Twilight of Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Suicide by Success

If this election has signified anything, it’s that the two party system of Liberal Tweedledum and Conservative Tweedledee has come to an end. Are Hillary Clinton and The Donald Trump the last in line? This is an historic election symptomatic of the demise of the liberal capitalist democratic order: the most stable and secure ruling class society ever known.

Scott Pelley of the CBS Evening News felt compelled to answer the question: “Are we going to be OK?” at the conclusion of his November 9 broadcast — the day after the election, of course. But instead of being candid and warning that this election season indicates a system in decline, Pelley gave us his thumbs up reassurance.

The CBS anchor comforted his audience with traditional pablum that the founders were such wise men that they instituted checks and balances, saving us from “passionate partisanship, absurd judgment, and ambitious self-serving behavior.” Checks and balances will offset abuse of power. Pelley points out, “James Madison called the separation of powers ‘the essential precaution in favor of liberty’. This is the perennial error of the patriots masses. What good are checks and balances when the whole system is controlled by a powerful unaccountable clique?

In 1931, after the Mafia War in New York City, Lucky Luciano and other leading mobsters organized The Commission. It was an attempt to replace the de facto system of “capi di tutti capi” or “boss of all bosses”, which led to many disputes, wars and general instability. You might say The Commission model was a form of “checks and balances”. Instead of having one boss ruling over all, the separate powers would be a check on each other. It replaced the supreme power of one man with a balance of power made up of the family bosses who would negotiate, and thus protect their own rackets and avoid destructive behavior.

The checks and balances instituted by the mafia did not make it more democratic. Checks and balances do not “favor liberty”. They make it possible for the bosses to work together for everybody’s benefit — the ruling class gets what belongs to it and the masses gets what they deserve. Checks and balances do not aid actual democracy. They simply make the ruling class society more stable and less violent.

Checks and balances won’t prevent the ruling class from abusing the lower orders. Nor do they make democracy more democratic. A government may institute all the checks and balances it wants on Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but that will not make them any less loyal to their ruling class masters. “Checks and balances” among thieves do not benefit their victims.

Regulating liberty and democracy is the responsibility of the masses, and it seems they are not up to the task. Loyal Liberals and Conservatives take the abuse and vote for more of the same. They lay down like good doormats while our servants walk through the ever revolving doors. Tweedledum and Tweedledee scramble around, bumping heads about “diversity”, “communists”, “big government” and exploitation of identity politics, while at the same time implementing Our agenda. The hopelessly colonized individual has been rendered incapable of preventing their own wretched demise, and with them society.

Believing Establishment lies such as “checks and balances will safeguard democracy” makes it easier to ignore the problem, and thus brings more danger to the social order. Yet this ignorance is a desired trait for the well bred individual. A good herd individual believes the big lies.

This is the ruling class curse: suicide by success. This phenomenon occurs when ruling forces have lost their authority due to their overwhelming success in controlling, and consequently abusing society. The abused masses begin to push back, and, together with their decaying ruling class, tear the country apart. But this push back is also vitally important to a properly functioning ruling class society. The contest becomes one in which the lower orders must put an effective check on their masters’ excessive activities before they both destroy each other in the ultimate sacrifice to the Supreme Executive, which will only destroy him as well. This is what Tweedledum and Tweedledee have given us.

The buffoonery of the Liberal/Conservative paradigm

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the right and left hands of the ruling class agenda, are rotting and putrefying with the insanity of syphilis of DC politicians whoring for their lobbyist handlers. The twins are in an unhealthy state. They no longer respond to the needs of their masses. The tokenism and deflection of blame is wearing thin.

The Establishment is losing its grip on the masses because We in the ruling class are not being forced to give them much in return for their service and sacrifice. Why should they believe We have their best interests at heart when We demonstrate Our contempt for the lower orders on a daily basis through the buffoonery of the Liberal/Conservative paradigm.

It would be nice if the ruling class did not depend on churning out well bred herds to accept Our agenda. It is not enough to breed the masses to starve. Many won’t accept it. And if We persist in Our brutal, non-reciprocating ways, We risk converting the herd into the people.

