"The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living." Anonymous
George Rebane
We have been told many times that democracy works only so long as the takers can’t use the government gun to derive their livelihood from the makers. Staged governance in a democratic republic was conceived to prevent (delay?) that from happening. But leftwing autocrats have also known that for over a century, and have always attempted to convince the masses of the non-existent benefits of a pure democracy applied wholesale across the land – it is the fastest way to secure enduring political control by unprincipled authoritarians.
Today we witness what appears to be the beginning of the end with a ‘fundamental transformation’ of our republic. The Deep State of autocratic elites and their central planners has become firmly ensconced in our government through 50 years of elections by an increasingly under-educated and politically dormant electorate. California’s failure to recall Newsom is undoubtedly the nation’s posterchild of such misguided elections when we look at the condition of the state and his horrible ongoing policies. Consider (here) that in just one region –
- SF retailers (e.g. Walgreens) closing stores because their city lets thieves clear shelves of goods and openly haul them away;
- People are moving away in numbers that leads to an enrollment drop in SF schools;
- Polls show that more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave permanently.
Given Newsom’s overwhelming repulse of the recall, it is clear that the added level of pain to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes is yet to be determined. And that again brings to question the ability of voters to understand the source and sustenance of their pain.
When we examine the level of understanding of voters, opinions like that of David Briceno in the 12oct21 Union stand out. (here) The man claims that FN, especially in the reporting of Tucker Carlson, is “dangerous to our physical and mental health”. And he then goes on to demonstrate the Olympian heights of his ignorance of literally everything that Carlson and the network broadcast. As an example of such heights, Briceno claims that Carlson told viewers “we must adopt policies ‘to change the racial mix of the country. That’s the reason to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.’ ” Here Carlson’s point was exactly the opposite – it the policies of the Left to reduce the political power of American citizens through their open border and amnesty-to-citizenship initiatives. Such twisted reporting is, of course, rampant on lamestream outlets, which is the font of news, wisdom, and political sacraments for our country’s Bricenos.
Today the politically dormant are also becoming dormant in our labor markets. Their political horizon stops where their ability to qualify for retirement and/or government checks starts. (more here) The Democrats are fully aware of this and its impact on the country’s current labor shortage. Every American who leaves the workforce and no longer looks for a job becomes a permanent Democrat voter. The Democrats’ policy of porous borders is abetted by their hope that the illegals flooding the country will somehow make up for our missing workers in America’s labor pool. For the anti-American party that is a clear threefer – enlarge their taker constituency, fill the pipeline for future amnesty cum citizenship voters, and reduce the existing open-market capitalist population share that still embraces traditional American values.
Finally, we come again to the deficits that make an alarming share of our voters members of the cohort of the ignorant and politically dormant, and therefore almost totally at the mercy of what Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution calls our “knowledge class” in his recent The Constitution of Knowledge (2021). As reported by political philosophers Benjamin and Stacey Storey (here), our experience with this class of people is uneven –
The experts who staff America’s universities, newspapers, law firms and government agencies are sufficiently numerous and powerful to constitute a class—the knowledge class. It isn’t exactly an honor to be counted among them. Decades of debacles—foreign-policy blunders, the 2008 financial crisis, the ObamaCare rollout—have undermined the credibility of the credentialed. Our would-be knowers often seem little more than self-dealing, blinkered elites. Many wonder if we would be better off without them.
To this Rauch “makes a convincing case that we still need our institutions of expertise and the people who work for them.” It is the institutions in western culture that sought truth by encouraging “constructive doubt” through employment of the “cardinal principles” of “fallibilism” and “empiricism”. Paralleling the scientific process built on falsifiability and Occam (simplest explanation verifiable by repeated experiment), Rauch teaches that “knowledge is fallible if it might be debunked yet withstands attempts to debunk it”, and “empirical if the method we use to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker.”
So far so good. And to his benefit, Rauch also incorporates liberalism’s two “hallmark institutions, … constitutional government and free-market economics.” These “organize far-flung cooperation, distribute decision-making across social networks, and exploit network intelligence. The result is political cooperation, reliable scientific findings and economic prosperity.” All this, as reported in ‘prestigious newspapers and scientific journals’ was embraced by the population at large. But today, many of us no longer do.
Rauch “identifies two forces undermining the constitution of knowledge. The first is the nihilism of the internet. The commercial internet was born with an epistemic defect, … its metrics and algorithms and optimization tools were sensitive to popularity but indifferent to truth. Sensational rumors, salacious images and outrage-driven social media pile-ons are clickbait; truth is at best a secondary consideration.” The point to remember here is that our somnambulant electorate is not very much aware of all this, as their focus remains on the more immediate pursuit of bread and circuses. Recognizing this, “some see the confusion that results as a political opportunity. State actors deploy bots to soak social media in conspiracy theories—less to promote certain electoral outcomes than to induce uncertainty, disorientation, and attendant cynicism.” And as Gary Kasparov has observed, republican government is weakened when this “exhausts your critical thinking, … and produces epistemic helplessness” – i.e. it makes it hard to identify and/or acquire usable knowledge.
Rauch’s antidote is the elite ruling class – i.e. “the ‘reality-based community’ that determines what views get published, platformed, and enacted as policies.” This is where he begins to go off the rails by omitting the notable historical critiques of knowledge by established thinkers “as if no knowledgeable person had ever challenged the constitution of knowledge.” He maintains that “liberal science … is the only legitimate validator of knowledge” despite the fact, recently made so obvious, that science does not speak with a single voice. In addition to this, the Storeys point out that “the expert class has undermined its pretensions to authority with high-profile displays of ineptitude, from shifting and contradictory pandemic policies to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
So we see that Rauch himself is of two minds, as are so many of our political leaders today (especially Republicans, see long ago here). He recognizes the benefits of constitutional government and free-market economics, and then goes on to argue for the maintenance and strengthening of the knowledge class as the source of our governing elites, those who in power will magically and ahistorically uphold and protect our republican governance. Today we see the knowledge class leading us toward a centrally planned and controlled autocracy. And as a student of governance and governments, Rauch clearly acknowledges that our electorate no longer has the interest or intellectual wherewithal to ‘keep’ our democratic republic when in the voting booth.
rebanesruminations.com 
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