"...we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them..." -- Livy, The History of Rome
Picking up where I left off, I need to return to the problem(s) of the current two-party system.
The primary problem is disconnect.
There is disconnect between the citizen and his government, and certainly the same is true of the leadership class and those they supposedly lead.
Those who are elected seem to inhabit a different reality than the rest of us do. Naturally, this leads to policy that bears no relation to the problems of America at hand. True to the nature of Managerialism, as postulated by Burnham, this is the natural result of growing bureaucracy and the technocratic impulse to put everything in the hands of "experts".
The "experts", of course, because they represent an entirely different social class that exists in the space between rulers and the ruled (much like myriad levels of management exist between owners and producers in business) also come to live in a different reality, but with this particular and important difference: they have the power to make their version of reality come true.
Or, at the very least, the reality they NEED to be true, for however long they need it to be so.
As an example, I give you the recent COVID crisis. Nothing you were told was true. Nothing that happened was particularly necessary. But you were locked in your home, forced to isolate yourself from your fellow citizens (and in some cases, your own families), to take an untested vaccine, convinced that medicines and therapies that had been successfully used to combat Corona outbreaks for nearly 100 years were all suddenly useless, or worse, dangerous, to you.
Your leaders went along with it, because that was what "the experts" told them was necessary.
Many of you reading this went along with it for the same reason.
The reality of quarantine, masking, "social distancing", of packing the very sick into nursing homes where they died and spread the disease to others, the use of ventilators where it was not necessary, the destruction of supply lines and sources that had knock-on effects through the economy, were all about as useful in fighting Coronavirus as pissing into a volcano about to erupt.
The origins and causes of the Corona outbreak -- rampant illegal immigration, free travel throughout the United States by Chinese nationals visiting relatives on either side of the Pacific for New years celebrations, the reliance on an ineffective public health system in the major cities, the absolute illegality of what Fauci and Company had done to create the virus in the first place -- had to wait a year to be discussed, and when they were finally discussed, the revelations were both shocking and appalling, but also quite consistent with a pattern of behavior among "the expert" class that festers in bureaucracy.
We found outright violations of law. We discovered co-ordination of messaging and propaganda between the medical and scientific communities, the media and most organs of the Left. We unearthed a conspiracy that was vast, and we discovered that the very people who have been given responsibility for the running of this country are, on the whole, incapable of doing so.
And this phenomenon wasn't limited to just the Corona response.
The last two decades have seen a veritable parade of malefactors who belong to this "expert" class pretty much doing whatever they felt like doing, just because they could, often because they believed there was (or is) personal gain in doing so.
Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, James Comey, James Clapper, General Milley, Christopher Wray, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, John Brennan, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew Weismann, and even the supposedly "incorruptible", "professional" Robert Mueller, William Barr and John Durham have been on public display spinning their own versions of reality to you, and they've not only gotten away with it all, they are often rewarded with book deals, consultancy gigs at CNN, professorships, and so forth.
Anthony Fauci (and his wife!), Kirsten Birx, Rochelle Wallensky, and a host of "reputable" scientists and scientific journals were all corrupted in order to hide the criminal activities behind the initial COVID-19 research, how it was funded, and the ties each had (or may have had) to the pharmaceutical industry that was finally given billions in order to produce a useless, untested vaccine based on a totally new and untested technology, given to millions and killing perhaps as many as the virus did.
And what does your two party system do about this brazen and open lawlessness, this violation of common decency, these attempts to subvert democracy and direct funds to their favored friends (and themselves)?
Well, One Side cleaves to the "expert" class, because they must. This class, working in bureaucracy, and therefore, a client of the democratic party, must be protected at all costs. It must be supported despite the fact that it has obviously lied, destroyed the fabric of civil society, distorted the results of elections, wasted billions and killed millions. To not do so would lose them the support -- financial and political -- that these institutions give to the Left in return for that protection. It would also expose the leftists who were the most-vocal in support of Russiagate or COVID-gate as either opportunistic shills, outright liars, or dumber than a box of rocks.
They would lose their "legitimacy to rule" just as a matter of public perception. The fact that Reality shows their unfitness is immaterial; what matters is the continuous illusion that they are on the side of the Little Guy.
