If ever there was any doubt whatsoever that there exists an powerful elite group within Western society, we need to look no further than the example of the United States and the United Kingdom (the latter of which will get a separate article in due time), each of which is stumbling into their own electoral hell.
In both cases, there is now a mammoth – probably system breaking – conflict between the interests of the people and those who have successfully implanted themselves into the institutions of power.
This elite group is comprised of powerful business interests, a majority of tenured academics of most universities, well-funded media organisations (that are now virtual propaganda engines), and the cream of the political class along with the various agencies and bureaucracies they fund.
In the United States, the situation is particularly parlous. A virtual cartel has arranged itself into battle positions. It has been extraordinary to see the lengths to which a loose confederation of liberal entities have gone to destroy a presidential candidate.
Do not misunderstand me. In common with many conservatives, I think Donald Trump would have to comprise one of America’s most unsuitable presidential candidates in living memory. I am not complaining about all of the tough treatment he has received.
No. It is not extraordinary to me that his foibles should receive the standard treatment of an anti-intellectual media enterprise that is now primarily concerned with drama, smugness, manipulation, glitz, showmanship and ratings than with truthful reporting.
What is truly extraordinary, however, are the ways in which the elite have championed an equally unsuitable candidate whose conduct, by many accounts, is transparently illegal.
We are talking here about a candidate whose connections naturally invite concerns of corruption, or at least, undue influence from powerful interests. A candidate who has given contradictory – or at least, very puzzling – answers to inquiries that cannot be seemingly reconciled when the video footage is played. It is for the sake of this candidate that so much of the mainline media have dispensed with even the pretence of impartiality.
I live in a country where our state broadcaster is meant to be politically impartial and claims not to take sides. Yet it has relentlessly published every embarrassing scandal it can about Trump, and has published every bit of good news about Clinton’s poll results. That is because it is an organisation that, like all elite media – is secularist and liberal to the core, and no longer even recognises its own biases.
So, where to next? Unfortunately the United States has now reached a point where the system is visibly no longer translating the views and wishes of at least half of its population into concrete consideration. Under such circumstances, it is only a matter of time before it comes to a shuddering stop.
Case in point. Today, Julian Assange gave an interview to RT news (yes, sponsored by Russia and thus to be taken in small doses with great caution, yet I note that it is often surprisingly good at linking its news stories to the source material and often is the first to explain what is going on in the Middle East). In this interview, Assange has asserted that Trump will not be “allowed to win”.
Now, I do not buy into conspiracy theories even though I do believe there now exists a powerful secular, liberal group of elites whose interests are increasingly convergent. And because I do not accept conspiracy theories, I accept that it is perfectly possible for Trump to lose this election as a genuine expression of democratic will.
But, here’s the rub. If he does win, he will have been pushing against the most hostile environment probably seen by any presidential candidate in United States history. It would require a large number of people to purposefully reject the vision of the elites and for the pollsters to have gamed their results so badly that they bear no semblance anymore to reality. Is it possible? Yes. Probable? Probably not.
Yet the sheer hostility naturally invites people to ask whether this election can be truly considered a fair run. Trump, after all, has faced more media hostility, dare it be said, than that faced by Herbert Hoover who presided over the outbreak of the Great Depression. Yes, Trump has contributed to it through his own hubris. But not all of it.
On the other hand, if Trump loses, statements like those being made by Assange will guarantee the perpetual suspicion and de-legitimisation of any Clinton presidency. The elites will have won but at what cost? To seize control of the wheel of the Titanic is a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Whoever wins, the system is manifestly broken and the leaks are getting worse. It’s so bad that no political group or president can scotch tape it back together anymore.
America now finds itself in a situation where nearly half of the people have absolutely no confidence left in the system; no faith in the institutions of power; no belief left in the essential institutions of society to regulate their own conduct; and no reverence for the new orthodoxy imposed upon people by law and by fear – i.e. radical “isms” about relationships, family, gender, and race. In fact, there is now open antipathy toward all of these things. Ironically, a Trump presidency might have gone some distance to restoring the confidence of the most angry, unhappy, disaffected and ignored Americans.
