Indolent White Riot: Revenge of the Mids

(To Possum Dixon's "Go West," at point where they sing, "exploding white mice")

Have you ever thought about how “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” (Pope), “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats) and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (aka, "everything is more complicated than it appears, unless you're ignorant") all point in the same direction, toward a set of rather unavoidable outcomes when dumbasses aren’t strictly corralled?

What I’m talking about today in my first Sew:YKnot? Weekly Essay is our elitist uprising. While in other parts of the world countries mostly face an authoritarian / far-right issue (China, Russia, Turkey, Arab states), and certainly there are parties (Bibi, MBS, Putin) openly pushing America in that direction, this is the wealthiest, most comfortable country in the world, and our issue is (sometimes ostensibly good) people with money and power acquiescing to whatever so long as it doesn’t involve them.

They want to make us like China or Russia or Saudi Arabia, but there are a lot of constraints on that, and that’s what I suspect led the various parties pulling Trump’s strings to enlist the tech bros alongside the Christian Nationalists and Nazis in overthrowing this country.

(The uneasy existence of the Zionists within that coalition suggests to me they will lose out to the Nazis who are already trying to take the reigns of the party, in part because they don’t think the Christians care for the Jews either, and know that it’s only sided with Israel to push the moment to its crisis and bring on the End of Days crusade, while the Nazis take advantage of GOP’s progression-of-evil infrastructure to attack them from even further right as pussies and collaborators – the expressway to hell.)

Because of how angering and frustrating this all is, I want to jump ahead to my landing spot, and get right to the conclusion, so you can release the tension that even acknowledging these unpleasant neckbones inevitably engenders.

Whatever success these people have had in life is almost entirely due to the fact that they inherited gobs of money, they’re unpunished crooks, (maybe they’re tall?) and we’ve let monopolies run rampant. They’ve succeeded not through guile, will and endurance but because someone handed it to them with very little effort. We're talking car dealerships, cable television chains, hell, all of broadcasting, private equity and wall street shysters.

They will not win. Mostly, they’re simply not competent enough. Indeed, the entire exercise seems to be an uprising fueled by the mediocre enabled by the massively corrupt. Apparently, this is an old model, and it's often the mediocre, who have trouble succeeding, that throw in with authoritarians. It really is an uprising of mids.

None of their leaders are especially smart either but all have enormous egos which limit their ability to work together. They have a single goal right now, but if/when that collapses they will scatter like rats because they’re all hothouse flowers whose wealth has protected them from the real world where they’d lose all their petals in a week just from the cortisol, let alone the lack of nutrients or water.

These are the weak men, the hollow men, Eliot speaks about. They’re draft-dodgers, white-collar cons from country club prisons where they played cards with other embezzlers, tax cheats and fraudsters. They’re the people who hoarded money instead of sharing it to help others, with the emotional atrophy that entails. Maybe they were born that way, or just never learned to relate, but their social deficits trigger them.

These aren’t fulfilled people. They aren’t people with hobbies. They aren’t people creating their own meaning and space in life. They’re people who treat others like instruments or things whose knobs can be turned to produce a reward. These are the exploiters. They think ethics are for others. The real “takers.”

The people who believe having the most toys makes them winners. The people who only want to win and wonder why nobody wants to spend time with them if they don’t have something tangible to offer them. Like attracts like. There may be no honor among thieves but that doesn’t stop them from having guilds and balls, like Davos or Bildenburg or Bohemian Grove.

There’s a self-justifying bias in us that makes us feel we earned something we clearly did not. It’s so American it’s part of our defining myth inasmuch as the American Dream is constructed from the lie of Manifest Destiny.

There are different ways to understand Manifest Destiny and the westward expansion of America as we rolled over the through the native Americans, but at the core was a Calvinistic post-hoc justification through God, that we wouldn’t have this good fortune if God didn’t mean for it, so we should take advantage of it. These days this is known as a rationalization and what we did was colonize another culture’s country and justified it basically with, “finder’s keepers, losers weepers.”

