Today Richard Fernandez has a lovely piece about the end of "prestige," how the western colonial regimes used it to dazzle the natives -- right up until the Japanese kicked the Brits out of Singapore in 1942. The colonialists decided that the only way to rule their colonies was to appear magnificent and incorruptible, and so they developed ways of removing the undesirables that didn't quite measure up and might smudge the perfect escutcheon of white colonialist prestige. Fernandez proposes that the 1942 moment has arrived for the colonialists of our own day, the ruling class that rules so magnificently over the deplorables of the modern West.
It's a beautiful idea, and makes a lovely article, but I don't agree. The "prestige" of our ruling class was obtained by force and intimidation, as the whole Harveygate episode has proved. Up till now "don't get in a fight with a guy that buys his ink by the barrel" has been good advice. You didn't attack ruling-class notables because they had the power to banish you to Outer Slobbovia. And the ruling class had the power to take care of their own, like Sixties radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, high-class terrorists that never went to jail and today hold prestigious positions in the academic/foundation world. Ayers is the son of a utility executive, and Dohrn a daughter of the upper-middle class.
No, today's ruling class has maintained its prestige not by culling the chaps that didn't put on the right show but by memory-holing anyone that dared to challenge its prestige. That was why the waitress sandwich between Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd never had her day with Gloria Allred. That is why the women that accused Bill Clinton were harassed and demeaned. That is why the GOPe learned their lesson and learned to go along to get along as junior partners in the ruling class. It wasn't prestige that ruled over them; it was power.
Look at the presidency of Barack Obama. It had its share of scandals and mistakes, but at the end of it, President Obama looked back on a presidency remarkably free of scandals, knowing that the Democratic operatives with bylines at the New York Times and the Washington Post would scarcely disagree and say that Obamacare was and is a scandal, that the use of the IRS to harass Tea Party groups was a monstrous injustice, and that the president's Middle East policy was a disaster. Hey, better not disagree, else you're a racist.
My line is that all ruling-class power contains the seeds of its own destruction, because government is force and politics is division and system is domination, and so any ruling class, by its resort to government force to tax the population and reward its supporters, eventually cannot distract the populace from the accumulation of injustice with the brilliance of its regime propaganda.
Put it this way. If you tax 35 cents of every dollar, as we do, if you force everyone into one-size-fits-all programs of pensions, healthcare, and education, and if you regulate everything up the ying-yang, it cannot but be that great sections of the people are unjustly treated. You can persuade them for decades that all this is the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, but eventually more and more people will see through the charade. And then they will get angry.
This is what we are seeing, after all, with Harveygate. Lots of people kept silent after being treated like trash, because they knew what was good for them. But they were angry. And then one day the force shield retracted and Harvey Weinstein and every other power abuser was dead meat.
But our ruling class is in trouble for another reason. Eventually the prestige of handing out goodies to the bubbas begins to tarnish.
You do not do people any lasting good by making them into the "little darlings" of the regime. The white working class is dying of despair because for decades it was the little darling of the ruling class, coddled and given special rewards and benefits by legislative ukase, until it wasn't. Today women and minorities are the little darlings of the ruling class, and they have replaced the white working class as the special favorites of the ruling class. The problem for the white working class is that the special coddlings and rewards handed out to them by the ruling class allowed them to ease up and reduce their efforts to make it in the market economy; their little darling status allowed them to hide from the world in union jobs and lifetime employment. Until it didn't.
The same thing applies to women and minorities. All the diversity and inclusion means that right now the world is bending over backwards to make life easy for women and minorities in the public square. Until the world finds a new little darling to shower with love and kisses. Then all the special coddling and rewards will turn out to be a disadvantage to the former little darlings.
So the prestige of today's ruling class is breaking down, probably because it can't intimidate the way it used to, and it can't deliver like it used to.
The question is what comes next. The answer is simple. The little darlings of yore will be fighting to maintain their special privileges, and it won't be pretty. After all, the promise to Make America Great Again is really a thinly veiled promise to restore the white working class to its former glory. Only it won't happen, except if the white working class completes its move into the middle class and learns to go with the flow of the market economy. Meanwhile the new little darlings, women and minorities, will be scrabbling to keep their special status, and in the end they will fail, just like the white working class.
The solution to the problem of the little darlings is simple. Don't be a little darling. Don't accept the protection of some political sugar daddy; learn to make it on your own. Above all, you have to learn to change horses. Just like in the old days of coaches and horses, you have to change your horse at every stage if you want to get to your destination. Right now I have friends that used to be tech writers at Microsoft. Now they all seem to be turning up at Amazon. That is what it takes in the market economy. Jobs and corporations and skills come and go. You have to get with the program and make sure that you don't get left by the side of the road, cold and sick and hungry, with a horse that won't go. And the only way to do that is to take responsibility for your own life and never believe a politician.
