New York
It is not about government per se.
Everyone recognizes the need for a government. It is this particular government that White America despises. It is this political class that America despises.
Because the political class is concentrated in Washington, people in the Heartland hate Washington. The tax burden and the debt ceiling are felt more strongly because the legitimacy of this government and this political class has evaporated in the same way the Federalists or the Bourbons lost their legitimacy.
The eunuchs run the show now. They never imagined that the day would come when Americans would rise up to hurl them out of power.
They couldn’t imagine it because their own fantasy ideology – a mix of Cultural Marxism, progressivism, and secular humanism – is irrationally identified with the “progress” of the human species. The eunuchs seriously believed they were the predestined “end of history.”
Thing is, no one can look at Barack Hussein Obama or Jens Stoltenberg or Gordon Brown and see that “progress” has been made over Caesar, Augustus, and George Washington. These so-called “leaders” have none of the recognizable qualities of leadership.
No one believes anymore that NPR or the New York Times is BRA’s authoritative moral voice. The only people who believe the Jesse Jackson is BRA’s moral evangel are black people and progressives. What is broken now can never be fixed.
Newsweek was sold for $1 dollar because of its loss of legitimacy. The establishment is now in political default. The failure to raise the debt ceiling is a symptom of the political crisis of the establishment.
Is this not obvious?
The establishment now has to fall on its sword and surrender power voluntarily … in the same way that the Jacksonians triumphed over the Federalists. The plane ride is over and the flight attendant (in the form of the Tea Party) is ordering the passengers in Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington to disembark at this terminal.
Of course the idea of an orderly transition of power is inconceivable to those who have possessed it for so long. The establishment is sitting in the plane on the tarmac and demanding that the pilot lift off for the Mile High Club can get back to business as usual.
This is a stand off between the people who own the plane and who in theory have the power to do anything they want with it, which they are ordering to land, and the passengers who are on the plane now, who see this as a temporary nuisance caused by “crazy people” who are “ignorant” and don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing.
Looking ahead, I can see the day coming when security will be called in to escort the establishment out of the plane, although I cannot say when that day will come. We are about to enter a very familiar type of historical situation when “the cake of custom” faces a crisis of its own contradictions and breaks down.
These are always the most interesting moments in history: Caesar crossing the Rubicon, South Carolina seceding from the Union, the rise of the Third Estate, the Crash of ’29, etc.
This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy sidelines Democrats and liberalism. Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?
In earlier periods, confidence in the economy and rising personal incomes put limits on voter discontent. Today, a dispiriting economy combined with a well-developed critique of government leaves government not just distrusted but illegitimate.