Dreaming of America's Future
After the indecisive midterm election, it is time for everyone to be doing thumbsucker pieces. Former President Trump had a couple of thinkers over to Mar-a-Lago -- Ye West and Nick Fuentes -- for a chat. Nick Fuentes? But he's a faaar-right conspiracy theorist last seen at Charlottesville! OMG! You should see the outrage on lefty Twitter.
Roger Kimball is more worried about "Highways to Utopia" such as the destructive dynamism of the Marxists and Wokists, the possibilities of technological Armageddon, and the ever-present threat of genetic engineering.
Yep, with all that stuff, there's no doubt it's the end of the world -- particularly when a far-right conspiracy theorist gets into range of Trump.
But my imagination sees three things that are going to affect traffic in the near to middle-distant future.
First, I think that the Dems made a big error in keeping the COVID handout giveaway going for so long. It is really going to muck up the economy and, more important, many marginal Americans. By the spring of 2024 this will be obvious to the dullest regime apologist with a byline. I just think, existentially, that the crazed money printing of 2020-21 and the dead stop on January 1, 2022 -- M2 is down from $21.7 trillion to $21.3 trillion – and cranking short term interest rates from zero to 5 percent in one year is going to echo for years. I know what Lina Lamont would say: "Are you dumb or somep'n, Jerry Powell?"
Second, I think that the top-down political and economic philosophy of everyone from Klaus Schwab to President Xi to the Duke of Fauci is going to blow up. As I put into my maxims library this week:
Five Year Plan equals Great Leap Forward equals Build Back Better.
Do you understand what that means, you progressives, you CCPers, and you WEFers, and all you twentysomething journalists that literally know nothing? It means that top-down supervision of the economy has never worked and never will. It means that your top-down Great Reset is just another version of the two biggest economic debacles of the 20th century, when educated idiots thought they knew the shortcut to the future.
But what if the climate reaches a tipping point?
What if it does? The one thing certain is that we don't want Klaus Schwab or Joe Biden or Lord Fauci anywhere near the Engineer's Dials.
And hey, with any luck, Elon Musk will have got his Occupy Mars thing going with Starships as far as the eye can see.
Third, I believe that, sooner or later, you ruling-class courtiers will get run over by the Commoner middle class. I have slowly come to realize that this has been building all my adult life, since Richard Nixon was elected by the Silent Majority to give space to ordinary middle-class folks after the Sixties Kids had strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage. And then the Reagan Democrats elected Ronald Reagan to stop the Carter stagflation so people could live an ordinary life without soaring grocery prices and gas lines. And then Donald Trump promised to Make America Great Again so that ordinary people could live an ordinary life.
Ever since Rousseau and Marx, educated people have gotten drunk on various home-brews of social transformation liquor. They were going to save the world, but the next morning the hangover revealed the inevitable wreckage after party night.
Did they ever ask the middle class what it wanted? Or for that matter the working class? All the educated ruling class has ever done is force its latest wizard wheeze on society by politics and force. And politics always reduces human life to a war on the enemy and rewards for the supporters.
It is easy to experience the politics of the last two decades merely as a monstrous injustice against ordinary people, but I prefer to look deeper.
I believe that all the wokiness, all the manipulation of voting systems, all the catering to gender craziness is really an unconscious knee-jerk by the ruling class to the failure of its project, and an unconscious acknowledgment of the harm done to the ordinary middle class over the decades.
Over the past two hundred years we have been lectured endlessly about the sufferings of the oppressed, and the monstrous injustices of landowners and the capitalists. Latterly, the lecturing has been all about racist-sexist-homophobes.
And yet, all along there has been this growing middle-class underground river, an accumulating seepage of injustices meted out by the educated class, year after year.
But your underground rivers, ever and anon, burst onto the surface in a spring that brings the water of life to the land and its people.
And one fine day we'll wake up and realize that the rule of the pompous and unjust educated class is over.
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: Jean-Victor Schnetz