The Other Side holds hearings, upon hearings, upon hearing, piling up evidence of election fraud, of public censorship, of real collusion between government and social media companies, of abuse of due process, abuse of FISA courts, deliberate attempts to pervert scientific inquiry and method, it continually uncovers new evidence of actual criminal conspiracies with each passing day...and nothing happens.
James Comey is still walking around a free man despite committing multiple felonies; Hillary Clinton is still free despite being the instigator of those felonies; Anthony Fauci is retiring with a pension bigger than the President's salary; Rochelle Wallensky leaves government service to become a pharmaceutical executive.
The Right shows very little legitimacy, at all. They show themselves to be men with no spines, weak and ineffectual, that even when presented with gold-plated, irrefutable evidence of crimes, they cannot actually DO anything about them. Because no one listens to them. No one wants to.
And apply this dialectic to all aspects of Modern American Life:
Illegal immigration, anyone? One side sees a bonanza of potential dependent voters and the other sees "natural" conservatives who might vote for them...one day...maybe.
Customs and Immigration, the law enforcement regime, thereof, continues to get funded, continues to carry out orders to "catch and release", doesn't follow up on most of the people they "process". They all get paid whether the problem is managed, solved, or out of control. Because "expert bureaucratic class".
Inflation? The official figures bear no resemblance to your reality at the supermarket checkout or the gas pump, or your mortgage and utility bills, for that matter. The people tasked with giving sound economic advice are not heeded. If they are heeded, then you must assume that the advice they're giving out is supposed to deliver this result. They still get paid and exert influence because "expert bureaucratic class".
Deliberate Racism disguised as non-Racism? Billions shelled out to universities and such to establish semi-official organs of racism and use them in a punitive fashion to ensure the next generation of "experts" that will poison our politics, society and culture, will be uniformly marinated in the current stupidities of "woke". Again, still getting paid and exerting influence, and flouting the Supreme Court, because these are the ideological foot soldiers of the left, and....all together now..."expert bureaucratic class".
Riots and rising crime rates. Do you think this is an accident, or is it useful to one of the two parties? Why? You already know.
None of this happens if the "powers that be" didn't want it to.
But the "powers" are hardly in power, are they? They are beholden and dependent upon the "professional", "expert", (supposedly) "non-political" bureaucracy they have created, funded, and failed to rein in over the course of decades.
It is a class of clerks, lawyers, and political appointees, none of them elected, none of them responsible to the voting public, mainly anonymous, all possessed of the means and opportunity to subvert, pervert, delay or kill with a thousand cuts, any policy which threatens their rice bowl, their influence, or their status.
The Two Party System is dead for another reason: There's an unofficial Third Party in existence, and it has the benefit of being the party that wields actual power by virtue of its control over the levers of production, but more-importantly, of distribution.
And it doesn't just reside in Washington, D.C.. It has it's counterparts at every level of government.
You cannot fix any problem in America until the bureaucracy that will supposedly fix it is sufficiently under control, something neither party is willing to do, one because it needs it and the other because the resulting backlash would banish them to the political wilderness.
(Note -- On the whole Kevin McCarthy thing: Matt Gaetz is a slimy piece of shit. If you were to set out to deliberately design an apex sexual predator from the ground up (allegedly) the finished product would probably resemble Gaetz. I find him to be an annoying and rather smugly-arrogant person, but par for the course when you take a look at the other assholes who have become "stars" on the Right -- Boebert, MTG, Crenshaw, and the like.
They're really good at social media and self-promotion -- and moving merch -- but they otherwise strike me as a group of petulant children, not much better than AOC and The Squat.
Having said that, he was right about McCarthy and he was correct on the need to exercise some fiscal responsibility and restraint. He was just the wrong messenger for it. But I guess SOMEONE had to do it, right? But having already destroyed usual norms by impeaching (or threatening to do so) presidents left, right, and center, why not go ahead and just do the other unprecedented thing and shiv the Speaker of the House in broad daylight?
So that CNN can have a field day with hours upon hours of "Republicans in Chaos" stories that spare them the pain and braincells of having to defend the indefensible Biden. Its much easier.
As I see it, at present, the only benefit to this is that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer got kicked out of their cushy offices. Because payback is a bitch. Now, if we could only hound them out of restaurants and other public places and have mobs show up on their front lawns, the payback would be so much sweeter.
Part One.
Part Two.
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