Would it surprise you that though the Preservation Society sees the demise of the Liberal/Conservative show, We still give to Our factions, diseased and dying as they may be. This is because We have no one else to give to. And We have to give to them because they’ll let Us off the hook. They’ll lower Our taxes. Tweedledum and Tweedledee will do what the ruling class wants, hence the ruling class props them up as much as possible. Remember what Maggie Thatcher said of capitalism, “There Is No Alternative”.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee remind Us of Clinton at the 9/11 Memorial when she had to be hauled into the vehicle like a sack of potatoes. The discredited parties are being propped for the same reason the Fed props up zombie banks. Giving the illusion of the dead as still living is done because it enriches and empowers a certain sector or rich and powerful individuals, not because they are useful to society. If these institutions and policies are helpful to the ruling class, it does not matter that they are destructive to society or the environment. It is the masses obligation to make Us stop. It is Our obligation to act as the Great Institution would have Us.

That is why We tell the herd to not be so blindly loyal to their political label. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are out to fleece you in the end. That’s how the Establishment works in ruling class society. The masses need to match that with awareness of it, at the very least. At best, it is okay to oppose your party on occasion. This should be seen as common sense. In a ruling class society you cannot trust big “official” organizations. Disciplining your labels should be seen part and parcel of a good party member. Shouldn’t this be common knowledge among the masses?

Opposing Tweedledum and Tweedledee at times helps strengthens the party. In the Pelley comment sited above, the mild-mannered anchor said, “The American government is inefficient. These days we call it gridlock. But that is what the founders were striving for.” This is Profit Logic for the asinine chicanery of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in “failing” to carry out the democratic wishes of the masses. Better gridlock than alleviate curable injustices. It demonstrates the ruling class’s priority in a “democratic” society, namely the republican fear of “tyranny” — which, by the way, included “democracy” as mob rule.

Mob rule is what we have. Uncle Sam is the don and Tweedledum and Tweedledee are his enforcers by pretending to be tools of the masses. Classic parasitism. You might call it “Our Thing“.

Scott Pelley instructs: “A system that would slow down, even stop, when politics became too partisan, absurd and self-serving. The constitution is a circuit breaker that prevents real damage.” What relation does this have to the facts on the ground? What about the false flags, the bribery, the lobbying and the revolving door? Is it just empty self-service or the logic of the criminal syndicate that claims these principles? However, We must agree with Pelley in that it is about partisanship: the ruling class vs. the masses. The ruling class also prefers gridlock to “progress”, for it maintains the status quo.

The Inevitable Course of Destruction

How have we come to this point? The U.S. is rich, flush with material wealth. It is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and yet neither the masses nor the ruling class can stop the self-destruction. This is the inevitable course of all societies whose ruling class completely dominate their masses and renders them helpless.

Democracy (should be read ruling class democracy) has evolved the Liberal/Conservative divide as the illusion of choice. While both aggressively support the ruling class, they have their functions. The Conservative aspect, whatever they are called, was more or less a conduit for the direct dissemination of the ruling class agenda. It also provided the means to combat Liberalism. The Liberal aspect played part of safety valve. The major grievances of the masses, including labor, poverty and social alienation were channeled by Liberalism into pro ruling class positions. Both Liberal and Conservative positions gave vent to anger and frustration. This is the structure which is falling apart.

The ruling class is a system in many ways defined by its technology. That is, the ruling class is limited in its reach and power due to technological limitations. In the early days, production had to be domestic. Investment in actual industry brought real wealth and relative prosperity to the masses. Then incorporation happened. Finance took over industrial capitalism and destroyed what was progressive about it. This is well explored by Michael Hudson in Killing the Host.

The system became more rarefied. Cutting costs and dropping the distinction between passive income and earned income became leading ideas, and abetted the extraordinary wealth agenda of the ruling class. Technology allowed for the massive expansion of power and profit. Tweedledum and Tweedledee ensured those gains did not benefit the masses as much as it could have, though some temporary gains were made.

