The Regime's Crisis of Legitimacy is Getting Worse
The Regime's Crisis of Legitimacy is Getting Worse
Over the past week, one of the more disturbing news stories to come out of the wheelhouse involved the apparent takeover of several apartment buildings in Colorado by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. On top of this, we then saw something similar happen in Chicago. American border security and social integrity, already in shambles, are being shown as practically non-existent in real time. Thanks to the massive influx of immigrants, we’re now formally seeing the rise of social and political balkanisation take place in America.
Legitimacy is one of those things that a government either has or it doesn’t. Either the rulers are able to maintain a moral mandate to exercise power that extends beyond reliance upon raw force or they aren’t. Having that moral mandate, however, comes with providing good leadership, safety, and so forth to your people. The Tren de Aragua takeovers are a stark reminder of the Regime’s worsening hold on this legitimacy. Think about what has happened. Portions of American soil - perhaps small right now, but which will grow in time to come - are more or less formally under the sovereignty of a foreign power (and a criminal gang, at that). When a government cannot maintain the ability to secure its own territory and protect its own people, it doesn’t really have a mandate to rule.
This is, however, only the latest chunk of the dam to fall out. The whole reason Tren de Aragua is there in Aurora and Chicago in the first place is because the US government has purposefully abdicated its responsibility to secure its own borders (one of the most basic functions of government). The Regime continues to import millions of “migrants” to replace the native-born American population. Many parts of this country have already been functionally colonised by various foreign peoples, who instead of assimilating like immigrants are “supposed” to do, just create their own enclaves. This is coupled with a worsening competency crisis across the board that means the people’s tax monies are wasted profligately, we can’t keep our military fully staffed, and we can’t even bring back home astronauts we send into space without needing help from private contractors. Every way we look at it, basic roles of government are being left unfulfilled. This means that there is a deep and pervasive legitimacy crisis for the Regime.
There is (of course) a demographic-structural reason for all of this. As regular readers know by now, I’m firmly of the belief that not only is our society in the collapse phase of our secular cycle, but we’re deep in that phase, pretty much to the point where we’re just waiting for a “Seneca point” to happen and push us over the edge. Well, delegitimisation of standing regimes is commonplace in collapse phases for all the usual reasons relating to fecklessness and incompetency. When people in government are more concerned about fleecing the commons and getting everything they can for themselves before it all falls apart (i.e. intensified intraelite competition), not a whole lot of thought goes into providing good governance. And this is exactly what we’re seeing now. The Regime and its managerial appendages are mainly interested in increasing taxes on the productive, using those taxes to further build their own client-patronage networks, and disarming you and me so we can’t do anything about it. That is an illegitimate government.
I mean, look at the way the Regime has handled the current election season. After years of trying to hide the open secret of Biden’s dementia, they were finally forced to admit what a disaster of a candidate he was. The solution? Have the “party of democracy” run a coup on him and replace him with a candidate who didn’t get a single vote from an actual voter. She then refuses to engage with the media except in extremely curated softball interviews (which she still flubs) and also begins to lose. To try to salvage this dumpster fire, they’re now trying to resurrect the “Russian collusion” nonsense from 2016. It’s all just naked political strategising at this point, with absolutely no sense of doing what’s good for the people or the country. None of this is what you’d do if you felt yourself to be on a secure footing and not on the verge of losing your governing mandate. The fact that the Regime, both here and abroad, is further cracking down on freedom of speech and dissident voices under the guise of “misinformation” shows that the sense of urgency and precariousness is worldwide.
The thing to understand is that rulers who are secure and confident in their legitimacy to rule don’t have to crack down hard on dissidence. They can allow a certain amount of opposition so long as it doesn’t rise to the level of actual rebellion. The king can tolerate the jesters who make jokes about him, the bawdy songs sang in the peasants’ taverns, and the like. Indeed, the American Founders codified this into the Constitution via the First Amendment, presuming that the constitutional system would convey the legitimacy necessary to allow for “ideological flexibility” to be indulged.
However, the opposite is also the case, which is precisely what we’re seeing with the current Regime. The Regime is cracking down on free speech because its fragility cannot handle challenges to its narrative frame. The Democratic nominee is openly talking about Elon Musk “losing his privilege” to run his own social media platform as he sees fit. The Regime tries to use mass shootings (by people who were always “on the FBI’s radar” yet about whom nothing was ever done) to disarm the American people. The whole point to this is to render you unable to resist when the mask completely comes off and they start going full Bolshevik on Heritage-Americans. In fact, pretty much everything the present American government does is, in one form or another, designed to impoverish and hobble regular Americans from being able to assert their own rights and duties as citizens.
