It’s dying. The inflection point is here, and will be easier than it has seemed. A new cycle is beginning. There will be friction and backsliding, but it’s done: We’re going somewhere else, now.
I’ve argued for years, agreeing with Christopher Lasch and Angelo Codevilla, that we’ve credentialed a supposedly elite class on the basis of the ability to engage in ritual chanting and social compliance performance. Allowed entry on the basis of their ability to say and think what the others in the class say and think, the leaders and climbers who occupy American institutions (and others, elsewhere) are locked in an increasingly severe cycle of self-reference, not seeing anything outside of their ritual compliance circle. I mean, really not seeing anything outside of their ritual compliance circle. Picture a group of people who have fallen back from the world in a tighter and tighter knot, gathered in the last cave and staring out into the darkness. It’s scary out there! Meanwhile, the terrifying people outside the cave are, like, having lunch. They’re the designated monsters in the set piece, but they aren’t in the cave or paying much attention to the cave, and they mostly don’t know or care about the sealed-off views of the cave people. This is only thirty seconds long — watch it if you haven’t already:
Look at this image. Look at his home, look what he’s wearing. Our children will be arrested and killed by the emerging regime! It could begin next week! And my private chef is twenty minutes late with lunch! How is Michael Beschloss supposed to remodel his seventh bedroom if the far-right murders his interior designer!?!?
What is this person, this idiot courtier who has built a life around his ability to flatter his idiot patrons, but silly. He’s an elite fop, an empty little man who dances for coins from princes. And holy shit do we have an army of these people.
So look at this laugh-out-loud funny piece from The Guardian today (you can get around the paywall here, via the Citizen Free Press), rounding up expert insights to tell us more or less the same thing. The civil war is here, the descent has begun, and the blood is about to flow. “I’ll wager that a civil war featuring terrorism, guerrilla war and ethnic cleansing will be waged from sea to shining sea,” Christopher Sebastian Parker warns. “Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law,” Barbara F Walter informs us.
Take comfort: If these idiots think the future looks like this, we’re headed into an unusual period of peace and calm. It’s a variation on the Paul Krugman rule — we have a whole class of people whose public expressions are nearly flawless contrary indicators.
Read the thing in The Guardian. I’m serious — take the time to go read the thing. I promise you, direct contact with the inanity of this Very Important Piece of Elite Insight will make the tension flow out of your shoulders, and you’ll start giggling like a schoolgirl. The feeling is nearly post-coital, a narcotic ease.
The first thing to notice is that these people don’t know anything. The very smart expert Stephen Marche, for example, says that the Dobbs decision is an obvious prelude to civil war. Every single thing Marche says about that decision, and about the Supreme Court, is simply wrong, not as interpretation but at the most basic level of fact:
The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.
The judicial branch is designed to avoid reflecting the will of the American people. It’s the function of the courts. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t reflect the will of the people; neither did Obergefell, for crying out loud, or Lawrence v. Texas. (Question for extra credit: In 1973, did Roe v. Wade reflect the will of the American people?) You have to be brutally fucking stupid, and therefore a highly regarded expert, to think that a Supreme Court decision that doesn’t “reflect the will of the American people” destroys the legitimacy of the institution.
Or take Marche’s analysis regarding the possibility of a presidential election without a clear winner in the Electoral College:
A contingent election is one mechanism, just one, by which an American government could be perfectly constitutional and completely undemocratic at the same time. The right has been preparing for exactly such a reality for a while, with a phrase they repeat as if in hope that it will mean something if they say it enough: “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”
The distinction between a republic and a democracy is just a partisan talking point, a dumb phrase right-wingers “repeat as if in hope that it will mean something if they say it enough.” This man is an empty barrel, full stop. There’s nothing in there.
There’s no end of things to say about this empty noise, and I could go paragraph by paragraph through all of it to show what’s wrong — factually wrong at a very simple level — in every word. But imagine how tedious that would be, so let’s not. But as a final example, look at the way Christopher Sebastian Parker depicts the political schism in America: It’s race, full stop. People on the right are white; everyone else is on the left.
Today, Republicans, driven by the existential threat of losing “their” (white) country, will continue their attack on democracy as a means towards preserving America for “real” Americans….In the end, race and racism will lead to another very American conflagration.
Or here’s the extremely conservative lieutenant governor of a reliably conservative state:
See all the whiteness in the contemporary American political right?
The experts speak, but they do not see. And they can’t preserve their hold on a country they don’t know. They’ve lost their connection and their knowledge, so they’ve lost their power. It’s the end, or at least the beginning of the end. It can’t be otherwise.
Quick side note: Home earlier than expected, owing to the tediousness of the US Forest Service, which in its infinite wisdom has decided that campfires and cookstoves will be too dangerous to use in the mountains of Southern California until next April.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/FSEPRD1059248.pdf
Through the winter, because heavy snow sometimes bursts into flames or something.
It was 28 degrees outside when we stepped out of the car onto our campsite, with the sun still visible, and the fire pit was taped shut and covered in plastic. That sound you heard from the west, that anguished cry that rang out and filled the sky? Yeah, that was me. I have now vowed never to camp within 200 miles of Los Angeles ever again, because the local foresters are greatly inclined to this kind of silliness, and we had caution tape across our wilderness trailheads for over a year to protect us from a virus. The city-centered zero-risk mentality spreads like an inkblot. Anyway, onward.
Wowzers. That piece in The Guardian with writers Walter, Marche, and Parker was crazier than anything I've ever heard from the Right on 4Chan. These people are lunatics.