Terms like “regulatory capture” make sense to us because we live in a society that has foolishly made itself complex enough to have enough loopholes, footnotes, exceptions, and other unassociated details so that the criminal-minded can work around the intentions of our laws.
In regulatory capture, a government agency tasked with regulating an industry finds itself forced to hire those who work in that industry, leading to a reverse takeover. Sometimes it occurs simply because people who work in the same industry get chummy, a type of peer pressure that rewards not rocking the boat.
Few will point out however how the middle class voters has enacted regulatory capture on politicians. To be middle class, you must care about nothing other than your own prospects; this is the nature of being cleverer than most but not quite wide-spectrum intelligent. The “bourgeois” mentality says “forget the world, focus on your career.”
Our civilization fell under the spell of this middle class mentality years ago when the barons who overthrew the English kings with the Magna Carta took some of their ranks from the rising middle classes. Money became more important than virtue, comfort more valued than heroism, convenience more than clarity of understanding.
When it comes to politics, the middle classes adore that “do not rock the boat” mentality. They would rather pay off troubling groups than fight them, and they fear scandal that might hurt business. If you can imagine a hamster in a voting booth, it is the middle class.
That includes the upper middle class, who now have enough “education” and credentialing to feel themselves entitled to an opinion they do not fully understand. This group, whose IQ range begins in the mid-120s, are generally more competent than others but still have that sticky middle class equilibrium mindset.
Equilibrium allows you to continue shopping, working, saving, and may bring you more customers as egalitarianism enfranchises yet another group of formerly excluded people. More people means more who will buy, or so goes the theory. If you imagine the middle class as a greedy shopkeeper, you have the general idea.
When we allowed the middle class to flex its power through the vote and donations to political parties, we guaranteed that we would then get hamsters for leaders. Take the case of Paul [[[ RYAN ]]] who speaks out against anything on the Right but Buckleyite neoconservatism:
Ryan made the comments in conversation with National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg. The two conservatives spoke at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. Ryan had harsh words for the alt-right, an umbrella term for extreme right-wing individuals who reject mainstream conservatism and often embrace racism and white supremacy.
“That is not conservatism. That is racism. That is nationalism. That is not what we believe in. That is not the founding vision, that is not the founders’ creed,” Ryan said. …
He said the faction “hijacked” conservative terms like “western civilization” and distorted the conservative message.
“It is identity politics. It’s antithetical to what we believe and it’s a hijacking of our terms,” Ryan said. “How do we get the core back? How do we get back classic liberalism properly understood in the 21st century?”
As you remember, William F. [[[ BUCKLEY ]]] took over conservatism in the 1960s when it reeled back from the Leftist assault in the 1960s. He invented a solution that involved abandoning core conservatism for libertarianism with a few token social issues, and morons everywhere still parrot that this is “true conservatism.”
Conservatism is the idea that we conserve the best of the past, which requires us to both know the past and the different results of our actions in reality, and be aware of how one would judge what is good, excellent, virtuous, beautiful, true, or simply, relevant. It is not an ideology but a philosophical discipline.
Part of that includes conserving populations, such as the Western Europeans who created America. As a more recent Irish immigrant, Buckley could not participate in that worldview, so he neutered conservatism into classical liberalism — now called libertarianism — with a smattering of notions about how “the right people” behave.
That gave the Left the green light it needed to roll right over conservatives. Conservatives had retreated into “personal choice” and making money, and left the institutions ripe for conquest. Not surprisingly, the Left won victory after victory while conservatives bloviated about working hard and going to church.
This makes Buckley, while not a stupid man and indeed often a man of great vision, a fool who betrayed his own side. However, what he said avoided conflict and so it was popular with the middle class, in particular the classic inert blockhead conservative who wanted to keep ignoring the problem so they could get rich.
Now we get to the stage where Buckleyite morons like Paul Ryan, who apparently learned nothing of the Generation X experience, tell us that “true conservatism” is actually this libertarian nonsense. If only they were straight classical liberals, we might respect them… but instead they add symbolic Christianity, symbolic morality, and symbolic masculinity to the mix, effectively replacing the real versions of those things with nonsense.
You know you are in the presence of a Buckleyite moron when you hear opinions that are designed to obscure a bigger task behind an easy one. Here are just a few:
Paul Ryan wants a country based entirely on an economic system and set of laws. He denies that a country is anything more, like a people, an organic culture, a spirit, or a way of life. He wants to, like the Communists did, have a bureaucracy set up a series of trapdoors and hoops through which the elite jump to prove their loyalty.
He thinks that this is the future. After all, people in the twentieth century thought it was a future, and fought wars killing millions of their brothers for it! It comes with nice egalitarian, ideological terms like “freedom” and “liberty” and “rugged individualism.”
Really what he describes is how civilizations die. His system legitimizes and incorporates herd behavior, bringing behavior to the lowest common denominator. Certainly some obedient and compliant people like himself benefit, but what about the nation? What about its future? He either has no clue or does not care.
The future of humankind lies in a rejection of modernity for futurism. Instead of a bureaucratic utilitarian existence, we want the Wild West, but while we explore the stars. We want the best rising above the rest, instead of tests and loyalty quizzes. We want an organic, natural life that uses technology for greatness.
People are tired of just good enough. They are bored sick with red tape. They see how the more laws we write and rules we make, the weaker we get and the stronger the bad people get. They see that Paul Ryan, for his selfishness, ultimately belongs to that group of bad people even if he “means well.”
In other words, we are turning our back on the middle class bourgeois hamster view, and turning toward an elitist and aristocratic view. We want social order more than endless “freedom” that results in social decay. We want hierarchy and rank; we want roles, duties, and privileges instead of constant infighting over “muh rights.”
The Alt-Right tapped into this sentiment, which is a cultural wave that is bigger than politics. Modern society is utilitarian, bureaucratic, ideological, and conformist, and we think it sucks. We want to bring back aspiration and joy in life. We want to travel the stars.
That scares the subordinate little cucks and so they call us names — based in the exclusively Leftist idea of egalitarianism — and tell us how we are backward. The opposite is true: they are defending an old and failed order, and we are the future.
Tags: bourgeois, cuckservatives, irish question, middle class, muh rights, paul ryan, william f. buckley