Populism: Divining the Future
I just read a charming piece at Quillette about the sacred calling of Russia, featuring Ivan the Terrible, who ended 200 years of the lamentation of Russian women under the Mongol horde. The idea is that
after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Moscow was the last true seat of Christian orthodoxy. And there would be no other…
Therefore, the true salvation of humanity lay with holy Russia. And this idea, of Russia as a providential land chosen to save humanity, is at the very heart of both the Russian Empire, and, later, [Russian] communism. It’s deeply connected to the sacralization of power because it presents the Czar as the direct manifestation of God on earth -- as Ivan the Terrible saw himself.
For, the fact is, it took a monster like Ivan the Terrible to send the Mongols back to Mongolia where they belonged.
You will recall that, back in 2021, Vladimir Putin added his bit to the conversation and published a profound article "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" showing unquestionably how Ukraine was part of the Ancient Rus and belonged in Russia, and how a whole bestiary of monsters had tried over the centuries to break up this sacred union. I had no idea that Our Vlad was such an intellectual; he must have inherited Stalin's library of 20,000 books.
I like all this Narrative generation. It's very human, it's Who We Are. It reminds me of the words of the son of a glover from a provincial town in England: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players," he wrote. Each of us acts out our own "lived experience." For instance, the year 1619 evokes the lived experience of Nikole Hannah-Jones, symbolizing the First Slave Ship to arrive in America. But for me, the year 1584 is more evocative, because that's the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived off our shores.
You see, back then, in England, the Big Issue pondered by superior minds was not Climate Change and the perfidy of Climate Deniers, or even Systemic Racism. Not at all. They were consumed by the planetary disaster of Surplus Population, 200 years before Malthus. And so, the best and the brightest decided, the answer was to ship the surplus population off to the Americas. The real founding of the United States was thus the first ragged scrapings of White Trash dumped on our shores.
But I have another Narrative, about the cruelest, most conceited, most hegemonic, most lethal ruling class in history, starting with the death of Louis XIV in 1715. I am talking about the educated class that presently rules humans all over the world.
Under the rule of the educated class, we have suffered gigantic world wars, the growth of government and taxes to unprecedented levels, and the most savage repressions, deliberate famines, Reigns of Terror, Great Purges, and Cultural Revolutions in history. And for what?
But at the same time that the educated class greedily pursued political power, the ordinary middle class was creating an era of unprecedented prosperity, beginning in northwest Europe, despite being hindered all along by the endless wars and pogroms and famines and regulations imposed upon the world by the administrative minds of the educated class.
For it was ordinary middle-class guys that created the textile revolution that brought cheap clothing to the masses, that invented steam transportation that allowed the lower class to travel around needlessly, that figured out how to make steel in industrial quantities, that substituted oil lamps for candles, and electric light for oil. It was ordinary guys that flew the first airplane, and invented the assembly line. And it was the adopted son of a Coast Guard mechanic that brought us smartphones for all.
The only question is, therefore, when and how the ordinary middle class will end the rule of the educated class that has done so much to ruin the world.
One narrative is that, after 200 hundred years of ruling class world wars and pogroms and famines, there will come a day when Trump the Terrible will descend an escalator in New York City, and send the rulers of the educated class scooting back to the college campi where they belong. But that, experts agree, is a fantasy.
Is that all there is? A man on a white horse -- er, beige escalator? Over at American Greatness they are puzzling all this out in "Is Republican Populism a Person or a Movement?" especially as the GOP establishment still doesn't have a clue.
To all those trying to divine the future, I propose the age-old maxim: "Cometh the hour, cometh the man."
Because really, it doesn't take too much divination to figure that with populist nationalism breaking out all over, from Poland to Hungary to Brexit to Sweden (!), from Dutch farmers to Canadian truckers to American MAGAs, something is up, and it ain't Pride Month.
Populism: Divining the Future - American Thinker
