this year’s United Nations climate talks said Saturday, a move environmental groups called a “smokescreen.”
Smokescreen it doesn't seem to be. That's a major commitment. But not as big as this one:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that's a huge factor in global warming.U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.
None of this should be a surprise. This is where we've been heading for some time, and it's inevitable. Indeed, I touched on this back in 2017 here:
Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry
And I cautiously dipped my toe in the water, wondering if Wyoming should ponder a fossil fuel free future here:
Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (a). The Economy again. . . the extractive industries
And here:
Well, now it's coming.
Not that we'll accept it. We'll do anything but. Our senior Senator in Washington will claim its part of Joe Biden's "radical green agenda", a radical agenda now sought after by the majority of people in the United States, and in the World. He doesn't believe that, but it sells back home. With a Republican Party in the state that was ready to boil Governor Gordon in WD40 for daring to say that Wyoming needed to look at a carbon-neutral future, he doesn't dare say anything else as it would imperil his position. Our junior Senator will likely say nothing at all.
Well, the voices are getting too loud to ignore, and they include people in the oil industry and now even entire nations that depend on petroleum. From the President, to the Pope, to the Governor of the state, the message is getting pretty clear. We're going to have to figure out a post fossil fuel economy here.
Quickly.
But, we'll choose not to. We'll pretend that somehow we can force others to consume the product that we wish to produce, as we've produced it for over a century and a half, and it's our economy.
That, however, isn't the way economies work.
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
On another topic, the current owners of Remington are closing the doors this week to its Ilion, New York factor. The company had been headquartered there since 1816.
It'd gone through hard times in the past. It nearly went bankrupt after World War One when the United States Government cancelled contracts for M1917 Enfield rifles overnight, leaving them with a large stock of unfinished and partially finished rifles. The Wilson Administration proved to be quite bad at demobilizing.
Remington, while profitable, had the very bad fortune to be bought by the aptly named Cerebus which focused on AR15 production and drove the company under. Our prior thread on it is here:
Cerebus is virtually a symbol of all that is wrong with corporate capitalism. Named for the three-headed dog that mythologically guards the gates of Hades to contain the dead therein, it might well be recalled, at least since Dante included it, that the creature is in Hell and of it.
Remington's history was mostly associated, over its long existence, with hunting rifles. That's what the company was founded on in 1816. It did manufacture military arms on occasion, however. For example, it was a large scale supplier of contract rifles for the Union during the Civil War. It's widely admired by riflemen rolling block rifle had a military variant that was purchased by some states in preference to the Trapdoor Springfield series of rifles, and it was in fact better than the Trapdoor. The rolling block was widely sold overseas as a military rifle.
By and large, however, it never invested heavily in military sales until the Great War, when the British first contracted with it to produce the rifle that had been intended to replace the SMLE, but adapted to .303 British. The P14 was a major British rifle of the war, but its production ceased in 1917 when the US entered the war, and the same rifle was adopted to the .30-06 and used by the U.S. as the M1917 Enfield. Remington's production capacity was so vast that somewhat over half of all U.S. troops in World War One carried that rifle, rather than the M1903, and it continued to be used into World War Two. But the experienced badly burned Remington and nearly left it bankrupt. After that it was extremely reluctant to make military arms, and it only reluctantly took to producing, ironically, M1903s during the Second World War when the government again needed help. No original Remington arms were invented for the war as Remington didn't try to undertake that as a project, although it did make a continual series of changes in the M1903 which resulted in the M1903A3, nearly a new rifle in some ways.
After the war and into the Cold War, Remington didn't bother with military arms. It wasn't a contractor to the M14 like H&R was. It didn't try to enter a rifle into light rifle contests, like Colt did with the AR15 and Winchester did with its M1 Carbine derived competitor. That all changed when Cerebus bought the company in 2007.
Cerebus also bought the AR15 manufacturer Bushmaster, which was highly regarded in that field. By 2012 Remington was making M4 Carbines for the Army. It leaped wholesale into the "America's Rifle" baloney with a hunting variant of the AR15. It reentered the pistol market, which it had not been in since a brief foray after the Civil War, with a version of the M1911 pistol. Cerebus didn't seem to understand what it was that Remington actually made.
Indeed, it was telling that a brilliant move by Remington to introduce a fairly cheap 98 Mauser hunting rifle, the 798, came in 2006, the year before Cerebus bought the company, and it quit offering it in 2008, the year after.
