The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the next generation? Are they just fumbling along, trying to keep ahead of their wokist crazies? Or are they executing another of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans that will inevitably blow up in their faces?

Let’s look at Option One. The closest thing I have ever seen to a brilliant strategy is Bill Clinton’s 1992 “New Democrat” campaign: nobody here but us moderates. But HillaryCare proved that a lie, and so the voters gave us the first Republican Congress in 50 years. So “New Democrat” was just a tactic to win an election. Then there was the Emerging Democratic Majority from Judis and Teixeira in the early 2000s about the inevitable Democratic majority of the educated, the young, the women, and the minorities. How’s that coming along, dear Democrats, down on the border?

Of course, then there is Sundance’s Fourth Branch of Government theory, that ever since Obama, the U.S. has been ruled by the intelligence community that knows everything about us, and can send a Donald Trump to hell any time it wants. Maybe the lefties and the gumshoes think this is brilliant. I don’t. The whole point of politics is to have a safety valve to avoid civil war. So the whole place doesn’t blow up.

The Biden U-Turn on the COVID rent moratorium and the student loan relief extension and the continued unemployment bonuses suggest Option Two: trying to keep ahead of the peaceful protesters. If I were Mr. Big I would be saying to my aides that the longer these handouts continue the harder it will be to eliminate them. This is because the longer the checks go out the more people will adjust their lives around the monthly check and be really angry if it ever goes away.

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back to normal as soon as possible because I would be worried that all the handouts would distort the economy, and unleash inflation, asset bubbles, and recessions that would wreck my presidency. I would bark at my aides that despite the narrative, FDR really screwed the economy in the 1930s, and the Great Society programs set up the inflation of the 1970s, and the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was a prime reason why the voters have been turning to Republicans in recent years, and that the massive spending proposals of my administration were bound to cause economic and political trouble in the near future, certainly before 2024. That’s what I’d be thinking, for all that I’m no genius.

Then there is Option Three: Baldrick’s Cunning Plan that turns out to be not so cunning after all. How about this:

Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’”

Because if a lowly “magistrate” is doing this, then he is getting the word from on high. Imagine the outrage from high and low in our beloved ruling class if, back in the day, federal magistrate judges started sanctioning Democratic lawyers for pushing Hillary Clinton’s Russian Collusion fantasies. I mean, really! You guys want to go down that road, denying the courts to crazy Republicans? Surely, it would be much better to give them full rein to rummage around and come up with nothing and prove the regime narrative that there is nothing to see here.

And that is to say nothing of the Five Year Plan to get rid of Donald Trump. Earth to Ruling Class: Donald Trump was not an insult to the noblest ruling class that ever bent the arc of history towards justice. It was a message that you guys got trouble, right here in River City, if you keep trashing and humiliating and utterly ignoring the religious and cultural and political and economic needs of the ordinary middle class.

You guys would get the picture if you just thought for a moment about your sacred Ally narrative: that you are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. If you were real Critical Theorists you would at least try out a Critical Ally Theory: what if the Allies are really the most conceited and dumb-as-a-post ruling class in history; what if the Oppressed Peoples are just recent migrants to the city that haven’t yet built the skills to master life in the city, no thanks to the Allies; what if the White Oppressors are just the ordinary middle class that wants to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law? And how would you brilliant educated critical theorists know which witch is which?

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.

Image: George Brehm

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