Amerika

The momentum toward regime change worldwide rides the coattails of the failure of democracy. The coming realist revolution will kick off as the promise of democracy fades, since after two centuries the Utopia it has promised is no closer and we are now bankrupt, dysfunctional, and mired in diversity conflict.

As usual, the forces actually manipulating the world exist outside of the political system. It responds to changes in the world, even if simply by denying them, because it exists as a service to the needs of citizens, sort of like police and courts do.

In this case, the Leftist revolution which kicked off during The Enlightenment™ will come to an end because after two centuries, it failed to achieve its Utopian aims, and left behind a ruin of bankrupt diversity dystopia instead. At this point, our governments cannot escape the mess they have created.

For example, national debts will finally wreck markets because they have made societies bottom-heavy:

In a note titled: “New leader, old problems,” Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, said the UK budget deficit is “still set to exceed 5% of GDP, the current account deficit is a huge 8% of GDP” and forecast that the UK will contract by 0.8% of GDP in 2023.”

Keep in mind that America is in an even worse position, but has cooked the books by carefully not mentioning that its deficit drops are relative to the current administration previously overspending even worse than it has lately:

But the non-partisan Bipartisan Policy Center said the reason for the decreased deficit was increased revenues through taxes and reduced federal spending, which came after covid-related spending expired.

The best part about democracy is that they can let these facts slip out via the “free press” knowing full well that no group of people large enough to form a plurality will read that far into the article.

For years, our societies have gotten along with tax-borrow-and-spend because the public perception was that something good was happening, and that it would be temporary. We would pay out the anti-poverty and anti-diversity fees in one giant burst, like the New Deal or Great Society, and then these problems would be vanquished.

Two things happened. First, the costs went up and the problems got bigger; we still have race riots in our cities, impoverished people committing crime, and rotted third world ghettos in the heart of first world America. Second, it became clear that the blank cheque to create “equality” had become a runaway fixation for government.

This finally peaked when an election needed to be stolen and an economy crashed to keep the one guy who was going to disrupt the system of tax-borrow-spend for diversity from becoming dominant, and COVID-19 became a fixation. It offered power to the weak and neurotic bureaucrats on all levels, and they began acting like totalitarians.

Government is an industry like anything else, more of a bazaar than a cathedral. People come in to have careers, make money, get pensions, and get out. It has no singular will; it reflects many people trying to keep the system together and avoid any fundamental changes because this would interrupt their careers.

The careerists have engineered a system where three-quarters of our budget goes directly to ideological programs. Aid to Ukraine, Israel, and corporations is a drop in the bucket compared to that, as is our military budget.

Any new “blank cheque” — anti-poverty, green energy, drunk driving abatement, anti-drug, anti-racism, the war on terror, the war on drugs, COVID-19 — becomes a new mini-industry that people attach to in order to advance their careers. Given the option, they will demand as much as the voters allow.

At first, the voters go along with this because of the symbolism of good feelings. Over time, this symbolism leads away from realism, and society in its pursuit of ideological good feelings creates a crisis state not just in its economy, but threatening its own stability:

But it is worth remembering that the August 1968 monetary policy mistake (cutting rates by 25 basis points, despite the fact that inflation was creeping up) coincided with the peak of US intervention in the Vietnam war, a conflict that played as big a part as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” policies in widening the US fiscal deficit — tiny though it was by modern standards — and ultimately breaking the dollar’s peg to gold in 1971. In 2022, a war played an analogous role in pouring kerosene on the inflationary fire. Food and energy prices were driven up the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and the EU.

It goes without saying that the return of great-power conflict has made the life of policymakers difficult, just as it did in 1973. I recently heard it said that the 2020s are not likely to be as inflationary as the 1970s because labor is less organized, so the risk of a wage-price spiral is lower. But I would draw your attention to a number of important differences that make our contemporary circumstances more worrisome than the situation in the 1970s.

