They've Given Up Trying to Persuade Us

It's fair to ask... what comes next?

If you wanted to find out why support for continued US funding of Ukraine in its war with invading Russian forces continues to erode amongst the American populace, you could do worse than to start with an absolutely mind-blowing tweet from a sitting Congressman this week on the app formerly known as Twitter.

Daniel Goldman, a Congresscritter from New York, actually sat down and typed out the following tweet:

“We are not supporting Ukraine simply because we like the country. This is the first real test of authoitarianism vs. democracy since world war II. Democracy must win for the sake of our own national security and global democracy, That is why we must support Ukraine.”

And then, incredibly, he clicked “send”…

I had to read the Tweet three times, just to make sure I wasn’t suffering from a traumatic brain injury, or being drowned in my toilet. But alas, it’s a real tweet.

There are only two possible explanations for it:

1. That a sitting Congressman really believes that this is the first time since WWII that the United States has fought or funded a proxy war against a totalitarian regime (which is scary enough).

2. He is lying and knows it (which is arguably scarier).

   

To quickly and ruthlessly refute Congressman Goldman, you don’t have to go as far back as our proxy wars in Korea or Vietnam, you don’t even have to go as far back as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon or even our very first proxy adventure in Afghanistan 1.0… you have only to recall the breathless 21st Century media coverage of “freedom-loving” Afghans with their purple fingers held in the air… and our own Government’s soaring rhetoric about the universal desire for human freedom… rhetoric which only stopped in the wake of our disastrous withdrawal from Afghan 2.0 a mere two years ago.

In other words, what Goldman was doing with that Tweet was not persuasion at all… it wasn’t even preaching to the choir. What it was, was something more like Paulie Cicero’s financial relationship with Sonny at the Bamboo Lounge in GOODFELLAS…

“Fuck you… pay me.”

I live in Los Angeles, the American city with the largest number of recent anti-Russian converts per capita, and by recent I mean post “Russia Collusion” recent. I’ve said this to some of them many times before. “I was hating on the Russians when you were going to candlelight vigils for unilateral disarmament and singing along to ‘the Russians love their children too’.” In other words, I am perfectly amenable to the idea of helping proxy militaries degrade Russian military capability, just don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, OK?

A similar sort of intellectual laziness masquerading as persuasion occured during Joe Biden’s incredible 24-hour flip-flop on completing the wall at the southern Border.

See, it turns out that Democrat constituents in blue enclaves like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York are really pissed off about the open border with Mexico and the strain that illegals coming across that border are putting on their cities. So much so that their anger is beginning to show up in the polls. Now, as this is a Presidential election year, that polling is causing quite a bit of panic around Democrat circles and so Biden decided to try and quietly “finish” the wall, just to y’know show those blue voters that he’s actually doing something… I mean, besides drooling.

You can probably already see the problem... Biden has spent the last 8 years telling us that building a wall on the southern border is either racist, fascist, doesn’t work, or some combination of all three, and the activists who run the hard left wing of his party have gleefully taken him at his word. As night follows day, when those same activists, who have come to relexively associate the wall with the very worst of Trump-era bigotry, howled in protest, Biden and his spokesmoron Karine Jean-Pierre quickly pivoted. They tried to argue that the money for the border wall had already been committed by Congress and, aw shucks, they tried real hard to stop it, but dontcha know, there just wasn’t anything they could do. They performed this pivot, all the while hoping you wouldn’t notice that Biden took the highly unusual step of waiving some twenty-six federal laws so that this border wall money he allegedly didn’t want them to spend at all, could be spent even faster.

And when that didn’t work either… when a reluctant press corps was finally forced to ask Biden and Secretary Mayorkas point blank, live on camera, if border walls work… these courageous men of principle looked right into those cameras and they said “no.”

There was never any attempt at persuasion, not at any point. Oh there was plenty of sneaking around and subterfuge, some bullying, a little bit of blame casting, a lot of lying, and then finally, surrender gussied up and made to look like courage.

But no persuasion… never think it.

