The "Four Americas" and My Three Peoples

As usual, during the night, I awoke to realize something. Thanks, unconscious, you're a real pal!

I thought to myself: how does the Four Americas of The Atlantic's George Packer and his "How America Fractured into Four Parts" match up with my reductive Three Peoples theory? 

I first noticed, yesterday, that Packer's view of America was a "View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club," another world, separate from the corridors of power trod by our rulers. But now it's time to Be Like Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Let's lay out the Four Americas, as described by George Packer:

Free America. That's the old Buckley conservatism, the anti-Communists, and the libertarians.

Smart America. That's the high-cognitive-skill folks with advanced degrees that work as salaried employees in tech, the professions, journalism and the arts.

Real America. These folk believe that the real heart of America is the "common people that work with their hands," a "country of white people."

Just America. Young "people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world... They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists."

Before I bring the hammer down, let's just rehearse my Three Peoples.

People of the Creative Self "These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary."

People of the Responsible Self "Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, 'deplorables,' these are people... that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law."

People of the Subordinate Self "Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, these are people that do not experience 'agency.'" They are somebody's subordinate.

Let us re-describe the Four Americas in their relationship to the ruling class and the ruling class's political formula of fighting systemic racism. And let's figure out how they fit in my reductive Three Peoples system.

Free America. These are the defeated foes of the ruling class that once hoped at least to sit at the table with the educated ruling class. Don't worry about they, they're done. They are, to me, People of the Creative Self.

Smart America. These are people that have thrived under the bureaucratic rule of the educated ruling class. They are good at education and taking exams and converting their skills into salaried positions approved by the rulers. They eagerly display BLM signs in front of their houses and deplatform people that peddle in "disinformation." They are, of course, People of the Creative Self.

Real America. These are people that don't have the intellectual chops, the cognitive skills to make it in Smart America. They are commoners that do the ordinary work of society: technicians rather than techies. Racist-sexist-homophobes, every one. The are, obviously, People of the Responsible Self, often in danger of falling into the world of the Subordinate Self.

Just America. These are people that have been screwed by the political and educational system set up by their liberal educated-class parents. They are almost all white, but don't talk about that. They are would-be People of the Creative Self only they'll never make it. So they think of themselves as helpless victims, "fake" People of the Subordinate Self.

Golly Geewillikins. Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.

First, this Fractured America is mostly an tableau of upper-class America, the People of the Creative Self. In other words it is the actual ruling class viewing the next class down as representing the whole of America. Almost everyone in the Four Americas -- except the dastardly "deplorables" -- is a member or would-be member of the creative class.

Second, there is no real mention for the underclass, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, the People of the Subordinate Self in my Three Peoples, except as a back-handed insults about "vodka in plastic cups" and "missing teeth from crystal meth." They sorta exist in Real America, in the lower section of Real America, in the 21st century collapse that "happened in the shadow of historic failures" like the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They get a fake entry as the wokey social-justice activists -- the "trained Marxists" of BLM -- but they don't really exist in George Packer's world. 

Third, you can see why Big Tech is down for the ruling class's program of beating up white deplorables. They are the fortunate sons of our educated ruling class, that happen to have the intellectual chops to thrive in the world that the educated class created over the last century. Why rock the boat?

Fourth, you can understand the lefty wokies and their rage. It's fiendish really. These young people, that have fake degrees in activism, that don't have the chops for the high-status salaried professions, are being drafted into the educated-class's activist army that is beating up ordinary Commoners because they are all systemic "white oppressors."

Here's what I think. 

The one vital need in every ruling class is to have a real understanding of the people that they rule. Otherwise that ruling class is not long for this world. If the rest of the ruling class thinks like George Packer, then they got a problem.

But really, it's not surprising that George Packer is dealing in fantasy and only thinking about people on the next step lower in the political and cultural hierarchy. For one thing, it is only those people that count, that are likely to mount a cultural or political challenge to our ruling class. Yep, no mention of the rising Hispanics, who are starting to vote Republican. No mention of the "oppressed peoples" of the underclass, the folks that have really taken it on the chin from the ruling class's race politics of the last half-century and the inflexible top-down culture of the administrative state. No mention of Asians, who are beginning to feel the whip of race-conscious government.

Could the omission of ordinary middle-class Hispanics and Asians from the Four Americas be a mistake? Or would it just complicate the agenda of the ruling class in the Biden years, so better not think about it?

Let's just say that if the clueless clots of Just America that "literally know nothing" -- in the words of Ben Rhodes -- ever got a clue, they might not continue as the useful idiots of the ruling class.

Might not, of course. I don't have much confidence in that. But you never know.