In name, it still exists, but now it's headquartered in Madison, NC. It was the oldest manufacturer in the United States at the time of its bankruptcy, and it died a victim of American capitalism.
Last Prior Edition:
Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XV. The 2% solution?
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 49th Edition. The speaking truth to the unwilling edition.
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 49th Edition. The spe...:
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 49th Edition. The speaking truth to the unwilling edition.
De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace
Georges Jacques Danton (often mistakenly attributed to Frederick the Great due to misattribution in the movie Patton).
Governor Gordon had the audacity to speak the truth. More specifically, he stated:
It is clear that we have a warming climate. It is clear that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to that challenge. There is an urgency to addressing this issue.
Wyoming is the first that has said that we will be carbon negative.
Gasp!
Well, of course the populist GOP in the state leaped on this.
Gordon is well-educated. Where you get your money doesn't determine scientific truths. Loving the state doesn't mean ignoring dangers to it so that we can exploit it until we die, leaving our children with a less livable planet and one that was different from the natural world we love.
Nor, might I add, does having to believe in a set of facts contrary to science and nature amount to a requirement for being a conservative, and it should not be a requirement to be a real Republican. Likewise, working in the current economy, in any occupation, does not amount to a requirement that you have to believe in its purity or that things should not change if they need to.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder.
Last Prior Edition:
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 48th Edition. Freaking out over the Polish election.
Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Wyoming Legislative Session. The Super Ea...
Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Wyoming Legislative Session. The Super Ea...:
October 7, 2024.
Senator Bob Ide has an op ed in the paper today, promising to introduce legislation to somehow require the Federal government to turn over the Federal domain to Wyoming. He terms the Federal Government's possession of its public land in Wyoming illegal and contrary to a promise it made at the time of Wyoming's statehood, both of which are absolutely false.
This would be a disaster for the state's sportsmen and the state in general, and would soon result in the land likely going to the wealthy, and wealthy out of staters. It would frankly make it not worth living here and destroy the character of the state.
Ide cites the popular transfer of the Marton ranch to the Federal Government and the recent southwestern Wyoming BLM plan as part of the reason this needs to occur, both of which are reason why it should never occur.
Poster from several years ago.
Ide is a far right member of the legislature and was in Washington, D.C. at the time of the insurrection, although there is no reason to believe he participated in it.
Lex Anteinternet: Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the "signs and wonders" and completely missing what's gong on.
Lex Anteinternet: Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the...:
Rich Men North of Richmond, Part I. Resisting the "signs and wonders" and completely missing what's gong on.
Rich Men North of Richmond, which is independently produced, I think, had made a big Internet and music scene splash, and frankly, not because it's good.
It is, as of this writing, on Billboard's Hot 100.
The ballad is played by Oliver Anthony, a genuine blue collar Virginian, apparently. All of his music videos seem to be filmed in a heavily wooded lot, which also appears to be genuine, although the rural South provides a certain cache in country music to such an extent that a Canadian band has even affected it, calling itself The Dead South. All of Anthony's music is played on a Resonator Guitar, a type of guitar I normally call a Dobro. I associate resonated guitars with the blues, not with country music, so this is a bit odd in and of itself.
How I imagine a guitar with a resonator properly being used.
Fans have gushed on the "return" of "real" or "authentic" country music, and this may indeed be the first genuine example of authentic country music to become a big hit in decades. Even 1st Lt. Austin von Letkemann, the author (host? mc?) of the wickedly funny Army satire series Mandatory Fun Day mentioned it the other day, as a real fan, citing Colter Wall at the same time. Wall is authentic, that's for sure, but in a different genre, genuine Western, i.e., cowboy, music.
But I don't think it's the music that boosted Anthony's song to the top of the C&W charts. It's the content. Consider the lyrics:
I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit paySo I can sit out here and waste my life awayDrag back home and drown my troubles awayIt's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI wish politicians would look out for minersAnd not just minors on an island somewhereLord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eatAnd the obese milkin' welfareWell, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 poundsTaxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsYoung men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downLord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit pay
Rich Man North of Richmond, it might be noted, comes hard on the heels of In A Small Town, by Jason Aldean.
