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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.

I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.

We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).

So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.

The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.

Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.

Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy.

Or a representative form, for those of us fortunate enough to have one, for as long as we can keep it.

And the Citizens of Rome kept theirs for just short of five centuries—and the Emperors were about a hundred years away from matching the stability of democracy when one of them broke the empire clean in half.

That's called oligarchy, and any investigation of the history of Rome will reveal exactly how "representative" the Senate was.

It’s not all or nothing. Plebs had a small amount of power, officially recognized. Every fighting man has a small amount of de facto power (though some, like rich men, generals etc, have far more than others), and when de facto power diverges too much from de jure power, it frequently results in civil war (“I guess we’ll see about that”).

The social war was near-zero power de jures getting their de facto power recognized. The end of the republic came about because the aristocrats had too much de jure power, relative to their actual power. English civil war and french revolution follow the same pattern.

The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate.

I'm all for analogies between America and late Republican Rome. But one difference that gives me pause is that American elites seem pretty damn united. In Republican Rome, the consulship and other elected positions were the height of prestige, and elites would stab each other in the back to win them. Many populares were not true believers. They were opportunists. For example, Crassus, who bankrolled Caesar in his early career and became a triumvir, hardly screams "champion of the people".

In our timeline, political office is not particularly prestigious. Very few of the uber-elite aspire to be president, with Trump being a rare example of one who did. So while Trump was willing to take up the banner of rust-belters and hillbillies and come at the king, who's the next clout-chaser with his resources who will? Elon?

All this Rome talk puts Mike Duncan on the brain. I basically agree with him that "a unified ruling class is a tough nut to crack."

I agree, but I don't think our ruling class is nearly as unified as you do. They maintain position through directing the hate-stream of popular scapegoating, but it's only a matter of time before some smart and ambitious person points it at them.

The reaction to Trump is instructive. The man is a clown, and they lost! They then marshalled all their forces, cut all the deals, ran four years of propaganda, enlisted the CIA, changed all the rules, metastasized a pandemic and started a program of race riots, impeached him twice and just barely squeaked out a win the second time. That is not the performance of a unified and capable ruling class. That's the performance of a fundamentally incompetent pack of morons with a loose and loosening grip on power. If the US ruling class does not want to be the last one, they had better set their house in order posthaste, because at the rate things are going, I'm going to rule a significant fraction of the US before I die.

the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

It is only because those norms have held that Trump's justice will be certain.

To the extent that norms have been violated, it is Trump who has violated them. There is no law saying we must commit suicide by holding to norms.

If your argument is that we cannot hold one person accountable, let me tell you: this is how you hold the system accountable. There is no universe in which the sane response to a part of the system being held accountable, no matter the story it has told about its persecution, is to complain about how the system is never held accountable.

Campaign finance law has been broken. The full facts of this case have already been read into the congressional record. Only terminally confused. Yes.

Welcome back!

Your arguments haven't improved, but welcome all the same.

Does the working class actually prefer Trump, though? In 2020 Biden won among people who make under $100,000 / year. Of course that metric is not precisely correlated with any reasonable definition of "working class", but it is some indication that maybe the idea of Trump being the working class' chosen candidate is wrong.

Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.

The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.

As usual for themotte a beautiful comment that captures my thoughts written far better than my own. Thank you!

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