Amerika

People talk about bipartisanship like it was a good thing and division like it was bad, but the latter means that we actually have options and the former means an invisible monopoly. More likely they are talking about our national incompatibility that has permanent split our population into two camps.

One camp is a broad one. They want social conservatism maybe, but many want simply fiscal conservatism. Others want fiscal liberalism with social conservatism, or worse, the libertarian ideal of anarchy with a neutered government that probably cannot respond to anything but a direct invasion.

Libertarians destroy elections just like evangelicals, mainly because people realize that the cost of American isolationism is war breaking out across the world. Fiscal conservatives are too lax on social issues, which the Left then uses to make fiscally Leftist policy.

This camp however is at least dedicated to function. The other camp is motivated purely by ideology in a quest for equality as both method and goal that leads to Utopia (in theory). Because they are more united, this camp is more effective and motivated than the disspirited, divided Right.

Since the Clinton years however, partisanship has accelerated and no one seems to be motivated to find out why. If they looked more closely at events leading up to this point, and who supports each side, they would see that diversity divided America by forcing internal opposition upon us:

The study outlines how Trump’s moral failings and lack of presidential character did nothing to undermine evangelical support for him because the US Christian right coalition is held together by “whiteness,” and being white in the U.S. can still mean enhanced access to political rights, economic prosperity, and legal benefits.

Dr. Crockford said, “Social changes, including the prediction of a non-white voter majority by 2048, means evangelicals have elevated Donald Trump to a messianic figure, equivalent to Cyrus the Great, a leader who will break down the current social and political order so it can be rebuilt for the benefit of believers.”

“Trump’s willingness to speak only to his followers positions him as a religious leader addressing the faithful rather than a political leader who is presumed to lead the nation regardless of whether they voted for him. However, the merging of politics with religion advocated in Christian nationalism calls for this kind of leadership; one who excludes those who do not follow their values. An American leader, in the eyes of Christian nationalists, should only represent and concern themselves with ‘real Americans’.”

To translate this, we have to see that what Trump represents is the functional old America, versus the politicized and diversity-driven nü-Amerika. People see what diversity is doing to the country and want to stop it by cutting off the free stuff and the government that sponsors it.

Even more, people see that a permanent class of bureaucrats and the contractors they support have taken over America in the name of things the voters like, such as civil rights, fighting climate change, and squashing poverty.

Their goal is to, as soon as an issue rears its head, bind goal and method forever. You dislike pollution? Here is our plan; you either support our plan, or you like pollution and are bad which justifies us destroying you.

Using this method, they co-opt any issue into doing what is convenient for the bureaucracy, which is an unwinnable quest for Utopia that coincidentally pays lots of salaries and allows lots of favor-trading. To them, politics is a job where the goal is personal profit, status, and power.

By formalizing government through the administrative state and regulatory agencies, we have created a permanent bureaucracy that spans all parties, public and private industry, even the military and law enforcement. Its goal is to expand its power like Tammany Hall did.

They did this by creating a Total System where there is only one path to power, wealth, and status but it also requires political obedience. They can now determine who gets into the elites, instead of letting just about anyone try for it.

Trump represents a backlash against the notion of a two-tiered society with the politically correct on top and everyone else suppressed by the educated class of power bureaucrats:

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

As part of this “education,” they mean that you must read the right books, listen to the right music, and have the right opinions. It is just like in third grade, or sophomore year in high school. They have formed a little clique, gang, club, or cult based around fads, trends, and panics.

The fiction they rely on is not meritocracy but consent. You are assumed to agree with whatever the elections decide even though most of the voters are barely mentally there. Therefore, if they get ahead, you were the one who pulled a chair up to the craps table and lost.

Bureaucrats love “education” because it selects for the obedient above all else, the right-thinking next, and distantly, talent. Many of the smartest people you will know in life have dropped out of school after seeing it as the hoop-jumping exercise that it is.

To be “educated,” you must be liberal and for the most part atheistic. You must believe in “science” that consists of finding correlations among the cherry picked data and rationalizing inverse causality as causality. You must be interested in the current intellectual fads and trends.

In order to ensure that loyalty is absolute, the system imports scab voters and then “disables” them by assuming they are nearly retarded and giving them curved grades and other boosts to help. This creates people who are incompetent but loyal:

However, by labeling students with these issues as disabled and providing them an accommodation that doesn’t aid in promoting agency or give them tools to overcome and compete with their peers, disability offices are exacerbating the problem and kicking the can down the road.