Consider its lyrics:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalkCarjack an old lady at a red lightPull a gun on the owner of a liquor storeYa think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya likeCuss out a cop, spit in his faceStomp on the flag and light it upYeah, ya think you're toughWell, try that in a small townSee how far ya make it down the roadAround here, we take care of our ownYou cross that line, it won't take longFor you to find out, I recommend you don'tTry that in a small townGot a gun that my granddad gave meThey say one day they're gonna round upWell, that shit might fly in the city, good luckTry that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the roadAround here, we take care of our ownYou cross that line, it won't take longFor you to find out, I recommend you don'tTry that in a small townFull of good ol' boys, raised up rightIf you're looking for a fightTry that in a small townTry that in a small townTry that in a small townSee how far ya make it down the roadAround here, we take care of our ownYou cross that line, it won't take longFor you to find out, I recommend you don'tTry that in a small townTry that in a small townOoh-oohTry that in a small town
Aldean, I'd note, isn't from a small town. He's' from Macon, Georgia, population 150,000 or so, so it's a mid-sized city. And In A Small Town isn't real country, but rather country and enjoyed the same popularity.
Both of these songs immediately became populist anthems. So much so that none other than liberal economist Robert Reich, whom this blog has an obvious love/hate relationship, just posted on the song, with frankly a typically disappointing analysis.
Rich Men North of Richmond
Republicans court cultural populism, while Democrats eschew economic populism. But economic populism is the key.
Reich offers his view, but he's wrong on what's going on here, at least in part, and certainly wrong on the fix. Like other left wing economists in the United States, Reich is a corporate capitalist, which is also what all the right wing economists are. Reich correctly believes that the system has gone wonky to the detriment of the working class (whatever the current working class may be), but he fails to grasp, as nearly every economist in the United States and perhaps the Western World, or maybe even the planet, that the economy is supposed to serve average lives and average lives come first. I.e., it's 1) my life and; 2) I need to work. Not I'm a worker in a glorious worker's state and work will exalt me, or I'm a consumer in a glorious consumption state and consumption will exalt me, which are effectively the flip side of corporate capitalism.
So what's going on here?
Well, the economy isn't serving people's lives, and that's because corporate capitalism doesn't. Neither right nor left economists get it. For that matter, left wing politicos, as exhibited by Reich's writings, particularly don't get it.
Reich is one of the people who keep interpreting this stuff from solely an economic prospective, while simultaneously, and increasingly from a bigoted prospective, issuing warnings about "Christian Nationalism", which actually isn't a movement this is part of at all. Southern Cultural Christianity is, but that's completely different, and indeed largely leans on a different branch of Christianity (the same people who go to Trump rallies and find him to be a fine Christian probably think Constantine the Great ripped the faith away from the Baptists, or something).
Constantine the Great watching the burning of the books of Arian heretics. Constantine would likely regard most MAGA Christians as appalling on religions grounds, while he'd recognize Christian Nationalist. He can't be considered one, however. He's regarded as a saint by the Easter Orthodox and the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
You can get a taste of what's actually up with these songs from the comments to Rich Men North of Richmond on Youtube.
1. 39 years old. Spent 12 1/2 years as a plumber until the small company I worked for went under as the pandemic began. Working for a big chain home store for the last 3 years getting beaten into the ground, treated like a disposable asset, and watching my earnings equal less and less as the prices of basic necessities goes up. Ive fought addiction and won. Ive found love and lost it. This song resonates on a level that I havent felt in a long time. Thank you and god bless. 🙏2. As a disabled Marine, struggling to even be in public, struggling with all the bullshit in this world, struggling with thoughts of suicide, struggling to find pride in my Country, struggling to find the strength to get up every day to do the same damn thing to barely make ends me… as an American STRUGGLING with LIFE… thank you for bringing a little hope to my small part of the world… thank you for letting me know I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings… THANK YOU and God bless you Oliver Anthony3. I’m a 42 year old ex addict living in a camper trailer pay cheque to pay cheque with my kids part time while working to help the homeless and addicted community. I won’t stop working like the rest of you because we know at some point that one day will come that we may get that one break that shows us it was all worth it.Amazing song Oliver, thank you for sharing it4. As a hard working black American man, this song is 🔥 📛 the first country song on my Playlist and I hope for more. In an Era where soul is gone from music THIS IS A BREATH OF MUCH NEEDED AIR. even put a tear in my eye 🔥5. And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men. Amazing work, sir.
And there are a lot more.
Let's break down the lyrics again, emphasizing the ones that are telling.
