August 12, 2022

The rise and fall of the security apparatus (Deep State) within the imperial life cycle

The FBI has removed any pretense of being non-partisan, above the fray, serving the nation rather than any party or individual, etc., by raiding the home of the candidate representing half the country in the next election. Don't remember them doing that to Hillary Clinton over her misplaced documents ("her emails").

But looking back on that ancient year of 2016, the FBI still did attempt to maintain a non-partisan stance for anyone watching. Whether the Director, James Comey, was hurting or helping the Clinton campaign seemed to change by the week. Probably he figured, like all the other clueless elites, that Trump was destined to lose, so by roughing up Clinton every now and then, he could wring some concessions out of her before she actually took office, in exchange for calling off his dogs.

Since the Trump era, though, the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the Deep State / security services / intel agencies / whatever you want to call them, have taken the mask off. Not just regarding their partisan stance -- Dems good, GOP bad -- but their status as a self-contained faction within society, with their own group interests that may clash with other sectors and/or the general public. Similar to the military, the media, the banks, agriculture, and so on.

They openly say that their goal is not to serve the people, the state, etc., but to increase their own numbers, their own influence, and to not be pushed around by elected representatives or the mob they represent. In this way, they are equivalent to the energy sector, finance sector, etc., that insists it not be regulated by elected government.

Laissez-faire for the secret police sector is argued in the same BS terms as for the others -- dire consequences would follow if elected government would hamstring them with regulations. In this case, internal chaos, mafia / warlordism, insurrection, coups, and so on, unless we just let the FBI and CIA do whatever they want.

As usual, the fools are interpreting events like this week's raid as a sign of the permanent power of the Deep State, perhaps even its growing strength going forward. In reality, they have begun their decline. And although their eventual liquidation is about a century away, that's not very long on the time-scale of the rise and fall of empires.

But rather than sperg out about the 24-hour news cycle for rage-bait clicks and clout, I decided to fit this into the big picture of imperial birth and death, looking across a range of empires around the world, from the past 2000 years.

Specific case studies will either be added to this post, or in the comments section, as I have time to write them up. I want to get the outline out ASAP, and fill in case study details when I can. The only case study aside from our own that I'll write up right now is the Praetorian Guard from the Roman Empire, since they're a well known example.

* * *


The most important fact about the Deep State is that it does not stretch back indefinitely in time, contrary to the paranoid view that it has existed forever and will continue to exist forever, always thwarting the will of the people.

Reality check: the FBI was created in 1908, and the CIA and its predecessor were formed in the 1940s. They were not there before the founding with the Pilgrims, nor by 1776 and independence, nor even during the Civil War of the 1860s. The people, institutions, and forces that created the American empire did so without a security apparatus.

And yet not every state has a security apparatus rivaling the FBI or the Praetorian Guard. These only arise within large expanding states, AKA empires.

First, a quick review of what causes imperial growth and decay in the first place, as popularized by Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War. The not-yet imperial people are being pushed up against by some other expanding group, that is, some other pre-existing empire. Those lying on the meta-ethnic frontier between the two groups, over a long time, cohere into an intense Us in order to withstand and beat back Them. This intense Us-ness (asabiyah, collective action potential, etc.) allows the group to grow and expand to become an empire in their own turn.

But this Us-ness does not last forever, nothing does in a dynamic system. It gets eroded by the waning of the initial external threat, as the nascent empire expands at the other's expense, as well as by internal divisions during the empire's resting-on-their-laurels stage of life. As the glue comes undone, the empire fragments and collapses. No more intense feeling of Us at that huge scale, and no more political or economic institutions left operating at that huge scale.

Now we see why there is no security apparatus before, during, or shortly after the birth of an empire -- the society is too focused on the external, not the internal (like the FBI), and they are focused on surviving the foreigners rather than on managing foreign clients (like the CIA).

In fact, it takes some degree of internal strife, after the initial imperial growth has begun, to make its elites worry about internal organized enemies. Random isolated individuals are never a collective threat to elites, only existing or start-up factions. And if those factions are not just farm-owners trying to lower tariffs a bit to get rich quick, but are vying for control of the entire empire's government -- that makes them dangerous enemies to the state writ large.

This is why the security apparatus only emerges after a new empire's first bout of protracted civil strife, unrest, war, etc. In the American empire, it was the Civil War, Reconstruction, labor unions, and anarchist and socialist movements, roughly during the second half of the 19th century. With hardly any delay, the FBI is formed in 1908, to target collective threats to the integrity and harmony of the empire, from within its own borders. It did not need such an apparatus in the early stages of imperial growth, when the society was focused on survival against the Indians.

