Amerika

European voters swing to the right, and American voters are now contemplating the end of the lifestyle they inaugurated in the 1960s and reinforced in the 1990s.

In Europe, an out-of-the-closet far-right party, the British NationalParty, found success in recent elections:

The British National Party secured its biggest mainstream electoral victory yesterday after Nick Griffin, the far right-wing party’s chairman, became the second BNP member to be elected to the European parliament.

Hours earlier, 61-year-old Andrew Brons, a former chairman of the National Front who has a long history of far right politics, became the BNP’s first MEP after winning almost 10% of the vote in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The Belfast Telegraph

This is perceived mainly as a backlash toward Europe importing foreign populations, most notably Muslims, who are not only failing to integrate but are implicated in riots in England, France and Germany. In addition, voters are lashing out at the dual welfare state and nanny state which has come about thanks to post-1960s liberal policies.

Leaving aside politics for a minute, let’s look at this in terms of the average voter. They are saying: let’s take care of our own, as we have traditionally seen them, and support traditional living and healthy normal people instead of worrying about subsidizing an unending stream of people with problems and bureaucratic programs with problems.

With the welfare state comes taking care of citizens who cannot take care of themselves, including those prone to crime, and with that comes the nanny state: endless rules to protect the clueless, and increasingly powerful political lobbies for every group of clueless both indigenous and not.

And from over in the United States:

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton announced a historic shift in government support for the poor. By requiring parents to work instead of merely handing them checks, Clinton vowed to “end welfare as we know it.”

This week, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking that goal quite literally, proposing to eliminate cash assistance for the state’s poorest families altogether. Legislators, poverty researchers and poor parents alike greeted with astonishment his unprecedented call to drop the state’s welfare-to-work program, known as CalWORKs.

The governor’s proposal would make California the only state in the nation to reject Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grants, the federal program that allows states to draw funds as long as they impose strict time limits and work requirements on recipients.

…

By week’s end, the governor says, he will unveil another $3 billion in cuts. He has said he knows there are faces behind all the dollars disappearing but that he has no other choice.

The Mercury News

I have a feeling that the old standby of the right, job insurance, will replace these troubled welfare programs.

Despite the positive bloviation in newspapers, welfare programs “help” many but the effects of that help seem to deviate little from where they already were. In addition, these programs both federal and local subsidize people for being out of work and having large families, which in turn encourages them to be out of work and have more kids.

Again, looking at this as the regular voter sees it: we all have to go to work. There is always work to be found. Let’s take care of the people who are responsible, and stop paying for the irresponsible — especially as we make more of them, and demographically, they will soon outnumber us and so have political power over us.

This is nothing more than a middle-class revolution on both continents. Marginalized by the 1960s, in which any sense of inequality among people was attacked, the middle class were seen as fortunate brats who rose above laborer status by cheating, stealing, lying, etc.

This view ignores the fact that middle class families create growth in cities and industry, as well as culture. They are the mainstay of all of these things and yet are a favorite target of both radical egalitarian activists and government nanny state programs that are designed to protect the irresponsible and incompetent from consequences of their actions.

It’s a mistake to view this issue as right or left. The original liberals had no bones of equality in them; they wanted to escape incompetent government that had become too powerful, and so emphasized individual “liberty” (an ill-defined word) through “freedom” (another vague term) using the device of “rights,” or absolute obligations to the individual by the state.

As we see how this vision has expanded from protecting people from government to creating more government that’s more intrusive, and has blurred from keeping good people safe to focusing on those who are in the most trouble and probably have arrived at that state by their own irresponsibility or incompetence, we’re seeing that liberalism and rightism have both been corrupted by this notion. It’s against natural selection. Even more, its fundamental rule seems to be taking from the responsible to compensate the irresponsible.