I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit paySo I can sit out here and waste my life awayDrag back home and drown my troubles awayIt's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI wish politicians would look out for minersAnd not just minors on an island somewhereLord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eatAnd the obese milkin' welfareWell, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 poundsTaxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsYoung men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downLord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit pay
Okay, some of that, like Mr. Reich notes, is economic, but a lot of it isn't. The protagonist notes:
1. He has "an old soul".
2. The rich men he complains about want total control, even over what he thinks.
3. He complains about the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but more in an allegorical way than a specific way, suggesting that politicians are more concerned with their immoral pursuits than the lives of average working people.
4. He takes a shot at the welfare poor, and unusually, notes fat ones (hardly anyone does that in contemporary America).
Hmmmm. . . Doesn't seem to be all economic. . .
There's a common liberal belief, and Reich is one of those espousing it, that if only the economy is good, everyone is happy. Reich is one of those who goes on to point out, and correctly, that the economy really is good right now. One who also does this nearly weekly is Donna Brazile, who is a Democratic political commentator I really like.
Nobody is saying the economy is perfect, of course, including Reich or Brazile.
But there's something they've noted, that they are missing.
If the economy is really good, and in actuality it is, and a large section of the middle class (and contrary to what pudits claim, its definately not all the "white male" middle class) are bitterly unhappy, what's going on.
The usual assertion is that the economy is doing well, but people just don't know it, which is a bit of a bizarre assertion. People tend to know if they're doing well or not, which raises this question, with unemployment down, wages up, and inflation slowing, are people doing well?
Well, they might not actually be, and COVID may have made that plain to them.
One thing that's underlying the tone of the song is the economic shift in the nature of work since about 1970.
Well, the economy isn't serving people's lives, and that's because corporate capitalism doesn't. Neither right nor left economists get it. For that matter, left wing politicos, as exhibited by Reich's writings, particularly don't get it.
Reich is one of the people who keep interpreting this stuff from solely an economic prospective, while simultaneously, and increasingly from a bigoted prospective, issuing warnings about "Christian Nationalism", which actually isn't a movement this is part of at all. Southern Cultural Christianity is, but that's completely different, and indeed largely leans on a different branch of Christianity (the same people who go to Trump rallies and find him to be a fine Christian probably think Constantine the Great ripped the faith away from the Baptists, or something).
Constantine the Great watching the burning of the books of Arian heretics. Constantine would likely regard most MAGA Christians as appalling on religions grounds, while he'd recognize Christian Nationalist. He can't be considered one, however. He's regarded as a saint by the Easter Orthodox and the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
You can get a taste of what's actually up with these songs from the comments to Rich Men North of Richmond on Youtube.
1. 39 years old. Spent 12 1/2 years as a plumber until the small company I worked for went under as the pandemic began. Working for a big chain home store for the last 3 years getting beaten into the ground, treated like a disposable asset, and watching my earnings equal less and less as the prices of basic necessities goes up. Ive fought addiction and won. Ive found love and lost it. This song resonates on a level that I havent felt in a long time. Thank you and god bless. 🙏2. As a disabled Marine, struggling to even be in public, struggling with all the bullshit in this world, struggling with thoughts of suicide, struggling to find pride in my Country, struggling to find the strength to get up every day to do the same damn thing to barely make ends me… as an American STRUGGLING with LIFE… thank you for bringing a little hope to my small part of the world… thank you for letting me know I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings… THANK YOU and God bless you Oliver Anthony3. I’m a 42 year old ex addict living in a camper trailer pay cheque to pay cheque with my kids part time while working to help the homeless and addicted community. I won’t stop working like the rest of you because we know at some point that one day will come that we may get that one break that shows us it was all worth it.Amazing song Oliver, thank you for sharing it4. As a hard working black American man, this song is 🔥 📛 the first country song on my Playlist and I hope for more. In an Era where soul is gone from music THIS IS A BREATH OF MUCH NEEDED AIR. even put a tear in my eye 🔥5. And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men. Amazing work, sir.
And there are a lot more.
Let's break down the lyrics again, emphasizing the ones that are telling.
I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit paySo I can sit out here and waste my life awayDrag back home and drown my troubles awayIt's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI wish politicians would look out for minersAnd not just minors on an island somewhereLord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eatAnd the obese milkin' welfareWell, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 poundsTaxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsYoung men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downLord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten toFor people like me and people like youWish I could just wake up and it not be trueBut it is, oh, it isLivin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI've been sellin' my soul, workin' all dayOvertime hours for bullshit pay
Okay, some of that, like Mr. Reich notes, is economic, but a lot of it isn't. The protagonist notes:
1. He has "an old soul".
2. The rich men he complains about want total control, even over what he thinks.
3. He complains about the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but more in an allegorical way than a specific way, suggesting that politicians are more concerned with their immoral pursuits than the lives of average working people.