Such a "public servant" rationalization has to be their mission statement, in order to wedge themselves into the broader network of elite sectors. They're not entrepreneurially filling a new open niche, and using their leverage to expand their own wealth, influence, and power -- no! They're simply responding to a crucial period of national weakness, and selflessly trying to put it back together and keep it from fracturing ever again. And thus, they are serving the interests of all political parties, and the state writ large, and the general public who elected them. They are magnanimous and godlike in providing the fundamental safety and structure that allows the lower-tier sectors like agriculture and finance to do their thing in peace.

At the time of its emergence, the security apparatus would be looked at with suspicion because everybody knows that the empire had gone over 100 years with no such apparatus, all the way to the founding and before. So what gives now? Well, that whole Civil War thing, the whole labor union thing, etc., which also were not there at the founding. Well, except that the American Revolution *was* a kind of civil war between loyalists and revolutionaries from the same British colonies. Why didn't the American revolutionaries need an extensive secret police? Well, uh, you're asking too many questions -- just focus on the threat of terrorism from the labor unions, socialists, and anarchists! Certainly *those* threats were not there at the founding.

And back and forth the debate must have gone. Even President Harry Truman matter-of-factly described the FBI as a new secret police. Of course -- he was born in 1884, and grew up entirely before the Bureau's creation from nothing. However, as new generations are more removed from the pre-security apparatus era, they come to accept it as totally natural and normal. How could there *not* have been an FBI-like apparatus during and after the American Revolution? Only there wasn't.

* * *


Nor was there a Praetorian Guard at the founding of the Roman Empire during the 3rd century BC, as Rome united the Italian peninsula against the main external threat -- the expansion of the Celts (or Gauls) from the northwest, and secondarily the Carthaginians from the southwest. As the personal police of the Emperor, the Guard only comes into existence after a long period of internal civil strife, well after the empire has begun expanding. That was the Crisis of the Roman Republic, lasting from the late 2nd C to the late 1st C BC, culminating in Caesar's Civil War in the 40s BC.

Right after the Civil Wars are over, the new emperors have a large Praetorian Guard that is not only their own personal bodyguard, but a network of spies / intel who are stationed permanently in the capital city itself. They begin intervening in political disputes during the 1st C AD, most notably by proclaiming Claudius emperor during a succession crisis, in which they had also assassinated the previous emperor, Caligula.

But to reiterate, they were not some permanent bureaucracy, an everlasting Deep State, etc. They were one among many powerful factions in society, along with the military, the large farm-owners, and so on and so forth. They could weigh in on political disputes by forming a coalition with other powerful interest groups, but they did not have supreme outranking power over their coalition mates.

For comparison, the FBI began intervening politically during the mid-20th C, and first joined a coalition to remove a sitting leader during the Watergate affair that deposed Nixon. The key confidential informant for WaPo media operative Bob Woodward, known as "Deep Throat," was not just any ol' inside source with juicy gossip -- he was 2nd in command at the FBI, Mark Felt. But back in those days, the security apparatus was still committed to the veneer of non-partisan public service, so they kept secret the FBI's central role in removing a landslide-elected president, not revealing it until 2005.

Sidenote: there has been a huge, and largely successful, propaganda campaign over the decades to make the CIA the scapegoat among the security apparatus, and to lionize the FBI in comparison. Everyone has heard someone say the CIA had a role in the JFK assassination, but almost no one has heard someone say the FBI had a role in removing Nixon, even though that's not a theory but an admission from the key actor himself. Anytime you need to say something bad about the Deep State, it's always "the CIA" instead of "the FBI" in figurative speech. I slip into that myself. But the CIA is mainly concerned with external matters, and the FBI internal matters.

If it's we American citizens who are complaining about something going on here, it's the FBI we're dealing with, not the CIA. If it's Syrian people whose apartment is getting shelled by Al-Qaeda, then it's the CIA that they're dealing with.

At any rate, the Praetorian Guard did not last forever, and neither will the FBI. During the Crisis of the Third Century, the Praetorian Guard shrank in numbers, territory, and distinctive influence -- they were just one of many military factions vying for power, assassinating one emperor and proclaiming another, during decades of military anarchy. If they were an all-powerful Deep State, they would simply proclaim one guy emperor, and that would be that -- no more chaos, division, coups, or insurrection. No constant turnover. All going along smoothly, with no disruption because the Deep State's competitors are supposedly lower-tier than those with real power, behind the curtain.

The Guard was de facto ruined by Diocletian, whose reign saw the end of the Third Century Crisis but not the rebound of the empire. It was now irrevocably split into a Western and Eastern half, with the latter becoming the new Byzantine Empire. If he had wanted to import the Western Roman Deep State to his Eastern Roman capital near Byzantium, he could have easily done so. The Praetorians had recent field experience in Palmyra, Syria. They're not physically tethered to Roman or Italian soil. But after decades of military anarchy, the power -- and indeed the role -- of the Deep State was over, for good. Diocletian would have palace guards to protect himself, but not an extensive new Deep State for the Byzantine Empire-to-be.