I suppose we can take comfort in one thing about this surprisingly honest final surrender from Team Biden… as Val Kilmer one said in TOMBSTONE…

At any rate, a mere 24 hours after it began, Biden’s “finish the border wall” initiative looked as dead as crabmeat.

But it isn’t just politicians who have lost the ability (or the desire) to persuade us, it’s everything everywhere all at once. Our entire elite institutional structure has collapsed under the weight of the zero trust environment it has willfully created for itself.

Our modern media, once so powerful that Walter Cronkite could convince huge majorities of the country of just about anything simply by saying “and that’s the way it is”, couldn’t convince us that the sun will rise tomorrow, if we didn’t already believe it. Not that anyone is watching the news, anyway… the primetime cable news hosts are somehow making due with a fraction of the audience they had even five years ago, all while subsisting on the meager ad revenue generated by gold IRA and vegetable supplement ads.

The Late Night Comedy Shows, once a staple of American cultural life, have suffered the same sad fate. They can’t convince more than a small percentage of the citizenry to take another COVID booster, no matter how many times Stephen Colbert degrades himself by starring in embarassing “take your shot, citizen” song-and-dance numbers for the benefit of his network’s Pharmacological patrons.

Hollywood can no longer convince us to go see their movies… regardless of how many critics they pay off, or how they game the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, or how quickly they shut down replies to their social media marketing campaigns in order to premeptively short-circuit the inevitable ratio. Increasingly, audiences simply do not believe that the movies they are being sold are going to be any good.

A new Rasmussen report out this week suggests that 40% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Disney… yes, I said “Disney”… as in The. Walt. Freaking. DISNEY. Company, for god’s sake! So, it is perhaps no coincidence, that the Disney live action remake of SNOW WHITE appears to be DOA before principle photography has even been completed.

Often it takes only a single whiff of a bad smell to convince audiences that a given movie, THE MARVELS or ELEMENTAL or DIAL OF DESTINY for example, is going to be awful. And no amount of persuasion, even assuming there is anyone left in Hollywood who knows how to do it or cares to try, will convince those audiences to change their minds.

And don’t even get me started on Public Education agencies, their officials and teachers unions, or our crumbling, unreliable and increasingly dangerous transportation system (thanks Mayor Pete!), or the medical establishment, the CDC and the WHO, or the financial system (did any more banks collapse this week?). Hell, the Marine Corps can’t even perform the most basic function of putting camo fatigues on all their Marines… but don’t worry Taiwan, we’ve got your back… we may have to invade with no pants on, going in “commando” as it were, but we gotchoo, Boo!

All of these critical American institutions, and many many more, have cynically sacrificed whatever reserves of trust they once had with the American public and have completely lost their abilitiy to persuade us… about anything.

To live successfully in a society requires constant persuasion, at every level of human interaction. Human beings are complex collections of often conflicting needs and desires which almost never line up in a complimentary way from one person to the next. And so, creating a world where we can all live together in relative peace and harmony requires constant persuasion by those in charge.

Except that none of those at the top of the elite institutions which nominally “run” this rapidly declining society of ours seem to know how to persuade anymore… indeed they appear to have mostly given up on trying to do so at all, often trading persuasion for nakedly partisan lies aimed at their own minority sliver of the voting public who already agrees with them.

Which is no way to run a railroad… to say nothing of a wildly diverse nation of three and a half million square miles and three hundred and fifty million citizens.

After all, Governments… legitimate governments anyway… rely on the consent of the governed for their authority. Without that consent, governments quickly descend into dictatorship. They must, for if they can no longer persuade their citizens to behave a certain way, then they must force them to do so… at the point of a gun… which is, perhaps, the point.

Have our elites lost the ability to persuade us? Or have they simply decided that persuasion is an inconvenient barrier to the acquisition of power… one that is best left ignored so they can get straight to the totalitarian point of the exercise? I worry it’s the latter, and I don’t think I’m alone.

And where will all of this lead us? The answer is anybody’s guess, but you can see hints in the growing sense among Americans that we are living in a divided nation, once which is slowly cracking apart, separating at some invisible seam, and careening towards national divorce court with its brake lines cut.

We may yet get there.

After that… it’s Katie, bar the door, see ya later alligator and don’t forget to write…