Not every poor person is irresponsible, but as history shows us, most societies remain poor not because of oppression, but because of lack of ability by their population, lack of political organization, and the corruption and incompetence that doom human endeavors. Most poor people are that way because of their own incompetence; when a friend of mine who grew up in a trailer park told me this, I almost vomited. But the more life stories and statistics I have seen, the more I realize it’s true.

Yet our government has, in the name of helping the most incompetent (sorry, “victimized” or “oppressed”), grown in size and started using that size to squeeze those who are generating wealth, knowledge, and culture for our society.

Those are the people we least want to squeeze.

Think about it this way: every society has had an impoverished class. Yet the societies that have risen have done so by encouraging their best to do their best. We’re doing the opposite: encouraging our least successful at the expense of our most successful.

We’re told by media that these plans are revenge against the super-rich, which sounds good because many people with absurd amounts of money got it by being in the right place at the right time. But they were also competent, even airheads like Madonna or George Soros, even if they were rewarded disproportionately. What bothers us most about them is that they’re competent at what they do, but not much else, and with their wealth they influence other areas of society with insane ideas. But these people are a tiny fraction.

The real target of this type of legislation is the middle class, and they are slowly turning away from their comfortable distractions, televisions and movies and vacations in the Hamptons, to see that they are the new endangered species — in the name of helping people we consider so helpless and oppressed that it seems cruel, corrupt, punitive and mean not to help them.

Yet these people exist in every society, and in societies that have failed, they are the vast majority.

History teaches us this lesson: support your worst, and end up being a third world kleptocracy. And history is on people’s minds quite a bit these days. Not just the recession; that passes. The vast political changes, the vast social changes, and the continuing misery of it all — the ugly cities dominated by commercial interests, the ongoing ecocide which global warming does not encompass, the boring jobs and many rules, the corrupt politicians, the bad culture, the dumb people everywhere acting like they deserve whatever their arrogant behavior leads them toward because they’re equal — this is what worries the middle class.

“My mate Penny likes to rant about standards of living and argues that we in the west have a rather low standard of living. Stressed out, working our asses off to buy low quality food and having no time for our families or communities. Living in fear of poverty, terrorism, governments and police and seeking meaning in purchases an possessions”

Forum Topic: The BNP — How worried should we be?

Realism and discontent at society failing is causing a backlash. People want to raise their kids free from propaganda for non-procreative and family-destructive sex, drug use, anti-family lifestyles, weird politics and cults that mislead for two decades and then leave burnt-out lonely single people, etc.

They’re not Conservative, but lower-case-c conservative: they know that what works biologically, including natural selection, will always work, and no amount of technology or government can change that. There is an eternal wisdom to living sanely, chastely, without a need for distraction or weirdness. A calm in the soul. A clear role. A culture that forms out of this and protects against the gross excesses of commerce and government alike.

Normal, functional middle-class families don’t want to raise their kids to inherit a huge national debt. They don’t want to raise them in a society of incompetents, or a society that subsidizes incompetents. They don’t want to raise them in a surveillance state, a nanny state or a total state — but as incompetence rises, they see how that’s going to be inevitable. More individuals doing stupid or criminal acts requires more cops and more powerful cops.

Families of the middle class are what keeps America and Europe afloat, economically, demographically, politically and socially.

The middle class is sensing that it’s about to be destroyed by family-incompetent urbanites, various people who find it impossible to succeed in this society, and other revengeful people who hate the traditional, lower-case-c conservative lifestyle.

It’s fighting back through its proxies.

And some of this is just common sense: every society in debt, spending more on newcomers who don’t fit in than on its best hopes, etc.

The people who aren’t self-destructive don’t want to get dragged down by the irresponsibility of those who are self-destructive. Their law is one of the able: life does not make it hard to succeed enough to have a good life, and you don’t need great wealth, but you do need self-discipline, moral awareness, self control and a sense of reality.

They’re seeing how compensating those who deny reality to avoid facing the bad consequences of their own behavior is creating a society which marginalizes the competent. That means their children will inherit a nightmare. And so, they’re fighting back — on both continents.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, crowdism