The System Is Collapsing. Good News?

And: Portlandia Prophecy; Britain's Shame; Sanger's Conversion; AI & The Demonic

Shadi Hamid is right:

The main divide in American politics today isn’t between liberals and conservatives or left and right. It’s between those who believe in the system and those who don’t. And sometimes it really does feel like a matter of belief. It’s a visceral divide about whether basic institutions of American life — from the federal bureaucracy and financial markets to academia and the mainstream media — are working or broken. But it’s more than a feeling, and it’s not entirely new.

Shadi, a liberal, says that the Democratic Party is the party of the status quo, of those who support the System. The Republican Party is the party of those who reject it:

The irony, of course, is that a billionaire has become the avatar of anti-system sentiment. But this seeming paradox makes more sense when we understand that the new dividing line isn’t about wealth per se. It’s about one’s relationship to institutions. An official at the State Department or a tenure-track professor might not be rich, but they each benefit from system stability. They inhabit a world where credentials matter, where professional networks open doors, where the rules make sense and following them leads to advancement.

I write this as someone who has benefited from the system, too. In some ways, it was designed for people like me — an upwardly mobile, educated (some might say overeducated), child of immigrants who can reasonably be considered a person of color. I am — dare I say it — privileged.

Remember what (liberal) Gerry Lynch said in that column I posted yesterday?

“Paradigms depend on faith; loss of faith kills them.”

I have pretty much benefited from the system, even though in some ways, it has made people like me — a middle-aged, right-wing, heterosexual, white Christian male — into the image of all that it hates. I have prospered financially, but aside from my own good fortune, I look around me and see most things going to hell.

I see a shrinking middle class, and the working class facing a wall against social mobility. I see an academic elite that by and large hates what America has traditionally stood for. I see a media elite that consistently refuses to see the country through any lens except its own educated, left-wing privilege, and that constantly propagandizes against people like me, who believe the things I do. I see a woke elite that has marched through every institution in the country — the military, churches, law, medicine, big business, the Scouts, you name it — and forced its degraded ideology on everybody. I see children being sexually mutilated, and celebrated as progressive. I see people losing their jobs for refusing to call men women, and vice versa. I see flat-out racism valorized as justice. I see two generations of young people who don’t know who they are, manipulated by the power-holders, and left incapable of building stable lives for themselves. I see a culture taught to hate Christianity. A culture drowning in pornography. I see America having been turned from a major force for good in the world into a menace to many people — not least its own soldiers, sent abroad in foolish wars by its leadership, both Republican and Democratic, and coming home damaged. I see teenage thugs beat a man in the street, and nobody in authority much cares, and there’s no hope that the kind of dysfunctional culture that produces thugs like that can ever reform itself. I see a system in Washington that can’t get control of the borders, and that can’t seem to care for actual Americans, but that sends billions overseas to promote the same sick ways of thinking that have wrecked us.

Here in Europe, where I am an outsider grateful to be here, I see a continent (in the western part, including Great Britain) where people live among the relics of a once-great civilization, but they have allowed their minds to be so colonized by modernity and liberalism that they cannot be moved to preserve what they have been given by their ancestors. Not only that, they are allowing themselves to be literally colonized by foreigners who hate them, and who will, as bearers of an alien and hostile culture, replace them in time. But these people, by and large, are such slaves to this ideology that they not only cannot or will not do anything meaningful about it, but they can’t even bring themselves to talk about it! As you will see from the next item today, in Britain, they throw old ladies into the back of police cars for standing silently on the street in prayer, or holding signs simply saying “If you want to talk, I’m here,” but they allow Muslim men to drive through the streets of the capital calling over loudspeakers for the raping Jews, and do nothing. Hell, they actually did rape thousands of English girls, and the authorities knew about it, and … you know the horrible story.

And so on. You won’t all share my perspective, but honestly, I can’t think of a single institution in which I really believe — that is, that I consider to have the common good and the best interests of the American people in mind. The System is collapsing? Good. It’s about time. David Brooks, at ARC, said that conservatives are supposed to conserve, not destroy. He’s right — which is why Shadi Hamid is correct to say the Democratic Party has become the conservative party, the party of the System.

Maybe it’s better to think of myself and people like me not as conservatives — I sure as hell don’t want to conserve most of what the ruling class and its conquered institutions have done to America — but as right-wing antagonists to the System. Donald Trump is very far from my ideal president, but you know what? He’s not One Of Them. More power to him. I say that with great trepidation, because history shows that revolution against a corrupt ancien régime can produce worse. Still.

If you had told 33-year-old me, back in 2000, in the flush of youthful conservatism, that I would be closing in on my 60th year feeling this way, I would have thought you were crazy. But the 21st century sure has been rough, hasn’t it?

Newer subscribers won’t remember this story, but I’ll tell it again. On 9/11/2002, I walked with a friend early in the morning from Brooklyn to Ground Zero, to the ceremony marking the anniversary of the attacks. A powerful wind arose just as the memorial service started, and blew like crazy, only ending when the service did. Back at home later that day, my friend rang me, in great distress, asking me to come over at once.

When I arrived at her apartment, she led me into her home office, and pointed to a small, antique, Revolutionary War-era American flag framed under glass and hanging on her wall. It was torn in two, from top to bottom. “What am I looking at?” I said.

She told me she had had that flag for decades, after someone gave it to her as a gift. It had been hanging in its sealed frame on her home office everywhere she has lived since then.

“When I came home from Ground Zero, it had been torn in half,” she said, in a half-whisper.

No one else had been in her place. The sealing on the frame had been untouched. We were both Christians, and we could not avoid the obvious reference to the veil in the Temple having been torn when Jesus died on the Cross (Matthew 27:41).

America was preparing to launch its war on Iraq in the months to come. I could not bear to think that she and I had seen a prophecy of how that war was going to go. Well, we might have done — I believe we did. But I think now it was a prophecy much broader than that. I think it was an omen about America herself.

The future is not fated. We can change. Maybe that’s what’s happening in Washington now. I hope so. But I know this: it could not go on as it had been doing. The old paradigm is over, because at least half the country has lost faith in it. Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno. We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.