The Liberal faction is no longer concerned with their working constituents. They don’t need to be. Our ruling class political factions have become detached from the interests of their constituent masses. The ruling class has no need to listen to their traditional blue collar base. They were not the big donors. Chuck Schumer the new Minority Leader in the Senate laid out the direction the Liberal Party was going in:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia,” Schumer said. “The voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue-collar Democrats. They are the college-educated Republicans or independents who lean Republican in the suburbs.”

How’s that working for Liberals?

Run by financial ideology rather than investment, businesses invested less, and schemed more with financial shenanigans and off shore accounts and cost cutting. Corporate raiders were, and are, allowed to destroy companies in the light of day. These de facto policies laid thousands off, increased poverty and debt, bringing society closer to self-destruction.

Ironically, these circumstances point to the complete success the of the ruling class. The Great Institution enjoys control of the colonized ego. Hillary Clinton’s various aides and volunteers wept as her loss became a reality. It was as if they were bidding farewell to humanity’s greatest benefactor, instead of a politician who pushes war, fracking, Wall St coddling, pay to play at the Clinton Foundation. And it is more than “just” the positions she takes. Her loyalists are not cognizant of her role in keeping them down as well. But those are Liberals (and Conservatives) for you.

Yet it turns out, the Tweedledum herd of Hillary Clinton didn’t turn out for her in droves. Nor did the Tweedledee herd turn out for the “respectable” candidates on the Conservative side. Are the masses shedding their colonizers a bit?

Almost half the electorate didn’t vote. One can hardly call that a respectable democracy in the first place. 2016 saw the lowest voter turnout in 20 years. Clinton received less votes than Romney and McCain before her. Trump garnered less votes than Clinton. It was an election of two of the most despised candidates ever to run for president.

All the decades (centuries) of neglect and abuse came home to roost on November 8, 2016. The authority of Tweedledum and Tweedledee is on the ropes.

The Morning After

The right-wing hail the brassy-haired, sometimes blonde, mogul as some outsider ready to take on the Establishment. His cabinet, however, is shaping up to the same old thing, and maybe worse, with names like John Bolton, Rudy Guiliani and Chris Christie being bandied about. No less a figure than Jamie Dimon has been considered for Treasury. Seems Conservatives are as clueless about change as Liberals are.

Liberals and Conservatives must learn to recognize the need for change, if they want it. Unfortunately, their idea of change is running in place with a new pair of shoes. This is reflected by the ruling class’s desire for the same policies that were successful in the past. It means being afraid of straying off the course of the status quo, and yet that is what the a majority of the masses want. They are starting to realize that the new pair of shoes have been the same worn out garbage they have been fed time and time again. Yet they still cling.

Yet again, Tweedledum and Tweedledee have lost so much credibility they can’t even win Our usually well-engineered elections. Donald Trump won, not a standard issue Republican or Democrat. Yet there will still be enough of the sucker class willing to believe, and a couch potato society that’s forgotten how to resist, to keep the status quo going for a while. But society does not have much time.

The machine is sputtering and dropping parts as it rolls down toward the cliff. This was the sliver of a silver lining that is Trump, namely the prospect of the machine breaking down along its path to social destruction. It gives the masses an opening to help the ruling class repair the machine.

Trump’s success, as Michael Moore correctly stated, is the biggest “fuck you” in history, soundly rejecting the ruling class status quo. But of course this was, and is not, a real direct challenge from the masses but a channeling of anger and frustration into safer pastures that protects superficial ruling class interest. The Donald is completely in line with those interests.

The Donald does not represent a move away from the status quo, he is chained to it by his wealth. He is not interested in a healthy redistribution of wealth, but on protecting and increasing his own. The Donald has a lot to lose should he stray significantly from dictates from ruling class minions. But the masses think they are sending a big “fuck you” DC’s way.

The masses will again be greatly disappointed by the Republican majority, just as they   have been greatly disappointed by the Democrats’ reign since Obama came to office with majorities in both houses — just like Trump. They have been discredited and so will he.

