Washington, D.C.
More philosophical feed bag. Free philosophical feed bag with the purchase of any fidget spinner.
John Lott, in FNC: Political vitriol won’t get any better and will get worse, because its increase is nothing more than a function of both the growth of governments’ (all levels in the aggregate) spending as a percentage of GDP and its power.
A few points:
(1) Okay, then, Sweden is a country whose central government spends even more as a percentage of GDP than all levels of American government in the aggregate do. In the last ten years, the range as been between 50% and 53%. So, why aren’t Swedish politics that acrimonious and vitriolic?
(2) That points to how Lott is both right and wrong. He’s right because he’s on the right track generally speaking, but wrong because he’s trying to find a golden unicorn to ride into town when there’s a perfectly good brown horse in front of his snoot. The percentage-of-GDP argument is the golden unicorn. The brown horse is that the American Federal government is both the largest spending institution in the world in terms of raw currency amounts, and the seat of what we all have to admit if we’re honest with ourselves is a global empire. No, it’s not like the British Empire, one so neatly delineated and defined and you can see a map of the world circa 1900 or 1920 and London controls whatever is rose-colored, and a lot of it was rose-colored. The American empire operates behind pretense and soft power manipulation, all backed up by the insurance policy of the world’s most powerful military. For instance, a modern world map won’t indicate to you that the United Kingdom is an American client state, or that the Germany and Japan are somewhere between American protectorates and used to be imperial possessions in all but formal recognition, or that a panoply of American-sponsored NGOs and think tanks influence Presidential elections in France. But it’s no less true even if it is tacit and not explicit. Our non-formal empire operates entirely in the client/vassal/protectorate/softpower fashion, with occasional “police” response.
So, when you mash that up with the current reality that, at least superficially, the deep state notwithstanding, and I’ll get to that in a moment, those that run it are chosen by plebiscites organized around a partisan superficial duopoly, then it’s obvious that the partisan politics will sometimes extend to the hot lead level.
(3) In “the good ole days,” when American governments’ spending was a far lower percentage of GDP, there was often way more partisan acrimony. The years of the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson presidencies made today look erudite. The years and one to two decades leading up to the War Between the States — If you’re a St. Louisan, you’ve heard of Elijah Lovejoy, unless you haven’t. If you want a really vitriolic election year, try 1884, not 2016. The former year being the first in the era of mass print media.
(4) A lot of today’s vitriol isn’t conventionally partisan, it’s the domestic-foreign policy deep state circling the wagons around itself to try to repel what it thinks is an invading virus that has “Donald J. Trump” written on its birth certificate. It’s just that, because Trump is a putative Republican, the deep state’s easiest route to trying expel this “virus” can be rooted through the other party. However, it should be noted that the Congressional Republican establishment isn’t comporting itself well.
(5) Lott is kidding himself if he thinks that governments allow themselves to become weaker and spend less in a domestic tranquility sense, and he’s extra strength kidding himself if he thinks that today’s Federal government and state governments will just to satisfy his social science hypothesis. Only after the conclusion of major wars has the Federal government’s percent-of-GDP spending decreased, but rarely and little the power it assumed for itself that it never had before to wage the wars. This is one of many reasons why I’m #NRx — Under the current circumstances (racial diversity, empire, powerful/big spending central state), mated with the relevant range of reality (none of those three are practically going away other than a geopolitical calamity), the best (or least bad) option for white people is a nationalist-minded hereditary monarchy ideologically governing with some variant of national socialist ideology.
