The funeral services for President George HW Bush triggered Ross Douthat’s nostalgia for the “aristocratic virtues of the old WASP establishment, and a disappointment with the meritocracy that has risen in its place.” This column ignores his nostalgia and alleged virtues and discusses briefly his bizarre assumption that a “meritocracy” runs America. Given the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and President Trump, I thought that the meritocracy fantasy was dead. We are far closer to anti-meritocracy (a kakistocracy).The basis of conservatism is traditionalism, which in the extreme mythologizes the supposed "gold age" of the past and yearns for recapturing it essence through reactionary politics.
Douthat’s Mendacious Meritocracy Myth
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC
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We live under an elite system that hates and fears merit. They fear we will have the merit to look through their lies and call our elites what they are – ideologues using the myth of meritocracy to hide their shameful lack of morality and empathy, their soul-destroying fixation on personal wealth, status, and power, and their recurrent failures. Bill Black [bold added]
Which is all the more reason that the financial system be founded on such principles as equal protection under the law. Instead, we have government privileges for private credit creation and these favor the banks themselves and the rich, the most so-called "worthy" of what is then, in essence, the public's credit but for private gain.
Moreover why is it with inexpensive fiat, unlike the unethical Gold Standard, that so much credit is needed in the first place? And why it it, except for mere grubby, unsafe, totally-inadequate-for-modern-commerce physical fiat, aka "cash", that citizens may not even use their Nation's fiat? But must use bank deposits instead?
Where is, as someone posed, our right to be free from banks?
"Where is our right to be free from banks?"
This aspect is overlooked by Marxism and mainstream economics alike.
Many people condemn capitalism without realizing that bank tyranny is a crucial part of capitalism.
“The funeral services for President George HW Bush triggered Ross Douthat’s nostalgia…”
This leads me to ask a question. When McCain and Bush Sr. died, why were we all forced to slog through weeks of nation-wide worship of these mass murdering slime-balls? Why the exaggerated tears and grief?
My hypothesis is that the fawning over these P.O.S. psychopaths is a product of collective neurosis caused by cognitive dissonance.
People who are addicted to Trump-bashing are sick of their own addiction. They are weary of their own negativity. Yet they refuse to stop it, since self-righteous carping is how they avoid facing the pain of their lives.
This addiction, combined with the yearning to be free of this addiction, creates cognitive dissonance, which people cope with by emotionally praising dead psychopaths. By worshiping these monsters, people briefly escape from their addiction to self-righteous negativity. They briefly step outside the world created by their own negativity, and glimpse a world where everything is golden sweet.
“Bush Sr. was a saint compared to Trump! He was real a real president! McCain was a real hero! Pass me a kleenex."
(I will if you pass me back a barf bag.)
People are tired of being self-righteous a**holes, yet they love being self-righteous a**holes. Hence they make tearful eulogies for mass murders. They obsesses on stupid sh*t. [At the funeral, everyone but Trump read the “Apostles Creed” aloud from a piece of paper, while Trump stood silent. Trump-bashes attacked him for this.]
This is the state of American society today. Some people avoid facing reality by worshipping Trump. Other people avoid facing reality by vilifying Trump non-stop, and treating mass murderers as saints by comparison.
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