Little Revolutions
Revolutions come when people suddenly realize that everyone else is privately thinking the same things about the current arrangements. Most people tend to keep their grievances private. Complaining is boring and considered bad form even in the worst of times, so people tend to keep their grievances to themselves. It is when they begin to notice that everyone else has similar complaints that the cascading effect turns complaints into demands and then into rebellion.
It is why the corporate communists who dominate the official social media platforms like Twitter are more deluded than they seem. Their entire public life is nothing but a litany of complaints, shared with other miserable wrecks on-line. They literally know everyone who shares their grievances, as they are all in the same groups. The only awakening that will happen from their endless griping is that the rest of society will realize that these people are nuts and need to be pushed back to the fringe.
A version of that took place a couple of weeks ago when Douglas Murray was assigned the task of purging Pedro Gonzalez. Murray took issue with Gonzalez making sport of various internationalist types on Twitter. Gonzalez was doing the “physiognomy is real” thing where he posted pics of the people he was mocking. Murray responded with, “Mr. Gonzalez spent his holiday weekend bringing what many have worked hard to relegate to the gutter into respectable conservative circles.”
This is an old stand-by for the neocons. Starting in the 1980’s they have slandered anyone who opposed their sociopathic agenda as anti-Semites or racists. The fact that the favorite tool of neoconservatism has always been the favorite tool of the far-left is not an accident. Despite their claims, the neocons were never conservative. Theirs is an ideology of the Left. They imagine a new world order where they sit atop as the moral arbiters, using extreme force to impose their will.
That incident was not all that interesting, but what is interesting is that few people bother to notice and those who did mocked Douglas Murray. His own comment section reads like satire cooked up by the anti-Semites. Many had to be trolls having a laugh at the expense of the geezers. On Twitter, Murray was mocked as a relic from an age in which people were still fooled by neoconservatives. Gonzalez just laughed the whole thing off as the rantings of an old man.
While a tempest in a teapot, there was a time when a bigfoot chattering skull like Murray could have someone thrown into the void this way. Bill Buckley was used this way back in the 1990’s when Bill Kristol forced him to denounce Buchanan. This trick worked thirty years ago but today it gets little more than a shrug. What people did notice is that it did not work. The ad hominem and guilt by association stuff is no longer the super weapon it was thirty years ago. The world has changed.
It is not just that these tactics do not work it is that they increasingly sound like the rantings of old people complaining about the world changing. This column from George Will before Christmas is a good example. His quill pen act was effective into the Bush years, but now it seems anachronistic and a bit ridiculous, like a man wearing a denim jacket with “disco forever” spelled out in rhinestones on the back. It reads like something that should have been written 40 years ago.
The tattered look of these old tactics also reveals the general shabbiness of the arguments behind the name calling. Will’s claims about individualism are pure nonsense and his claim that nationalism is collectivism is ridiculous. How did this man get through high school with such nonsense in his head? In other words, the datedness makes it easier to see that these people were never smart. Neoconservatism, like so-called conservatism, was a tactic, not a set of ideas.
It is not just among the chattering skulls that we are seeing a change. All of sudden, without anyone noticing, Gab is no longer the bogeyman. Hundreds of right-wing pols have joined and legitimate political players like Rasmussen have joined because they see that is where the crowd is going, the crowd they need to survive. People have noticed that the biggest players on the planet tried to destroy Torba and his company, but he simply refused to buckle to them.
Of course, this change in attitudes reflects the growing divide in society. Half of the people who voted for Joe Biden support internment camps for dissidents and house arrest for the non-complaint. Behind every double mask is someone who would volunteer to be a camp guard. One of the causes of revolution is that there is always some portion of society willing to support the regime. Disordered minds seek the order of the bloody fist imposing its will on society.
Those people, the fringe crazies who have been allowed to run free in the public square, are a fixture in human society. A central part of every human society is maintaining the rules that define the society. This means keeping the crazies under control and away from the levers of power. That is, perhaps, what we are beginning to see with these recent events. People are rejecting the moral claims of these people and living their lives in spite of them.
There is a great scene in the movie Braveheart in which the main character captures the leader of the kings guard. He looks down at first, as was required when addressing a superior man, but then he looks up into the man’s eyes as an equal. It is a great scene, because it reflects how control is exercised and broken. It seems that many are now willing to look moral scoundrels like Murray in the eyes and give them the treatment they so richly deserve.
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