The United States government is increasingly becoming an anti-government. It does not attempt to preserve order, but to undermine it.
Example 1 is the government's refusal to enforce its own immigration law, overwhelming its own border police, incentivizing human trafficking, drug trafficking, and other forms of criminality not only here in the U.S. but also in Mexico, straining public resources like schools and welfare systems, and depressing wages. That this is happening during a supposed pandemic erodes public confidence in the government's anti-Covid messaging.
Example 2 is the Covid response. The government seems to be actively discouraging people from getting vaccinated with their conflicted messaging and undermining its own credibility with lies, shifting goals, and ideologically selective enforcement of its own recommendations. Local governments seem to be intentionally hurting working class families by keeping public schools closed (public schools basically serve as daycare for single-parent or two-working parent homes) and shutting down service industries.
Example 3 is the tacit approval of political violence in American cities by the Mayors' offices and local DAs, resulting in demoralized police, higher crime rates, and shrinking tax bases. These same Mayors and DAs often refuse to prosecute petty crime like shoplifting, and set low bails for violent offenders who go on to commit more violent crime while awaiting trial.
Other examples might include driving up gas prices by limiting domestic oil production, using the FBI to instigate domestic terrorism, and undermining faith in the electoral process by making votes easy to manufacture and difficult to audit.
Granted, there is not just one "government" involved here but various federal, state, and local versions, each with their internal conflicts. But it is clear that there is a growing philosophy of anti-government.
What on earth motives this? I think it comes down to ideology, incompetence, and spite.
Progressive ideology is by nature unsettling: to legitimize itself it has to condemn the past and the status-quo as evil, simply because it is not the future the progressives are currently selling. Even past forms of progressivism must be condemned; today's progressives can have goals diametrically opposed to yesterday's progressives, because ultimately the only thing progressives believe in is their own right to rule.
The progressive ideology of the day is Critical Race Theory which is a revolutionary theory that seeks to destroy current culture in the hope that an egalitarian state-of-nature will arise. The pattern is derived from the Marxist notion of the superstructure (culture) which hides or justifies the exploitation of the workers, except here the superstructure hides or justifies racial inequalities. It is in fact a devolution of Marxism, which at least had explanatory power and wasn't explicitly hostile to empirical analysis. Like all ideologies, Critical Race Theory is utopian and escapist. In this case it is faith that destruction of social norms will magically result in something nice.
Critical Race Theory might be the most popular dumbass ideology out there but it isn't the only one. Neoconservatives, with their touching faith that Western Liberalism is a natural order waiting to flourish in tribal societies, if only the wicked men in charge of those tribal societies were swapped out for other wicked me, seem to still be running the show at the DoD.
Ideology of course makes one stupid. It makes the ideologue mistake the theoretical map for the territory, blinding him to inconvenient realities. It makes institutions blind to actual competence and only see personnel in terms of ideological purity. In short, it makes prudential decision-making impossible. The ideologue is necessarily incompetent.
As for spite, the ideologues make no secret of their hatred for ordinary, non-ideological people. Spite is evident in every news broadcast and in much of contemporary entertainment. Open class hatred is encouraged in legacy and social media propaganda. Spite towards working class Americans (even more if they are white working class) helps drive the push for infinite immigration. Spite towards people on a budget and non-urban populations helps drive the increase in gas prices. Spite towards taxpayers drives the lax attitudes to urban crime. I would not be surprised at all if the military's chaotic withdraw in Afghanistan was driven by spite towards the President for daring to order an end to the forever-war gift.
Is spite the effect or cause of ideology? That is, does ideology make the ideologue spiteful, or does it justify the spite they already have in their hearts?
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