What the military anarchy of the 3rd C showed to everyone was that the Praetorian Guard was not a non-partisan group, given to public service rather than collective self-interest like so many other sectors of society. They were not above the fray, they were participating at every step of the way. And worse, they proved they were no longer capable of fulfilling their raison d'etre -- securing peace, harmony, etc., against the forces and groups who could bring chaos, division, strife, and civil war.

So who needs the Deep State, if they're too powerless to keep internal peace and harmony? Let alone when they are direct participants in the very anarchy, chaos, and civil war they were supposed to be preventing! And not at the BS level of promoting a few agents provocateurs to discredit their enemies and bolster their own position in society. But by going full-force into one succession crisis after another.

The Praetorian Guard was finally liquidated by Constantine, another proto-Byzantine emperor who invaded Italy in order to crush the Roman ruler, Maxentius. That's who Constantine defeated at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD -- the Praetorian Guard, who backed Maxentius rather than Constantine. But they choose the wrong guy, and by that point they had no power left to eke out an existence afterward. Constatine dissolved them as a Deep State entity, and they would never reappear again, going on 1700 years later.

We are currently around the Crisis of the Third Century phase of Roman history -- we are done with expansion, and have begun contracting territorially (losing the Philippines, Cuba, and the Panama Canal, beginning after our peak in WWII). Our only additions have come through peaceful alliances, not conquest (i.e., the difference between Germany and Italy being in NATO, vs. Poland and Lithuania being in NATO). And the national and imperial order is visibly breaking down by the month. Anyone who points to a much earlier phase of Roman history as analogous to our own is a 100% copium-dealer (and user), who can't handle the cognitive dissonance that our golden age is long gone, never to come back. All that we have to look forward to is the new Dark Ages, for better or worse.

So that still leaves some decades ahead of FBI and other security apparatus intervention in domestic politics, with increasingly civil breakdown effects, delegitimizing their own sector and their coalition allies such as the Democrat party writ large. But give it a century, and they will barely exist as they had up until 2020. Whatever rump states replace the American empire, they will not include the FBI, nor the CIA.

If one of those rump states comes under the expansionary pressure of some other empire, and then becomes an empire in its own right, then such a neo-American empire could develop a new Deep State, after a period of civil war of course. But it would not be the same Deep State as ours, nor anyone else's. Each security apparatus is particular to the empire on which it is a parasite, having had zero role in its creation or early growth, and directly contributing to its ultimate demise.

* * *


To preview other case studies that I'll post about: China during the Han and Ming dynasties (court eunuchs as their Deep State), and the modern empires of Prussia / Germany and Russia. Unfortunately, not much I can say on the Ottoman / Turkish Deep State, the one that gave the term its name, since info is scant on Wikipedia and cursory searches (but then, it would be). I'd like to look into Indian and Persian empires, but my curiosity has already been satisfied and the basic pattern confirmed. So we'll see about them.

22 comments:

  1. If one uses Oswald Spengler's conception of Western Civilization, they are the culmination of the Westward moving Celtic-Germanic tribes circa 1000 AD. By that logic, the last successful Western colonial war was the American war against Japan in the early 1940s! From there on, things went downhill. The Korean War was a stalemate (if only Douglas Macarthur was allowed to use nukes in Manchuria) and Vietnam was a flop. This is why Pacific coast people are the most woke; since the 1960s, they were the first to get the message that their time of expansion was over and now it is time to repent.

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  2. Regarding the Nixon conspiracy, I recall hearing from one source that Nixon's opponents (especially of the Vietnamization policy) wanted a President Spiro Agnew who was more pliable and "right on". Then Agnew was forced to leave office by his own scandals before that could happen!

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  3. I actually think West Coast people are the wokest because they have the highest asabiya among Americans. Our meta-ethnic frontier has always been Out West, albeit a moving target because we were expanding from the get-go.

    West Coasters have the least internal divisions -- compare to the Yankees vs. Southerners, Back East. And they all have the same accent -- unlike Back East -- and it's *the* standard American accent at that. Like it or not, they're the most American of the Americans, along with the Plains and Mountain regions, and the Midwest as a transitional zone.

    Wokeness is a pro-imperial project, adapted to the stage of imperial stagnation -- they would say "consolidation", after the furthest conquests have been made. OK then, time to integrate all the various peoples you have conquered, lest they remain a constant rebellious thorn in your occupying side.

    As always, you buy off the elites or aspiring elites of the conquered groups. That's why only the well-to-do from "minority" groups benefit from wokeness. And it's why no one gets wokeness points if they're not from a conquered group -- worst, if they're from a hostile group.

