Feudalism Is Coming to America, and You're the Serf
We knew that the Biden presidency would be a disaster for America, but how bad can it really be? During his so-called campaign, he never even hid his agenda, and now, with unprecedented overuse of executive power, he pushes it down America's throat.
In my recent article "Feudalism returns to America?," I outlined some general economic and socio-political trends that dominate in America and that indicate an establishment of neo-feudalism. Joe Biden's policies accelerate them, bringing up a world of almighty lords regulating "commoners'" lives by decree, with new clergy explaining from our small screens how much lords care about their loyal subjects...er, constituency.
As Voltaire once said, history never repeats itself — man always does. Even though America was never a feudal society, it doesn't mean that it can't be. What we are observing right now is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our post-industrial economy is concentrated in ever fewer hands. We are seeing those hands overwhelmingly giving and aligning with the Democratic Party, as their believes closely collide — such as those on foreign trade, climate change, and migration. Society is becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population, whose well-being has been exacerbated by economic restrictions imposed as a response to COVID-19 pandemic, and which is to getting hit even harder with Biden's "progressive" policies. Simultaneous with the new "aristocratic" ruling class rises a class of new clerisy that provides intellectual support of the emerging system — the media, academia, and celebrity influencers (pop culture). The model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe for different reasons, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of autocracy, elitism, and socialism that drastically curtail the capitalist methods and achievements. They do not offer reform; they insist on a complete demolition. The first structure of the "old" system to go is democracy.
Fascization is often mentioned as the dominating trend of the American political process, and a recent article from Dennis Prager, "I now better understand the 'good German,'" is often cited on conservative blogs. In that article, Prager tries to rationalize the ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional, and unprecedented police state–type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, as well as acceptance by most Americans of the rampant censorship on all major social media platforms. The answer found was the power of long-going brainwashing that turns people into an obedient herd; those who hold "deviant" opinions conclude that keeping their heads down is only a reasonable survival strategy. Thus, fascization is a political part of the much larger trend. Big Tech's censorship and persecution of conservatives are needed to create a general submission to the arising order. Your freedom of speech comes costly.
The "cancel culture" dominated the whole of 2020 and is likely to boom in 2021. But there was another, even more disturbing process unfolding covertly, and even more damaging to a liberal democracy, but great for the neo-feudal order. This process was explicitly detailed in the shocking article titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election," published by Time. To get a clue on how deep and wide the establishment conspiracy — the author uses this world in a positive sense — against Trump was, it is certainly a must-read.
Here are a couple of the revelations to get a taste:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
Here is what this alliance achieved:
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump's conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
Why they did it: "They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."
Got the irony? An article dedicated to the real conspiracy against the popular president being re-elected points out that the president spreading information about that conspiracy was a threat to the success of the conspiracy to save democracy from Trump! Because what can be more democratic than "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information," as it is put in the Time article?
As the conclusion, the author, relieved, writes: "Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it's crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America." Clearly, for the establishment, democracy is a rule of the Democrats (and Republicans aligned with them) and nothing else. The alienation of the Washington insiders from the ordinary Americans who felt dissatisfied with political corruption and their deteriorating economic state brough Donald Trump to power — "the redneck revolt" in 2016 was akin to the peasant rebellions in the Middle Ages. A sophisticated, well organized cabal of lords who control finances and the flow of information curb it with all their might four years later.
"Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things," wrote the historian Joseph Tainer. Amid our civilization's considerable period of success and stability, we may not recognize that things are shifting dangerously until it's too late.