It wasn't prestige that kept our ruling class in power; it was free stuff and intimidation. And now the free stuff and the intimidation aren't working like they used to. Which is a problem for all of us.
It's a beautiful idea, and makes a lovely article, but I don't agree. The "prestige" of our ruling class was obtained by force and intimidation, as the whole Harveygate episode has proved. Up till now "don't get in a fight with a guy that buys his ink by the barrel" has been good advice. You didn't attack ruling-class notables because they had the power to banish you to Outer Slobbovia. And the ruling class had the power to take care of their own, like Sixties radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, high-class terrorists that never went to jail and today hold prestigious positions in the academic/foundation world. Ayers is the son of a utility executive, and Dohrn a daughter of the upper-middle class.
No, today's ruling class has maintained its prestige not by culling the chaps that didn't put on the right show but by memory-holing anyone that dared to challenge its prestige. That was why the waitress sandwich between Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd never had her day with Gloria Allred. That is why the women that accused Bill Clinton were harassed and demeaned. That is why the GOPe learned their lesson and learned to go along to get along as junior partners in the ruling class. It wasn't prestige that ruled over them; it was power.
Look at the presidency of Barack Obama. It had its share of scandals and mistakes, but at the end of it, President Obama looked back on a presidency remarkably free of scandals, knowing that the Democratic operatives with bylines at the New York Times and the Washington Post would scarcely disagree and say that Obamacare was and is a scandal, that the use of the IRS to harass Tea Party groups was a monstrous injustice, and that the president's Middle East policy was a disaster. Hey, better not disagree, else you're a racist.
My line is that all ruling-class power contains the seeds of its own destruction, because government is force and politics is division and system is domination, and so any ruling class, by its resort to government force to tax the population and reward its supporters, eventually cannot distract the populace from the accumulation of injustice with the brilliance of its regime propaganda.
Put it this way. If you tax 35 cents of every dollar, as we do, if you force everyone into one-size-fits-all programs of pensions, healthcare, and education, and if you regulate everything up the ying-yang, it cannot but be that great sections of the people are unjustly treated. You can persuade them for decades that all this is the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, but eventually more and more people will see through the charade. And then they will get angry.
This is what we are seeing, after all, with Harveygate. Lots of people kept silent after being treated like trash, because they knew what was good for them. But they were angry. And then one day the force shield retracted and Harvey Weinstein and every other power abuser was dead meat.
But our ruling class is in trouble for another reason. Eventually the prestige of handing out goodies to the bubbas begins to tarnish.
You do not do people any lasting good by making them into the "little darlings" of the regime. The white working class is dying of despair because for decades it was the little darling of the ruling class, coddled and given special rewards and benefits by legislative ukase, until it wasn't. Today women and minorities are the little darlings of the ruling class, and they have replaced the white working class as the special favorites of the ruling class. The problem for the white working class is that the special coddlings and rewards handed out to them by the ruling class allowed them to ease up and reduce their efforts to make it in the market economy; their little darling status allowed them to hide from the world in union jobs and lifetime employment. Until it didn't.
The same thing applies to women and minorities. All the diversity and inclusion means that right now the world is bending over backwards to make life easy for women and minorities in the public square. Until the world finds a new little darling to shower with love and kisses. Then all the special coddling and rewards will turn out to be a disadvantage to the former little darlings.
So the prestige of today's ruling class is breaking down, probably because it can't intimidate the way it used to, and it can't deliver like it used to.
The question is what comes next. The answer is simple. The little darlings of yore will be fighting to maintain their special privileges, and it won't be pretty. After all, the promise to Make America Great Again is really a thinly veiled promise to restore the white working class to its former glory. Only it won't happen, except if the white working class completes its move into the middle class and learns to go with the flow of the market economy. Meanwhile the new little darlings, women and minorities, will be scrabbling to keep their special status, and in the end they will fail, just like the white working class.
The solution to the problem of the little darlings is simple. Don't be a little darling. Don't accept the protection of some political sugar daddy; learn to make it on your own. Above all, you have to learn to change horses. Just like in the old days of coaches and horses, you have to change your horse at every stage if you want to get to your destination. Right now I have friends that used to be tech writers at Microsoft. Now they all seem to be turning up at Amazon. That is what it takes in the market economy. Jobs and corporations and skills come and go. You have to get with the program and make sure that you don't get left by the side of the road, cold and sick and hungry, with a horse that won't go. And the only way to do that is to take responsibility for your own life and never believe a politician.
It wasn't prestige that kept our ruling class in power; it was free stuff and intimidation. And now the free stuff and the intimidation aren't working like they used to. Which is a problem for all of us.
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