One of the stumbling blocks to an undistorted understanding of US politics is the default elite conventional wisdom that Republicans and conservatives are barely legitimate. Thus our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media are always just one step away from saying: Now those GOP yahoos have done it! This latest screw-up should finish them!
But now that Trump has won the government shutdown another possibility emerges. It is the Democrats that are the ones in a tight spot.
Take the fabled DACA issue. It has been the focus of the immigration debate for over a year, ever since President Obama issued an illegal edict to suspend deportation of the foreign-born children of illegal aliens. We have been told, again and again, that these young people are veritable American "Dreamers" and their legal uncertainty is monstrous and unjust.
But the situation right now is that Congress has until March to "do something" about the Dreamers; otherwise normal law respecting illegal aliens resumes. It is the Democrats that have raised the Dreamer issue, and it is they that are the targets of Dreamer rage now that the shutdown failed, and it is they that are in a weak position; they must do anything to get their beloved Dreamers safe to shore.
In other words, Democrats have been promising something to the Dreamers and it is starting to look as if the Democrats can't deliver on their promise. Not good. It's the reason why the Republican base has been so angry for the last several years: they elected a Republican Congress and nothing changed. Democrats promised the Dreamers the moon and stars, and they haven't delivered.
Now, in my view, elite liberals have a basic world view that they are the world. They are in charge; their faith is the faith that should guide us; their agenda is the one that matters. For the last 15 months they have been, as the liberal psychologists say, in "denial." It can't be true that the deplorables actually elected Donald Trump! Look under the sofa cushions! There must be some skulduggery there, or at least Russians under the bed.
But in the last couple of months it is starting to look as if Trump is getting his stride. He has won a notable tax-cut victory; he has won a government shutdown fight. And now Democrats are going to be under the gun to ink a deal with Trump that will pacify their left-wing activist base. Remember. On DACA, Trump has the whip hand. He doesn't care if the suspension of actual law-enforcement action on the children of illegal aliens in March expires without Congressional legislation to replace it. It is the Democrats that care.
Democrats are running around chanting "we are the lions, we are the chosen," when it is starting to look as if the opposite is true.
The left has always insisted that its "activism" of the last 200 years is the Voice of the People, and that the left represents the Forgotten Man, the exploited, the marginalized. In reality, a lot of left-wing activism is AstroTurf, well-born youths financed by billionaires that are in fact the running dogs of the ruling class. They are organizing the lower orders in fake grass-roots movements in order to bolster the power of the progressive ruling class.
On this view the unexpected rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the extraordinary emergence of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential nomination process in 2016, the rise of nationalist political parties in Europe, are something like the Jungian "collective unconscious," of something happening politically beneath the level of human consciousness, and beyond the horizon of ruling-class understanding: a sort of hive mind that is responding to an existential peril.
There is a profound change in our western culture a-building, and we ain't seen nothing yet.
Here's another thing that I want to blend into this: the phenomenon of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. Of course, he is in the middle of his 15 minutes of fame because of a stunning interview on BBC Channel 4 with mainstream feminist journalist Cathy Newman. Almost more interesting is his take on the interview, where he marvels that 80 percent of the on-line reaction was anti-Newman. This, he says is almost unheard-of.
Now the thing about Jordan B. Peterson is that he is a Jungian. That means that he views the issue of good and evil through the lens of Jung's persona and Shadow. And he sees the good life for a man as the Hero's Journey, including the journey through the underworld. He says that maybe the point of evil is that it creates a reason to be good. Peterson has also produced a series on the Christian Bible, available on YouTube, which answers Jung's desire to reconcile modern psychology with ancient myth and the Axial Age religions in a unified faith and worldview that would reset Christianity on a new foundation. Then, as Cathy Newman complained, Peterson is having an extraordinary impact on young men in the West. I wonder why. Could his Jungian hero-myth approach be exactly what young men need and want in order to become strong and worthy and good?
But back to the surly bonds of Earth. We are starting to see a veritable Hegelian antithesis: FBI corruption and collusion with the Clinton campaign that is starting to compete with the ruling-class thesis of Russia collusion in the Trump campaign. Who knows what the synthesis will be? We deplorables would like to see the scandal brought out into the light of day right now, but I am starting to wonder if Trump and the Congressional investigators are smarter than we are. If you were a political pro, you would want the scandals of gross Obama administration malfeasance in the intelligence community to come out when they would have maximum influence on the mid-term elections.
