Asses&Villains: The Decaying Corpse of the American Republic

In Christopher Nolan’s film ‘The Dark Knight’, the Joker tells the Batman, “You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble,” Joker tells Batman. “They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other.” While the Joker’s main goal is chaos, watching the world burn, his philosophy is what essayist Curtis Yarvin would call a cogent amoral realist. 

The Joker understands what Batman, Commissioner Gordan, and Harry Dent refuse to accept. As he gleefully sprays paint on museum ‘masterpieces’, this action is the physical reaction to the realization that progressives in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent government bureaucracy are the ones that really hold true power in the decaying republic we call America. Meanwhile, the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and utterly feckless. When Trump was elected there was all this talk about draining the swamp, but in the end, it was the swamp that drained him.

In 1899, Gaetano Mosca wrote the Elements of Political Science. Mosca claimed that societies are ruled by a select minority which he called the political class. That means that every society could be split between two social classes: the one that rules and the one which is ruled. This is always true, for Mosca, because without a political class there is no rule. The idea of a so-called limited government that we hear so much about does not exist. He does say that there is incomplete government.

The Joker is fully aware of this, a power that is birthed in anarchy. These circles of local power we call crime. So Batman, just so you know, a regime that tolerates crime has merely decided to abdicate some of its power to the criminal element. We saw this during the summer of BLM, where all of a sudden it was okay to gather in masses for the cause of social justice, and if the cause was acceptable, burning and looting is okay. Just be sure not to go full Rittenhouse and try to defend your property and yourself.

The ‘political class dominates’ American society, preaching progressive values to the masses. Democracy never really existed, and the idea of a Republic is a myth–and all myth is a lie.

“The British army is waiting out there
An’ it weighs fifteen hundred tons” – The Clash

Mosca noted that, yes, there is an army and physical threats, but sovereignty is not just physical but also psychological. The regime is a minority and it must obtain psychological consent from its subjects. It does this by managing the stories and controlling the narrative. The narrative is the political formula that keeps power. This convinces the subject to ‘buy in’.

Where does the narrative come from? The Mainstream Media, Social Media Big Tech, and others. With everything we are learning about the origin of Covid-19, the censorship of scientists and political opinion, the media getting paid to promote Big Pharma and Military Industrial Complex narratives, and Big Tech (Twitter, Google, Facebook) acting like deep state subsidiaries, we can see how the narrative can take hold. Just look at how the narrative changed and continues to morph to this day.

Social media companies engaged in censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, the explicit direction of the government. Google frequently makes links disappear, for example. President Joe Biden repeatedly directed his staff to silence Americans on Twitter who disagreed with his policies.

Google’s Trust & Safety team is managed by 3 ex-CIA agents, who control “misinfo & hate speech.” Here is the breakdown of government agencies that were embedded:
CIA-27
FBI-52
NSA-30
DHS-50
ODNI-6

Mosca pointed out that the best regimes will use the ‘Medium’ to create a message suitable for each stratum of the ‘culture’. For those in power, the message has to be self-affirming, that they are doing the best thing. It convinces the official class, the bureaucratic worker bees, that they are doing the right thing. For the rest of us, the best formula convinces us to shut up, keep going to work, and hand over our taxes.

We find ourselves in The red pill and blue pill moment where we are offered a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill (Wikipedia). In contemporary politics,  “the red pill,” from The Matrix movies has created a metaphor for the revelation of a suppressed truth that cracks open progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.

Yarvin, in his blog Gray Mirror explains that the modus operandi of American democracy is not founded and sustained by public elections but by “illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy” in what he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

So, political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of merit but through their connection to the bureaucratic functions of the state. American democracy is more symbolic than concrete. The voters, the people hold no real power. They basically elect officials that in reality have little power, and are controlled by other aspects of the apparatus, the Cathedral.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’” – Peter Thiel.

Covid, if it did anything, exposed how broken our government is. Didn’t it seem odd how as the narrative changed, places like the CDC, the NT Times, Universities, and ‘The Science’ were all in lockstep with the changes? This is the source–elite academic and media institutions determine what is acceptable political discourse and distort boots-on-the-ground reality to fit the prescribed ideology. While MAGAs continue to see a centralized conspiracy in their cornflakes, it is instead indicative of a shared (liberal) worldview and culture. This should be clear as we watch all aspects of society continue to move to the left.

It has been noted by members of the New Right, that the humiliating fall of Afghanistan was to be expected. It is a metaphor. After 20 years and billions of dollars, the Taliban took control without firing a shot. Yet, nobody assumed responsibility, it was just written off as a bad job. As critics have said, of course, it ended this way, because no one is actually in charge of the government, and the fact that boondoggles like this don’t happen more often is the real mystery.

Tocqueville warned that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie, “In such conditions, we might become so enamored with ‘a relaxed love of present enjoyments’ that we lose interest in the future of our descendants…and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one”, wrote The New Yorker’s James Wood. Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a modern democracy, it would be a much more dangerous version than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time.[wikipedia]

Tocqueville somewhat predicted the outcome of our democracy falling to the Cathedral–he could see “a multitude of men”, uniformly alike, equal, “constantly circling for petty pleasures”, unaware of fellow citizens and subject to the will of a powerful state which exerted an “immense protective power”.

Is there any real way to purge the state, local, and federal bureaucracy? Is there a way to end the never-ending political wars, race wars, class wars, and the blue-state vs. red-state conflicts? Left and right are frustrated–the left is frustrated by a weak executive, an outdated constitution, and a supreme court that is too powerful. The right has its own grievances.

The problem is ingrained, and we see it all the time, even in places where elitist towns like Cape Charles can come to dominate the entire culture of Northampton County. The problem, as JD Vance notes, is that “a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests” that directly oppose those of people in places like Northampton. These people have no real stake in the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. Our government has morphed into an “oligarchy of the educated who care more about competing for status within the system than they do about America’s national interest. Culture war is class warfare”.

The New Right, the dissident right, and the heterodox fringe’s disdain are hog-tied to what Blake Masters would say is a belief that “liberal ideology, growing bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning”.

Is there hope for the American Experiment? This is a generational question. If the cool kids start coming, maybe there will be a direction. Just as they gravitated towards punk in the 70s, and abandoned corporate rock, maybe they will abandon the current state and do something revolutionary.