    Thus, no wokeness points for being North Korean, Iranian, Russian, etc., in the American empire.

    If there is any rump state after the American empire that becomes a mighty state, or a neo-American empire after several centuries, it will definitely include the West Coast. Probably go all the way east to Texas and the Plains. Maybe the Old Northwest / Great Lakes, maybe not (that's east of the Mississippi River, after all). But not the East Coast, whether its northern or southern regions -- too fragmented, back to the Civil War.

    Same dynamic in Canada, where you're from. Back East is totally fragmented, with Quebec being de facto separatist at this point from Ontario. But once you get out to Alberta and British Columbia, perhaps including some Prairie provinces to their east, they're all part of the same people, albeit some are liberal and some are conservative. They're not separatist Out West.

    Same reasons as in America -- the westward expanding frontier was what little the Canadians had for a meta-ethnic frontier. Wasn't much, and they often teamed up with the Indian tribes in order to jointly resist American expansion to the north. But to the extent that Canadians are a real rather than fictional people, it's because of the people Out West.

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  4. I wish they all could be Vaaa-ancouver girls...

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  5. The United States hasn't yet reached its Crisis of the Third Century yet. Right now, it is around the last years of its equivalent of Commodus's reign as Emperor, with the stuff about the transgender and covid vaccine requirements and BLM being the equivalent of Commodus's megalomaniac behavior between 190-192 where Commodus tried to remake Rome in his own image.

    Trump will be reelected in 2024 but his reign is probably going to be like Pertinex's reign, bitterly opposed by America's Praetorian Guards, the FBI, and he will be toppled by the same FBI in the same way that Pertinex were toppled by the Praetorian Guards. This will lead to America's equivalent of the Year of the 4 Emperors, which despite its name was a 4 year civil war between different Roman generals vying for the emperor spot leading to victory by Septimus Severus in 197. Septimus Severus's American equivalent will probably bring piece to America and manage to hold power for 40 more years until 2070, before the American core reaches the Crisis of the Third Century and actually splinters into multiple parts.

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  6. Yeah, I wrote before that we're in the Year of the Five Emperors (193 AD), strictly speaking, but I lump that in with the so-called Crisis of the Third Century. The long-term crisis that irrevocably broke up the Roman Empire began after ineffectual Commodus was assassinated, similar to ineffectual Trump being deposed by stolen election in 2020.

    Trump was a cosplay president (hailing from the TV world), like Commodus was a literal cosplay Hercules (spending most of his time in entertainment, i.e. gladiator sports). And the Antonines were like our Reaganite era -- past the golden age, stagnation, but before it all began to unravel.

    So far, I count at least five aspirants for the role of national and imperial leader, crucially having to deal with foreign affairs and meeting with other big internal leaders. Trump, Pence (while Trump was held incommunicado during the transition), Biden, Harris (since Biden is a zombie), Pelosi (bucking the others by going to Taiwan to meet with foreign heads of state and risk war), and before long, probably DeSantis and Newsom as well, once the really old geezers die off. Our Septimus Severus has yet to show up.

    Off-hand comment here in the last days of the Trump era:

    https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/01/drivers-license-by-olivia-rodrigo.html

    Further discussion here:

    https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/07/unlike-911-response-covid-response.html

    I'm growing less sure that Septimus Severus was really so Roman anyway. Not just because he had Saharo-Arabian DNA from North Africa -- some of them were heaviliy acculturated into Roman civ by that point. But he spoke a Saharo-Arabian language growing up and in everyday life, and spoke Latin with a noticeable accent. That's not due to DNA, but to imperfect acculturation into Roman civ.

    When cultural foreigners are in control of your empire, even if they are de jure citizens, it's not really your empire anymore. Same with the Illyrian emperors further into the 3rd C, let alone Diocletian and Constantine who are ruling from Byzantium instead of Rome, and were born & raised in the Balkans.

    BTW, I was 100% correct about the COVID "authoritarianism" being doomed to failure, because they were introduced during a period of national break-up and illegitimacy. So no one would adhere to them at the time, or afterward. And sure enough, the CDC has started to unwind all their crazy bullshit with their new guidance (long after ordinary citizens have de facto defied the federal orders).

    COVID measures were NOT the new 9/11 measures, since 9/11 was when we still had a cohesive country. No one defied them at the time, certainly not a governor of a big state like Florida, let alone ordinary citizens in airport lines.

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  7. Found another case! I wasn't even thinking of it at first, but then, it *is* an example that famously noooobody expects...

    I'll have to write this up in separate posts. Too much to cover in just comments.

    And some of the key details are not available in the overview sources in English. So writing them up in a standalone post will help bring them to greater visibility.

