It’s widely accepted that politics over the past 5–10 years has taken a turn to the crazy. The political debate has moved significantly from questions of economic interest to questions of identity. Unconventional figures are succeeding in elections: Donald Trump is president of the USA, Boris Johnson is joint favourite to be next Prime Minister of Britain.
The chief mechanism of this shift has been the destruction or bypassing of the old centres of power. The institutions and informal hierarchies that used to be important to politics no longer are. Obama was said to have bypassed the Democratic establishment with an internet and grass-roots campaign (though is that really true?) Trump undoubtedly ran against the Republican establishment and won, and his ad-hoc campaign seriously outperformed the institutional support behind the Clinton campaign.
Money is still important, in US politics, but the fund-raising establishments that mediated it are much less so. A candidate can appeal to donors directly, whether rich donors in person or large numbers of small donors via the internet. The money isn’t flowing through kingmaker fund-raisers who could influence the direction of a party with other people’s money.
From the other side, donors can get influence through big-name candidates, or through pressure groups that set the media agenda, better than through party institutions.
In the UK it’s access to media rather than money that gave the party establishments real power, but that power has declined in the same way: the old gatekeepers can be bypassed.
These are material causes, but there are also social causes. The political parties were once socially important — politicians believed in the party as a force in society, and as a kind of class consciousness. Politicians in a party were insiders, everyone else was an outsider, and insiders knew what was going on in a way that outsiders didn’t. The important people in the party were those who could organise and persuade in private. That has faded: the parties have become more diverse in every sense, and there is much less in the way of solidarity and social ties to political institutions.
That’s the first element: the loss of power of political institutions. That certainly goes back more than the timescale of 5–10 years that I referred to. But its effects are still playing out. The new, open, meritocratic political mechanisms have given rise to a new style in politics.
When politics was carried out within powerful institutions with social and organisational coherence, political factions could keep secrets. They could plan to carry out actions, and to present arguments, without publicly announcing what they were going to do. Today that is not the case. Because political factions are open and meritocratic, collective decisions can only be reached in public.
The effects go further: because all communication within a faction is essentially public, the only way to advance within the faction is through public statements. If you can plan privately and then act, you can be responsible for the consequences of your actions. If you can only contribute to a public debate, then you are responsible for nothing but your public statements. The loss of institutional power has led, through the loss of secrecy, to a loss of responsibility.
The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.
“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.” — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.
Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.
The failed coup against Trump is a good example of the phenomenon: If there was an actual conspiracy it was tiny, and most of the work of making the Russia frame stick on Trump was done by people who genuinely believed it was real, and therefore adopted the wrong tactics. At a stretch, it’s possible there was no real conspiracy at all: Hillary and her team were making up excuses for their failure, and some intel people were just nuts (an occupational hazard) or were showing off to their friends. It’s important to understand that the publicly claimed positions get internalised. Even if they start as cynical lies, in the absence of private meetings where everyone agrees, “yes we said that, but it’s not really true”, people end up really believing what they pretend to believe.
What this means is that the purity spirals that characterise the Cathedral have now migrated directly into party politics itself. In the old model, the “Modern Structure“, the political agenda is ultimately driven by the Cathedral, meaning elite academia and the prestige media. They set the common understandings of the electorate and society, which in turn compel politicians to follow. But as politics shifts from private compromises to public debate, the distinction between media and politics dissolves. Every politician is a pundit, and not really anything more. This development has been going for years , but only reaches its full effect when the politicians become conscious of it, or have carried on their whole careers under these conditions.
So that ultimately is the cause of the insanity: The old political class which followed the ideological line produced from the Cathedral but with a delay and a practical, moderating influence, has been dissolved into the Cathedral itself.
The civil service is still—for now—out of this: it can still form policy in quiet and carry it on. It is now the last remaining holdout against true popular democracy. It used to be able to make deals with the political class in private, though. The exposing to the public of all political decision-making has taken that mechanism away from it—the question of “what is the official advice” is now part of the public debate on every major issue. It’s also worth noting that it has always been more directly influenced by the Cathedral proper than the old political class was.
I read Spandrell’s rant with amusement, but object to his self-indulgent statement: Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. Obviously this is false. The most that these categories of person can hope is that they enjoy the same status as white, Christian, heterosexual non-transsexual males, but that they enjoy a higher status than them simply is not true.
The conspiracy of evil fat black disabled women and transsexual Muslim paedophiles running our society strikes me as no more of a clear and present danger than the march of bodybuilding male nudists. Here in Merseyside we have not yet learnt to treat these classes of people as our rulers, but rather continue to isolate, pillory and demean them, as this video shows:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIHg5RyU6Mw
The transsexual in question works in a charity shop, not yet having assumed executive power. I was approached by the evil ugly fat black woman yesterday, she asked me for spare change, which I did not give to her. I don’t think she enjoys a particularly high status in our society either.
