Monday, July 4, 2016

The New Revolution....A Rabble in Arms!



Vox Popoli by Vox Day July 4, 2016

Joel Kotkin tries to explain why the world is rebelling against the experts claiming the right to lead it:
The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

What holds the rebels together is a single idea: the rejection of the neo-liberal crony capitalist order that has arisen since the fall of the Soviet Union. For two decades, this new ruling class could boast of great successes: rising living standards, limited warfare, rapid technological change and an optimism about the future spread of liberal democracy. Now, that’s all fading or failing.

Living standards are stagnating, vicious wars raging, poverty-stricken migrants pouring across borders and class chasms growing. Amidst this, the crony capitalists and their bureaucratic allies have only grown more arrogant and demanding. But the failures of those who occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights” are obvious to most of the citizens on whose behalf they claim to speak and act.

The Great Rebellion draws on five disparate and sometimes contradictory causes that find common ground in frustration with the steady bureaucratic erosion of democratic self-governance: class resentment, racial concerns, geographic disparities, nationalism, cultural identity. Each of these strains appeals to different constituencies, but together they are creating a political Molotov cocktail.
It's moderately amusing that Kotkin first asserts that nobody knows where the Great Rebellion is leading before promptly explaining where it is going to go. He doesn't know. No one does, but the idea that someone whose sympathies clearly lie with the dishonest, predatory elite that has met with such a visceral rejection from widely disparate people suggests that he will no more be able to anticipate its direction than he was able to see it coming in the first place.

11 comments:

edutcher said...

Not fading or failing.

They see themselves as the new royalty with their own divine right of kings to justify they should live better at the expense of the people.

Anyone who knows history has seen movements spring up - the American and French Revolutions, the Revolution of 1848, the overthrow of nobility and the rise of the common man in the aftermath of the World Wars, the overthrow of the Warsaw Pact.

We are due.

Trooper York said...

Overdue.

Trooper York said...

Class resentment, racial concerns, geographic disparities, nationalism, cultural identity.

That is the nub of it right there.

edutcher said...

Great post, let me say, and, for those who've never read it, "Rabble in Arms" is a great read.

Trooper York said...

I love that book. I read it when I was a kid and I often recommend the works of Kenneth Roberts to young people like my nieces and nephews.

edutcher said...

Also read "Oliver Wiswell" and, in later years, "Northwest Passage".

I can see why Metro stopped at Book I, although a few years ago, I had occasion to go up yo Mackinac with The Blonde and see the fort. Impressive.

Synova said...

So very very strange that he's going on about neo-liberals or crony-capitalists. Now no one likes a crony-capitalist but government, but if the initial successes brought prosperity, the current stagnation has more to do with that capitalism loosing ground and the progressive elite taking over. The impoverished immigrant masses pouring over borders were invited. The endless grinding wars and strife are encouraged by a lack of leadership and lack of focus, a weird twisted foreign policy that refuses to identify the problem in favor of narrative. Domestic frustrations are fanned by governments controlled by those who show their clear favoritism for non-citizens... which is a bit like your mother liking the neighbor kid best, and making sure you know it.

But those progressives are so convinced that they are still the university student feeling the power of their activism for the first time, sticking it to the "man", plucky underdogs all of them, that this dumb nut speaks as if those in the "commanding heights" are neo-liberals and capitalists.

"...the dishonest, predatory elite that has met with such a visceral rejection from widely disparate people..."

That ^^^ and we can sit back and wait for another lecture about America's unfortunate anti-intellectualism because it is surly coming.

.

Synova said...

Surely... but surly, too.

edutcher said...

Synova said...

So very very strange that he's going on about neo-liberals or crony-capitalists. Now no one likes a crony-capitalist but government, but if the initial successes brought prosperity, the current stagnation has more to do with that capitalism loosing ground and the progressive elite taking over. The impoverished immigrant masses pouring over borders were invited

First, I'd say, the "impoverished immigrant masses pouring over borders" have been imported, to a great degree.

Second, were there initial successes and did they bring prosperity? I'd say the Reagan economy and the end of the Cold War did that. When those principles were abandoned, that's when things started getting sticky.

YMMV

Synova said...

That's pretty much what I meant. I was taking his "initial successes" to be the Reagan economy. "Neo-liberal" is what people who are not in America call "free market capitalism". I took "crony capitalism" to be his way of saying "all capitalism sucks".

But the idea that this system that brought initial success and prosperity *is still in place* is some sort of Marxist fantasy land.

I'm probably less than wonderfully coherent today...

edutcher said...

You're allowed, ma'am.