Years ago when institutions had more credibility, skepticism was met with the phrase “Would your government lie to you?” Afterward, when the 60s established that Uncle Sam told fibs, the Watergate generation found a new source of truth: “Would the media lie to you?” Events since, from the Dan Rather document fiasco to the scandalous off-and-on-again prohibitions on public rallies, have convinced many the media is no better than the U.S. government at telling the truth.
“You can’t say, ‘Listen to the science and keep your churches at 25 percent occupancy and socially distance your choir singers,’ and then say, ‘but thousands of people pressed together in a giant mass while screaming is worth the risk.’”
This disillusionment has made America hard to govern through the former method of the Narrative. Roger Simon thinks American elites are increasingly suffering from “China envy” because they are losing control over an increasingly divided country and hope that left-wing protesters will push the Deep State into governing by regulation.
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, over the years, found a way to regulate Chinese society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
In a political vacuum, bureaucrats can make a lot of law because the representative institutions are deadlocked. “Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) took to the floor of the Senate on Tuesday to excoriate the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision [extending sexual discrimination protection to transgenders] which essentially rewrote federal law, usurping the power of Congress, in order to redefine the meaning of ‘sex’ in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
“Every honest person knows that the laws in this country today, they’re made almost entirely by unelected bureaucrats and courts,” he [Hawley] said. “They’re not made by this body. Why not? Because this body doesn’t want to make law, that’s why not. Because in order to make law, you have to take a vote. In order to vote, you have to be on the record, and to be on the record is to be held accountable, and that’s what this body fears above all else.”
The bureaucracy became even more important after SCOTUS declined to reexamine the doctrine of “qualified immunity … that has shielded police and other government officials from lawsuits over their conduct.” Whether or not “qualified immunity” serves the cause of justice, it clearly helps government by bureaucracy.
This can favor the left, who have long penetrated state agencies. But the bureaucrats can’t fix “China envy” if left-wing rioters, vandals and statue wreckers keep chipping away at the last remaining pillar on which the big-government project depends. Perhaps the most extreme example of this self-destructive process was the inability of police and emergency services to enter Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, or CHOP, to attend the victim of a shooting.
Seattle police are investigating a shooting that left one person dead and another critically injured inside Seattle’s so-called “CHOP” or Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone. …
Police tried to find the shooting victims but were met by a “violent crowd” that prevented the officers from safely accessing the victims, according to a release from Seattle police Saturday.
Body camera footage released by Seattle police Saturday evening shows a crowd of people gathering around the officers.
But even more dangerous than the roving gangs is the possibility a Woke bureaucracy will choke itself to death through morbid expansion. As Hawley noted in connection with the SCOTUS decision, redefining sexual identity will spawn new government departments.
“And we eagerly await what our super-legislators across the street at the Supreme Court building, there at 1 First Street, how they will legislate on this question. What will become of church hiring liberty? What will become of the policies of religious schools? What will become of the fate of religious charities? Who knows? Who’s to say? They are questions for ‘future cases.’”
This is a real possibility. Contact tracing is fast becoming a career path, like TSA security officer. “The coronavirus pandemic has pushed more than 30 million Americans out of the workforce since mid-March. At the same time, it has turned contact tracing, a little-known public health technique, into a big job opportunity in parts of the country.” Now race-based healthcare is in the offing. Newsweek reports:
Protesters in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, put forth a list of 30 demands upon taking over the area, one of which is that hospitals hire black doctors and nurses to treat black patients, a move that would require health care facilities to walk a fine legal line.
Race-based health care, while having gained support, presents legal and practical challenges to implementation. Proponents say it’s one way to start closing disparities in health care, but it could take years and require changes to the education system to fill the shortage of black doctors, and CHAZ’s demand that black doctors be employed for the specific purposes of treating black patients isn’t quite legally sound.
Once started, it will grow. This is in addition to proposals already set forth, like student loan forgiveness and free college and Medicare for All. For all its defects, the former method of rule by prestige was cheap by comparison. To continue the China metaphor, administrative rule is no more economically viable than the backyard steel mills of the Great Leap Forward.
It follows that the only way an elite can regain a semblance of control is to rebuild the devastated political consensus. But that is impossible while America’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is underway. If Washington’s elites envy China they would do well to note that the foundational moment for the current regime in Beijing was when they crushed their own Woke movement in a last-ditch effort to save China.
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new paramount leader of China and started the “Boluan Fanzheng” program which gradually dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution and brought the country back to order. Deng then started a new phase of China by initiating the historic Reforms and Opening-up program. In 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”.
If you’re going to envy China, envy it all the way.
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