#paleoconservative

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.

By today's standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.

Our share of the global economy is much shrunken from Reagan’s time. Our deficit is approaching $1 trillion. Our debt is surging toward 100 percent of GDP. Entitlements are consuming our national wealth. We are committed to containing the two other greatest powers, Russia and China. We are tied down militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, with the War Party beating the drums for another and larger war — with Iran. And we are sanctioning adversaries and allies for not following our leadership of the West and the world. In looking at America’s global commitments, greatly expanded since our Cold War victory, one word come to mind: unsustainable.

By means of such plebiscitary, egalitarian, and libertarian intrusions, the managerial state breaks down the intermediary and differentiating institutions of the bourgeois order and homogenizes and subjugates their component members, rationalizing their extension into these institutions through cosmopolitan ideological formulas that condemn bourgeois heterogeneity as artificial and repressive as well as through meliorist or utopian formulas.

The conflict between the new elites and the older elites they challenge occurs not only within the organizations themselves, but also in all the political, economic, and social and cultural activities that mass organizations undertake, and the conflict is not restricted to a struggle for formal political and economical power but involves a contest for social and cultural power as well. The persistence of traditional institutions and systems of beliefs constrains and impedes the continuing growth of mass organizations and their operations, and it is imperative for the emerging elites to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society that sustains the older elites and the systems of beliefs, or ideologies, on which their rule is based.

We have transformed our colleges from places of higher learning into places for the technical training of poorly prepared young men and women who need a degree to get a job in a college-crazy society.