    I had to google-translate entire articles from Russian-language Wikipedia, about the secret police before the Okhrana, or randomly stumble upon the relevant history of civil wars in Spain before 1492 (not in any of the English-language articles about Spain, History of Spain, Medieval Spain, Reconquista, etc.).

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  8. TPM Thorne’s “Yellow Sky” is a work of historical fiction set in the Han’s dying days that’s a good read about the factional battles between the eunuchs and the gentry and fairly cheap. Rafe de Crespigny’s books, such as “Fire Over Luoyang,” are the actual scholarly sources covering that period in depth, but they are very expensive and hard to get.

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  9. "Gawrling" for "darling" -- how has no one thought of this yet? Checked Twitter, no results.

    Just popped into my mind while blasting "Vanilla Twilight" out the car windows, thinking of how to adapt the lyrics to the Goobinator. "Oh sharky, I wish you were here..." And then suddenly, "Oh Gawrling, I wish you were here..."

    She might find that level of cuteness offensive, and playfully smack you back for calling her by such a twee pet name. But maybe I wanna be... ^_^

    Or a name for the more distinguished among Gura's fans. "He rose to become quite the Gawrling of the vtuber princess' inner circle on discord."

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  10. Oh my Gawrlin',
    Oh my Gawrlin',
    Oh my Gawrlin',
    Shark o' mine

    You're logged off
    And graduated
    Oh my Gawrlin'
    Shark o' mine

    For that inevitable day when the chumbos will be sobbing buckets and need some plaintive Western folk songs to help them cope with their loss.

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  11. The most '90s sweater ever, if you're looking for something ahead of fall weather. And by Lobo (the outdoorsy brand from Pendleton).

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/393971022235

    Tons of teal, much magenta, super Southwest symbols!

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  12. As of August of 2022, which factions of the American elite are likely to defect from the Republican Party to the non-Republicans, and which factions of the American elites are likely to defect from the non-Republicans to the Republican Party, in the upcoming political realignment?

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  13. Hard to say about realignment now, when the bigger picture is imperial disintegration. A few years ago, the lines would've been clearer. But now after the stolen election, and the legitimacy crisis that induced, there are bigger matters to worry about than whatever they were worrying about in 2018.

    That said, wokeness will be a huge topic. Aside from cheap talk, I haven't seen any sacrifice of their core leverage to the cause of wokeness from the energy sector, the agriculture sector, or the manufacturing sector, which are all Republican. In fact, manufacturing has always been Republican, including its predecessors the Whigs and Federalists.

    The only GOP sector that is sacrificing itself to wokeness is the military, and they were also the most bitterly anti-Trump and thwarting of Trump's 2016 campaign agenda while he was in office. They're still by far the biggest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, spouting off in the media all the time about how crucial NATO is, how we have to deplete our supplies of missiles so that Ukraine can still get its ass handed to it by Russia, why Nanci Pelosi is a badass girlboss for provoking war with China, etc.

    You don't see that festering hostility from manufacturing companies whose profit margins would've been crushed if Trump had managed to on-shore all those off-shored plants away from the sweatshop colonies. Ditto for Big Ag, if Trump had managed to kill NAFTA (depriving subsidized US farms from dominating the Mexican market).

    Trumpism never really threatened the energy sector that much, since that is necessarily domestic, and can't be off-shored or otherwise globalized. West Virginia coal is in West Virginia, forever. Same with Texas oil. At most they might've bristled when he reminded everyone that it was Saudi and other Gulf Arab oil monarchies that blew us up on 9/11, not Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran. That could pit Saudi against the US interests in OPEC+. But they didn't say much at the time, or since, so it was probably NBD to them.

    Small brick-and-mortar businesses are also not defecting from the GOP, and none of them whined about Trump.

    So Trump's hardcore support remains in Texas (energy), Appalachia (energy), Florida (small brick-and-mortar biz), Ohio (manufacturing), and the farm states in the Plains (agriculture).

    Anywhere that the military dominates the other sectors for GOP support, especially at the higher levels of military brass, his support is weakest. So the Pentagon and broader security state in the swamp of DC. But even Georgia -- look how easy it was for the Georgia GOP to betray Trump and their own McConnell-approved Senators, to the most flimsily stolen elections we've ever seen.

    Georgia wants to rely less on Fort Benning and the broader military, and recruit a bunch of Yankee bankers to take over their economy, so that Georgia's parasitic elite have preferred status with the central bank's money-printer. Not to mention CNN's HQ in Atlanta, and the movie / TV studios that film around the state.

    The military was always the weakest GOP supporter -- it was always in the Democrat Solid South column, until the Reagan realignment of 1980.