So it wasn’t surprising the other day to hear about the “Monopoly Experiment,” which though less than a decade old is quickly becoming a modern day “Stanford Prison Guard” (1971)/”Milgram Buzzer” (early ‘60s) experiment as far as revealing deep-seated cultural biases. (For those instantly not familiar, Milgram did the famous buzzer experiment where people listened to authorities to administer ever larger shocks, and the Guard experiment revealed how quickly people act callous and cruel when placed in arbitrary positions of power/dominance.)

Dr. Paul Piff and researchers at UC-Berkeley created a rigged Monopoly game where one participant received more money to start, rolled two dice, and got more money for passing Go. They split the pool randomly and noted the behavior of the players. The privileged players took up more space, gibed the poorer player and afterwards noted the strategy of their play, while the poor players became depressed.

But here’s the thing, and crowd in close because it’s important: Not caring about anything larger than yourself is a bit problematic when there’s like 3500 of you and 5.54 billion of us. Money can hire people, but it’s simply hard to oppress that many openly. (Brave New World offers an alternative: Soma, which is sorta an early riff on Infinite Jest.) They can’t even put ICE into but a couple cities at a time. They simply don’t have the capacity, and everything else is just terra cotta soldiers.

But widespread corruption and embezzlement from the state is no way to win a war.

Russia has failed to successfully invade a single country. They’re gonna lose because their only idea is to meat grind as many of their citizens as possible. (Papa knows best! Where’s the King’s Hand when you need him? Bootlickers.)

They kill their own citizens. Does that sound like a strategy that will win them allies? Are allies necessary when you’re trying to overthrow democracy, which at least on paper, enfranchises everyone? There are increased rumblings as yesterday it was suggested Russia might start employing children 12 and older to replace all the working people they’ve lost throwing their citizens into a meat grinder. They're even training the stolen Ukraine kids to fight their homeland. Depravity!

Trump is epically unpopular. But the GOP’s main facet is to project strength. There’s a reason for that, which boils down to the theory that Republicans crave a Daddy. I mean, obviously part of it is misogynistic. But even beyond, it’s about a somewhat capricious use of authority and a downgrading of empathy in favor of punishment. So they’re gonna act tough and like they are confident until the car explodes at the bottom of the gully. Most people see dying with your boots on doing something stupid as avoidable folly.

Like in Minnesota, they will find they’re not popular enough or doing anything useful enough to continue to cook with culture war gas. The economy is getting worse and monopolies are limiting the typical capitalist feedback loops, so a lot of wealthy people are only going to realize there’s a problem when the boiler blows. I think about Cable, which was a monopoly, and never really needed to change until it was already too late to do so.

Twenty-five years ago, cable companies seemed like wonderful monopolies. Now they’re blighted. But without feeling your arm, you won’t know your hand’s on the stove, until you smell the burning flesh.

We’re headed that direction between the price disruptions caused by the close Strait of Hormuz, , which if you recall when that ship went sideways, it took time for those costs to filter through the economy. But beyond that tariffs and the war driving up inflation, there are huge systemic threats caused by the AI bubble.

Already the hints are rampant. Private credit is seeing large withdrawals. As with the last crisis the dark nature of this money and the large sums naturally engender instability.

For a while these outsized stock returns caused people to feel rich, but the fact is, the economy is increasingly propped up by the spending of the wealthy while the middle and lower class close their wallets.

But it’s hard to imagine people incapable of running an economy, ending a war, wearing the right-sized shoes, not fall asleep or shart yourself on television. The smart people already had jobs and didn’t need Trump’s handouts. Indeed I wonder about that period where Trump was hard-up for cash, before the Arabs and the Tech Bross stepped in. The Christian Nationalists and the Nazis didn’t have the money. So how much of it came by hook or by crook from overseas? What was promised? But I digress.

The point is that at no point have any of these guys evidenced any ability to manage anything more complicated than demolition. The outcome for the midterms – even with widespread disenfranchisement – bodes poorly for them. Consumer sentiment keeps setting new record lows. What’s your coalition? Even dudes are freaking abandoning him. Europe’s spending nearly $1T on their military industrial complex, which would’ve otherwise mostly come here.

Nobody’s particularly fooled, but the Emperor’s-New-Clothes sect that call themselves journalists.

