The electoral map this year, as in 2004, portrays something other than plain electoral potential.   See one here.   It’s absolutely true that these Red and Blue State distinctions today stand for something other than objective politics.  Anyone who’s lived in either of the colored enclaves knows that they’re insular social systems, with the natural tendency to grow more insular and self-reinforcing, especially during times of stress like an election season. 

Here in Connecticut, our company of the “coastal elites” has no real opposition, and has been especially liberal in its open contempt for that which is not itself.  Politics here is simply white noise, containing all the possible ideas about humankind, but with the same old fantastic historical narratives about how to create a good society. 

Nothing meaningful gets done, because what really matters is the perpetuation of the steely states-of-mind that come from social and cultural stratifications.  Unfortunately, as the ruling classes yammer and assert their worldview into empty space, the ”culture” around them grows more  noisy and chaotic and unstable.   Mass immigration and emigration, and  the blessed end of the ’60’s generation’s power are all happening at once, and the future is unknown. 

What can we expect in the next thirty years?  We don’t know.   America has, ’til now, managed the Hobbsean-Lockean problem - the rule of man versus the rule of law - although rule by courts is essentially rule by man, and rule by minoritarianism is just as wicked.  Still, we have no pockets of cultural entropy like Lebanon, yet, unless it’s Detroit.  We have no lethal tribal, sectarian or ideological wars. Not yet.  But do we have reason to believe that, in forty years,  New York City, or Baltimore won’t look like Beirut does today. 

Or Boston.  When the last restraining vines of the Yankee myth systems have been pruned away and burned, and the levelling blandishments of capitalism  and consumption no longer flatten the passions, will the coercive tools of progressive government  be enough to keep the peace?  I don’t think so.  And by the way, that Yankee myth system isn’t useful because it’s upheld by a Yankee bloodline - that began to disappear in the New England sterility of the 1840’s - but because it knits together a common culture.  Take it away with no replacement and you have third-century Rome, or the Middle East today.  

As for the Middle East, is it accurate to attribute the troubles there to irrational colonial borders,  or post-colonial pseudo-statehood, or poverty, or despotism or lack of economic mobility?  These all add to the poison, no doubt, but is there any category for the plain perversity of human self-assertion, and the moral malfunctions that cause it?  Not today. 

It’s unfashionable to fit Western Enlightenment modes of conduct to the “senseless” hate and murder in the Middle East because it’s culture specific, so we’re left with no disciminating capacities at all.   And for that reason, we can’t even evaluate the past, present and future for ourselves.   If  Hartford, with eleven shootings in a single afternoon, isn’t the land of the Droogs, what is?  In one week, these events have faded from memory.  Who are we today?

It’s a long way from The White Man’s Burden on the express train to moral nullity, but we’ve made the journey without a stop for the mail.  Today, in a multiculutural stupor, we’re close to accepting arranged marriage, female circumcision, polygamy, polyandry, polyamory, the oppression of women and children in general, exceptions to religion/state barriers for Muslims, and the vagaries of Shari’a Law in parts of America, and in many parts of Europe.   All of these adjustments will lead to more  more extreme adjustments to others, and they won’t necessarily be Muslims, but some other group with a claim to legitimacy and indulgence. 

45 years ago I read a dreary thesis on political legitimacy, written by some figure in international relations, and whose name I’ve completely forgotten.  He concluded that free-thinking, tolerant Britain was the most stable country in the world, where the totalitarian USSR and its constituent countries, were fragile pressure-cookers.  Britain’s social vigor then was attributed to the usual assortment of virtues assigned to free-societies. 

Completely ignored was Britain’s post-industrial torpor, Commonwealth immigration policies, declining aspirations, the stirrings of a ”New” Labor every bit as dogmatic and certain as the old hereditary ruling class,  and the burning, destructive fever known as the  1960’s.  Britain is in steep decline today, with a continuous current of emigres to other English-speaking lands.  We should pay attention. 

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