Index

Rhyming History

Zombie Ideas and Defunct Ideologies

In the 1860s, faced with decaying economic conditions and a loss of their economic power, the wealthy aristocracy of the southern states decided that they could no longer survive in the United States as it existed. They split off and tried to form their own government and attacked the remaining United States. They could not match the economic power of the industrial North, and they failed to get any real help from Europe in the end. They could not end it quickly and had no chance to win the extended conflict as their opponent’s strength grew.

Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, the centralized industrial barons that had won the war for Lincoln were facing their own decline and obsolescence. The new economic order coming in is based on the power of individual knowledge workers, not the concentration of capital. The centralized decision-making and financing of the industrial system has been losing its power and effectiveness to the distributed power of individual educated, motivated workers. Just as the European and papal aristocracies fell to the economic power of craftsmen and capital during the Italian Renaissance, so is the World War era aristocracy falling to the distributed power of the knowledge economy.

Nixon fired the first shot in the current war. His attempt at delegitimizing his opponents took two forms: the first was expanding the illegitimate war in Vietnam, allowing him to kill off many of the younger generation. The young were drafted and sent off to war completely unprepared to fight, so they died in droves. The second way he fought against the intellectuals was called a “war on drugs,” made possible by the general ignorance of the public, and the duplicity of the press in helping demonize them. The stated goal of stopping drug use was a failure literally from day one - smuggling never even slows down when there is a demand for the product, and drug use expanded as the social misery increased.

The public tired of the pathetic war in Vietnam. The press quit cooperating when they got tired of looking the fool for spreading the government lies that supported the war. We have not been so fortunate with the so-called drug war - general ignorance about drugs has prevented more intelligent responses to the problem of drugs addiction from happening. With all of the dollars wasted and lives thrown away, we still have nothing to show. Even the mainline pharmaceutical companies have gotten in on the addiction game with carefully designed opioids, something that is only slowly beginning to wake up America. The wolf has been in the henhouse for years, and the chickens are finally about gone.

Reagan refined Nixon’s anti-intellectual strategy by playing to the idiocracy of the racist South left over from the Civil War. Reagan’s “Southern strategy” solidified what is now the “base” for the fascist GOP created by Trump. Every GOP president since Reagan has expanded this by spreading the idiocy with lies. Defunding the education system wrecked much of the basis for the new, individualized economy. All of us are suffering from this strategy. The old blue-collar economy is dead and buried, but the GOP politicians keep pumping the zombies up with their lies. The rest of us are left scrambling to eat.

In a worst-case scenario for the fascists, the COVID plague has greatly hastened the demise of the centralized economy. Even the blindest, most money-grubbing bean counters cannot help but see the obvious failings of attempting to enslave the productive workers when they do so much better on their own. The plague has demonstrated the uselessness of so-called management in an environment where work actually needs to be done. The managers are struggling mightily to avoid having to work again. Just like the slaveholding aristocracy, the industrial barons, and the new GOP fascists, the current culture of business administration is facing its final obsolescence. They don’t want to go down without a fight, just like all of their predecessors. Also like their predecessors, they don’t care who else gets destroyed, as long as it isn’t them.