Lights Out, Comrades

In 1988 my brother and I visited what was then the Soviet Union. Our intent was to sell them pile driving equipment for their offshore oil exploration, but before it was all over we acquired some valuable technology from them that has been useful both before and after my time in the family business. We (well, I, it was his only trip to the place, he usually got to go to Singapore and Italy) learned quite a lot about the country; had our rulers not been so boorishly provincial and more observant, they might have learned something too and avoided some of the mistakes they have made with the country.

To get there we took an overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad. We had a two-bed (first class) compartment, but as we lumbered away from Moscow the conductor threw the master switch and the lights went out. We looked at each other. We knew. “Lights out, comrades.”

This election cycle I get the feeling that, barring a real miracle, we’ve reached a “lights out, comrades” moment in our own history. I’ve been saying for a long time that you cannot run a country the way we have and expect it to go on in the same way. That’s especially true with an elite whose own new articles of faith have taken hold with the ascent of the Boomers, who have been beating the same drum since the 1960’s:

• The central purpose of life is to get laid, high, or drunk. It is also important to beat down people who think otherwise, which is a big reason they hate Christianity so much. They have succeeded in propagating this idea to the population at large. A major evidence of that has been the serious pushback on abortion that has taken place since the Dobbs decision. The right thought it was over with this decision, but they were wrong. The reason for this is simple: it wasn’t about the babies (as they thought) but the idea that people weren’t fully human unless they were sexually active, and abortion is a necessary tool in the toolbox of such a mentality. (I noted that the transgender movement is a tacit admission that the sexual revolution was a failure, but Boomers aren’t much in admitting their mistakes.) Failing to recognise this in advance is a major–and potentially fatal–fault in their strategy, but it is typically American to be totally incapable of understanding the motivation of one’s opponents.
• There are too many people on the planet, thus we must reduce their number. Getting volunteers to get the ball rolling is difficult, as I noted in We’re Looking for a Volunteer, Ted, so we may have been seeing calls for draftees. All of this in the face of declining fertility rates, but we still hear calls for fewer people, as noted in Should My Students Be Here?
• The suburbs are full of phonies who take up too much space and consume too much. The homeless are truly “authentic,” although no one wants to answer the question “authentically what?” So, I suppose, are those who vote for this agenda, which is why we see so much appeal to suburban women this time in the election cycle. Authenticity and self-actualisation have been the hallmarks of the modern and post-modern world, but as Modris Ekstiens shows in The Rites of Spring, such quests lead to disaster. In the meanwhile getting suburbanites to lower their standards of living to suit their “betters” has been a tough sell for half a century.

So much for the legacy of the Sixties and Seventies. Have these people come up with anything else since then? There are two things that have turned in their favour, mostly in the last decade.

The first is that the security apparatus has flipped to the left. I don’t think anyone really saw this coming, although there have been signs of this out there for a long time. But such is understandable when you consider that the Right has adopted an anti-government agenda; what else did we expect bureaucrats to do?

The second is the whole “equity” business. Now the call for equity–which really means that everyone who works (or doesn’t) has the same income and lives in the same circumstances–does have Marxist roots, although the American Left has never been up to a Marxist standard. This is evidenced by contrasting classical Marxism with what’s going on these days. Classical Marxism tells us that, as capitalists centralise more of the wealth and the working class is driven to the margins, same working class will revolt and establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the current equity movement same will be enforced via DEI and other race and preferred group rearrangements. But who will enforce all of this? The capitalists who have centralised the wealth in our own time, of course!

A push towards equity is also a push against personal achievement. Why work hard when there is no forward movement for you? That push against personal achievement is the major reason why the Jews are so unpopular these days, all of the other things they throw up at you notwithstanding.

So what is to be done? A long time ago I realised that fixing thus broken system of ours will never come from within but from without. The Right has tried to convince me otherwise but they have had 40+ years to finish the job and have not. The Left has the upper hand at this point (had they not taken 20% out of everyone’s wallet with inflation, this election wouldn’t be a contest) but they have neither the inclination nor the expertise to make the productive sector of the country the “Arsenal of Democracy” again, even to help their pet projects such as the war in Ukraine and keeping Taiwan from slipping into the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Even the lights are in danger. Our masters are so unscientific and fixated on lowering our standard of living that they have embraced “renewables” as our only hope to lower our carbon footprint. These aren’t really ready for prime time yet; nuclear power is the only technology at hand to insure a base-load source of electricity until these get up to speed down the road. In the meanwhile we can expect blackouts, either scheduled or unscheduled.

Lights out, comrades.