by PAUL COLLITS – EVERYTHING we know about ruling elites suggests that they are control freaks and that they know what they are doing.
One of the things they do very well is to create and manage narratives. Very carefully. And they have allies, all the while willing to promote their interests.
- They are all on the side of system preservation.
- But the comfortable world of the establishment has fractured, and is waning globally.
- The useful idiots are backing a loser in the age of post-modernist political disruption.
One of the great allies of the establishment can be found in the legacy media. We saw this during COVID.
Another great asset of the political establishment is the narrative of establishment Party politics. There are many actors whose personal and corporate interests lie in the maintenance of “politics as usual”.
ENEMIES
The two major Parties must be preserved at all costs – as a system. This means creating enemies of logic and of reason, as defined by the elites. And the enemies currently chosen for this task are insurgent Parties and ideas.
Which brings us to the scourge of populism and the outsider class. And the notion of useful idiots as defenders of the insider class.
A useful idiot is person fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions – and who doesn’t realise they are being cynically manipulated by the cause’s leaders or by other political players.
Lenin may or may not have used the term.
Characteristics of the useful idiot defence of the political class and the status quo might include the following:
- Use of epithets to discredit outsider politics, eg far-Right, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, controversial, divisive, racist, xenophobe and deplorables;
- Constant tacking to an imaginary “centre”;
- Continuation of the Left-Right axis as the only prism through which politics can be seen;
- Belief in the inherent goodness of the political class and the institutions of government as they have evolved;
- A willingness to accept false binaries proffered by the political class, such as the lockdown versus vaccine mandates policy “choice” in 2020-21;
- Defence of the use of institutions of government to crush the perceived threats of labelled dissidents, eg through censorship or the judicial system;
- Selective willingness in the age of woke to accept, even embrace and cheer for, some outsiders (homosexuals, migrants, Aborigines) but not others (Christians);
- A lack of political imagination.
Two classic cases of useful idiot defences of the political class relate (of course) to Donald Trump and to Brexit.
Today, the enemy list has expanded to include Nigel Farage, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the Fatherland and France’s Marine Le Pen. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is a favourite hate figure.
Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg tacked towards the progressive Left in search of collaborators in the Get Trump project.
The London Telegraph has operated in the same way for the British Tories (to little effect, as we saw the other week). The British establishment did its best to ignore Farage.
The Australian newspaper acted as a useful idiot for the political class, including unelected, biased bureaucrats, grant-troughing academics and Big Pharma during COVID, faithfully, indeed breathlessly, reporting daily press conferences which detailed either inflated or entirely false “case” numbers.
They are all on the side of system preservation.
Two recent examples in the Australian mainstream media remind us that the ruling elites still have their useful idiots.
One was an attack on Julian Assange and on those who support him, or at least recognise that he is one of the good guys. The second was an article in The Australian attacking populism.
The perpetrators are useful idiots for the UniParty regime and for the Deep State. In the case of Assange, they are simply repeating Asio’s talking points.
TERROR
Assange was typecast as merely a tool of the enemies of the West and its politico-military order. The sort of order, incidentally, that gave us the war on terror, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, Five Eyes surveillance and their direct descendants in the bioweapons establishment that delivered us gain-of-function research and COVID-19.
Oh, and the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Challenging all this was demonised at the time. Just as opposition to Vietnam was, half a century or so ago.
In the second recent example, Paul Kelly, endlessly promoted as the venerable “guru of Australian politics”, lamented in The Australian the rise of Nigel Farage, Trump (re-rise?) and Marine Le Pen.
Well, he got his wish on the last of the three.
All this new politics is “divisive” for Paul Kelly. In other words, it upsets the existing political order to which Kelly is committed.
It is all a bit off. The peasants revolting. In Kelly’s carefully ordered world, the outsiders and their deplorable views are dangerous. Dangerous to the established order of the UniParty.
But there is a bigger story here.
The comfortable political world of the establishment has fractured, and is waning globally. The useful idiots are backing a loser in the age of post-modernist political disruption.
The future of politics, of course, is landing in different places at different times and with unequal force. It certainly hasn’t hit Australia, as the hitherto poor electoral performance of the micro freedom Parties and their predecessors like One Nation.
On the other hand, the internal insurgents in the Coalition appear to have made ground under Peter Dutton. But the direction of travel seems clear, internationally. Hence the worries articulated by the media’s defenders of the status quo.
It is time the punditocracy caught up. We have moved far beyond “business as usual” politics and many still don’t see this.
There is an emerging literature on the decline of democratic governance and on the need for a way out if our freedoms are to survive in a shape that is even vaguely recognisable.
The starting point is to name our predicament.
Managerial elites now run everything in politics and the culture, and their rule is not only complete but also consequential.
It is not as if the people are left in peace to get on with their lives, distant from a remote, non-interventionist ruling class.
CONTROL
No, our new rulers meddle and bully and steal from us. They control our fates, and it is worsening by the day.
Some see the current pickle we are in as a class war, in Marxist terms. There is much to admire in this view.
Having named our problem, then we need to determine what is to be done.
The American political scientist Patrick Deneen, author of the book Why Liberalism Failed, sees our dilemma as an ancient one, between the rulers and the “demos”.
It is something over which there has been argument since Plato and Aristotle. Much of mainstream political theory over two millennia has been mulling over how to resolve the dilemma.
