Amerika

On the Right these days, one popular trope involves the replacement of the West with the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — which delights conservatives because in their zeal to achieve a mass audience, they fall prey to the siren call of the Useful Idiot.

Useful Idiots after all can be counted to do one thing: oppose whatever is good. They are discontented, lost, and sad people who are venting their rage at their society by conspiring to destroy it through subversion, retaliation, sabotage, and revenge.

Conservatives see the huge Useful Idiot audience out there and try to capture it, not realizing that it will never swing their way. Useful Idiots do not want solutions; they want movie backdrops painted in glowing buzzwords and feelings of superiority. They want to be right where everyone else is wrong.

In short, democracy ruins everything: since it is based on symbolism, not results which are intangible and immeasurable by most and happen in the long term, it selects those who tell plausible lies that mobilize people right now even if they result in defeat months or years later.

Made deceptive by the need for votes and lobbyist dollars, conservatives turn away from the obvious elephants in the room and focus on whatever has provoked outrage in the Crowd (of individualists). In the hands of the herd, we spend all our time debating abortion and school prayer.

You gain Useful Idiots by appealing to contrarianism. When voters get angry at something, they want it destroyed and run to its opposite, just like they do every four or eight years when the party in charge screws up. This is a perpetual Revolution narrative: destroy whatever offends.

Consequently, Republicans are playing to people who are angry at the modern West by attacking the West, instead of looking at the causes of its decline like equality, democracy, socialism, and diversity, since those are beyond critique lest one be seen as “racist” or “sexist” (or something).

This has brought forth a new narrative. In their eyes, the West became decadent and destroyed itself, so we should welcome our new overlords who do not have the same Leftism propelling them. What they miss is that these new overlords are just as Leftist, just slightly more socially conservative.

To pander to the audience who finds this appealing, conservatives and others have unleashed the rising BRICs narrative to appeal to people who do not think very clearly:

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are trying to position themselves as representatives of the Global South, providing “an alternative model to the G7.”

The most recent economic developments in BRICS member states have little to do with the initial myths upon which the group was founded. Of the five members, only China has achieved sustained and extensive growth since then.

Since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, the BRICS countries have only distanced themselves further from the so-called West. Neither India, Brazil, South Africa or China are taking part in sanctions against Russia. This is increasingly clear with near-historic levels of trade between India and Russia, or in Brazil’s dependence on Russian fertilizer.

In other words, the Cold War is playing out again: longtime allies Russia and China have gathered around them some vassal states dependent on their resources, and are using this to form a bloc against the West, which they despise not for its liberalism, but that it is foreign to them.

Behind the scenes as usual we see the Chinese, who have never forgiven the West for its support of the Chinese Nationalists during the 1940s or the West showing up the East after the West bounced back from the Mongol invasions.

Not only that, but the costume that conceals raw Communism is slipping as China, with its free ticket as the factory of the West coming to an end after Trump called it out, has resumed its pursuit of centralized economic control of its population:

And Xi Jinping, China’s leader since late 2012, has been reasserting the CCP’s control over the economy, weakening the hand of private businesspeople and tech entrepreneurs, whom he views as becoming too powerful and contributing to widening wealth inequality.

Roberts said Xi’s move risks “damaging China’s growth model for the last few decades.”

Collier said Xi appears to have recognized the need for China to transform its investment-driven economic model to a consumer-driven model.

Communism is properly understood as the third-world system. Instead of being motivated by culture or transcendent goals, the society controls its people through manipulation of wealth, basically bribing them to obey.

Warlords hold most of the wealth and give out favors to those who are properly obedient, slowly starving dissidents and others who refuse to show unthinking loyalty to the central command. Asia may have formalized this system but every third world nation uses it in some form.

The BRICs stand behind and promote this third world system, which is more Leftist than the mixed economies of the West, although the push for civil rights (“equality”) has made the West weak and neurotic.

Despite the verbiage about “equality,” its primary goal is control, although words and symbols of equal acceptance and social status tend to sway the distracted, fatalistic, and opportunistic third world audience into supporting their warlords.

History seems to be showing us that for mature societies, avoiding the risk of revolution becomes the primary goal of government. As a result, it settles on bribery with half of the income of its highest earnings bracket, who then use that as an excuse to earn more through corruption.

The BRICs use the third world system to manage revolution, and the only problem in the West is that we have adopted a similar system — “equality” — that we maintain with our massive wealth. If we are to save ourselves, it is by changing methods, not turning on our societies.

In the meantime, the BRICs face massive problems of their own. The Chinese miracle is ending; India depends on Western companies for its wealth; Brazil is unstable and facing sudden decline under Communism; Russia has experienced total economic stagnation, and South Africa is coming apart.

The grass always seems greener on the other side, but there is no hope there for conservatives. No one is coming to save us; the best they can do is offer a worse version of what we have. We must fix ourselves or watch these incompetents take over the world.

Tags: BRICS, third world system, useful idiots