Productivity growth is lower today in nearly all OECD countries than it was 50 years ago. Demographic trends are worse today, with a significantly higher ratio of dependents to the working-age population. Fiscal positions are worse today, with much larger amounts of government debt and projected deficits relative to GDP, not least in the US.

When we see society chase ideology, we see the scam in progress. It has no conspiracy behind it; like a hatch of spider eggs it consists of many little conspiracies, each running in its own direction. Some are little cliques spanning institutions, but most are simply individuals cashing in on the latest trend.

The more power ideology has, the more wealth follows these trends, because as government shifts to ideology, that determines which industries survive becaus ethose are where the subsidies go and the regulations open doors. When government dumps a trillion dollars on a problem, it creates a new industry and industries to support it.

While the following assessment of Generation X is both incorrect and oversimplified, it does apply just fine to anyone who witnessed America before Clinton. By the second Clinton term, America suffered the same malaise it did today, after the boost of good feelings in the first Clinton term.

People who see a society before ideology tend to prefer it because it aims for function and normal life, what is now called “cozy” on the internet. Then the ideology comes, the careerists arrive, the government swells, and reality becomes forgotten, creating alienated people who simply want the pre-ideology society of their youth back:

What makes X-ers like me (born in 1977) so damn conservative? In the context of 2022, there is no great mystery. We grew up in the 1980s, a blessedly simpler time when life was fun and carefree, when the USA was cruising toward Cold War triumph, and when truth, justice, and the American way were both time-tested certainties and the unstoppable wave of the future. As far as we knew, we were living in the best of all possible worlds, riding our bikes without helmets, going to raves without social media tracking our every move and pill, knowing our moms and dads couldn’t be helicopter parents if they had the whole Army Air Cavalry Brigade at their disposal. Every problem had a solution. Every feeling found a form. Every dream became a reality.

Moronic boomers took our complacency for laziness. We were derided as “slackers,” dismissed as the first generation who would live worse than our parents. We were chided for our cynicism toward the Sixties ideals that our elders still mouthed but had abandoned so hypocritically that for us they were little more than a good laugh when the adults left the room.

For a brief moment, we were the Brat Pack ready to take the reins in a Pax Americana. Then, as the college students and young professionals of the 1990s, we watched the boomers piss it all away. Scandal followed scandal. Power grab followed power grab. One institution after the next was corroded by corruption and greed. By the end of the decade, the first boomer commander-in-chief left us wondering what the definition of “is” was as he testified in the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years. The boomers knew they had failed. But rather than admit it, they retreated into Bob Dylan’s tedious word salads and hid behind corporatized Beatles lyrics.

When an ammo dump bakes off, it starts with a single explosion. This detonates others, raising the temperature. Then everything starts to go off at once. This is the scenario that is facing us in the future, held at bay for now by the speculators who are making a lot of money betting on how bad things will get.

Democracy is headed toward this ammo dump explosion because it has run out of money because it has pursued ideology instead of reality. Ideology is unavoidably anti-realist; it is based on the idea of correcting reality with the appearances and symbols that make people feel safe, accepted, and valued even if they are being used.

All ideology builds itself around some idea of equality. The Left is the “it’s anyone else’s fault but mine” party, and egalitarianism by presuming human equality serves to separate cause and effect. The actions of individuals are no longer responsible for their plight, since they are equal; someone did this to them, and it must be corrected.

Every time society goes down this path it becomes corrupted. Plato noted that this had been true for thousands of years in his time, 2400 years ago. We have all seen where the Soviet Union ended up. Even more, we can recall FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, and other American flirtations with Utopian equality.

Eventually however the bill has to be paid. The West is out of money because we spent it all on diversity, including those anti-poverty programs. This has produced permanent economic malaise at a time when we need to be gearing up to defeat enemies both foreign and domestic. The collapse arising from that will enforce regime change on democracy.

Tags: debt, deficit, democracy, ideology