In this chaotic moment, the question is whether it is all part of our ruling class's brilliant and eternal strategy to maintain itself in power. Or whether it is all a Baldrick's Cunning Plan, as rehearsed over and over on the Blackadder TV series.
If you remember, the whole schtick of the Blackadder series was that the British ruling class since whenever had been a bunch of snobby twerps.
Odd, isn't it, that that kind of comedy has kinda gone out of fashion. We don't really see too much comedy on TV or anywhere about how the woke lefty ruling class is a bunch of vicious snobby twerps that wouldn't be seen dead in a Chevy on the levee.
So, on the one hand, I get the line of the Zman that we have a Roman Empire Mk 2 that conducts its business at a level way up beyond the ken of the ordinary mortals of the plebs.
On the other hand I would point to the shambolic Russia collusion epic that dogged Donald Trump for five years. And we had the shambolic effort to find ballots in the 2020 election when it turned out that Donald Trump won more votes than the ruling class had expected, and so extraordinary measures were needed to ensure a correct result. And now we have the shambolic disaster in Kabul. And the shambolic lockdowns and vaccine passports that really do nothing to deal with the COVID epidemic. And the ridiculous overreach in the Democratic Congress to pass everything including the kitchen sink in one year.
I just can't help feel that these rulers really aren't up to snuff. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe they are smarter than they appear.
See, I think that the over/under political formula of our educated ruling class is breaking down because of the "internal contradictions" of the over/under formula.
Back in the day, Karl Marx argued that there was an "internal contradiction" between what he called "commodity production" and "surplus value," the value of labor snitched by the capitalists from the workers. Except that the classical economics he used for his theory got blown up in the 1870 marginal revolution. So there wasn't an internal contradiction after all.
Our rulers are getting boxed in, more and more, by the logic of their over/under political formula, that they are the allies, the noble advocates of the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.
Previously, of course, their over/under political formula was that they were the saviors of the working class against the capitalists and the malefactors of great wealth. But they switched horses in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, abandoning the old working class and now advocating for blacks and women.
Only, the program of the ruling class necessarily includes rewarding loyal supporters in the ruling class as well as helping the working class and/or blacks and other oppressed peoples. So they are become the very exploiters that they claim to oppose. And the victims of all this is the middle class caught in the middle.
Look, this is the soft underbelly of every ruling class since the dawn of time. They pretend to be the saviors of the people from a fate worse than death, but really they are always just in it for themselves. And, as often as not, they are not very good at pretending.
In our time we may say that the more that the ruling class finds more ways to distribute loot and plunder to its supporters the more it visits injustice upon the broad middle class. And the more it provokes the middle class into forming a head of rebellion. Thus Trump.
And so, in its very program of helping the oppressed it creates a new class of people oppressed by its loot-and-plunder operations. Thus Trump.
And thus, repeating the words of Hamlet, our ruling class blows up its own regime with its own brand of injustice that it fervently believes is the royal road to justice.
But here's another idea. I would say that the one big thing that ends a ruling class is defeat in war. See, the whole point of a ruling class is to protect the people from foreign enemies.
You know, like our noble ruling class protects oppressed peoples from systemic racists.
But if you lose a war, Joey Boy, who needs you?
Oh, I know. Our ruling class doesn't really think of the Afghan business as a war. Our rulers are way above such sordid stuff. Instead they are Building Back Better, and working for Equity. Stuff like that.
Only, deep down below all the modern frooh-frah there is still the basic Freudian unconscious, and the Jungian archetypes and collective unconscious.
Today, we read, twelve US Marines were killed at Kabul airport. I wonder how that affects the unconscious of the average American voter, and in particular the average American woman voter.
You may think that the average American voter will not be happy with all this. I couldn't possibly comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment