I think this article by Angelo Codevilla, written from a perspective assumedly based on the Iron Law of Oligarchy is about as insightful as they come. I really can't see any backward analysis that is wrong. It reads wonderfully well from a Turchinian cultural evolutionary multi-level selection perspective. You can see how intra-elite competition, especially in the form of aspiring elite issues come to the front. There is system need to push commoners back into the role of serfs so that the system doesn't destabilize and aspirant elite movements can be properly controlled and throttled.
Here's a few quotes. I'll leave them as full paragraphs.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
The idea that we have close to the same level of ruling class pressure as Eastern bloc Iron curtain countries is scary. Is it hyperbole?If you have the "right views" it sure is. But have you ever thought about what it is actually like to be a center right Trumpish conservative in a white collar profession? Blue collars are largely exempt from this pressure. While a hundred reasons can explain this, the "serf" analysis rings as the most scary. Intra-elite competition among the quasi-elite class is cut throat. Filtering is required. Thus, you can read the last decade of mounting progressive purges as really forcing a big group of aspiring elite competitors out into the fringes. The Tuchinian cultural evolution idea is that if you're as quasi elite, there is a very fine line you need to stay ahead of in order to keep from falling into serfdom. The costs of staying ahead of this curve grow larger and larger, and require more and more grifting from a growing commoner class. Government "do good" initiatives certainly fit this bill. Hey we really do need to add 30% onto this to ensure proper diversity/ideological training... and to hire the right type of almost qualified BIPOC
Analogous things happened in every field of life. Medicine came to be dominated by the government’s relationship with drug companies and hospital associations. When Americans went to buy cars, or even light bulbs and shower nozzles, they found their choices limited by deals between government, industry, and insurance companies. These entities regarded each other as “stakeholders” in an oligarchic system. But they had ever less need to take account of mere citizens in what was becoming a republic in name only. As the 20th century was drawing to a close, wherever citizens looked, they saw a government and government-empowered entities over which they had ever less say, which ruled ever more unaccountably, and whose attitude toward them was ever less friendly.
The formalities were the last to go. Ever since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., the rulers’ dependence on popular assent to expenditures has been the essence of limited government. Article I, section 9 of the U.S. Constitution enshrines that principle. Congressional practice embodied it. Details of bills and expenditures were subject to public hearings and votes in subcommittees, committees, and the floors of both Houses. But beginning in the early 1980s and culminating in 2007, the U.S government abandoned the appropriations process.
Until 1981, Congress had used “continuing resolutions” to continue funding government operations unchanged until regular appropriations could be made. Thereafter, as congressional leaders learned how easy it is to use this vehicle to avoid exposing what they are doing to public scrutiny, they legislated and appropriated ever less in public, and increasingly put Congress’ output into continuing resolutions or omnibus bills, amounting to trillions of dollars and thousands of pages, impossible for representatives and senators to read, and presented to them as the only alternative to “shutting down the government.” This—now the U.S government standard operating procedure—enables the oligarchy’s “stakeholders” to negotiate their internal arrangements free from responsibility to citizens. It is the practical abolition of Article I section 9—and of the Magna Carta itself.
This is very damning. It's the natural evolution into Mandarin based technocracy. John Ralston Saul predicted the inevitability of this evolutionary path back in the 90's with Voltaire's Bastards - albeit with no solid theoretical grounding. The proper cultural evolutionary tools to make this rigorous just weren't around back then. But the recent omnibus pork bills in the US, make it hard not to think about how much government types love all the "good things" that level of pork allow one to do. It affords all sorts of opportunities to pay back one's donors and settle some balance sheets. That this solidifies oligarchical relationships is a feature not a bug. The populace just can't be trusted to do these things right. That's why you need a deplorable label for resistors and a type of cultish religious fervour for one's base. Both solutions prevent the masses from making any mischief on these wonderful structures.
Evolutionarily, these actions solidify hierarchy. From a multi-level selection perspective, hierachies are an inevitable landscape well. It is part of the process fo moving to a higher level of selection. And, this evolutionary arrow is almost deterministic. I don't know of many cases of de-evolution. There are some. But when one adds a strong cultural level of evolution, de-evolution is a very bad idea in Malthusian space.
