One of the ways to understand social change is through the notion of the "Great Awakening." The North American colonies such a religious awakening in the years before the American Revolution.
You might say it is a confirmation of Andrew Breitbart's notion that politics -- the revolution -- is downstream from culture, as modified by John C. Wright that culture is downstream from religion. So,
Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.
In other words, a political revolution is the product of a cultural revolution and cultural revolutions are products of religious "awakenings." Another way of looking at this is to say that a Great Awakening is a time when a mob of people suddenly revise their understanding of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And so the world changes.
So, the Zman was descanting about Awakenings and wondering if we were in the middle of such an event, that the combination of waking up to the left's race grift, the mass media keeping its creatures in power, the Hunter Biden story, are going to wake people up.
But that made me think of the Trump phenomenon. Even my fairly Democratic Greek friend admits that the Trump enthusiasts are not "white oppressors" but people that have been left behind by the current rulers.
And I have to think that there is something organic, something Jungian and archetypal, in the phenomenon of the Trump rally, the Trump Boat Parade, the Trump Car Parade. I don't mean to say something specific, that it shows Trump will win the election; I am just saying that, if you are a human, programmed like every living thing to "notice" things that don't compute, then you are bound to suspect that something deep and archetypal, something of the unconscious, is going on, as people seem to be coming together in something below the obviously rational consciousness.
Of course, for me, with my mind trained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, it all connects. Obviously, to me, this is a Great Awakening of the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, starting to rise up, instinctively, against an unjust ruling class of educated Gentry. But, just as obviously, I could be completely wrong. I could be connecting dots in one way when, in reality, the dots are connecting in another way that will make me look like a complete idiot.
What will it all lead to, continues the Zman? Will it lead to civil war? Insurrection? Revolution? He plumps for "Insurrection, then Revolution." Civil war, to him, is a fight between two sides of the ruling class.
Revolutions, on the other hand, are when a new elite overthrows the old elite, because the old system offers no way for the new elite to join the elite.
So we aren't there because the ruling class is in fact pretty united, at least on the surface. So that means insurrection.
When people begin to sense that the invisible bargain between the people and the ruler is breaking down, that the ruler is not holding up his end of the bargain, that is the beginning of an insurrection.
For instance, if the state won't let the cops do their job then people will start to police the streets themselves. If the schools don't do the jobs, they start to pull their kids from school.
Actually, he says, there is an insurrection going on in the elite, as liberal cities refuse to keep law and order, and federal judges don't follow the rules, Judge Sullivan. But that is an insurrection within the ruling class!
This is the soil of revolution. On the one hand, you have the people seeing a breakdown of that invisible bargain between themselves and their rulers. Basic things like road maintenance, policing and public order are not being done. On the other hand, you have members of the elite who no longer accept the authority of the system in which they function, causing that system to further breakdown. American is a machine that is breaking down and no one wants to repair it.
For me, it's all rather odd. You would think that the elite would be smart enough to fob off the Commoners and the Deplorables with some penny-ante action to make the bitter-clingers think that the elite "cares about people like me." But they haven't.
Indeed, with the Ally-ist notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" they are proposing that the people you see at Trump rallies are "white oppressors."
Sorry, wokies. For me it does not compute. I'd say that Jeffrey Toobin, he of Zoom fame, is a "white oppressor" cunningly disguised as an "ally," up until the day before yesterday. That would make sense.
Of course, I would say that nothing illuminates a possible Commoner Great Awakening better than my Commoner Manifesto, that begins
A spectre is haunting the liberal elite -- the spectre of the Commoners. All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre...
Ooh. See that word ally-ance? And I continue:
It is high time that Commoners should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of “systemic racism” with a manifesto of the Commoners themselves.
And more of the same. But it's going to get worse before it gets better.
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