Beyond Consequence

“I don’t know why the Democrats lost. I don’t understand … Prices have come down, the economy is good. I don’t know why they voted against her, against the party.” — William Shatner (Captain Kirk)

       If you boil down everything the woked-up, psychopathic Democratic Party did the past eight years as it drove the country into a ditch, it all amounted to a Great Pretending. Whatever the party said, they knew it was not so. Whatever they did, they pretended the other side was doing. They lied lavishly, knowingly, and incessantly and now they are pretending to soul-search in a great public display of pretend humility as they await the dreaded reckoning.

      Case in point: the interview on PBS between the Aspen Institute’s former chief Walter Isaacson and Harvard civics philosophy prof Michael Sandel, “to make sense of Donald Trump’s Presidency.” Listen to them prattle about “the dignity of work,” “credentialist condescension,” and “income disparities.” You know it was way worse than that: censorship, witch hunts, the gestapo FBI, a stupid money-pit war, medical fascism, the wide-open border, race-and gender hustles, state-sponsored riots, lawfare programmatically destroying lives, careers, reputations, and misuse of the news media (including PBS) to lie about all of it. These two pusillanimous pricks, pretending to be genteel, are the poster boys for a diseased polity.

     And behind the scenes now, in the C-suites of the big agencies, the faculty lounges of Higher Ed, the Zoom meet-ups of so many crypto-government NGOs, and especially in the Big Media board-rooms, the cries of anxiety and desperation signal a momentous end of something: the punking of America by a gang of vicious, criminal snobs. The aggregate insult alone deserves a world-class beat-down. They know it, and they know they are going to get it, and it will be satisfying to watch them rat each other out as judgment nears.

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     But even as all that plays out, and justice returns to the scene, Mr. Trump and Company face the enormous task of getting our nation’s house in order. The balance sheet is a catastrophe, we are functionally bankrupt, and “Joe Biden” has been busy destroying the value of our money in the futile attempt to work around all that. All the economic statistics rolled out to benefit Ms. Harris in the election are false. Something is underway that is too big to stop and it will express itself as ruinous inflation and economic depression in some wicked combo of the two. It will surely lead to epic rearrangements in everyday life. I will suggest a few examples.

      The people of this land have been deprived of purpose and meaning in an economy organized among giant enterprises and vast distances from wherever you live. To call ourselves “consumers” degrades us. We are citizens who have duties, responsibilities, and obligations to each other. We are economic actors who can make choices and take risks, not passive units to be exploited. The people need an economic role in their locality: employer of neighbors, producer of useful goods and services, all the way down to faithful servants of something and someone.

      Monopolies and chain stores killed American towns and all the complex relations in them that furnished purpose, meaning, and livelihoods for the people in a rich ecosystem of production and services. Now it’s the monopolies and chain store’s turn to decline and die off — and they will in the course of things, but it would be foolish to try to prop them up. Let them go and let the people rebuild their networks of making-and-doing locally. It’s already happening.    

      The giant shopping malls that came along in the 1970s have already died, and there was no official campaign to rescue them, nor any official funeral. It just happened quietly in the background. The malls were a pure product of the combo of Boomer household formation and Happy Motoring. That’s ending now. What replaced the malls, strangely, is the new model of Garage Sale Nation. That will continue to evolve and elaborate itself, and integrate into what happens next — which will not be the A-I robot nirvana of endless leisure, but rather an era of tribulation. You can see it coming on all around you. So many things don’t work anymore. Medicine. School. The task of reorganizing them is monumental. It will generate plenty of friction and hardship.

      The people also need a social role in their community: head of household, mother, mentor, public servant, caretaker, local hero. You need a place in this world to enact those roles, a location in it, at the proper scale, and it must be a place that is worthy of your affection. Too many places in the USA do not meet these requirements. They are ugly, sprawling, chaotic, and grotesque. The suburban template for development is a long-running fiasco, the anti-community, and MAGA’s psychological investment in it is, sadly, a mistake — though it is consistent with the psychology of previous investment (sunk costs).

      We’ve got to fix all that and it’s another monumental task. I would argue against the idea that we should just forget about the wrecked existing towns and cities and build all-new ones out in the hard-pan somewhere. First of all, our cities and towns exist where they are because they occupy important geographical sites: rivers, harbors, a rail nexus. Secondly, the capital (money) will not be there to build these proposed sci-fi utopias in the middle of nowhere. We’ve already squandered it on color revolutions, grift, and four-star hotel rooms for Venezuelan gangs. So, forget about that. Just realize that what we’re left with — Detroit, Bangor, Memphis, Spokane, and thousands of small towns — is what we’ve got to work with, and wrap your head around making them better places.

      If the Democratic Party had not gone completely insane for a decade, its many eggheads like Walter Isaacson and Michael Sandel would have been working on these major socio-economic transformations instead of punking us with drag queens, pointless wars, and Marxian punishments. I don’t know whether Mr. Trump and Company can tackle the transformations that this new pulse of history is calling for. The Elon-and-Vivek DOGE initiative is at least a good start in rescaling the way we govern ourselves. But it’s going to take a lot more than that to meet what circumstances require of us.

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