Professors may pass these students, often under the pressure of a disability office. But the students will enter the workforce—and life—expecting a lowering of bars rather than being trained to scale them. It is highly unlikely a manager will give them double the time to complete a task as they give others, and many careers require reading and executing tasks in expedient fashion. These students may be given superficial, short-term equality in the form of higher attendance scores or test grades. However, the education they are receiving—in spite of the insistence that accommodations do not fundamentally alter the curriculum, standards or rigor—is less rigorous and is altering the curriculum, making a college degree even less an indicator of one’s ability to analyze, process and problem-solve at an advanced level.

Many of the students who are accommodated are actually being badly shortchanged. Long-term equality means that college students of all backgrounds, including those marginalized by race or income, should graduate with the ability to take an exam in the format intended, read at a pace that would be expected in a professional career and make an oral presentation … in front of a group of people. If, at the college level, students are unable to meet universal curricular and testing standards with the support systems of tutoring and therapy in place, the college should not change the bar to ensure that they do. No driving school would allow students to do their driver’s exam on a closed road, with a bumper car or grant them time and a half to decide whether or not to merge onto a highway, even if the student had anxiety or a learning disability.

With this in mind, we can see why so much of populist rhetoric resembles a battle between the organic culture and the bureaucratic ideology. We, the naturalistic, like our woods, hunting, culture, faith, heritage, history, and way of life. This offends the bureaucrat.

The organic culture wants life that relates to reality; the ideological bureaucracy wants anti-realism so that it can demand people repeat its half-truths as fact to show their loyalty. It works solely within the system, where organic culture operates outside of it.

At this juncture, it seems very much to be the system versus the people who actually do things. The Left are rationalizers and the Right are naturalists, so the organic culture tends toward the Right as it has done since the beginning of this nation.

As a result, people see a division between ordinary functional people and parasitic elites who work toward their own power, status, and wealth at the expense of the organic nation:

A well-known feature of populist discourse cropped up repeatedly: the assertion of a fundamental opposition between the “people” and the “elite.”

According to the party, the people are penalized by the elite’s “green policies” because the policies advantage the affluent and multinational corporations. Moreover, the party also upholds the vision of a virtuous “people” whose strength and collective action are the key to sustainable development.

This takes us back to the old debate about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. Bureaucrats and lawyers love to find little details to exploit; naturalists look at the intention of the law as it fits into how our system works, and aim for that.

In the same way, naturalists are ends-over-means people. Find out what is right and make it happen by any means necessary, they say. Bureaucrats are means-over-ends people. They do not care about what is right, only that everyone follows the correct procedure and is “safe” and “peaceful.”

The people who care about results in reality, and therefore are ends-over-means — find what is real, choose the best option, and make it happen by any means necessary — are finding themselves opposed to the schoolmarm managerial-administrative “deep state” bureaucracy.

Like most power structures, the bureaucracy achieved sustenance without results, and therefore views its position as a monopoly, where it should act for its own interests and go through the motions for the rest of us. This is no different from what happens to big corporations, unions, and volunteer groups.

Now people are agitating to get the goal of our civilization back in focus, and see themselves as opposed to the bureaucracy, which they perceive has become tyrannical now that its programs have been around long enough to fail and it has no new ideas:

Of course, their ultimate targets go far beyond Trump. It’s the America First movement. It’s the normal, hardworking Americans who have gotten screwed by their globalist policies and selfish disregard. It’s the Constitution, rule of law, and the social contract that have kept our freedoms in place. Those of us who put America first stand in the way of their ceaseless effort to overthrow all of it and grant themselves total power and control.

Brooks sees this as a class war, but more likely it is a battle between those who can succeed outside of the system and those who are dependent upon the system.

This reflects the difference in function. Those who make things work directly tend to be naturalistic, or ends-over-means; opportunities arise, are met, and the system evolves as a result. Those who depend on the system and have paper-shuffling jobs are more concerned with optics and symbolism instead.

People are rejecting the false reality created by democracy. The symbols, emotions, and rationalizations used to manipulate us together form a giant distraction, and normies limit their thought to this realm, which leaves out how the world actually works outside of votes, money, and products.

When societies establish “systems,” they move away from the naturalistic way of life, which is to find out what must be done and reward those who do it. Instead we get meritocracy, elections, commerce, and other proxies for reality that eventually turn entirely anti-realistic.

Our bureaucrats have governed us now for over a century based on the presumed moral rightness of diversity. This is their blank cheque and mandate for rule, overriding any social contract because of its presumed moral correctness.

The divided politics we see out there today reflect some people wanting to have the system continue so that they do not need to change their thinking to see how diversity has failed, and the rest of us who simply want to bring back function, optics and morality and symbols be damned.

Tags: bureaucracy, deep state, donald j. trump, naturalism, optics, symbolism