TAC:
“Notre Dame political philosophy professor Patrick J. Deneen gave a lecture in March titled “Aristopopulism: A Political Proposal for America.” In the talk (available here), Deneen described our current political paradigm as pitting “an increasingly corrupt elite against an increasingly coarse and angry populace.” Both of these, Deneen observed, are “morally adrift and engaged in politics as an assertion of power.”
Deneen’s suggested solution to this is a return to “classical political theory,” which proposed that “only an appropriately mixed regime”—in other words, a society that appreciates inherent goods in both elites and commoners—can “correct and even elevate the shortcomings of an opposing faction.” Such a dynamic demands that both elites and populists be “well-formed,” defined by virtuous desires and actions …
BRAVO.
The intense polarization in the electorate is being caused by the breakdown of the liberal paradigm. It is ripping apart the social fabric from both ends. It has shattered our common culture and divided us into hostile tribes. As globalization accelerates, it is also presiding over the rise of economic stress. Opportunistic politicians competing for political power under liberal democracy are stirring resentment with political correctness and identity politics to fan the flames.
In The Great Plantation: A Better Paradigm, I laid out a road map of how we can begin to fix this problem culturally, economically and politically by electing Andrew Yang as the 46th president. We can’t even begin to untangle issues like ethnic and cultural heterogeneity creating multiple levels of resentment in the electorate until we address and fix the root cause which is the liberal order.
In order to replace liberalism, we’re going to have to draw from Aristotle, Christianity, Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of moral collapse, Hegel, Marx, Fitzhugh, Nietzsche, Foucault and others. Fortunately, Yang is pointing out right now what the economic future is going to look like as it becomes increasingly obvious over the next 15 years that technology and investment is generating wealth.
In order to reconcile these two extremes, we have to rebuild the center:
Further reading:
ARISTOPOPULISM: A POLITICAL PROPOSAL FOR AMERICA
This can’t be allowed to happen again in light of Yang’s analysis:
All the tech companies are severely over valuated. Yang is not even close to the solution.
The actual solution is to properly valuate the tech industry and knock it down to size. Reality. Who is more insane, the person valuing a ten year old Chrysler at $400,000 or the person that buys it for that?
How so?
If Yang is right and 50% of the workforce will be idled by automation, what then? How do you stop those people from violently overthrowing the system? In such a scenario, all you can do is peacefully redistribute the wealth generated by the robotic workforce to buy social peace like we already do with the existing welfare state.
@HW
People will sink further into drugs, depression, and despair rather than overthrow the system; they have already proven this to us. Look at West coast cities as the model of human reaction to the technological tidal wave.
There are many answers besides UBI, although I will acknowledge UBI as a interim measure. But do we not already have that interim measure in the form of unemployment? The answer to technology is to train more craftsmanship and trades, otherwise technology will only improve the wealthy classes. You train the youth to take laser-etched scroll wood pieces and build them into their homes-as an example.
I’m convinced that AI and automation will eventually abolish virtually all forms of work. In such a world, humans will have to refocus on culture and innovation. It won’t be unlike how it was under slavery.
@HW
The problem with where we are now is who is in control. In publishing, Amazon doesn’t store books on shelves anymore. When you click ‘buy’ it goes to a large printing conveyor system that immediately prints out your book and mails it to you at the end of the line (I’ve worked on machinery in these facilities). You can almost understand if Amazon didn’t want to store books written by (insert Nationalist’ name here) on their shelves, but it’s more sinister than that, they are scrubbing the information completely!
My point is, in a day when technology is making book access, literacy, knowledge so available to anyone it is also the most unaccessible and censored. You can see the social negative here. So what good is the great technology when the people who own it have a net-negative-social-agenda for us. Is it going to create a healthy society? Will UBI address this?
We have great medical machinery, and yet they try not to use it on patients because they know most can’t afford it. Is that going to change if you had $1,000 a month?
