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| KEK Wars 4 - the Future |
| 2018-08-19 |
| Conclusion: On the basis of the points discussed above, I think it's safe to predict that no future attempt to stop Trump in his tracks will get any further than the ones we've already seen. The efforts to hit Trump over the head with an investigation or stab him with media tirades will doubtless continue‐in fact, with an eye toward the legends, I wouldn't be surprised if the Mueller investigation is still lumbering ineffectually onward for a long time to come, and I'd be amazed if there's the slightest decrease in the sniping from the media and the official intelligentsia‐but none of it will affect the outcome. At the beginning of 2025, when Donald Trump hands over the presidency to his successor, he'll look back on a long string of crises that never quite managed to derail him. By that time, furthermore, the nation and the world will have changed irrevocably. With an eye to the first two parts of this series of posts, it's not too hard to see the new realities taking shape on the far side of the Trump era. The drastic pruning of federal regulations, the end of one-sided free trade agreements that encourage the offshoring of working class jobs, and the end of the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration and the resulting downward pressure on wages and benefits‐all core policies of the Trump administration‐represent a dramatic rebalancing of economic power in American society away from the managerial aristocracy. The realities of politics being what they are, that will bring about an equally dramatic rebalancing of political influence. We're already seeing a lively socialist insurgency threatening the Democratic Party establishment, and a less dramatic but equally far-reaching influx of populist candidates into the GOP is also well under way. Despite all the shrill denunciations of the mainstream media and the official intelligentsia, There Is An Alternative‐in fact, more than one‐and that in itself shows that the enforced consensus of the last forty years is shattering around us. That will have equally dramatic effects on the international scene. The managerial aristocracy of the recent past had the power and wealth it did because the United States maintained hegemony over most of the world. Our empire‐yes, I know, it's impolite to use such terms, but let's please be real‐our empire, as I was saying, gave the five per cent of humanity that lived in the United States a quarter of the planet's resources and a third of its manufactured products, and of course those were by no means equally distributed among Americans. The way that old-money families and tech-stock godzillionaires alike have by and large rallied around the opposition to the Trump administration shows that they know perfectly well which way the wind is blowing. In the history of every empire, there comes a point when the costs of maintaining the empire exceeds the profits. We got to that point quite some time ago, and the policies that drove the US working class into destitution and misery can best be understood as attempts to keep the privileged classes comfortable by shoving the rising costs of empire onto everyone else. The end of free-trade arrangements, the retreat from foreign military commitments such as NATO, and the first steps toward a modus vivendi with Russia, North Korea, and other rival nations are necessary steps in the retreat from empire. Off in the distance, on the far side of the Changer's upriver journey, we can see the first dim foreshadowings of post-imperial America, and with any luck, of a nation a little less riven by rigid class barriers and so a little more likely to deal with its many pressing problems. Mind you, fifty years from now, there will doubtless still be people who get their moth-eaten pussy hats down from a box in the attic, and reminisce fondly about the good old days when the United States could still pretend to be the world's irreplaceable nation, when Barack Obama used drone strikes to vaporize wedding parties on the other side of the world and the deplorables still knew their place. That's the nature of outworn aristocracies; on a broader scale, it's the nature of historical change‐especially when the deep patterns of the collective psyche surge into action and leave the presumptions of a fading era shattered in their wake. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #2 Fixed |
| Posted by: Frank G 2018-08-19 11:39 |
| #1 Ummmmmmmmmmm...should be KEK Wars. Before coffee... |
| Posted by: Bobby 2018-08-19 11:11 |