We Americans have three political tendencies. First, there is “struggle.” Just before the election Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said:
If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over.
Interesting how, in Bernie’s mind, a straightforward mega-trillion-dollar handout to regime supporters in the Climate Industrial Complex is an existential “struggle.” But that’s the whole idea behind the left since 1789 and the French Revolution. We struggle for justice! We struggle for equality! We struggle for climate change!
It’s an idea that’s as old as the hills: rallying the faithful to kill for the One True God in Münster in 1534; rallying the people to kill for communism in Russia and China in the 20th century.
But average people in the ordinary middle class don’t get the struggle session. In their tendency they just want the world to function while they go to work, get married, buy a house with a picket fence in the suburbs, and drive the next generation of children around in SUVs.
The third tendency is the idea of “disruption.” Speaker Mike Johnson just endorsed that tendency on CNN’s “State of the Union” with respect to Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.
What I’ll say about the nominees, that the president has put forward, is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo.
Which tendency is right? I’d say: all of them, and none of them.
Most of the time, we humans just need to keep on doing what we do, just like the ordinary middle class. Only Jeffrey A. Tucker writes,
These are deeply networked relationships between industry, government, lobbyists, friend networks, academia, and pockets of family wealth intent on building in protection for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Sounds familiar. President Eisenhower knew all about this, back in the day. He alerted us to the problem of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell speech. Wikipedia cites no less than 16 “industrial complexes.”
Did Ike get it right, or did he get it right?
How do we save ourselves from Distributional Coalitions, the metastasizing Industrial Complexes, and that favorite of “far-right” conspiracy theorists, the Deep State?
The answer, says Jeffrey A. Tucker echoing Olson, is Disruptors.
A major lesson from the Olson thesis: fundamental institutional change is only rarely produced from within the system itself; it mostly comes from without. It is exogenous from a shock, something that prevailing elites find profoundly upsetting.
And this week everyone is talking Disruption.
In our era, we have two ways of ending the calcification of Distributional Coalitions. One way is the lefty way of revolution and struggle and mostly peaceful protest. Just between you and me, I think that the lefty way is the bloody way, with millions of humans stacked in the abattoir every time it’s tried. No doubt that’s why our lefty friends accuse everyone else of genocide.
Then there’s the Disruption way, whether it’s Trump appointing disruptors to the Department of Justice or the Department of Health and Human Services, or Rockefeller disrupting the whale-oil industry, or Henry Ford disrupting the buggy-whip industry. Then there’s Elon Musk busy disrupting the Censorship Industrial Complex and the disposable rocket industry.
Why disruption rather than revolution? I think it has to do with the technology of communication. Back in the day, let’s call it the One Way Epoch, the most powerful means of communication was writing: writers write, readers read. The Age of Parchment gave us the Bible; the Age of Gutenberg gave us revolutionary intellectuals; the Age of Mass Media gave us world wars.
Today, I declare, we have entered the Two Way Epoch and its first age, the Age of Conversation.
Today we are all nodding our heads about the Joe Rogan Experience and how the “bros” listen to him in their cars, and how it elected Donald Trump and also gave him a majority of the popular vote, and how the progressives on Kamala’s campaign nixed going on Rogan, because not our kind.
The Internet is Two Way, conversational. With blogs, with podcasts, with new media, with SubStack, there is the opportunity to talk back. Internet “influencers” succeed by engaging their audiences, not just fire-hosing them as in the days of Mass Media.
Alas, every new Epoch leaves many people worse off, and that makes me really sad. Watch this interview of Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) by Andrea Mitchell. Mitchell seems “exhausted,” almost unable to focus on the interview. Now I understand “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country” that Mark Halperin warned (1:55:35) Tucker Carlson about.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Carravaggio
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