4. He takes a shot at the welfare poor, and unusually, notes fat ones (hardly anyone does that in contemporary America).
Hmmmm. . . Doesn't seem to be all economic. . .
There's a common liberal belief, and Reich is one of those espousing it, that if only the economy is good, everyone is happy. Reich is one of those who goes on to point out, and correctly, that the economy really is good right now. One who also does this nearly weekly is Donna Brazile, who is a Democratic political commentator I really like.
Nobody is saying the economy is perfect, of course, including Reich or Brazile.
But there's something they've noted, that they are missing.
If the economy is really good, and in actuality it is, and a large section of the middle class (and contrary to what pundits claim, it's definitely not all the "white male" middle class) are bitterly unhappy, what's going on.
The usual assertion is that the economy is doing well, but people just don't know it, which is a bit of a bizarre assertion. People tend to know if they're doing well or not, which raises this question, with unemployment down, wages up, and inflation slowing, are people doing well?
Well, they might not actually be, and COVID may have made that plain to them.
One thing that's underlying the tone of the song is the economic shift in the nature of work since about 1970.
A meme version of the economics of the 1950s. . . dealing with more than economics. This depiction of the 50s drives commentators nuts, who decry it as a myth, but there's more than a little truth to it, both in what it states, and in what it otherwise depicts.
Americans tend to look back to the 1950s as some sort of golden age, and have a really mythologized view of the era. Be that as it may, in the 50s, most men could in fact support a family on their income alone, and not just from white collar jobs but from blue collar jobs. Not only could most men do it, but most men did do it. As late as the 1970s, a lot of husbands actually objected to their wives working, whereas now most married women not only do work, but must work. Perhaps an error in here, however, is that in the 50s that a lot of people were going to college. In reality, in 1950 only 7.3% of men had a college degree and only 5.2% of women did, which by 1960 was 10.3% and 6% respectively. This means, however, that a university degree was like gold. Of interest, both of my mother's parents had university degrees, which is phenomenal given that they obtained them in the early 20th Century. Neither of my father's parents did. Also of note, my mother had a college degree, an AS, but she obtained in the 1970s and was not a high school graduate due to the Great Depression, where has my father had a DDS and his brother and one of his sisters attended university in the 1940s/1950s.
The 50s through the early 1970s really reflect post World War Two conditions, however, and might not be the best era to look at. The 40s can't be looked at either, due to World War Two, nor can the 30s, due to the Great Depression. You really have to get back to the 10s and 20s for economies to compare to, with some comparison from later decades. Any way you look at it, however, a lot more families were supported from a single, usually male, income, but it was also the case that a lot more women always worked than is recognized.
Myths have power, however, and they also reflect aspects of reality as a rule. Beowulf may not have slain a dragon in Sweden, but a warrior named Bear (Bee Wolf) probably was an early Scandinavia warrior vassal of note. There really was a big battle at Troy, and it probably did start off as a totally juvenile spat over a girl that somebody regarded as a babe, although it's likely there was more to it than that. Arthur wasn't a chivalric knight, but somebody the legend was based on, probably was a British Roman who did take on the invading Teutons in defense of Roman Britain heroically before going down on a battlefield. There was indeed an era, not long ago, when a high school education could bring a person a living wage for not only the graduate, but a spouse and kids, and provide a middle income life.
And there was also a time during which, as harsh as the reality is, that you weren't in grocery store lines behind people who are paying for food with assistance, but who had money for tattoos, and who have suspended any regard for their personal appearance.
This is all obvious to people who are barely eeking by, but who know that their grandparents, with no more education than they have, did relatively well.
To add to it, although only subtly grasped, people are also aware, even as they participate in it, that the country's become a moral sewer. The problem, in a way, is not that Jeffrey Epstein is uncommon, but rather than he is common in a way. Only the rich, of course, used him as a procurer for teenage prostitutes, but the entertainment industry is essentially a society wide procurer for cinematic prostitution that has become increasingly debased.
