I wish the man would blog again, but I’ll take ’em where I can get ’em. He left this over at Kim duToit’s place. I’ll fix his edit and quote in whole:
Super long story short:
I no longer believe the axis entirely pivots on Right vs Left.
I was using the term “collaborative establishment” until I encountered the term “Deep State”, which I think is probably more apropos.
Viewed as dispassionately and as objectively as I can muster, the federal US government is a machine whose function is to ingest a significant fraction of the people’s productivity, and transform that wealth into various benefits and favors. Both establishment parties fully, 100% agree that this machine shall persist and grow, and will drop all differences towards that end, collaborating fully. Where the parties compete is on the output end, crafting such packages of benefit such that they will believe will attract the most power, votes and influence.
This is the single largest coherent economic activity on the planet, and is jealously guarded as such, with all the violence implicit in a gang banger protecting his profits on a single drug corner. The “military industrial complex” was merely the prototype for the “governmental economic complex”.
The election of 2016 is entirely about the people of the US recognizing that they’ve lost control of their government, (even if they couldn’t articulate it in similar terms) that this was the result of normal electoral politics, and that the the cost of rejecting the continuation of the status quo via the Established candidate Hillary was electing the outrageous blowhard and loose cannon Trump, in the wild hopes that doing something different would result in a different outcome.
The extent to which Trump simply recognized and rode that wave to the Oval Office is a subject of academic debate.
For myself, I think that this is a temporary respite on the long march to Deep State Progressivism, for it is the Progressives, an inherently statist, totalitarian and parasitic entity that is the primary architect of its favorite tool, the Deep State, as well as the primary antagonist of the infiltration and subversion of the institutions of influence whose purpose is now to position in the public’s mind the essential necessity and centrality of the Deep State as the most critical component of a just society and source of the good life.
Nonetheless, Trump is neither the solution nor antithesis to this. The most we can hope for is enough demolition to the underpinnings of the Deep State’s mechanisms that some deep reform will be made possible, but on this, I am not optimistic.
Neither am I.