Joel Kotkin is sounding a warning. As always, the Democrat argues like a rational analyst about the situation at hand. Especially, about the ongoing transformation of the United States into Europe.
Heck, even once-Great Britain is becoming Europeanized. So much for Brexit.
Kotkin lists the characteristics that define European culture and that the Democratic Party is mimicking:
… an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews.
Does that sound familiar? Even at a time when Democrats are pretending to respect the will of the people, they are still promoting the Green New Deal, transmania, identity politics and hostility toward Israel and Jews.
The ascent of Kamala Harris counts as a symptom. The Democratic Party is now “a tightly controlled, elite driven cabal.”
It is almost confusing. The party appeals to the downtrodden and offers them mountains of goodies. And yet, the price of that largesse, of gimme politics, is that a small group of elites gets to impose its will on the rest. You recall the cries of outrage when the Supreme Court did not rule as the Democrats wanted them to rule. And you recall the current efforts to kneecap the Court, the better to allow Democratic party elites to impose their will.
Kotkin does not put it in these terms, but the model for this political culture lies with Plato. The elites in question are the guardian class of philosopher kings, the people who take charge because they see the ideas more clearly. They need merely to persuade the rest of the populace that they are doing what is best for everyone, and that the populace should obey their dictates, dutifully.
Of course, this is Western idealism on steroids, seen most clearly in the notion that if you think you are a man and feel like you are a man and believe to the roots of your marrow that you are a man-- well then, you are a man. You might have trillions of XX chromosomes, but you are really a man.
The alternative to Platonic idealism values empirical verification and pragmatics. Your policies, like your hypotheses, are to be tested against reality. Even if the greatest philosopher king concocted them, reality has the final say. In a culture based on pragmatics, a policy either works or does not work. It does not gain special value for having been proposed by a philosopher king.
Great Britain and America have traditionally valued empiricism and pragmatism. The rest of Europe has valued idealism, especially the effort to turn the earthly governments into a Heavenly City.
Rule by philosopher kings means rule by the intelligentsia and the cognoscenti. That includes intellectuals, professors, journalists, lawyers, bureaucrats and other assorted serious thinkers.
Being a philosopher king does not mean that you have ever done anything. It means that you think big thoughts.
In an empirically-based culture people value those who build and construct and produce. They value merchants and anyone who submits to the verdict of the marketplace. They also value the verdict of the battlefield.
If you want to devalue building and industry, you can do as the Europeans do, you can impose draconian environmental standards, designed to overcome the evil that is industrial production. As Kotkin points out, certain American states have wrecked their local economies by imposing regulations designed to save the climate.
One notes, in passing, that candidate Donald Trump, a man who has built more than his share of massive edifices, never receives any credit or any respect for his accomplishments in business.
Philosopher kings gain power when they colonize minds. It helps to have an educational establishment that refuses to teach much of anything, least of all, how to weigh two alternatives. In place of rational thought philosopher kings and their satraps in the teachers’ unions teach an ideology, a system of beliefs. That is, they propagate a narrative, a story that presumably explains everything.
In the story there are usually two main characters, an oppressor and a victim. The more deeply you believe in the story the more reasonable it seems to arrogate to yourself what the oppressor has earned.
Philosopher kings consolidate their own power by feeding people, by making people dependent on them for goods and services. In their earthly paradise you do not need to work to earn. You will be given what you need, as ample recompense for your willingness to spout the party line.
In an advanced form, the philosopher kings rationalize their activities by declaring that everyone deserves to have the same, that, as Kamala put it, we should all end up at the same place on the finish line. Anything but competitive striving.
It might not work out that way in reality, but it is a seductive promise, especially for people who do not excel in the competitive market place.
As Kotkin explains it, correctly, I believe, today’s Democratic Party suffers from nearly Stalinist discipline. Without votes or elections, the party embraced Kamala unthinkingly and elevated her to what Kotkin calls, near-mythic status.
This means that she became a character in a grand narrative, a perfect representative of the oppressed classes. Now she is being given her due, not because she earned it, but because she fulfills the terms of the oppression narrative.
Democrats showed themselves to be of one mind, as though they had all received the same indoctrination and as though they all embraced it, dare I say, mindlessly.
The irony of it all is that Europe is currently a failing civilization. It is falling behind in the clash of civilizations and is living off of its credit. Kotkin explains:
Today, outside of its historic charms, Europe isn’t much of a model for anything – except how to decline. The once vaunted European quality of life is dropping, its industrial base is eroding and there seems little promise of future improvement. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone economy grew about six per cent, compared with 82 per cent for the US.
Europe also lags in virtually every major cutting-edge industry from software and space to cars. This is, in part, due to a lack of new tech investment. Among the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in continental Europe. The list is dominated largely by the US, with China in second place.
Unsurprisingly, America’s red states are largely outcompeting America’s blue states. Kotkin explains:
Last year, ultra-blue California ranked last in income growth, followed closely by Maryland, Massachusetts and New York. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled Texas, Nevada, Florida and Arkansas experienced the highest. Overall, in the past decade, the six fastest growing southern states – Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – added more to the national GDP than the north-east, once the nation’s powerhouse.
He continues:
The American economy is increasingly shifting towards places like Dallas-Fort Worth, which recently dethroned Chicago as the No2 financial centre in the US. Dallas has even started to raise capital to build a new stock exchange. Then there’s the mass migration of key technology firms – Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and, perhaps most crucially, Tesla and SpaceX – to the red states.
So, we need to reject Middle European idealism and return to good old American pragmatism.
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