    As with the FBI, CIA, and NSA, I think conservatives / Republicans / Trump supporters are going to sour on the military next. They already have to a considerable degree, but not like the others. Once they intervene enough against the 2016 Trump agenda -- permanent waste of money to lose wars against Russia and China, necessitating starvation back home -- then they will be just another Deep State agency pursuing their own crooked agenda, in the eyes of former jingoists and patriotic types.

    So for any right-wing LARP-ers out there, I wouldn't bet on the military having your back, or even paying based lip service to your ideas. They'll be pro-woke in lip service, and "starve Americans in order to lose wars against Russia" in action.

    Lower-ranking officers and grunts are a different story, but we're talking about elite factions here.

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  14. I don't see any defectors from the Democrat side (finance, media, entertainment, info-tech, schools, healthcare, gov agencies). After all, they're the side that has been out of central power since the last realignment in 1980. The pendulum is swinging back to them, away from the sclerotic laurel-resting GOP, whose last revolutionary energy was the neolib / neocon explosion in the late '70s and early '80s.

    That said, the weakest support for whatever the next-gen Democrat agenda is, will be finance, especially at the top levels.

    Although all Dem sectors suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome, finance was the least mobilized in action, or lip service even. They didn't de-bank half the country for voting for the other party. Only a small handful of highly visible uber-Trump supporters got de-banked.

    Contrast with media, entertainment, schools, info-tech, healthcare, and gov agencies -- nothing short of a nationwide purge. Not just purging their own workers and professionals, but denying their core leverage to half of their would-be customer base, for voting the wrong way.

    Constant demonization and polarization in all forms of entertainment and media. Rolling perma-bans on the biggest social media platforms. Censorship of any pro-Trump media (Alex Jones). Schools turned into TDS boot camps. Denial of healthcare to anyone who didn't want to wear the pointless mask, or didn't want to get the pointless gene therapy for the bad-flu. Etc.

    Not only did the banks not go whole-hog on political persecution of half the country, they didn't even turn up the heat a little bit. Short of de-banking you, they could've lowered the interest rate on your savings account, raised the rate on your credit cards, hiked fees for ATM / checking / transfers / etc. Jack up your mortgage rate. All sorts of weapons in their arsenal, that they never even brandished, let alone wielded against their political enemies.

    Wall Street CEOs were not a constant presence in the talking-head circuit during peak TDS, nor since.

    Military generals are resting on their laurels, using up good faith that had been built up over many generations. They're wasting it, but they began with quite a bit.

    Everybody hates all bankers, they have zero good faith to burn through while attacking the country. So they prefer not to get even more on everyone's bad side, and do their bloodsucking with the heads down and in the shadows, like vampires.

    That doesn't mean they'll defect to the GOP, but they will be applying the brakes the most among the Dem sectors. Not least because they actually create and distribute the money that the other sectors require in order to survive. None of them are profitable, only propped up like Japan's zombie corpos through the same Japanese central bank pioneering policy of money-printing.

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  15. The closest thing to a finance vampire being a leader in the TDS movement was Bloomberg, both as talking head and viable candidate for the Dems' 2020 ticket.

    But he was not actually a banker. He invented the Bloomberg terminal -- a kind of computer used for making trades, used by actual bankers. So he is more of an info-tech guy. Then he expanded into the media with the various Bloomberg outlets, buying up BusinessWeek, etc.

    He was not involved in the creation and allocation of money.

    If Lloyd Blankfein had been as heavily involved in the TDS movement, that would've been different. But that vampire doesn't want anyone to know his name or face, since bankers are at the opposite end of the "good faith" spectrum. They're not even neutral, where some people like them and some people hate them -- everybody hates them, suspects them, and would like to come after them.

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  16. A central dividing line around which realignment will happen is profitability. In the 1980 realignment, it was labor-intensive and material sectors (GOP) vs. non-labor-intensive and informational sectors (Dem).

    But that was back when both sides could've had profitable members, just generating their profits through different means.

    Now, everything has come crashing down after 2008, and the central bank's attempt to just flood the elites with free money and no-interest loans has failed. They admitted that in 2020, with another several trillion printed up and handed out to rich failures, just in a summer, vs. in a decade previously.

    Now there's runaway prices, due to all that inflation of the money supply.

    So, although the finance sector will be within the new central-power party after realignment (Dems), if that realignment also brings in a big chunk or all of the military, as during the New Deal, then they will not necessarily be the strongest member. But certainly they'll be #1 or #2, from creating and allocating money.

    However, the days of easy free money for strivers and upward-failing Boomers are over. They're going to actually care about viability, profitability, and all that, before printing up and forking over another trillion dollars.

