Political Ground Zero

It should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a luddite shut in or self-deluded that America’s political system is broken.

Not only is it broken, politics per se are no longer possible. That’s because how to organize society for the common good is the role of government, and the matter of who constitutes the government is supposed to be answered by the political process.

But we now live in a de facto one-party state where elections that once took an evening to decide now drag on until the decision approved by the ruling class is reached. The system allows just enough public participation to give the illusion that the people have a say.

Frequent readers of this blog know that back tracing the starting point of the decline is something of a pet project here. What we’ve learned is that instead of one flashpoint for the manifold types of social decay visible online, on TV, and through the window, the decline has proceeded in stages. Each major dimension of Western society has eroded in fits and starts, beginning at different times.

As most of you know, my painstaking research has dated Cultural Ground Zero to 1997. This was the last time that consumers of Western popular culture could expect new entertainment products to equal or surpass prior releases. Like all rules, this one admits of some exceptions. Video games soldiered on for another decade, in large part owing to their Eastern cultural connection. But we’re now living in an era when all cultural coin has been debased.

To borrow a maxim coined by the late Andrew Breitbart, politics is downstream from culture. If all other aspects of Western society have degraded, we shouldn’t be surprised that politics suffered the same fate.

But when did it happen? When was Political Ground Zero?

Dissident blogger the Z Man has advanced the theory that terminal rot took hold of Washington with the arrival of the Clintons. There had been graft and moral turpitude before, but Bill and Hillary completed DC’s descent into a combination black market arms warehouse/brothel. That would place the start of Political Ground Zero in 1992.

Here we have an apparent contradiction. If politics is downstream from culture, and Cultural Ground Zero was in 1997, how could politics have hit the skids five years sooner?

The answer, to use another modern proverb, is that social decline is like bankruptcy. It happens gradually at first, then all at once. Social capital is real, and it can behave like financial capital.

Think of American social institutions’ health as timelines that chart when each ran out of social capital. The general supply had been running out for some time. But we can put a finger on a point in history when the slurping-the-last-drops-of-soda-through-a-straw sound became audible across the board.

Consider:

• The pathologies that would kill the entertainment industry in 1997 first presented serious symptoms in the early 90s.
• Gay propaganda like After the Ball started getting a major signal boost from academia around the same time.
• American Christian identity, which had hovered at 90 percent, took a nosedive in 1991.

There’s a historical specter hanging over all of those early 90s inflection points.

Those from Gen Y and older don’t need to be told it was the end of the Cold War.

It makes sense when you think about it. Western civilization had already been sick for decades when WWII broke out. Societal disorders that result in back-to-back global industrial wars don’t spring up overnight.

By all rights, we should have plunged into Clown World long before now. Weimar Germany, and even the decadence and violence of the Roaring 20s were previews of nascent worldwide phenomena.

It turns out that having one existential threat to organize around staved off the worst for half a century. And it was during those prosperous, mostly stable years that the Baby Boomers came to power.

Which brings us back to Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president.

After that, politics stopped being about the common good and became all about validating our rulers’ personal preferences.

But Bill Clinton couldn’t have happened had America’s political institutions not already been too weak to repel him. That means politics succumbed in a year to the same rot that took another five to bring down pop culture.

It also means that what we’re living through is the accelerated resumption of a process that the Cold War arrested temporarily.

The respite is over. We can’t save the system by voting harder because the cultural capital needed to maintain the old system is gone.

And that’s normal. Civilizations go through cycles like this. The Boomer clinging to the democratic process is under the same nostalgia spell as the Pop Cultist consooming product.

That’s all politics is now – nostalgia for your past repackaged and sold back to you by people who have only contempt for you and your opinion.

The only way out is through. The disease must run its course.

Don’t worry, this fever will burn the petty tyrants who oppress us out with it.

Spiritual revivals always follow crises like this. There are already signs of another Christian awakening in the West.

Once we get our spiritual house in order, we can start building healthy cultural institutions on that strong foundation.

Meanwhile, you can help nature along.  Learn how here: