Cliche at this point to say, but a shift of political tectonics is underway across the developed world. To me, the remarkable commonality among the insurgents is the lack of either philosophical or practical specificity; gassiness (not one newspaper in the country endorsed Trump, largely because he said little specific enough for analysis). Where there is specificity there is dissonance, if not outright contradiction: Trump will make “great deals,” but he stands at the head of a party not given to pragmatic deal-making.
Let’s look at the most obvious example of the modern world’s divide between what is gaseously said and what is actually done: China rules as communist, but they provide as capitalists. The communist abstract philosophical rules can be ignored(they have to be), but never the provisions. Where is China’s philosophical framework for ruling? It is: we have lifted China up, with capitalism, to a degree unknown in man’s history. Leave us alone and we’ll keep the prosperity music playing. Pay no attention to all the “square” red stuff. But the Chinese Communist Party’s economic policy is a submission to the fact that Government does not develop an economy or generate wealth by force, wish or “struggle of the Bourgeoisie” rhetorical gas. Maybe the Chinese understand this better now than Americans do: the great distance between the lip-service and the application. Maybe the pragmatism of it is easier to see with the contrast of red.
Look at the gassy, completely undefinable issues driving the modern world’s political dialogue: “defeat Terror” (an emotion), “keep our culture pure,” “return to greatness,” “hope and change,” “drive out racism,” “more holy,” “restore the empire,” “return to the past,” “civilize the enemy,” “drain the swamp.” Not one of the slogans involves any attainable goal which can be defined (the President today declares us “terror free”). Not one of the slogans has a promising historical precedent of success, except as an evolutionary force made of the interplay between many factors and generations in the making.
I think this non-specific disease exists because dDemocracy and the rule of law have solved the simply solvable problems of the human condition, the low hanging fruit, and the remaining ones require fine-tuned, precise adaptability; evolutionary feedback loops. And that is something no government has ever been any good at. The slogan “Build a National Health System” is very different than “fix the many details of why the (British) National Health System is inefficient, despite being the largest employer in Europe after the disbanding of the Red Army, and with all those employees, doctors still aren’t content, and there is a totally private system able to thrive alongside a free one for a reason.” One is a gaseous pleasin’ slogan-bonbon, the other is an evolutionary process, subject to the successes and failures of its laws.
The rage of the politically developed world’s electorate is the distance between the gassy promise and the reality made necessary by evolutionary conditions not contingent on the wants of the voters, and beyond the power of the politicians (though they will never admit it).
Since a voter cannot possibly know the details of an immense control system, controlling the intricate developed world becomes something like an indirect metaphor, where the political candidates’ gas takes form through our input. This is how Trump’s Gas-Giant cloud invaded the philosophical husk of the Republican party (the Democrats’ philosophical cul-de-sac as the party of dispensed largess for its supplicants is no better). Modern politicians are vessels that we fill our hopes with, and the vessels gain solidity according to what fills them with applause on the campaign trail. “I know more about terror than the generals, my plan will be great, believe me.” Hillary Clinton was too hard of a crystalline structure to be filled with anything. She held forth with her encyclopedic specificity (mostly wrong conclusions, in my opinion, but specific), only to find she is that drip of a scientist at the conference punchbowl nobody wants to talk to. She must have gaseous forms invading her nightmares, whipped by a white cloud then a dark, first “hope” then “build the wall to greatness” (did the rocky John McCain pick the nearly thin-air gassy Sarah Palin in acknowledgment of this pattern? That’s probably giving the Republicans too much credit).
In reality, the success of our modern world is an evolutionary outcome, over time, born from a set of favorable rules, like a garden. No tomato can be grown according to anyone’s campaign gas. No politician has made better crop yields, or improving the weather, his slogan, but if one tried it, and his vessel filled to solid, they would. Part of Obama’s 2008 platform was to miracle solar power into an economically viable system (of course, helped along by campaign contributions. Miracles ain’t free).
It is the voter’s fault for buying the bunkum. At some point an adult learns unicorns are not real. But when the promised thing does not materialize, expect rage. Expect people to believe all politicians are lying schemers. And the human-weakness hack is that people like this tend to look for the next-up bunkum in the heating gas cycle. The only slogan that makes any evolutionarily stable sense would be Kate Fox’s: “What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!” But, again, this describes an evolution, and the slogan is impossible as a soundbite or tweet.
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