    Media, entertainment, and info-tech are not profitable -- they cratered with the popping of the Dot-Com bubble in 2000, and remained at the bottom for the entire decade, as the GOP was in control and had no interest in bailing them out. It wasn't until Obama took over that these informational sectors got rich. I.e., through hand-outs from their political coalition members (the central bank printing up trillions, and the investment banks allocating that into info-tech corpos instead of other sectors).

    Neither is healthcare, neither are the schools, or gov agencies. Those are all funded through the government in one way or another.

    Agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and even finance, can be profitable under the right conditions. It's at least possible -- the others are inherently not profitable, and are propped up for other reasons (to control information per se, not to get rich doing so). Often they are deliberately so -- the non-profit sector, which never works in ag / mfg / energy.

    That's what I see as a central goal of the newly ascendant party (after this Biden Reaganite inter-regnum, when the Dems win legitimately rather than stealing elections). What will be on the chopping block, in order to prevent runaway inflation? Military failures all over the world -- gone. NATO specifically, and occupying Japan and South Korea -- gone. Media jobs that pay a New York City salary -- gone. Internet start-ups -- gone. College endowments -- gone.

    (I hope the Japanese central bank still props up Cover through QE, though -- no one wants to live in a world without Gura streams.)

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  17. Why does finance, rather than any other sector (Dem or GOP), have a vested interest in doing this? Because their assets are all denominated in US dollars. If there's runaway inflation, their assets become worthless. But hyper-inflation won't affect the military as much -- that relies on the social capital from the grunts up through the chain of command to follow orders. They're not landlords charging rents for profit, when they operate a base.

    And they have teams of men with guns and vehicles to go warlord if they needed to -- but that wouldn't be affected by hyper-inflation either. Can't hyper-inflate the monopoly on armed violence, which is their core leverage.

    And the US central bank is the world's de facto central bank, issuing the global reserve currency, because it hasn't been subjected to hyper-inflation forever. But that process has started, and could go totally out of control. They didn't print up trillions of dollars in the '70s, or the 1890s, or other bad periods. They're on track to do so indefinitely, at an accelerating rate, which will destroy global faith in the dollar as a stable reserve currency. With that, there goes the global status of the US central bank.

    Contrary to copers, there doesn't need to be a single world's reserve currency -- it could go multipolar, just as military alliances can. Or it could remain unipolar, but switch to Russian rubles or Chinese yuan (doubtful). It's already heading in the multipolar direction, thanks to the military's intervention in the Russia-Ukraine War, and soon in the China-Taiwan War. That was not spearheaded by Wall Street investment banks or the US central bank.

    Roman coins continued to circulate somewhat into the Middle Ages, but they still collapsed as a uniform currency after the collapse of the empire. Our currency isn't backed by anything intrinsically valuable, though, so ours will collapse even sooner than the Romans'.

    It's not just the creation and allocation of money that the finance sector relies on for elite status -- it's having their currency accepted as something valuable, to mediate an exchange or store value. If the recipients of your currency come to view it as an unstable, increasingly worthless joke, then there goes your societal status.

    That's why the central bank has begun to jack up interest rates, but that's only going to impact the creation of money into the future -- what about all the fake money that was printed up during the past decade? That's where Quantitative Tightening comes in -- retiring all that fake money from circulation.

    Obviously these changes won't happen overnight, but over the next several decades, that'll be a key part of the realignment and next-gen Dem agenda.

    The big banks, and the biggest bank of all, would love to patronize their party coalition members with fake jobs propped up by indefinite fake money printing -- but that decision has already started to threaten the finance elites themselves, with runaway inflation and diminishing status of the dollar globally.

    So now the finance sector is going to start imposing major discipline on their own coalition members, especially at the low-ranking / striver levels. That will be part of the broader de-population of the elite class, which has been in over-production mode for the entire period of the current alignment, back to 1980.

    Grandfathering in the old elites in Dem sectors, to placate them, but cutting loose the strivers, and throwing up "not hiring" signs for any would-be upwardly mobile yuppies in the future.

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  18. So, you might ask why wouldn't finance be in the same party as the other profitable sectors. Whether it was the Dems or GOP, shouldn't finance be partners with ag, mfg, and energy? While the unprofitable ones were in the other party -- military, media, entertainment, info-tech, schools, healthcare, gov agencies, etc.

    Then the finance sector wouldn't have to impose so much discipline on their own party members, and could just target their political rivals.

    Crazier things have happened, I guess. If the military left the GOP, while finance left the Dems, then that would be stable at the coalition level. But the GOP is too weak, since it was the most recent party to realign. It's a remote chance, but could happen -- an internal party realignment, where the GOP would still be in central power, but with a crucially different make-up of coalition members.

    Usually realignments swing from one party to the other, though.