It's gonna be a pitched battle. This won't return to us easily. To be clear, the GOP has burnt the boats. The media is rooting for Trump because they think they're the elite, and not stenographers to the elite. The Supreme Court won’t survive Democratic control. They seem to be aware of this, hence the openly partisan warfare.

But the GOP is a hollow shell that stands only for reducing taxes on the rich at a time when wealth taxes are very very popular. I don’t know, do you think spending gobs of money is going to change that other than convince people if you’re willing to spend gobs, you probably have too much. Maybe it works a couple times, but you gotta know spending hundreds of millions to stop a wealth tax is very much a Streisand Effect. Read the room mofo.

In the end we didn’t give rich white men enough to do and their laziness has done us in. They could’ve spent time with their families, spent the money helping their relatives. There is no noblesse oblige. Studies suggest the more money you have the more entitled and full of shit you become, high on your own supply, whether it was earned or not. They aren’t going to slit their own wrists, and while we wait the world burns.

Suddenly the 90% top rate makes a helluva lot more sense.

So the guys who spend to keep the government from taking their money are atop the list of the people who need a lot less money. We once understood this. Why do you think that was? Do you think they understood something about war we’ve forgotten since?

Now there are a multitude of reasons this happened now, and in many ways it’s both the legacy of the civil rights and desegregation movements, as well as the women’s rights movement. This is a rear guard action of some of the shittiest people, who unfortunately due to science aren’t dying quickly enough and now want to return us to antebellum times.

But it’s an army of people who believe nothing led by the most selfish, bubbled, smelling-their-own-farts types you can possibly imagine. Their ideas are ludicrous but nobody around them is willing to tell them because they’re too valuable as a mark. While certainly Russ Vought put some serious thought and work into this, most of it is as simple as “Make the courts force us to disburse the cash Congress mandated.” It's illegal, but Bartleby got pretty far by simply refusing.

Not like this is some amazing legalistic kludge, it’s just a backhoe of sand in the gears of government, backed by political appointees with no vested interest in whatever department(s) they’re leading.

That’s great for demolishing stuff, but it won’t do much for getting stuff done, as their purge has demonstrated, leaving them bereft of expertise, hardly capable of defending the illegal actions they take, protected by less of a legal shred than protects a stripper’s dignity. (I jest, whatever you do that isn’t working for the GOP should engender zero shame. You know, other than marketing.)

This administration is decaying as quickly as Trump’s health, The more garish his surroundings and fevered their attempts to suggests the guy sleeping in the chair is some amazing brilliant dynamo despite his fourth-grade language patterns, the more their position disintegrates. The “status quo” people are shit improvisers.

We’re watching what amounts to a white riot, by entitled children made soft by wealth and angry by their own rationalizations and projections of their exploitation and unearned privilege.

The Clash song calls for a “riot of my own” (presumably poor white kids), but when those in charge call for a riot, it’s known as a tantrum. Or a coup.

Like any good modern riot, they’re only succeeding in impoverishing their future environs. Unfortunately we live there too. They demand to be heard. Only we’ve already seen plenty of misogyny, racism and xenophobia. This is just reruns.

They created their own meritocracy which looks a lot like “who you know” and is built on legacy admissions to the Ivy League and phony sports scholarships. They supped on the land, and when it reached its capacity for parasite, they tried to burn it down.

But like I said, they have little plan outside animus, little company beyond AI Chatbots, and aren’t self-aware enough to question and surveil their own motivations/behavior. The result is they are quietly but decisively pantsing themselves in the most public way. One day the tide will go out again and we will have already collected and organized all the receipts.

I mean, that's my hope. Anything is possible. Nothing is assured by God or anything else. But authoritarian states have never survived for very long. And it doesn't seem likely these guys will either, judging from their life’s work, or the grandiose ambition to enslave and rule the largest economy in the world, based not on their non-existence charisma, but because they’ve accumulated, leveraged and faked their way to large sums of money, while barely seeming capable of running a corner grocery. (The wonder of private equity – making yourself rich with other’s money! Good work if you can get it.)

I find their performance gives no indication they will respond effectively when the inevitable banana peel appears to send them on their appointed way. (See Iran, for instance.) My mother always told me that if you gave an asshole enough rope they’d hang themselves.

Some necks, like heads, are extra thick and take more time.