Every government throughout history has had some sort of legitimating mechanism - an ideology and associated symbolism (including, but not limited to iconography) that represents and justifies its right to rule. The Iron Age kings of the ancient Near East were legitimated by the evident favour of the gods in giving good harvests and military victories. The Chinese Emperors ruled via the Mandate of Heaven, as expressed in many of the same ways. Medieval monarchies and aristocrats needed to keep the favour of the Roman Catholic Church. And so on.
When these mechanisms began to fail (as they often do during collapse phases), these governments would often find themselves replaced by others. When the famines hit and the Great King’s armies were defeated in the field, a new faction usually usurped the throne. When the Emperor lost the Mandate of Heaven, a new dynasty might be initiated. If a duke or king fell out of Rome’s favour, it might well be time for an out-of-power elite to take over the throne with the Pope’s blessings. In the process of all of this, the old icons, the old “mental substructure” that sustained that regime’s right to rule, will often be overthrown. When Christianity replaced paganism in Europe, the old totems were cut down, shown to be impotent, and replaced with crosses and cathedrals. More recently, the Left’s Cultural Revolution in America worked assiduously to erase the old underpinnings of Americanism and replace it with woke progressivism’s transnational idols.
Losing legitimacy is a big deal when you’re in power, which is why those in power are so desperate to keep it, or failing that, to suppress those who might be in a position to take advantage. This is, ultimately, why the Regime and its creatures on social media are flipping out to intensely about the Tucker Carlson interview with historian Darryl Cooper.
See, the Regime’s legitimising mechanism is the Post-War Consensus (PWC) that has existed as the foundation of the West’s official ideology since the end of World War II. This heavily sanitised and mythologised consensus forms the basis of the Regime’s commitment to “democracy,” by which is meant “whatever we durn well tell you it means, bub!” Included in this constellation of related ideological constructs are things like feminism, egalitarianism, blank slatism, etc. Now, all of these things are grossly out of accord with how the world actually works. They’ve also come under sustained attack by people who actually understand how reality operates. More and more people understand that different people (and peoples) have different strengths and weakness. Try as they might to overthrow it, the fact that men and women are different (and can’t magically transform into each other) continually reasserts itself.
But these are all attacks upon the incidentals. Tucker’s interview, on the other hand, allowed the PWC itself to be questioned. And if it can’t stand up to sustained scrutiny, then one of the last remaining moral underpinnings to which the Regime is desperately grasping would be knocked away. What happens if people started to wonder if Churchill approving the firebombing of civilians at Dresden sounds an awful lot like something Hitler would do? What if they started questioning why the western allies were cool with handing Eastern Europe over to the Soviets, exchanging one dictator for an even worse one with something like quadruple the body count?
In short, what if people gradually stopped believing in the absolute sanctity of the religion of the PWC and started to wonder why the people who keep ballyhooing it at us are allowed to suppress our speech, disarm our citizens, tax monies we haven’t even made yet, fill our communities with hostile foreigners, rig our elections, pervasively spy on us, and defame our religion while using various aspects of a discredited PWC “democracy” to justify all of these things?
As mentioned above, when a regime loses legitimacy, it has no moral authority anymore to expect or command obedience from the people. Instead, all it has left is raw force and guile. This is essentially the point at which our Regime is. It has to rig elections to stay in power and utilise an all-encompassing propaganda apparatus to deflect from this and other failings. It uses tragedies like mass shootings to frighten normies into obedience and convince them to go along with their own suppression. Regime spokemen (including the president himself) threaten to use the military to assault the American people themselves if they don’t get with the program. These are all signs that the Regime itself feels insecure and fears it has lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Unfortunately, like a cornered animal, this makes the Regime very dangerous. The next couple of months (as Election Day nears and every effort to kneecap Trump fails, including actually trying to put a bullet in him) really are of critical importance. What if Trump wins to such an extent that they can’t rig it? Will the 75,000+ foreign antifas already in country be activated to “reeducate” the American people for voting wrongly? Will the mask come off and the Regime formally attempt to assert itself through raw power, all in the name of “saving democracy”? Time will tell, of course. In the meantime, it’d be wise to stay frosty.
Comments
Post a Comment