    How would that be stable? At the voter level, not the coalition elite level. The Dems would be getting votes from voters who work in ag, energy, manufacturing, or other profitable and labor-intensive sectors. Enough crossover to be a stable central party, at any rate.

    Why would there be a critical mass of new Dems in those sectors? Because the Reaganite GOP destroyed their jobs through off-shoring, NAFTA, etc. And the big banks and central bank want to make the US economy profitable again, since the "end of history" days are over, and free fake money indefinitely, is no longer an option for the banks.

    And while on-shoring mfg plants would make the owners / corpos less profitable, it would make the US as a whole more stable and profitable, since lots of good-paying jobs would return to the US. More income to tax, to stabilize the gov's balance sheet.

    This would be similar to the New Deal alignment, where big banks were in charge, and manufacturing elites were GOP -- but enough of the mfg workforce was unionized, and these union members were loyal Dems, since the Democrat unions got them good pay & conditions & didn't off-shore their plants to a sweatshop colony, like their Republican mfg owners would have liked to do for higher profits.

    The next-gen Dems could get more crossover from indie / purple / suburbanite people, who have heavily sided with Trump, by branding as the "post-woke" Democrats. Wokeness was only an option for a rich society that didn't have to worry about fundamentals, but now that our economy is cratering, it's time to stop worrying about culture war bullshit, and focus on surviving.

    "We're not defunding the woketards in our coalition because we side against them in the culture war -- we're a bunch of libtards on Wall Street, too. We are defunding them because they are simply not profitable, and too many strivers are angling for too few slots, and we can't hand them free fake money any longer, or our currency will implode and destroy the status of us bankers. It's just business."

    The indie purple suburbanites don't care what reason the woketard crusaders are eliminated for, just as long as they aren't a festering cancer anymore. In 2020, they had to vote for Trump to get the wokeness out. In 2028 or the 2030s, they may have a Wall Street-run party that will be more attractive for de-wokifying the society, without the culture war zealotry that accompanied it under the Trump campaign -- just a cold, rational business calculation for defunding the woketards.

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  19. "It's a remote chance, but could happen -- an internal party realignment, where the GOP would still be in central power, but with a crucially different make-up of coalition members."

    About that, was 1896 an internal party realignment? The dominant coalition went from Lincoln's Republicans to McKinley's Republicans, rather than flipping to Bryan's Democrats.

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  20. Yeah, 1896 is the only one in US history, but that can be explained by the Dems still being too toxic to be afforded dominant status -- too soon after the Civil War and Reconstrution.

    We haven't had anything at that level yet, but maybe the 2014-2020 wave of woke violence and terror was enough to scare safe-off modern voters in the same way that 1896 voters would've been scared by a new civil war.

    Dems got punished huge for their woke violent psychosis in the late '60s and early '70s as well -- Nixon's '72 landslide, after his first win in '68.

    And they got punished huge for their violent psychosis in the late 1910s, mostly from new urban immigrants, who were the Dems' responsibility (and the lynchings in the Solid South as well). Wilson had two terms, then his party was a no-go, and America voted for a Return to Normalcy in 1920.

    I still think the backlash against the woketards will, and is already taking the form of the Wall Street wing of the Dems yanking the leash and cutting off the credit cards for the useless polarizing dipshits on their side, especially in media / tech / entertainment. Next up, nuking college endowments, gutting their bloated admins and departments, and taking back all that land they've gobbled up with the student loan treasure chest.

    That's my hope for the solution to the over-produced elite / student loan bubble -- write it off for those who have it (perhaps up to a reasonable amount, not to include Harvard JD expenses). Fund it by seizing enough of the college endowment treasure chest, targeting the sub-Ivy level (since that's where most of the bubble was taking place, and to placate some elites in academia), and seizing / selling off / renting out all of that land and building they've done over the past 3 decades. From student dorms to apartments, and the rents go to paying off the student loan debt jubilee.

    And obviously, no more 40% of the next gen going to college -- 15% max.

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  21. And no, it's too technocratic and retarded to take the "sensible middle road" of merely allowing student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy court. That will be too costly to administer -- all those forms, all those useless lawyers getting billable hours. Fuck that.

    Just write it off, it amounts to the same thing -- the US gov doesn't get back their money, and has to collect it somewhere else (like the very colleges that hoovered it up during the bubble, not new taxes on taxpayers, who didn't benefit from the bubble like the colleges did).

    Underage students were just the conduit through which a shitload of gov money was funneled into the colleges, so the students should not have to pay for popping the bubble. The schemers, orchestrators, and bloated-up vampires were the college admins and their endowment managers -- they're the ones who need to hang for this mess.

    We can let them live, but we can't let them keep all that ill-gotten wealth. Time to take it back, and pay off the gov that funneled it to them to begin with. Lord knows these students will never have enough income to pay it off.

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