Since the end of World War II, both sides of the Iron Curtain proclaimed to be internationalist. This tendency only consolidated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We counselled our students to ‘think globally, and act locally.” The future would be one of increased global trade and cooperation under a framework of international law, with a peace guaranteed by the ‘hyper-powerful’ American military. Nuclear weapons would prevent the outbreak of overt hostilities between major powers.

This belief, while still pervasive, is fading away, but contemporary Western leftists — that is to say, the entire thinking-writing-and-speaking class, has turned its gaze inward, preferring to ‘act globally and think locally.’ This local thinking combined with rash global action has lead to the debacles in countries as far afield as Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and the Ukraine.

The way that ‘act global, think local’ works is that strategists, mostly in America, apply their local thinking about their own societies — usually a pastiche of egalitarian ideology, tinged with sentimentality, without the internal consistency of even a system like Marxism — and then apply it globally, while ignoring it in their immediate area.

So it is that a State Department bureaucrat who sends her child to a private school to protect her from bad influences coming from local Blacks at the public schools, can then support a pro-democracy policy abroad which she subverts at home through her own actions.

Similarly, at the same time as America faces increased economic and political competition from states dominated by a single ethnicity and inegalitarian political structure — like China — the former country doubles down on its ideological commitments to deny reality, pushing a multicultural ideal which no longer makes any decent geopolitical sense.

If you’re administering a global empire, it makes at least some sense to bring in some foreigners to your universities to be trained in global Americanism — so that they can administer the holdings. If there is no global empire anymore, it’s just importing a lot of incompatible people. Given that modern Americanism has come to resemble an ideological commitment to the destruction of the American empire, the political training that happens at American universities seems to do little other than strengthen a fifth column that has become so dominant that it’s hard to find educated people who aren’t, in some way or another, seeking to undermine the American national interest — whatever that means anymore.

The parochial left is losing influence abroad at the same time as it’s gaining in power domestically. While this is good news for foreigners, it’s bad news for the rest of us, as democracy-promotion goes local, having been frustrated everywhere else.

Conservative media outlets in the US are almost entirely concerned with electoral politics. While there are occasionally seasonal detours onto bureaucratic issues (like local bans on nativity displays — a point of conflict going back centuries in Anglo-American societies) and local crime stories, most of the air time on shows like Rush Limbaugh’s or channels like Fox News concern what elected officials are doing, and how campaigns are shaping up.

This makes the viewers obsess over what politicians are and aren’t doing, while keeping the focus current. News is supposed to be new, so when people spend their lives accumulating a stack of knowledge which is recent and shallow, divorced from the relevant context. The democratic mind winds up orbiting around ‘issues’ which are often the consequences of decisions made in previous decades or centuries.

For example, a pundit will talk about the ‘immigration debate,’ but will not usually bring up the directly relevant context of the predictions made by the Johnson administration at the time of the end of most of the immigration quotas, and comparing those predictions to the results of the policies of his administration.

Media channels create fictional — under the ‘reality TV model’ — narratives about politicians which tend to focus on their personalities, along with their stands on arbitrarily chosen ‘issues.’ These issues must be framed in a way that can be comprehended by the median voter while still exciting the party faithful.

In modern states, elected politicians tend to have rather limited influence. It’s not so much that there’s no difference between the political parties, it’s more that the politicians once elected have little influence over what bills get passed, what’s written into bills, and how the existing beureacracies are administered.

In effect, these political news channels act as cover and public relations for the real work of government, to create a greater sense of popular legitimacy. The hack around some of the crises of democracy has been to make it so that the people are only extensively polled and consulted on the selection of actors in the television show that purports to be about the American government.

Polling for the actual work of the state tends to be done to measure the effectiveness of what intellectuals and administrators already wanted to do. Even if public support for a proposal is low to start with, that’s just the baseline of opinion that administrators have to work with before they mount their effort to change society. Only rarely does widespread opposition to a proposal stop such an effort in its tracks — if it’s a high enough priority, popular consent can be engineered through the use of propaganda.

Anomaly UK writes about some potential alternatives to the virtual news stands / watering holes that are Twitter and Facebook.

Back in 2012, I looked at the concept of peer-to-peer blogging. It is definitely time to revisit
the environment.

Back then, the main threat I was concerned with was state action directed against service providers being used for copyright infringement. Since then, my political views have become more extreme, while the intolerance of the mainstream left has escalated alarmingly, and so the main threat today is censorship by service providers, based on their own politics or pressure from users and/or advertisers.

Actually publishing content has become easier, due to cheap virtualised hosting and fast residential broadband, making a few megabytes of data available is not likely to be a problem. The difficult bit is reaching an audience. The demise of Bloglines and then Google Reader has been either a cause or a symptom of the decline of RSS, and the main channels for reaching an audience today are facebook and twitter. I don’t actually use facebook, so for me twitter is the vital battleground. If you can build up a following linked to a twitter ID, you can move your content hosting around and followers will barely be aware it’s moved. Last week’s Chuck Johnson affair defines the situation we face. We require a robust alternative to twitter—not urgently but ideally within a 12–24 month timeframe.

From an economic perspective, at least, you would expect the impetus for this sort of censorship to come from nonstate actors in advance of such actions by the state itself.

The state, after all, has an institutional interest — and its administrators have a limited personal interest — in protecting tax revenues. If people begin to feel that the state has lost legitimacy and that it no longer guarantees their rights or interests, they may become uncooperative when it comes to generating revenue for that state. This is one of the reasons as to why governments like that of Greece have trouble keeping regular operations going.

If we look at the American government like a corporation, we see one with a relatively secure position over its own territory, which is losing some measure of its influence internationally.

While the American bureaucracy is, generally speaking, leftist, that doesn’t mean that it’s immune from attacks from other leftists trying to drive the country further to the left.

With the suspension of Chuck Johnson at GotNews, we see the asymmetry between the left and the right when it comes to the media. Chuck is essentially a ‘right wing journalist.’ The person whom he was trying to expose — left activist DeRay Mckesson —  was able to curb some traffic to Johnson’s site by getting him banned from Twitter.

That’s Twitter’s prereogative, of whom they decide to permit or forbid to use their service in any way.

From the Times’ account of Mckesson:

One protester was DeRay Mckesson, a 29-year-old former school administrator who has spent much of the past nine months attending and catalyzing such protests, from Ferguson, Mo., last summer and fall, to New York City and Milwaukee in December, to North Charleston, S.C., in April. Mckesson, who is from Baltimore, had returned to his hometown not long after Gray’s death to join the protests. Now he stood in his usual pose — his slender back straight as a ramrod, phone held in front of angular face, camera lens pointed directly ahead.

Naturally, it’d be interesting to find out more about this, since that sounds a lot like the incitement of violent riots which have done enormous amounts of damage to both people and property throughout the US. The Times portrays him as heroic, even though it tangentially connects his ‘activism’ to the murders of two policemen in New York City.

It’s important not to count too much on ‘social media’ or the ‘internet’ as an equalizer in politics. It’s not. It’s just another political tool. Many tools which appear to be decentralized actually aren’t. In the case of Twitter, everything routs through the service that they run, and they can and do ban people for arbitrary reasons.