The real problem with governments in the West is not elected officials. It is the armies of unelected “third way” liberal bureaucrats who grease the wheels of the new soft tyranny. The existence of their jobs depends upon the ignorance of the public. If the Average Joe knew even a fraction of what most so-called “civil servants” were actually doing for a living, they would not tolerate it.
The Right are sick of them:
The Left are sick of them:
The so-called “Deep State” are nothing more than an international mafia of bureaucrats, ones who think that we are stupid cattle and unfit to govern ourselves.
They take their marching orders from billionaire elites, through their apparatuses; the NGOs and nonprofits that populate our institutions and make up the petitioning bodies of the rich and powerful.
Thousands of think tanks, charities, and other non-profit, tax-free organizations, pushing what are allegedly American ideas and American values on foreign countries, when they are actually the values of the flavorless centrist amoeboid liberal bureaucrats who hope to reshape the world in their image, with or without our consent. Who stands to gain from all of this? Big finance. The bankers. The World Bank and the IMF. Wall Street. The City of London. Bern. Amsterdam. Shanghai. A tiny aristocratic caste is profiting off of our misery.
Democracy requires that those who vote have accurate information on what they’re voting for. Millions are now voting with not even the slightest inkling of what their government consists of. How can that be called democracy?
The Right are sick of them:
By the 1940s liberals defined their outlook as a “fighting faith” opposed to fascism (communism having somewhat escaped their attention). “Value relativity” had been a useful cudgel against existing bourgeois, Christian values—“social acids” as one Deweyite put it—but liberalism itself was exempt from inquisition. Ongoing experiment gave ever-shifting “content” to an ever-new liberalism. The welfare state was means and end, since planning and economic redistribution were keys to a rational society. Freedom, Gottfried observes, was reduced to “what judges, public administrators, and journalists see fit to impose on other people.” Bored with handing out pottage, welfare states “also tried to shape or reshape social relations to fit particular worldviews.”
This social engineering and therapy is known, oddly, as “pluralism,” although it is “plural” only in terms of organized factions, accredited victims (lately), and the administrators themselves. Gottfried quarrels with paleoconservatives who see modern liberalism as a “front” for New Class public meddlers. The truth, he says, is much worse: the administrators actually believe in their ideology and wish to impose it everywhere.
Fearing, after 1945, that “fascism” might come back, liberals turned education into an engine of social reconstruction. Egged on by that emigré Marxist charlatan Theodor Adorno, they fretted over the backward Americans’ “mental health” and psychoanalyzed the “Radical Right” long distance. (This remains fashionable.) In the hands of journalists incapable of making distinctions, this attitude became a weapon of mass demonization.
The Left are sick of them:
We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of our existence. It’s as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up. Insofar as we are even willing to discuss it, it’s still in the terms popular in the sixties and early seventies. The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against (“rules and regulations, who needs them?”) every form of social control.
With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with—often even spearheaded —attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” through the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principles,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.
The result is a political catastrophe. There’s really no other way to put it. What is presented as the “moderate” Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It’s as if someone had consciously tried to create the least appealing possible political position. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it’s not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth. Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger? The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered- down version of the right-wing critique. -David Graeber
The so-called “Deep State” are nothing more than an international mafia of bureaucrats, ones who think that we are stupid cattle and unfit to govern ourselves.
They take their marching orders from billionaire elites, through their apparatuses; the NGOs and nonprofits that populate our institutions and make up the petitioning bodies of the rich and powerful.
Thousands of think tanks, charities, and other non-profit, tax-free organizations, pushing what are allegedly American ideas and American values on foreign countries, when they are actually the values of the flavorless centrist amoeboid liberal bureaucrats who hope to reshape the world in their image, with or without our consent. Who stands to gain from all of this? Big finance. The bankers. The World Bank and the IMF. Wall Street. The City of London. Bern. Amsterdam. Shanghai. A tiny aristocratic caste is profiting off of our misery.
Democracy requires that those who vote have accurate information on what they’re voting for. Millions are now voting with not even the slightest inkling of what their government consists of. How can that be called democracy?
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