By 2016, America was already well into the classic cycles of revolution. The atrophy of institutions, the waning of republican habits, and the increasing, reciprocal disrespect between classes that have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another, than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners precluded returning to traditional republican life. The election would determine whether the oligarchy could consolidate itself. More important, it would affect the speed by which the revolutionary vortex would carry the country, and the amount of violence this would involve.
Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.
Particular individuals had never been the oligarchy’s worry. In 2008, as Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain—far cries from Trump—he pointed to those Americans who “cling to God and guns” as the problem’s root. Clinton’s 2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,”—racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.—merely voiced what had long been the oligarchy’s consensus judgment of most Americans. For them, pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of power, treating them as less than citizens, had already come to define justice and right.
Not much to say here. Trump's populism and untethered outsider status was an existential threat to the establishment. Those who try to apply rational policy objections to Trump seem to miss the forest for the trees. I think the easiest way to view #Orangemanbad moral hysteria is via an outsider/usurper power lens. He empowered the wrong type of people. He broke the elite's social contract on how people in power should be restrained. He wasn't limited by a political "machine". And, his norms were not at all the refined ones of the nobelese.
I can understand the issue about norms (crass personality). It hasn't been very long since the time when non-diplomatic language could induce war. I think we're past that now. It's sort of like thinking a Walmart CEO's nasty language will cause a physical war with Amazon. Not going to happen. The need to noble class CEO's is largely a insiders hoodwink that enables them to sell the plebes on why they need to pay them 10mil. After, all if you don't, none of the other big companies will do business with you. You see this amplified with big tech monopolies right now. You have a de facto cabal going on. There is no illegal coordination when they ban Parler because every player knows the exact morals of the game. Outsiders will not survive. Monopoly and unfair competition laws no longer apply because the Oligarchs have found a way around this - moral uniformity amongst an elite class. This is made unbreakable due to the establishment una-party of media - tech - political - educational - deep state alignment. As you don't break the back of the Catholic church after the time of Charlemagne, I don't think you really break this. Even a really major revolution at the level of Partiot - Loyalists, probably won't be sufficient.
This next paragraph is what I think the historical consensus about Trump will find. His lack of a political machine caused most of his problems. He was a lame duck whose achilles heel was his inability to enforce anything. Never-Trump insiders controlled his appointments because Trump just wasn't up to knowing any better. He was always played. And, media derangement could make any appearance of authoritarianism stick. Heck, he was impeached for obstruction on the Russia Collusion hoax for having the terminity of defending himself. Now he's being impeached on a insurrection hoax for the legal process of questioning suspect election regularities. Flynn was basically charged with perjury for daring to claim innocence after getting pressured for a guilty plea by compromised lawyers and "you love your family don't you" threats.
Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.
He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly.
Already by the end of January 2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.
Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.
The thing I like about these paragraphs is how forthright they are. As John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards long ago (1990) theorized, a Heroic leader only serves to re-inforce technocracy and the Mandarins. Saul is right here. But, I think the Iron Law of Oligarchies is more right. The technocrats and Mandarins are, in the Peter Turchin perspective, mostly emblems of aspirant elite and elite class competition. It isn't solidification of a quasi-elite class position that matters, it is the competitional dynamics of the elite class as a hole which then forces a very steep competition gradient and success pyramid that matter. While this creates a broader quasi-elite base, its main effect is to require unsustainable levels of intra-elite competition which necessitate ever increasing levels of grift onto its commoner base. I hate to sound Marxist here, but the marginalization of 70 million Americans (all the deplorables) isn't a small thing. That the interests of working class "non-allies" can be ignored by Obama and likely further ridiculed by the blue una-party is scary. It is very Turchinian.
Here's the ?suma graci? of the article
#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob—especially when all can be sure they are acting safely, gratuitously. Success supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the ruling class’ members that they are more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger and better about themselves than they ever had.
Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.
Ruling-class judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump Administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, non-stop and unquestioned. #TheResistance made it ruling-class policy that Trump’s and his voters’ racism and a host of other wrongdoing made them, personally, illegitimate. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2018, the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set upon in the streets, prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even for defending themselves.
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