Both parties have become firmly entrenched in the neocon sphere of influence. Israel receives priority treatment with $38 billion in handouts, even as it build more illegal settlements. Meanwhile, Keynesian ideas of restarting the economy with public investment have not been the dominant principle of the Washington Liberal leadership for quite a while. We have been able to marginalize “public investment” with a paltry “stimulus” that has allowed Conservatives to claim it doesn’t work. Public investment has not been part of the program for quite a while. When Bernie Sanders offered his Keynesian New New Deal, Krugman exposed himself as an austerity-loving neocon by calling Sanders’s polices “outlandish economic claims”. In 2012, he expressed a different view to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: How do we end this depression now?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Spend. I mean, it’s really—it’s actually—the economics is really easy. If we were to spend more money at the government level, and actually, at this point, largely, just rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. Other things to do, we could talk about monetary policy, debt relief for homeowners and students. But the core of it is, right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need.

AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, you’re going against the accepted dogma on all television among the so-called leaders of our country. Spend? In a time when the government has the debt the size it has?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. So you can always say, “Oh, you know, $14 trillion.” Everything about the U.S. economy is huge. Investors don’t think it’s a problem. Investors are willing to lend the U.S. government money at 1.8 percent interest. This is not the time. I’ll be all for worrying about the budget deficit once the—once the economy is off the bottom. But it is not off the bottom. We are in a depression. This is the time to spend.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the money?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Borrow it, and then repay it later in better times, which is not at all—that may sound funny, but that’s exactly what we’ve done in the past. That’s exactly—how did we get out of the Great Depression? We got out of it by—actually, we got out of it before World War II, but thanks to the spending that preceded World War II, thanks to the military buildup.

The loyal Liberal and Conservative herd are like jilted lovers with no self-respect. They believe the double-talk. They believe the lies. And in the morning they find they’ve been used and tossed aside. Then they come back for more. That is the well trained herd.

The higher orders actually encourage their masses to play this role of abused partner who would only abet their abuser “partner”. “Elect Hillary Clinton — and then give her hell” says the Liberal shill Bill McKibben.

Today’s ideology, forced to the forefront by Sanders, is austerity. Thanks to Sanders, Liberals along with their Conservative allies, cry “we can’t afford it!” In prior times Tweedledum pretended it opposed Tweedledee, and further pretended that their public investment was being blocked by their twin. Everyone has their part to play. We have a corporate ruling class order to support.

But we are no longer in an age in which investments in material production and labor are seen as primary drivers of economic prosperity. It is easier for the ruling class to keep the money and make more through debt, labor offshoring, fees and stock manipulations such as buybacks. It is more cost effective for big business to bribe politicians to deregulate, which precipitates a market crash, which destroys businesses. Inevitably big business gets bailed out by the government — government, We must add, run by the logical implications of late stage corporate capitalism not socialists or progressives.

Too many Liberals and Conservatives still don’t know that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are done for. But every election dwindles both parties’ support. Their decline is accompanied by changing forces nobody wants to speak of. Like Scott Pelley, they comfort us with talk of how “everything is going to be okay”. Or they cry with hysteria that Trump will bring back Jim Crow.

When he sees that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are no longer effective, and that the masses are no longer responding to them like the well bred should, the Supreme Executive will replace them with a Tweedledum and Tweedledee that the ruling class will feel comfortable with. In an existential crisis, that newer system is usually authoritarian in nature. It is a move for survival, and all pretense to markets and democratic principles go out the window. When seriously threaten the ruling class exposes its undemocratic face. The loyal masses can believe the hysteria of the right or left, or they can take a step back and look at this election as a turning point, as an indication that their parties are not working for them.

It could very well be that this election ushers in authoritarianism, but it will not be because of Trump himself decides it, but because that is what the system of the ruling class zeitgeist demands. If the Supreme Executive feels that his system is not working or is significantly threatened he will not hesitate to switch forms of government and ideology. At the same time the ruling class hold desperately to its status quo. Is that what the masses want? Or do they want a society that won’t make them beholden to Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

This is the twilight of the absurd political servants of the ruling class. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are being left behind with eyes glazed, mumbling nonsense from the Liberal/Conservative era. Who will lead the masses along now? Themselves?