Inevitable Thing Was Inevitable

the social structure of tedious dullards

You probably missed it, but we just survived a terrifying apocalypse.

America 250 was hard for a lot of people, because we’re having a lot of difficult conversations about being in trauma right now (screenshot, click the link to listen to the idiot whine):

We’re trapped in such a painful malaise that we have to send explorers out to try to find other countries we can emulate so we can be happy again. But good news, because the explorers say that higher taxes and a lot more government programs (the “Nordic model”) would make us feel better.

And of course…

Computer, enhance!

America is very hard and painful, please send another five million dollars to my Learing Center so I can afford my SSRIs. The content of the shameful Mamdani speech is beneath consideration, but you already more or less know what he said just by looking at these grim faces. Boo hoo America, why is it so terrible, we need more government.

They’ve just become boring, and are somehow convinced that more whining and sad-sackery are the keys to victory. But this is where the road was always going to end. Lulu what’s-her-name pretending to writhe in terror because she saw some airplanes was a structural inevitability.

Shocking no one, I’m inclined to start the story of the inevitable thing with the Gilded Age “incorporation of America,” the emergence of a managerial class, and the growth of the “new elite” that Christopher Lasch described as having seceded “not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.” They define themselves against, and I think this is exactly what they’re doing this weekend:

The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.

But the oppositionalism born in the era of Woodrow Wilson got a steroid injection with the Glorious Coronation of God-King Barack the Holy Lightbringer, after which the thing that calls itself the cosmopolitan “left,” the Cathedral of the professional sensemaking institutions, abandoned argument entirely and transitioned to full-time emotional signaling and status performance: “permission structures,” cultural gestures about acceptability and the absence of choice.

Q: Is an individual mandate from central government requiring the purchase of health insurance from private corporations a reasonable policy that lives within the boundaries of our system of limited government?

A: Ohhhh, stop being a RACIST!!!!

We’ve had a years-long ratcheting effect in which the automaticity of the defining-against became more and more urgent, and the steroid injection of the Obama years became the extra-strength-steroids of the pandemic, when the failure to BELIEVE IN SCIENCE became a culturally fatal act of apostasy.

They defined themselves against Middle America, then defined themselves against Middle America, then defined themselves against Middle America, then DEFINED THEMSELVES AGAINST MIDDLE AMERICA!!!!!!!, and here we are. There’s no logic to it, anymore, and no argument. It’s a set of reflexes. I doubt very much that they hear themselves, or perceive their reception. They inherited a set of noises, and the sense that making the noises makes them high-status, so they make the noises. I am agonized by the existence of Orange Man’s terrifying airplanes. We are experiencing national trauma. America has declined into a horrible malaise. Thay have seceded “not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.”

Zohran Mamdani plus Barbara McQuade plus Nicholas Kristof plus Lulu what’s-her-name, making their squinty faces and signaling that vulgar orange things make them hurt inside:

It’s all just comically stupid and boring. I had a good weekend, and I’m planning to have an enjoyable week. You should too.