How Covid despots humiliated America - The Democrats have become public health technocrats

UnHerd ^ | November 10, 2021 | Jacob Howland

[Cboldt]

A year after Biden's election, the question of whether anyone really intended to destroy democratic republicanism in the United States is now moot. Forty-six years ago, a headline in New York�s Daily News read "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Today, the Biden administration and its legion of corporate media and big tech allies communicate the same message to the American people so consistently, and so pointedly, that one can only conclude the humiliation of the electorate is a matter of policy. The administration's undeniable incompetence, fresh evidence of which is forthcoming every day as it squabbles over vaccine mandates and fails to address multiple crises of supply, inflation, and illegal immigration, both masks and serves its managerial method. Not least because the multiplication of crises furnishes a pretext for ever greater extensions of governmental control. ...

The chafing humiliations of the Covid police are just part of a surge of social friction that was gestating for years and exploded with the election of President Trump five years ago. Strong political passions, multiplied, amplified, and frequently concentrated on specific targets by corporate media and big tech, have destabilised our essential public and private institutions, virtually all of which, through some demonic Oedipal fatality, now seem intent on repudiating their founding principles and betraying their core missions.

[Cboldt]

Done as an excerpt in part to encourage reading of the comments that follow Mr. Howland's essay.

[livius]

“Depleted and uncharacteristically depressed, the American people now spin and shudder along the edge of the abyss. “

That’s how it feels, but I’m not sure there’s time enough for the fix he proposes (getting back to historical principles).

I liked one of the comments to the effect that separation was coming and someday citizens of the “Federation of Democratic States” would be bribing border guards with gas ration books so that they could escape into the “Republic of American States.” At this rate, it may come to that.

[Cboldt]

The comment on Cliodynamics (overproduction of elites) caught my eye. Granted, the theory is a short time scale (70 years) so doesnt get to a durable solution.

This one is good too ...

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It’s worth remarking, of course, that the conjunction of authoritarianism and incompetence is not an unlucky accident, it’s inevitable, because once people in power find the job beyond them, they don’t retire in the shame of failure, they just use their power to enforce the compliance with their agenda that they failed to achieve through the persuasion that competence on their own part would have brought about.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Negligence in safeguarding the vote is a sure and certain way to weaken and destroy a republic.