In my last post I mentioned that Western countries are signaling themselves into annihilation due to the spill over effect of upwardly mobile people wanting to show themselves as being upper class, i.e. not proles. Others have called that Goodwhites signaling they are not Badwhites. Same thing.
There's a recent article in the New York Times that unintendedly makes the same point. It's about how Sweden has run out of means to actually accept more refugees, but it can't stop signaling virtue so they just can't stop getting more. If you're in a charitable mood, you might think sounds like a reactionary is very skillfully trying to use progressive rhetoric to make the case for closing the borders. But note this part:
The government’s slow response to all of this seems baffling. But the seeds of the current debacle were sown earlier, when immigration became an untouchable centerpiece of Sweden’s politics. For the past five years, the nationalist Sweden Democrats party has been the only force opposing the country’s refugee policies. Born in the late 1980s through the fusion of an anti-tax populist party and a neo-Nazi activist group, the Sweden Democrats have grown exponentially since entering Parliament in 2010. Their rise has nonetheless been condemned and hotly contested by a mainstream weary of seeing the country’s reputation for tolerance tarnished. Far from introducing new restrictions to immigration, the Sweden Democrats have caused the political establishment to entrench itself: Any move to restrict immigration is now seen as a concession to paranoid nativism.Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has called the Sweden Democrats “neo-fascists,” and like all other mainstream party leaders — on the left as well as the right — he has refused to communicate with them. But on the heels of his administration’s about-face on its own immigration policy, his past attacks on the party seem awkward. When members of the Sweden Democrats began criticizing his policy months ago for its blindness to logistical and economic pitfalls, he dismissed them. The party also argued early on that money for humanitarian purposes would be more efficiently and equitably spent through foreign aid than immigration, and he disregarded their argument as a convenient excuse for a xenophobic agenda. He may have been right, but so were they.And therein lies the problem. The real nightmare for Swedish politics is not that it now includes the kind of continental-style far-right party it once thought itself immune to. It is rather that mainstream forces have surrendered all critical perspectives on immigration to a party with which they can neither collaborate nor bear to see affirmed. Had a transparent and dynamic public discussion been taking place in Sweden during the past months — a discussion that acknowledged both the need for human solidarity and the limitations of the country’s infrastructure — a more sustainable immigration policy might have emerged. Instead, it seems ill-fated policies will not be altered until the country brings itself to the brink of collapse.
And that's the thing. Critics from the right often point out how powerful leftists don't have to actually suffer the consequences of their decisions; they are isolated in their wealthy neighborhoods, and don't even have to interact with any of the foreigners they are bringing in. All this humanitarian rhetoric is just an abstraction.
But everything is an abstraction. The FDA don't suffer personally the consequences of their decisions. Well they do eventually, if somebody gets cancer. But that's far removed from the decision, and it's all in the realm of possibility. But that's not the way politics work. Human groups don't make decisions like that. It's not what, or how; politics is about who and whom, who is your friend and who is your foe, who is a useful associate and who isn't. The left is a social club. A social club which allots status points according to allegiance to some abstract ideological principle, which changes all the time.
By making an opposing social club, and going public on its opinions, that constraints the freedom of action of leftists. Leftists can take any sort of position as long as they frame it in a plausibly deniable way, and they agree to go on with it. But by, say, forming a party called Sweden Democrats to argue against everything that leftist have been doing until now, you put them in a bind. Agreeing with the enemy makes you lose your position completely. If they are right, you have no reason to rule. So no matter what you must double down on everything you do, lest you help your enemies undermine you.
But follow that to the logic conclusion. If Sweden, or France, can't make good policy because that would undermine their own legitimacy; then under a democratic system of open debate, all governments all the time will find themselves in the same situation. If having an opposition prevents you from doing good policy then we should not have oppositions. Democracy doesn't work. I didn't say this; the New York Times did. Not that I disagree.
It also follows that the only way of achieving meaningful political change is through the completely replacement of people in power. A coup. That's the only way. The politicians can't just repudiate all they have been doing for decades and admit they're wrong. They must double down, or else. So they must all go. Every single one of them. In other times, the top politicians would be the ones doing the speeches, and in case of a change in policy they could be made to "take responsibility" and step out. But today in the era of social media everybody is doing political speeches. Everybody has committed itself to a hundred causes every year. Facebook, Twitter, constant garbage on TV and the Internet are semi-forcing you to take a stand on a dozen causes every day. Changing your opinion in any of those is giving ammunition to your enemies to undermine you. So even low level bureaucrats, college students, everybody who's been talking politics in public must double down on whatever madness they have been committing themselves to. Which is why the leftist madness has been accelerating as of late. Everybody is in the game now.