Professional,
Focus your mind on the following:
1.) 50% of the US workforce will be idled over the next 15 years because deep learning AI will revolutionize the global economy.
2.) In such a world, the political establishment will have no choice but to simply give people ever increasing amounts of money to buy social peace.
3.) Now, it doesn’t really matter whether Yang wins or loses because the equivalent of electricity has been invented and there is no stopping economic change.
4.) So, the only real question is how long will it take our culture and economy to catch up with this new development. I suppose we can put on $1,000 a month in 2020. We can reelect Blompf and the consequence of that will be just this black hole of automation creating social and economic havoc under the working class
5.) Suppose we have to wait until 2024 to address the problem. The black hole of automation will only be exerting a stronger gravitational force by then. Such is the new reality which everyone seems to be missing because they are myopicaly focused on Yang being Asian rather than whether what he is saying is true or false.
“-politics as an assertion of power.”
It is.
Politics is activity in relation to power. Nothing else.
That, Sir, cannot be gainsaid.
Bravo, except for the fly in the ointment – race. Only whites do well-ordered republics. Partition away the parts of America that are non/anti white and you have your answer.
That’s where you are wrong.
Smart people do well-ordered republics. There are smart and dumb people in every race. It is why Silicon Valley works. It is why the scientific community works.
In the future, the smart people will have to take care of everyone, but even they should be worried about being replaced by AI.
OK, HW. but [on average] non-Whites are far LESS ‘smart’ than [ On Average] Whites.
And if we are going to go forward in this Brave New Yangworld, we are going to have to sterilize all non-whites below a certain IQ threshhold-
‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” I believe a Southernor once said that….
“it becomes increasingly obvious over the next 15 years that technology and investment is generating wealth.”
Capital, not labour, has gotten more productive over the last 150 years.
It’s been about replacing muscle power with steam power, gas power, hydraulics and electricity all along. Soon, button mashers, lever pullers and dial turners will be replaced by computers. In many cases, they already have been.
As machines become more capable and productive, labour and the muscle powered work regime become less relevant. In fact, they were already obsolete by the 1960s, when the first tentative steps towards automation were taken and Alvin Toffler saw the writting on the wall before he wrote it.
In industry and agriculture, labourers have been replaced by machine operators and skilled technicians.
Eventually, machines won’t need operators anymore, and they’ll grow even more productive, as well.
The idea of working for money, instead of money working for you, is already outdated in the face of Automation.
As an aside.
On drilling rigs they have a machine called an iron roughneck. It breaks out and connects drill strings without any need for Human muscles and hands. It’s now possible to operate a rig from a control cabin with a tool pusher and a few other technicians. It will become more common, saving lives and body parts.
Good point.
Capital is replacing labor with a robotic workforce. How are workers going to respond to this in the long run?
We can look forward to the formation of a massive, permanent underclass of chronically unemployed and underemployed, HW. The role of a President is merely to preside over the Government, hence the title. No one holding such Office will be capable of fixing this looming, inevitable crisis.
IMO, the robots can do the labor. If some humans still want to toil 40+ hours a week for 50 weeks a year out of a sense of pride, go for it. God speed.
But speaking for only myself, after decades of both physic and non-physical labor, basically the majority of my joints (e.g., shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles) and back ache.
Now I am not some sixty or seventy-something boomer, but closing in on 50 years old. So at this rate, my quality of life physically in my middle to old age is going continue to be on a downhill gradient which is the natural course of events. But if automation and robotics can alleviate the majority of the wear and tear on our mortal bodies, and we are still able to be financially and thus psychologically sated via UBI then where is the harm?
If Yang were elected, polarization would actually increase. Your analysis on this point is piss poor. The only thing maintaining the status quo right now is the consolidated power in the hands of the donor/lobbyist class. Yang’s policies would break that power, which would allow for the actualization of the currently suppressed tribal competition lying below the surface. What we have now is tribalism in rhetoric only, only going beyond that when a particular group will serve the interests of power by attacking power’s rivals. Yang would create the conditions for true tribal politics, which would become much more openly hostile, since the tribes would actually be serving their own interests rather than merely serving as tools of power.
