Tag Archives: Aristocracy

The Elites’ Battle for the Future America, by Charles Hugh Smith

The Deep State is not a monolith, and there are indications that it is fracturing. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

No nation can produce less of lesser quality, and squander more on infinitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by issuing trillions of new units of currency, and imagine that this asymmetry will never have consequences.

As I have often noted, historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling class as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a book I have been recommending since 2009.

I’ve been writing about the fractures in America’s ruling elites for many years, as well as the erosion of the foundations of society that lead to systemic collapse, for example, Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay (June 2015), Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007) and The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare (March 10, 2017)

America’s elites are fracturing along multiple tectonic fissures: while the conventional media focuses on the ginned-up bread and circuses of Red and Blue political games (i.e., The Purple Empire), the real conflicts are within the camps running the Red and Blue games, the Imperial Project of global hegemony (a.k.a. The Deep State), the New Nobility of Big Tech attempting to overthrow the Old Nobility, the Nationalists versus the Globalists and the Financial Gamesters versus The New Foundation.

These are my informal acronyms, of course, but the conflicts are real and intensifying as extreme policies reach new extremes and the risks of breakdown increase.

The most dangerous elites are the ones clinging to the perverse but compelling faith that the Federal Reserve and Treasury can conjure endless trillions of U.S. dollars without any consequence other than continued global hegemony, the faith that the Federal Reserve has god-like powers to tweak the dials so that 1) the U.S. dollar remains the pre-eminent reserve currency 2) but not so strong that it sinks the emerging market economies and 3) magical enough that there are no limits on how many can be absorbed by global stock, bond, debt, risk and commodity markets and 4) remains the primary method of limiting the global financial leverage of geopolitical rivals. Uh, sure. No problem, the Fed is all-powerful, right?

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Our Revolutionary Age, by the Zman

The almost complete disconnect between our powers that be and the common clay is similar to that between the French aristocracy and the peasants before the French Revolution. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

If one were to conjure just one image to explain the French Revolution, it would be of the sheltered and self-indulged Marie Antoinette saying “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” when told the peasants were starving. Perhaps framing it alongside an image of the peasants in the streets, desperate for food. The story is apocryphal, but it probably stands as the most enduring image of the Revolution. The decadent and indifferent ruling class on one side and the desperate peasants on the other.

Even though the story is not true, it works as an explanation for what happened in 18th century France. On the one hand, there was a ruling class that was increasingly out of touch, physically and culturally removed from the people. On the other hand, the people were evolving away from the ruling class. The growth of what we would call a middle-class was changing the nature of France. It is the psychological separation that drove the political dynamic, leading to the revolution.

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