All that does involve wealth, but part of the underlying tone, and one that people like Reich can't seem to grasp, is that the American political left insists that it all conduct be accepted and each person's choices, no matter how self-destructive, anti-natural, debased, or weird, be celebrated. People very well know that the entire movement to support surgical gender mutilation of children is wrong, for example, as well as deeply weird, but the left demands it be celebrated, just as it insists that what nearly amount to homosexual sex manuals be placed in public schools with public funds. It is not that the standard bearers of the right are moral people. Trump is a serial polygamist. It's rather that there's a difference in promoting immorality and demanding that it be accepted and distancing policy from it, even if you engage in immorality yourself. Double standards abound, but what the unhappy class is looking at doesn't seem to be grasped.
Indeed, as the left repeatedly fails to grasp in regards to the that unhappy class, is that the class itself may not really apply the standards it mourns all that deeply, in regard to at least some of them. Critics from the left, like Robert Reich, keep branding the movement "Christian Nationalist", as do some critics from the right, such as Susan Stubson. They're both in correct. Christian Nationalist take the practice of Christianity really seriously. Southern Cultural Christian Populist, however, have a world roughly framed out by the Southern Baptist Convention, the pre-1970 Episcopal and Methodist Church's, or the African Methodist Church loosely in mind, but as a framework, not as a fortress. Put another way, Christian Nationalist look to the Apostolic age and know what that meant, and aren't really comfortable completely with people who sit around watching NASCAR on Sundays. Southern Cultural Christians are perfectly comfortable with watching NASCAR on Sundays and attend church for weddings, funerals, Easter and Christmas. They aren't the same thing.
But what both are uncomfortable with, but in different ways, is a liberalism that insists that genders can be changed, and there's nothing wrong with books in public schools that explore sodomy. That exceeds the boundaries of the loosely defined structure for Southern Cultural Christians and is definitely gravely immoral to Christian Nationalists, as well as frankly gravely immoral to any Christians of any stripe who are serious about what their faiths hold.
In 2008, I stopped at the liquor store on my way home from work to buy a six-pack of beer. It was late summer.
In the liquor store there were two young women, in their very early 20s, with a young man of the same age. One of the young women was holding a baby.
The girl, and that's really what she was, holding the baby was pretty, but in a trashy sort of way, and in the way that you know won't last. The other girl was not. Both young women were wearing t-shirts that were too small for them, and too tight to be decent. They were both wearing Daisy Dukes. The young man was shaking and incredibly disheveled. It was pretty clear that he was the father of the baby, equally clear that he and the young woman weren't married, and just as clear that he was a tweaker.
The pretty girl holding the baby had eyeliner and a proud visage, sort of like the pretty but trashy girls did back when I was in high school. They'd retained the eyeliner sort of make up that girls in junior high wore, back when I was in junior high, after girls of that age first started taking up makeup. Most girls abandoned that by high school, but the ones that were of a certain type didn't. That girl, the pretty one, was wearing an Obama for President t-shirt. I knew at that moment, well before the election, who would win.
The image that was on the girl's t-shirt. It wasn't "Hope" that they had a vested interest in.
Now, this isn't a comment on President Obama at all, but rather on something else, and that something else gets back to Rich Men North of Richmond.
The young man in that group is likely dead by now. Tweaking in his early 20s, it's unlikely he survived another fifteen years. The girl who the mother likely is, and if she was 21 then, she's 36 now. She's also likely in the 300 lbs category the song referenced, the signs of that already being there. And indeed, what she was supporting, and likely at least her female cohort, wasn't "hope", as Obama was espousing, it was government assistance. The child, now 15, has probably spent his or her entire life on it.
And that, in some vague sort of way, is what Oliver Anthony is lamenting.
All of these people likely descended from people who had held blue collar jobs. But a modern society reconstructed in a liberal image had turned them into wards of the government in some ways, and they weren't ashamed of it. Their attachment to any sort of conventional morality had lapsed, perhaps beyond repair, and they were reproducing without structure and raising a generation behind them, perhaps as they'd been raised, that recalls Philippians, "Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things." They didn't go on to be Megan Rapinoe, who would be just about their age, almost undoubtedly, but probably heavily tattooed, and living on the funds generated by others.
A large number of abandoned rust belt and other blue collar Americans are well aware of this, even if they aren't necessarily beyond some of the call of that themselves.
That's what liberal pundits are missing, and that's what populist, some sincere and some not, have picked up on.
El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.
No Country For Old Men.
And that's why their message is failing.
And for traditional conservatives, as, well as liberals, there may now be, by this time, something even scarier at work. . .
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