You see, I am a bit of a Particularist myself. In Ceredigion we had an MP who was half Green and half Welsh Nationalist. My dream team includes people like this. Nor do I see myself as in thrall to the “slogans of the gone-and-forgotten proletarian revolutionaries”.
It would be indiscrete to name the Fire Brigade I worked for, but the Station Officer assured me he had been present when the visiting Margaret Thatcher (Finchley, Con) drank from a cup of tea around which every man in the Station had previously wiped his penis. From this we divine that there was quite a gulf between the ruling Conservative Party and the staff of this useful and necessary public service, but they were not exactly proletarian revolutionaries: one member was quite an enthusiast for the Liberal Democrats, I imagine the rest were satisfied with Labour. Their programme was quite mild and did not include Permanent Cultural Revolutions or liquidation of kulaks: it merely involved banalities such as the continuation of Emergency Services, the imposition of Fire Retardant Cladding, and permanent, pensionable full-hours contracts for Public Service workers.
This was well into the days of enforced diversity, Equal Opportunities and the like. As I recall, in a force of hundreds, we had on our books but three women, one who got pregnant and exited the force, one who, disabled from active service, was permanently on light duties and one who had taken and passed every single examination in Fire Fighting Tech and so passed seamlessly into administration.
Fire-fighting is a not only a male orientated activity, but one which attracts the less cerebral, more physical sort of male. Diversity meant there were White firemen, West Indian, Sikh and Muslim firemen but no Jews, Chinese or Hindus that I noticed.
There was one incident when a cleaning lady walked into a toilet and encountered a Station Officer sodomising one of the firemen. Curiously, instead of being promoted to encourage diversity, they were fired for outraging public decency. It seems to be the wrong kind of homosexuality, an opportunistic indulgence of dirty boys looking for fast, strings-free relief (encouraged perhaps by the intimacies of preparing cups of tea for visiting Home Secretaries), (the choice of the Fire Station for the activity indicating that they both led more conventional lives elsewhere), rather than the life long commitment with right-on demands for equality that constitutes political gayness.
Feminism I don’t see as that much of a threat because it is essentially bipolar and content free. On the one hand we have shrinking violets afraid of men photographing under their skirts, and on the other bull dykes who think they can run the S.A.S. They sort of cancel each other out. I was particularly impressed by a television programme on the unpromising topic of the interviewees for the position of Lighting Engineer at Royal Albert Hall. There were 350 of them, all male. To me this shows that ordinary men’s work—boring and unglamorous—continues to be done by men: it is only when it comes with high prestige and earning capacity that women start clamouring for equality.
If women succeed in taking over half the posts in the cabinet, then that means that the true seat of control lies elsewhere, business or the mafia perhaps. Certain roles, the models for Britannia or Hibernia for example, were always traditionally performed by women. This just means that the cabinet have changed their role to that of national mascots.
But the intrusion of women into the workplace is an ongoing, experimental process: initial enthusiasm often gives way to disillusionment. Either women can do men’s jobs, in which case we have to ask whether we were right to exclude them in the first place, or they cannot, in which case their candidacy will eventually be barred. A good example of this happened in Fulton Co, GA, which appointed as Sheriff’s Deputy a fat black 5́ 2 woman of 51 years and left her in sole charge of 6́ Brian Nichols (also black and extremely ornery) aged 33. He overpowered her, took her gun, and shot the judge and 3 others. One imagines that the appointments committee took notice and altered their practice. Allegations of sexism, sizeism and ageism should not be allowed to sway the appointment of Sheriff’s Deputies, though those of racism can still be investigated.
By contrast however we must consider the case of Det Con Hazel Savage, who obdurately and in the face of opposition from male colleagues insisted on digging up the property of Fred West, who had corrupted the male members of the force by giving them free rides of his missus.
So as I see it there should be an auxiliary female police force: I am prepared to believe that women can make better administrators (less likely to bend the rules) and better interrogators (I have some experience of male police interrogation, as perhaps do you). As the number of female police officers increases, the incidence of rape in the community declines, as does the incidence of workplace flatulence. But it is only in fictional police procedurals with science fiction bionic implants that they are better fighters than men, not because of a Cathedral conspiracy but because these things are written by women. So I still see them as auxiliaries and believe they should be paid less because they are not contributing muscle to maintaining law and order to the same extent.
It has taken considerable discrimination and a formidable colour-bar to maintain the existence of the Black population in the US. In Argentina, which once had slaves on the same scale as the US, only 149,493 (0.3%) out of a total population of 40,117,096 identified themselves as Afro-Argentine in 2010. At one time they were a third of the population in Buenos Aires. African DNA has disappeared into the general population through intermarriage, in the same way that Native American DNA has in the US. In Britain also, Windrush era immigration is in many cases no longer discernable in the current generation. So I would say that Spandrell’s objection to any persons of ebony hue enjoying the status they have earned when they are long standing citizens of the same country as him is an example of unacceptable reactionary bile. He does supply a good example of an undeserving case, but we cannot base a conclusion on a sample of one.