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Following up on yesterday’s post, the default performance of a leadership class in a crisis — across many boundaries of time and place — is to present the appearance of going down into the street and linking arms with the people. The king is the king because he shows up at just the right moment and says that he feels sorry for the poor bastards who can’t bleed on the battlefield with us today.

So here’s Joe Biden explaining why people think the country is moving in the wrong direction:

RNC Research @RNCResearch

Biden claims he's made things better but people are “psychologically” unable to "feel happy."

It’s the “fuck you” version of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech: Look, the enemy is here, and they outnumber us, and maybe it looks bad to you, but that’s just because you’re an idiot and you don’t understand, and you’re, like, psychologically defective. So, uh, anyway, men, uh, to your places for the, you know, uh, the battle.

Over and over and over again, the default posture of the contemporary governing class across the English-speaking world — the baked-in performative instinct of a Dan Andrews, a Jacinda Ardern, a Justin Trudeau, a Joe Biden, a Barack “Bitter Clingers” Obama — is to offer a petulant bill of grievances against the trash our better kind is stuck governing. Things seem bad, folks, but it’s because you suck. This is so entirely who they are and how they think that they don’t even notice they’re doing it; it’s the joke about the fish who says, “Water’s cold today.” They’re the second fish, the one that says, “What’s water?” A Justin Trudeau or a Jacinda Ardern has absolutely not one fiber of being that whispers to them, “Psst, go stand on the tank.” Why would they go out and…interact…with…oh god, yuck. Truck drivers?

We have 535 roughly human forms serving in the two houses of Congress, and not one of them responded to the January 6 protest spinning out of control by walking out and talking to protesters. All over the world, through most of history, that’s exactly the instinct that most people in leadership roles would have had, especially in a moment of apparent risk: to move to the crisis, to the center, and to speak.

This is the core of the problem, and it’s only solved by a collapse, details TBD. A society can’t be led by people who disdain it, fear it, and hold themselves apart from it. There’s no question at all that we’re in a historical end stage of some kind, watching the grim decline of a dying status group. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.