The ideal is a functioning “mixed constitution” polity in which the rulers don’t have too much power and the people too little. Or in our case, none.
When this occurs, it leads to trouble. The apologist-pundits sneeringly term what we are experiencing a populist revolt. Well, it is.
But they see “populism” as a problem to be solved. What they don’t get is that this is precisely what is needed to break the broken system.
Clearly the likes of Paul Kelly don’t see the system as broken. The truly awake do. For us, it is the system, not the reaction, that is the problem. The reaction is the solution.
Do the elites have too much power? We are here in Blind Freddie territory. We have a political and cultural crisis. Two quotes make the point.
Here is Jean-Claude Juncker, former European Union President: “We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamor occurs – because most people don’t grasp what has been decided – we continue, step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”
Astonishing. At least he is disarmingly honest about the way the world now works, and who is charge.
Then there is Michael Lind, referring specifically to just one of the ways that democracy has been hollowed out.
This is the march of globalism and its impact on nations: “For global elites, countries are merely exotic names for trade zones and labor camps, and citizenship has about as much ethical or emotional significance as a gym membership.”
TRASHING
Trashing the tradition of patriotism is one thing. Of course, it isn’t only nation States in the elites’ sights.
They have gone after anything that bespeaks “tradition”. Truth. Citizenship. Community. Faith. The family (as it once was). Human rights, like medical freedom. The working class and its values. The middle class. Boundaries (like borders). The classical virtues.
US academic Victor Davis Hanson sees three things “destroying the idea of America” (for which, also read Australia) – progressive elites, tribalism (identity politics of the woke variety) and globalisation.
He also notes, soberly, that “empowered citizenship” is very rare in history. Rule by elites, often tyrannical and sometimes cruel, has been the norm.
But often, historically, we also had very small government to go with the tyrannical rule. Small in terms of reach.
Now we have huge government to go with tyrannical rule. Yes, it is a crisis.PC
Umm, in the context of control of the narrative, the main problem is statute supported agencies like the AHRC that have powers of determining what constitutes blasphemy. These agencies censor the debate so that genuine threats, specifically Islam, cannot be mentioned let alone discussed. To give a topical example, this writer lodged a post in a national broadsheet that asked what motivated the youth who went on a stabbing spree in Southport UK. Nothing more. But such was the apparent sensitivity of the question that the post was rejected. Of course, by inference the question draws a link to the recent stabbing of an Orthodox priest in western Sydney and more tenuously, to the bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester UK some years ago. In the latter two cases, an Islamist was responsible. At the time of writing, we don’t know the ”identity” of the Southport stabber. But we can guess.
This is where the Left’s creation of identity politics becomes invaluable, and indeed, pregnant with unintended consequences. After all, if identity is of critical importance, at some point we need to categorise identities and name them. Even the blasphemy laws cannot prevent this evolution and in a hierarchy of rights, the right to identify and self-identify trumps other sensitivities. We see this in the trans debate. Once a cohort self-identifies, it is correct to accept and use their own terminology of self-identity, however ridiculous. in this game, the next step is to find a competent political entrepreneur who can build an opposing majority to the irksome minority. An opposing majority of sufficiently ruthless self-interest can impose restrictions on minorities it regards as threatening.
Putting this into practice in Australia currently requires two measures. The first is simple, the introduction of photo ID for voters in all elections. The second is harder and requires a change to the Electoral Act. That would be to introduce first past the post voting in Federal elections, effectively marginalising Muslim-based political parties. Confronting Islam within the framework of liberal democracy is the challenge of the age, all else is irrelevant.
Yep kean is an idiot but an arrogant one. As bad as blackout and the rest of the climate alarmists.
Man made climate change is a lie and renewables are a hoax.
I don’t know what it will take for the punters to wake up; and more importantly for the conservatives (sic), the LNP, to shunt this climate BS. Obviously blackouts will get their attention and Minns was very clever to keep Eraring open for 3 more years. But it doesn’t matter how long they wait renewables will NEVER work.
Personal view
I hope this report gives the bare facts about what is implied
by committing to a net-zero emissions economy for 2050.
Short of a command economy, it is simply an unattainable
pipe dream, and we will struggle to get 10–20% of the way
to the target, even with a democratic mandate to proceed. I
think that the hard facts should put a stop to urgent mitiga-
tion and lead to a focus on adaptation. Mankind has adapted
to the climate over recent millennia, and is better equipped
than ever to adapt in the coming decades. With respect to
sea-level-rise, the Dutch have been showing us the way for
centuries. Climate adaptation in the here and now is a much
easier sell to the UK citizenry than mitigation.
There is a very strong case to repeal the net-zero emis-
sions legislation, and replace it with a rather longer time ho-
rizon. The continued pressure towards a net-zero economy
will become a crime of sedition if the public rise up violently
to reject it. The silence of the Royal Society, the Royal Acad-
emy of Engineering and the professional science and engi-
neering bodies about these engineering realities is a matter
of complicity.
Why do monarchists want our head of state to be inferior to another country’s head of state?
yawn.
Yawn?
So monarchists want Australia’s head of state to be inferior and subordinate to another country’s head of state because they are tired?
How odd.
The yawn is to signify the boredom of this tired republic BS. (as you well know)
We are concerned about the state of republican’s heads.