Happens every 100 years or so - A new political dynamic is emerging. Everyday people have had it.
Left/right to a large degree is quaint, antiquated thinking
The game has long felt rigged. It feels like some people get advantages and play by different rules than the rest (great majority) of us. If one is part of the club, whether as a new probationary member like President Gay at Harvard who is now accused of EVEN MORE plagiarism, an established but not quite senior member like Mr. Biden, a senior member like George Soros, or a founding member who enjoys general public anonymity, the rules are different. Perhaps this has always been the case. But just as the printing press brought literacy to everyday people, the Internet has brought political literacy (of a kind) to everyday people. And just as the Church and the ancient aristocracy feared widespread literacy (there is a reason it was against the law to teach slaves to read) as people began to read the Bible for themselves without taking the word of the village priest, today’s “priesthood” fears an empowered and educated middle class that can think for itself in more sophisticated ways. Educated and empowered people have a tendency to say “no”. Even worse, if given the chance educated everyday people can hold those in positions of privilege to account. To be humiliated by one’s lessers is almost unforgivable within the club. The hoi polloi should know its place. Why do you think that at this late date we have yet to see the Epstein flight list?
Being held to account is the last thing the club, the power vestige of a less informed era, wants. The members resent that it is even possible. They would prefer to continue on as before consolidating (their) power in centralized nodes.
But increased centralization invariably leads to deep inefficiencies, corruption, and ultimately implosion. Many giant companies have gone down this route over the last century. Many empires over the millenia have also. But in our current situation information has become an accelerant of societal transformation. Consider how much has changed over the last two decades. Consider how much things have changed in the last five.
Gone are the days when people simply deferred to their doctor or the local university’s professor, or the old media talking heads that we now know are (and likely always were) full of bovine excrement and compromised by sponsors of various kinds.
Two relatively recent developments put the fear of God into the club. And before we go on let us say that we seek to keep things open and non-dogmatic and to avoid old school partisanship at ACC. But the two political earthquakes to which we refer are Trump’s election and then Brexit after that. It was these two developments that put the club on notice and got them to mobilize their forces en masse. Any more developments like Trump or Brexit and the trajectory that the privileged classes of the 20th century had for the 21st might be derailed. That simply could not happen. Post Brexit is when the club really went to war with the informed middle class.
Of course the current unrest has been characterized in old terms, right versus left. Trump vs Biden. UK versus EU. This works for the club. But is that really what we are seeing now? It seems to us that the real area of political cleavage is between those who think that individuals have dignity and that with technology a decentralized approach to things is wisest and most just, and those who believe in centralized bureaucracy and really (and sadly) authoritarianism where the individual is not respected, where free speech is curtailed in favor of the interests of the old guard, and where property rights and “middle class” (really just human) agency are stripped.
We look at it this way. Are you against crony capitalism? One can be if one is on the “right” or “left”. If you believe in the individual, that the rule of law should apply to all and not just those outside of the crony club, in property rights, in the dignity of the everyday person, whether you are on the “right” or “left” is much less important these days than the fact that you are against crony capitalism. These are the emerging lines on the political map today. Will the educated middle class tell the old guard “no” and move toward a freer world? Or will the old guard, the club (largely still based in Europe by the way), be able to overcome the collective resistance of everyday educated people by selling what they call “progress” to those who do not see the real nature of the fight?
It’s an open question at the moment. We believe the educated everyday people of the world have an obligation to do what is right and to resist the current centralization efforts. Our future and the future of generations to come depends on it.
