Class Warfare

That's the reality of America, as Glenn Harlan Reynolds describes it today:

America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small bizAmerica’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz

The question, of course, is: What's behind this class war?

Reynolds starts with the economic rationale--and there's little doubt that this is a very real and conscious motive at the level of corporations and their enablers:

In America, class warfare is often disguised as culture war, and culture war is often cloaked by talk of race. But underneath it all, the class warfare is still there. Whether accidentally or intentionally, America’s upper classes seem to wind up harming the working class and small businesses, always in the name of some high-minded cause.

On immigration, for example, the go-to move is to call people who object to open borders racists and nativists. But what’s behind it? As Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein commented: “A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers . . . One equally surefire way to short-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.” Immigration as a way of keeping working-class wages down.

Strangely, Reynolds fails to mention the role of outsourcing in this. The outsourcing of American manufacturing and jobs is all about boosting profits by suppressing the biggest portion of the cost of goods sold--wages and related expenses. The gradual forcing of the working class onto the government dole in various forms (guaranteed income?) is supposed to make up for that and insure a docile populace. But it won't substitute for the meaningful life that all normal humans seek. It will fail.

UPDATED: The New Normal In Light Of Gamestop

Yesterday evening/night and much of today I've spent digging out from a massive snowstorm, and I'm still not done. In between bouts of shoveling I've also been spending time tweaking new privacy measures--just because. Not that I don't trust Uncle but, well, just because, as I say. In fact, the measures, so far, are really directed at my ISP.

Along those lines, by the way, I've seen commenters discussing various supposedly more private browsers. During the last couple of weeks I've experimented with several additional browsers--additional to the several that I already use (at any given time I always have at least two different browsers open). Those additional browsers have included Brave and Iridium. While I like them well enough I'll probably be sticking with my two default browsers, the main one being Slimjet. Slimjet has, for quite a long time, simply worked for me--it doesn't call back to Google and it's builtin adblocker is very efficient (more so than most extensions). Slimjet is cross platform and based on Chromium, so it uses the Blink rendering engine. There's also a Slimbrowser, which is a Windows only product and is based on Firefox (Gecko rendering engine). I assume it's every bit as good as Slimjet. If you're looking for an excellent browser, one of those two may well fit the bill for you.

With that said, I've seen virtually no news today, but I did just read what I thought was an excellent article by Edward Ring:

Robinhood, Reddit, and the Cram Down of Economic Populism

This is what we can expect from Biden’s financialized economy, ascendant now over Trump’s productivity economy.

Ring first provides what I thought was a very lucid overview of short selling and what happened this past week with regard to GameSpot. He then moves on to what it means in the overall Big Picture. In particular, he punctures the narratival balloon that tells us what noble things the short sellers do for us all, but preventing over valuation of stocks. Here's how he concludes--I really like the way he wraps it all up and ties it in to things like the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Big Tech, etc.

Recommended Reads For Presidents Day: The Use Of Prosecutors

Two recommended reads that provide additional insights into the way the office of prosecutor fits into the progressive scheme for societal and political transformation. The two, of course, go hand in hand.

First, Andrew McCarthy weighs in:

Trump And Impeachments Past--The Difference

Daniel McCarthy has a fascinating article at Spectator | USA today that examines the significance of the current Trump impeachment mania of the Dems by comparing it to past impeachments of the modern era. His conclusion is that, as recently as the Clinton impeachment, there was still what he terms a ruling class consensus regarding the fundamental legitimacy of "the system," or as I would say, the constitutional order. We can certainly see that in the attacks from the Left on basic constitutional principles such as the electoral process as it has been know up till now. McCarthy maintains that the consensus has thus vanished and, with it, the legitimacy of the ruling class. The ruling class is going through the forms of legitimate constitutionalism, but in reality they are exposing their own constitutional bankruptcy. What we are seeing now is, thus, tantamount to unthinking "regime suicide."

Impeachment is regime suicideThe ruling class still believes in a consensus that doesn’t exist. Their legitimacy is vanishing

What I present below is the last third or so of the much longer article--read it all. And then compare it with the views of Daniel Greenfield, Patrick Deneen, and Gary Saul Morson that we've examined recently.

To the extent that there was still a skeletal national consensus, it favored Clinton. Impeachment was a circus, but it wasn’t a national trauma. It cast no shadow over the next presidential election two years later. It was a dud that reaffirmed the stability of the American regime. 

With Trump, everything is different. The 2016 election was a referendum on the regime itself. Trump resurrected the populist attacks on the country’s political and economic establishment that Buchanan and Perot had battle-tested in the 1990s. 

Trump was no mere conventional Republican who happened to beat Hillary Clinton. He was a completely unconventional Republican who first beat the party’s own ideological standard-bearers during the primaries, in the course of which he often said things that no Republican had said for a generation or more. Trump’s message in the primaries and general election boiled down to: they screwed you. ‘They’ being the Bushes, the Clintons, the establishment in both parties, the warmongers, the trade-deal architects, the communist Chinese, free-riding allies, and more. 

Trump is no ideologue or political theorist, but he launched a comprehensive attack on the domestic and international liberal order. He campaigned against the system as it has existed since the Cold War ended.​