From top-to-bottom the edifice is creaking and rocking. The iceberg has smashed a hole and the engine room is flooding. This is manifestly obvious in any quick survey of American society and culture.
Take the Supreme Court. It’s judges are now held in open derision. Their detection of same-sex marriage in the Constitution (and subsequent defence of it) are laughably absurd. And the Supreme Court itself is so hopelessly politicised that stacking it with partisan judges is now considered an urgent reason to elect Trump.
The Presidency itself is held in deep suspicion by nearly half of the voting public, many of whom are convinced that it is misused and neck deep in questionable overseas entanglements.
The Congress is an open joke, and has been for decades. But never in United States history has the contempt reached the stratospheric dimensions it has in 2016. Paralysed by lobby groups; bogged down in mindless procedures; boring; unable (and unwilling) to check either the President or the Supreme Court, it is stacked with career politicians – creatures for whom re-election is the ultimate goal – drawn from two corporate political parties who fall over themselves to collude when it is in their interests to do so. Together they pass bills that are purposefully rigged with miscellaneous legislation and spending, until the deception is so common it no longer even makes headlines.
The United States’ higher education system is now plagued with political correctness to the detriment of serious intellectual endeavour. A whole new industry has sprung up in which protesting students are interviewed, trolled, bailed, or questioned and the subsequent idiocy published on Youtube. Their banal mindless defence of every new liberal shibboleth rolling off the assembly line is not conducive to the continuance of a sane society. These people are being given skills and training to take responsible professions, and yet their cause célèbre are bathrooms, “safe spaces”, and essentially finding egalatarian-sounding language and arguments that would enable them to nobble free expression.
As for racism, well, quite possibly, not since the 1960’s has relations between races been at such a nadir. Race riots in Ferguson and Baltimore (et al) and misleading statistics regarding police shootings have sparked a fresh wave of antipathy toward the police (who are already severely besieged by expectations of political correctness). Not only do large numbers of black Americans now have open contempt for the law, and not only do their find succour and support in the academy, but the various responses have legitimised violence and property destruction as expressions of validated rage.
Behaviour that constitutes sheer madness is being treated as if it is a legal conundrum. Forcing cake shop owners to bake cakes against their wishes, or florists to supply flowers when they do not want to is an infringement of liberty by any meaningful, traditional, historical definition. Instead, government coercion is being packaged as the true freedom. It is becoming increasingly clear that “isms” of all kinds that require government support, need it because they are anti-democratic. Eventually those same “isms”, once entrenched, force a kind of moral tyranny on the society. It’s the only way they can flourish.
Single parenting is now the new normal. Literacy rates are plummeting. Widespread disregard for the state school system has led to waves of parents – mostly with a conservative bent – taking their children out of them. Radical atheists are on the march, trying to sue anyone who so much as utters the name of a deity in the precincts of a government institution (so much for diversity!). The list could go on. The madness is escalating. It really is a form of social insanity that people take some of what is happening remotely seriously – like the scientific journal that has blasted some contributors for giving a medical presentation inconvenient to the the transgender movement because their journal is about “diversity”. I mean, you could not make it up.
About 70 years ago, Orwell presciently gave us the mantra of his fictional (yet frighteningly realistic) authoritarian regime fronted by “Big Brother”:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
I propose an updated version of this intellectual sophistry of the kind that Orwell rightly pointed out was a blatant lie; a nakedly obvious contradiction of reality visible to those with eyes not dimmed by ideology to see:
Diversity is Conformity
Equality is Inequality
Free Speech is Controlled Speech
Non-Discrimination is Compulsion
Not as pithy as Orwell’s, of course. But the basic point is the same. No society, no political system, no culture can long survive when its entire intellectual, spiritual and institutional landscape is bankrupt. In this, the pessimists are quite right. For they have long gloomily pointed out that America is veering toward the iceberg. And the liberal watchmen on the decks are crying, “It is merely a bump in the voyage. Nothing to worry about at all!“
The Determined Pilgrim in an Arid Land 