They Hate Us For Our Progress

"his foot is rotting off in the streets"

The backward white people are very angry, so they’re turning to their Hitler figure to stop all the brilliant progress that’s making America so much better. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Robert Kagan, an Applebaumian insider, is married to Victoria Nuland. He’s a senior fellow at Brookings. He has a PhD in history. He’s a branch on an unusually prominent family tree. And he’s insane — completely detached from the most basic reality. His writing is defined by its curious flattening effect, the relentlessly obtuse stripping away of obvious detail:

Weimar Germany was messy and often gridlocked. See, that’s a lot like what we’re going through now — they had trouble passing a lot of legislation, so then Hitler. Messy and gridlocked!

But Weimar Germany had “four years of political murder,” with hundreds of assassinations and with street battles between factions. They had devastating hyperinflation, massive levels of unemployment, presidencies that lasted for months — Gustav Stresemann, August to November 1923 — and (of course) crushing peace terms after a lost war. Ask Robert Kagan if Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg would have regarded Weimar Germany as “messy and often gridlocked.” The literature of the period is about horrifying levels of popular despair and a deeply shared sense of futurelessness and ruin: Little Man, What Now? Compare Kagan’s description of the thing to the…thing. It doesn’t match. That’s a sign.

So what’s happening in America? Well, Trump voters are absolutely frantic, because they’re running out of time to secure white supremacy:

So Trump is the Great White Hope, the last shot at a national Grand Wizard:

Things are getting so good, so equal and free, that the angry white people are desperate to hit the brakes and make all the progress stop so they can be overseers again in a crushing system of white nationalist power.

Victoria Nuland’s husband, insider D.C. personified, doesn’t see the country he lives in, where considerable pain and decline is centered in the bluest of the blue zones.

See also, and click the link to play the video:

See, the angry white people hate that we’re making that much progress.

Marriage rates are declining sharply, childbearing rates are declining sharply, loneliness and atomization are increasing, SSRI prescriptions are soaring, obesity rates are high and getting higher, homeownership is moving out of reach for young people in the blue zones, and Trump voters are all culturally stranded white nationalists who are furious that the country is making so much progress and experiencing so much equality.

This level of elite disconnection is dangerous and unsustainable.