I don’t think so.
If the tribes could cooperate to achieve common goals, then we could work together to solve some issues.
Don’t count on the tribes working together to achieve common goals, especially since the tribes have conflicting goals. Only whites want to work together for the “good of all” and it led to us losing our country.
The effect that democracy dollars would have on politics would be analogous to the effect that the internet overtaking old media had on the distribution of political opinions in general. With the internet, the monopoly on opinion-making was broken, and it allowed for many alternatives to arise that resulted in polarization in political opinion. That’s part of the reason things polarized so quickly in the 2000s when normal people started getting on social media. With democracy dollars, the monopoly on political funding would be broken and would allow for many alternatives that lie far outside of the spectrum of what currently is funded.
Another thing to consider is that with the elite control in this area broken, they would need to step up their game in other areas to compensate. Without being able to buy politicians as easily, there would need to be even more political astroturf, more street agitation, more brainwashing in academia, more paid political organizing, etc. If they can’t buy the politicians, then they need to attempt to propagandize the people so they will give their democracy dollars to the chosen politicians, and they need to build more organizational structures outside of the current parties. Decentralization of power doesn’t cause power to cease existing. It just has to function through other pathways. And it usually leads to an increase in conflicts. The printing press caused polarization and more conflict. Firearms caused polarization and more conflict. Because these technologies were levelling and decentralizing, so brought a greater number of people to a greater degree of parity, which allows a greater number of people to compete with each other. Capitalism itself could originally be seen as a decentralization of power that led to more polarization and conflict too, as the bourgeoisie overtook the old monarchies and nobilities (before eventually consolidating and centralizing power themselves).
1.) You’re right that democracy dollars would cancel the MIGA oligarchy.
2.) I don’t think it will unfold that way at all because the existing elite is crumbling and a new one is about to take its place. It has happened here before after the abolition of slavery ruined the planters.
3.) You’re not considering the driving root cause of all of this – the development of deep learning AI – and the ramifications it will have throughout the social and economic order. As I have been trying to tell people, Silicon Valley and China have effectively restored slavery. We’re about to become a Slave Society again which is a very familiar system.
4.) This isn’t going to lead to conflict and polarization. Instead, it will lead to reconciliation and depolarization, and the reason is that within a few generations no one will even have to work anymore. The robotic slaves will create so much wealth that it will simply be redistributed to people through a social dividend. After the abolition of wage slavery, cheap labor will become redundant and people will have the economic independence to do whatever they want in life.
5.) Just as a pure thought experiment try to imagine a world where everyone starts out at, say, $50,000 a year from the government. What would they do with that money? They will sort themselves back into homogeneous groups to be with other likeminded people. In the absence of scarcity, there will be no point to conflict.
“Opportunistic politicians competing for political power under liberal democracy are stirring resentment with political correctness and identity politics to fan the flames.”
They are not opportunistic! Post-modernism reduces everything (Race, class, gender) down to power relationships.
The Libruls are making a calculated move for power using this destructive ideology post-modern critical theory… And it is being directed from Tell Aviv!
“Aristopopulism”? Talk about an oxymoron! I daresay it ranks right up there with “known secret” and “deafening silence”, haw-haw.
The elites (due to their blind stupidity and empty pretensions, I always call them the “kakistocracy”) don’t care about the lower classes. In my experience, 99% of people are lazy, stupid, and selfish. The kaks may have won the materialistic lottery, but have the same characteristics as everybody else. Even more so, as they indulge themselves without consequence.
The only way for we plebes to have a modicum of protection is to have our own access to resources, and a framework where certain rights are enshrined. Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of the market forces and regulatory control (elite manipulation, in other words) that leave us scrambling to figure out how to make the house and car payments. Under such perilous circumstances, who wants to get involved in political or cultural battles against TPTB? Very, very few of us.