Trump is basically a comment section running for president.It's funny for the obvious reason. Internet comment sections aren't renowned for their eloquence, and neither is Trump. Liberals also found it vital to associate Trump with something they could easily claim intellectual superiority over. But there's another deeper truth to the comment, something that the TDS sufferers smugly sharing the quip on social media would probably not have picked up on. It reflects Trump's populism. Comment sections are the voice of the people, for better or worse. Call it the ugly side of freedom of speech, if you want, but the whole point is that the unpopular speech still gets its say. There is some order to it as well. Most forums these days have a voting mechanism so that the favorite comments shuffle towards the top, and the rest get buried. Sure, often it's something ridiculous that makes it to the top, which just shows that it is a truly proper analog of modern democracy.
The situation, then, is that you have so-called democrats acting like aristocrats to keep a populist movement suppressed. We've often noted here that liberals will abandon any principle in their zeal to attack Trump. Is this just the normal hypocrisy? Well, it certainly is hypocrisy, to be sure. I really like the new motto of the Democrat Party: For the People. This after they allowed a corrupt insider to steal the nomination from their own populist candidate, and are so full of rage at the success of their opponents' populist candidate that they clamor day and night for some way to overturn that electoral outcome. They're as hypocritical as a group of people could be. Still, I think there's more to it than that.
I've started thinking of politics in terms of competence hierarchies as described by Jordan Peterson. The hierarchies arise naturally, and can be destroyed in two ways, which we can think of as leftist and rightist scenarios. In the rightist scenario, the hierarchy becomes corrupt and stagnant. People find ways to game the system so they achieve and maintain positions in the hierarchy above their merit. They seek to maximize their rewards while blocking the paths of their competitors from ascending. Thus, the hierarchy becomes steep, with little fluidity. The society no longer functions as a meritocracy, but as a tyranny. The leftist scenario is one of flattening. They become resentful of the successes of the high-ranking and seek to level the playing field by deflating the hierarchy. Leftism can be a good balancing force when the hierarchy is corrupt, but is a societal hazard when the hierarchy is functioning properly. In our society there is all kinds of corruption among our elites to be contested, yet the liberals seem to only fixate on the parts of the hierarchy that work. (The reason is obvious...they are controlled by the corporate media.) The leftist scenario leads to chaotic anarchy, the rightist to a tyrannical order.
Generally we think of conservatives as defenders of the hierarchy against liberals, but it's not quite so straightforward, because there are three roles. On the far right (of this representation) are the aristocrats, in the center would be meritocrats, and those on the left you could call populists - the political faction of the dispossessed. We see it play out in our politics. Democrats have always been the union party, which made sense when laborers were at the mercy of robber barons. That situation has changed, and Democrats are losing their grip on the union vote. Instead, they go about convincing various identity groups that they are oppressed, and then importing as many 3rd world immigrants as they can - legally or otherwise. Liberals, whose niche is representing the interests of the dispossessed (a worthy goal in itself) tend to find themselves in the perverse business of growing the numbers of the dispossessed to improve their political clout.
Liberals are normally battling against the hierarchy, whether it is good or bad. What about us? When the hierarchy is functioning, we rightly defend it. What about when we decry a corrupt hierarchy? That puts us to the left of it...do we morph into liberals? What do you call people who defend a functioning hierarchy and condemn a corrupt one? Meritocratic, sure, but are they liberal or conservative? I suppose it's hard to find a political label because that's just what we innately expect sane rational people to do. Perhaps this is why it can be so hard to define what a conservative it. We pretty well know what a liberal is. Conservative is hard to peg down. Conserving what? The most significant observation made by the alt-right is simply that mainstream conservatives don't seem to conserve anything at all. Where do we, the "real" conservatives, sit in the hierarchal spectrum? Perhaps right in the center. I see myself as sitting a bit right of center: a meritocracy with some national inertia built in. It can't necessarily be said that the right side of the hierarchal spectrum means the most conservative. Those at the far right have far more in common with liberals than with us. Think of it from r/K theory (the fundamental political theory). What the two ends have in common is a disdain for free competition. The liberal and aristocrat both seek to buttress their positions by suppressing competition, and they seek to leverage the power of the state to do so.
In another video, Mr Peterson was making the case, regarding competence hierarchies, that neither left nor right are inherently better. Judging their merit is relevant to the current predicament, and it's the extremes on both ends that are dangerous. He stated there are many examples of the rightist scenario, that of excessive order - the Nazis being the canonical example. He struggled to think of a leftist scenario example and then moved on with his argument. Now that is interesting indeed! There are of course many examples of left-wing ideological governments that killed many times what the Nazis did. Shouldn't it be quite easy to think of one example of the leftist scenario? How could it be that the left, hell-bent on destroying hierarchy as they are, could gain an excess of power multiple times in different time and places, and yet we don't have a good go-to example of the anarchy scenario? The answer is that the left don't eradicate hierarchies when they take power...they become the hierarchy. Leftists only loathe the hierarchies in place because they are excluded, either because they are inept or because the structure is corrupt. They can never accept the former as true, so they assume all hierarchies are corrupt. Thus, they have no qualms with erecting a truly corrupt hierarchy themselves, so long as they are highly placed within it.
The normal example given for leftist tyranny is the Soviet Union. The agenda of the Marxists/Communists was that the hierarchy existed for the sole purpose of disenfranchising the commoners, and must be dismantled. When the Communists finally gained power, they merely replaced the competence hierarchy with an incompetence hierarchy. (See spandrell on Biological Leninism.) Stalin had a particular umbrage with the intelligentsia, and took great effort to torture and destroy them. He propped up a system where the most brutal thugs were rewarded with state power. Not only was Russian society not pulled leftward (in the hierarchal sense) when the leftists gained power, but it actually moved to the right, becoming an extreme aristocracy, with Stalin as autocrat. The whole framework became inverted. The society was structured around an incompetence hierarchy where liberals pulled to the right for aristocracy, and conservatives/meritocrats hoped for a leftward shift.
That all should shed some light on today's predicament, where the left nominated an aristocrat and the right a populist promising to drain "the swamp" - a metaphor for the national power structure centered on the Potomac. This situation only makes sense if the hierarchy is already inverted. Under an inverted hierarchy, liberals become aristocrats and conservatives become anti-establishment. The last election was utter proof of how far things have gotten. We are in the upside-down world. I used to find it amusing that liberals were making so much pro-establishment commentary, as a display of how unprincipled they were. Now I realize that it's the expected behavior once they attain power. Sure, they do make plenty of anti-hierarchal pronouncements - such as opposing the patriarchy - but they would have to. By definition, liberals must stand opposed to some corrupt social hierarchy, real or imagined. Even when Stalin had attained absolute power, he still orchestrated a great mythology where Western-aligned "wreckers" were conspiring to sabotage the peoples' government. Liberals complaining about oppressive hierarchies can be ignored as background noise. It's when they start displaying pro-establishment sentiments that we should be concerned.
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