It’s America for the Commoners! Get Used to It, Wokies!
I noticed Jonah Goldberg last week checking the altimeter in his spiral dive as he wondered why everyone is so angry if we’ve been having a “Super-Decade.”
Maybe you don’t know what’s going on, Jonah, but James Delingpole thinks The 2010s were the Twilight of the Elites. By the way, level the wings before you pull back on the stick.
So I am here to tell the confused elites what is really going down. You readers may agree with me, if you like.
The modern era started with the Rise of the Bourgeoisie. The folks that were transforming the world with manufacturing and commerce decided to change the rules of the feudal system and bring the absolute monarchs to heel. Hey, if you snooties wanted to use the credit system to finance your wars, we propose a constitution and a separation of powers to keep you dukes in check.
Then came the Rise of the Educated Gentry. What, they said? You expect us to go into the counting houses of our fathers and soil our educated hands with bills of exchange and listen to angry customers? You must be joking! We defy the fathers and their patriarchy! We demand a dictatorship of the proletariat -- led by us -- to bend the arc of history towards justice!
Now comes the Rise of the Commoners. Yes, the Educated Gentry felt so good, fighting for the workers, minorities and women. But there was a cost; there always is. To help those helpless victims, real and fake, the Educated Gentry needed an enemy, because all politics is about Us and Them. As St. Saul wrote: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Initially that target was the rich, the corporations, the banks, the bourgeoisie, but now it is racist-sexist-homophobes, toxic masculinity, white supremacists, deplorables.
So right now the Enemy of the Educated Gentry is Commoners: ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives, to get a job, a wife, a family, a home. Nothing personal, you understand! It’s just the internal logic of any politics. If the Gentry are going to use the force of government to change the world, they are going to need an enemy to fight.
I repeat: the enemy of the Educated Gentry of liberals, lefties, Wokies, and SJW Twitter mobs is the great mass of middling Commoners. Because? Because if the Educated Gentry are going to be the activistes for the victims, real and fake, there must be an enemy bashing away on the victims.
I confess to being as blind as a bat to this, until Curtis Yarvin came along and opened my eyes with his “Commoner” notion. It’s all very well for libertarian conservatives like me to call for an open economy and minimal government, I realized. But Commoners have a different view of things, and no wonder. If there’s a big economic slowdown, they are the guys that lose their jobs and houses. If the Gentry decides to turn the public schools upside down, because diversity, it is their children that get the short straw. If the nation decides to integrate housing, it’s their houses that lose most of their value. All humans look to the government for protection. But for the Commoners it’s been: Sorry, sucker. We’re too busy developing the interagency consensus for bending the arc of history towards justice.
If the Educated Gentry gang members are going to beat up the Commoners in the rest room, just because it feels good, then the only honorable thing for red-blooded Americans to do is to step out of hiding and defend them -- the Commoners, that is.
Man and boy, you Educated Gentry chaps have been churning out victims, real and fake, for 150 years to make them into Little Darlings of the ruling class for ever and ever, amen, and nobody, not one of you geniuses, could spare a dime -- I mean a thought -- for the ordinary Commoners, except to insult them.
It’s worse than that, isn’t it, dear Educated Gentry? Because today’s vile Commoners used to be yesterday’s helpless working-class victims, that you were going to defend for ever and ever, amen. That was before they became Nixon’s Silent Majority, before they became white nationalists, and now deplorables. Or whatever the lefty pejorative of the day is that you all bark like an interagency consensus of trained seals.
I wonder which helpless victim group the Educated Gentry is going to drop next like a hot potato? Blacks? Maybe, if 20 percent vote for Trump in 2020. Hispanics? Who knows?
A word to you blacks and Hispanics. Despite what you’ve heard tell, we would love to have you join the nearest lodge of the Ancient Order of All-American Commoners.
But I know what you interagency Gentry are thinking. How dare. How dare he spew such hate speech!
Welcome to America for the Commoners!
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.