And if that happens, then Ronald Reagan might be right, that you ain't seen nothing yet.
But now that Trump has won the government shutdown another possibility emerges. It is the Democrats that are the ones in a tight spot.
Take the fabled DACA issue. It has been the focus of the immigration debate for over a year, ever since President Obama issued an illegal edict to suspend deportation of the foreign-born children of illegal aliens. We have been told, again and again, that these young people are veritable American "Dreamers" and their legal uncertainty is monstrous and unjust.
But the situation right now is that Congress has until March to "do something" about the Dreamers; otherwise normal law respecting illegal aliens resumes. It is the Democrats that have raised the Dreamer issue, and it is they that are the targets of Dreamer rage now that the shutdown failed, and it is they that are in a weak position; they must do anything to get their beloved Dreamers safe to shore.
In other words, Democrats have been promising something to the Dreamers and it is starting to look as if the Democrats can't deliver on their promise. Not good. It's the reason why the Republican base has been so angry for the last several years: they elected a Republican Congress and nothing changed. Democrats promised the Dreamers the moon and stars, and they haven't delivered.
Now, in my view, elite liberals have a basic world view that they are the world. They are in charge; their faith is the faith that should guide us; their agenda is the one that matters. For the last 15 months they have been, as the liberal psychologists say, in "denial." It can't be true that the deplorables actually elected Donald Trump! Look under the sofa cushions! There must be some skulduggery there, or at least Russians under the bed.
But in the last couple of months it is starting to look as if Trump is getting his stride. He has won a notable tax-cut victory; he has won a government shutdown fight. And now Democrats are going to be under the gun to ink a deal with Trump that will pacify their left-wing activist base. Remember. On DACA, Trump has the whip hand. He doesn't care if the suspension of actual law-enforcement action on the children of illegal aliens in March expires without Congressional legislation to replace it. It is the Democrats that care.
Democrats are running around chanting "we are the lions, we are the chosen," when it is starting to look as if the opposite is true.
The left has always insisted that its "activism" of the last 200 years is the Voice of the People, and that the left represents the Forgotten Man, the exploited, the marginalized. In reality, a lot of left-wing activism is AstroTurf, well-born youths financed by billionaires that are in fact the running dogs of the ruling class. They are organizing the lower orders in fake grass-roots movements in order to bolster the power of the progressive ruling class.
On this view the unexpected rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the extraordinary emergence of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential nomination process in 2016, the rise of nationalist political parties in Europe, are something like the Jungian "collective unconscious," of something happening politically beneath the level of human consciousness, and beyond the horizon of ruling-class understanding: a sort of hive mind that is responding to an existential peril.
There is a profound change in our western culture a-building, and we ain't seen nothing yet.
Here's another thing that I want to blend into this: the phenomenon of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. Of course, he is in the middle of his 15 minutes of fame because of a stunning interview on BBC Channel 4 with mainstream feminist journalist Cathy Newman. Almost more interesting is his take on the interview, where he marvels that 80 percent of the on-line reaction was anti-Newman. This, he says is almost unheard-of.
Now the thing about Jordan B. Peterson is that he is a Jungian. That means that he views the issue of good and evil through the lens of Jung's persona and Shadow. And he sees the good life for a man as the Hero's Journey, including the journey through the underworld. He says that maybe the point of evil is that it creates a reason to be good. Peterson has also produced a series on the Christian Bible, available on YouTube, which answers Jung's desire to reconcile modern psychology with ancient myth and the Axial Age religions in a unified faith and worldview that would reset Christianity on a new foundation. Then, as Cathy Newman complained, Peterson is having an extraordinary impact on young men in the West. I wonder why. Could his Jungian hero-myth approach be exactly what young men need and want in order to become strong and worthy and good?
But back to the surly bonds of Earth. We are starting to see a veritable Hegelian antithesis: FBI corruption and collusion with the Clinton campaign that is starting to compete with the ruling-class thesis of Russia collusion in the Trump campaign. Who knows what the synthesis will be? We deplorables would like to see the scandal brought out into the light of day right now, but I am starting to wonder if Trump and the Congressional investigators are smarter than we are. If you were a political pro, you would want the scandals of gross Obama administration malfeasance in the intelligence community to come out when they would have maximum influence on the mid-term elections.
And if that happens, then Ronald Reagan might be right, that you ain't seen nothing yet.
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