Most people do not understand what freedom means so no, unfortunately they won't revolt for freedom as the article suggest they might..
But they do understand about income and can easily see their income shrinking. And that historically has always been a reason for revolt in every country, no exception.
Declining economic marginal returns are now turning into absolute decline of income. We can therefore confidently expect troubles ahead. Now the problem of course is that the people in charge can also see where the wind is blowing. What will they do then? Historically again, war has always been the solution. Will this time be different?
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,
My first article on the coming backlash - admittedly wildly optimistic - went to print April 24, 2020.
After
6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a
movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a
demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.
I was off by four years. I
wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that
our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown
scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I
also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown
would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and
the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.
The forces
that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the
time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and
the administrative state at all levels of society.
There is every
evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a
foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our
lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so
easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I
had anticipated.
Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.
New literature is emerging to document it all.
The new book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” is
a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that
gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed
up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony.
The
revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even
about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s
class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the
ruled.
With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population.
One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.”
She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that:
“The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed .... The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”
A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:
“The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts.
I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and
Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up
in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying
institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial
edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are
exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return
to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the
cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous
ambition.”
We truly want to believe
this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are
incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the
deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones,
New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York
Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain
predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class
mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while
demonizing disagreement.
After all, all of these venues, in
addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still
defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than
express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they
have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of
the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the
relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible
results.
Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own
outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap
lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they
have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to
the powerful.
The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct.
This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with
authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone
who makes a basic demand for normal freedom—to speak or choose one’s
own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask—can reliably
anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely
no sense.
The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.
It’s
enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols
themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that
they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The
World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure
of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well,
and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.
The
issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been
admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on
preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting
themselves.
That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.
This
is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media,
which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media
venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are
losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are
gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states
are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.
Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining.
When
the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is
followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun,
with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”
DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it.
Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure
indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great
reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have
come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer
demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.
As for
politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist
movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in
Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the
widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in
migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the
administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a
possible unfriendly president in the form of Donald Trump or RFK, Jr.
So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.
What
does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a
revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly
likely pathway for long-term social change?
These are legitimate questions.
For
hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no
system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is
coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving
themselves at public expense.
That seems correct. In the
days of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 15 years ago, the street
protesters spoke of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. They were speaking
of those with the money inside the traders’ buildings as opposed to the
people on the streets and everywhere else.
Even if that movement misidentified the full nature of the problem, the intuition into which it tapped spoke to a truth. Such a disproportionate distribution of power and wealth is dangerously unsustainable. Revolution of some sort threatens. The mystery right now is what form this takes. It’s unknown because we’ve never been here before.
There
is no real historical record of a highly developed society ostensibly
living under a civilized code of law that experiences an upheaval of the
type that would be required to unseat the rulers of all the commanding
heights. We’ve seen political reform movements that take place from the
top down but not really anything that approximates a genuine bottom-up
revolution of the sort that is shaping up right now.
We know, or think we know, how it all transpires in a tinpot dictatorship or a socialist society of the old Soviet bloc. The
government loses all legitimacy, the military flips loyalties, there is
a popular revolt that boils over, and the leaders of the government
flee. Or they simply lose their jobs and take up new positions in
civilian life. These revolutions can be violent or peaceful but the end
result is the same. One regime replaces another.
It’s hard
to know how this translates to a society that is heavily modernized and
seen as non-totalitarian and even existing under the rule of law, more
or less. How does revolution occur in this case? How does the
regime come around to adapting itself to a public revolt against
governance as we know it in the US, UK, and Europe?
Yes, there is the vote, if we can trust that.
But even here, there are the candidates, which are that for a reason.
They specialize in politics, which does not necessarily mean doing the
right thing or reflecting the aspirations of the voters behind them.
They are responsive to their donors first, as we have long discovered.
Public opinion can matter but there is no mechanism that guarantees a
smoothly responsive pathway from popular attitudes to political
outcomes.
There is also the pathway of industrial change, a
migration of resources out of legacy venues to new ones. Indeed, in the
marketplace of ideas, the amplifiers of regime propaganda are failing
but we also observe the response: widened censorship. What’s happening
in Brazil with the full criminalization of free speech can easily happen
in the US.
In social media, were it not for Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it’s hard to know where we would be. We
have no large platform in which to influence the culture more broadly.
And yet the attacks on that platform and other enterprises owned by Musk
are growing. This is emblematic of a much more robust upheaval taking
place, one that suggests change is on the way.
But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is
a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the
ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts.
An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but
that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate
the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new
elite replaces them with different ideas.
In this model, we can
expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology
could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is
roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing
thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by
the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot
mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.
And yet,
people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a
future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here
sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The
slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be
decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There
is no other path.
The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.
