Back in the day, our good friend Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt gave it to us straight. Politics is about friend vs. enemy. You gift your friends; you defeat your enemy. Experts call this the friend/enemy distinction.
In the old days this was pretty simple. A ruler defended the border against marauding enemies intent upon stealing his women and his good rich acres; he gifted his loyal feudal vassals, noble and not so noble, with noble titles and estates.
Ours is a progressive age, and so our leaders, at least in the 20th century, upped the ante from border wars to world wars. But J. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had spare time from relaxing in his vacation ranch in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico just down the road from the Ranch School in Los Alamos, put a bit of a cramp on world wars.
So what’s a ruling class to do? First of all, it should ramp it up on the gifting front. And if anyone objects, the Protest Industrial Complex will helpfully go nuclear, like this neighbor of mine.
Basically, it’s HANDS OFF! every program that our liberal friends legislated. Ever.
Reality is that shoveling trillions in spending to your supporters isn’t enough. You need an enemy. But what to do? World War is out, thanks to Oppie, so where do we conjure up an enemy? That’s where climate change comes in.
If Commies and Nazis are a bit scarce on the ground, you must substitute a world-ending emergency as your enemy. This is not new. Religious leaders have been warning about the End of the World for ages.
So our leaders now lead us into battle against the existential enemy: climate change. They fight climate change with billions in NetZero programs and deal out NGO grants to their elite friends, to professors and scientists and sons and daughters of the political elite.
For instance, there’s the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Did you know that:
According to the Daily Wire the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which receives more than $5 billion a year and produces a National Climate Assessment every four years, outsources much of that research to the liberal consulting firm ICF that hires scientists to spread climate change doom.
ICF? What’s that? I assume we are talking about ICF International.
Do you see the genius in the ICF gambit? Instead of wasting trillions of dollars on the Trump-voting peasants and their Social Security and Medicare, the climate scam funnels money exclusively to the educated-class supporters of the regime: the professors, the researchers, the NGO-connected.
No wonder that the higher-education community all votes Democrat. They are much more likely to be on the receiving end of government grants and research programs and public relations efforts on everything from climate change to DEI than ordinary middle-class Americans that make things and sell things.
And notice that the grantees and scientists and researchers are not just corrupt hangers-on feeding off the latest handouts from the great-grandson of Boss Tweed. No! The educated-class grantees are Saving the World!
If you object to anything dished out by our educated elite, it’s HANDS OFF! Do you see what our liberal friends in the Protest Industrial Complex are telling us? All federal spending programs, from Social Security to education and libraries(!) are the property of the ruling class. HANDS OFF! And all the moral issues, from free speech to human rights and women’s reproductive choices, are non-negotiable. HANDS OFF!
I recently ran across a comment in an article that tells us exactly what is happening:
[E]very moral issue is deliberately made into a political battle and every political issue is moralized to absurdity[.]
But I have hope. It issues from my Real Simple analysis of the last 500 years in terms of communications revolutions. Refer back to my analysis of Martin Gurri’s Five Waves of Communications for details.
Invention of Printing: Religious intellectuals break up the Pope’s religious monopoly and secular intellectuals break up the kings’ political monopoly.
Invention of Mass Media: Dictators and propagandists force feed the human race on world wars and mega government. Democratic presidents join the battle, to make the world safe for democracy.
Invention of Independent Media: For the first time ever, normies get a seat at the table.
If you don’t understand the power of independent media, here is the Harris campaign’s “digital director Rob Flaherty:”
The media successes of 2024 were independent, nontraditional online personalities who themselves were avatars of the rewards of going up against the Establishment.
Because in 2024, he said, folks didn’t trust elites, and they didn’t trust legacy media.
But the Protest Industrial Complex is still doing its same-old-same-old with the HANDS OFF! campaign. I wonder if it is time for them to try something new.
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: Christopher Chantrill
Source link