The only quibble I would have is the description of China as not particularly communist. In everything except its economic system, it displays all the worst features of a communist state including, in a recent development, a president who will stay in power until he kicks the bucket (or is overthrown in an internal party power struggle).
JH
Julian Hartley
3 years ago
‘And things will get better’. This is a nice idea, but not how history works. Empires have their time in the sun, and then they decline. And the decline is not pleasant for those who live in them.
Absolutely correct, Julian. The Salem witch trials lasted a little over a year. WWII/Holocaust lasted six years. McCarthyism a decade or so, same as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But they all ended because sane people managed to get back into control or in power (not always the same thing). “The pendulum always swings back” is not an axiom you can take to the bank regarding American politics, which, on the Left, becomes ever more radical, illogical, and violent. The pendulum can only swing back if the mechanism (clock) in which it exists functions as it should. Who can say that about today’s American politics?
CC
Cathy Carron
3 years ago
An Interesting essay and at least for me, a yet to be heard overview of events that rings accurate. However, I think you’ve got Trump and his role wrong or at least incomplete. For millions of Americans Trump is the antidote to the left’s craziness; putting a stop to ‘too fast, too many’ immigration to the extent that some communities couldn’t recognize their own way of life, the ‘woke’ culturalists which have little to offer the ordinary person who’s just try to earn a living & put meals on a table, the overstretched foreign policy of the past 50 years which has strained budgets & broken hearts. For these people, myself included, Trump will remain a national hero.
MP
Matthew Powell
3 years ago
” If I were Joe Biden, I’d be worried about what I was letting myself in for…”
Agreed. Expect the Republican establishment to be even more half hearted in its campaigning, if that’s even possible, at this years election. Trump probably moved the party in the right direction but is a dead end himself. Biden looks like a one term President and is going to have to deal with a divided country and a radicalised Democratic Party, which is an embarrassment to many voters. A realigned, popularist centre right Republican Party should be able to capitalise and may well calculate they can do so better without the presidency.
If, heaven help you, Biden gets in, the Chinese will be ‘all over you! Mr Trump isn’t dead yet, so as we used to say in happier days, “don’t count your chickens,,,,,”
Biden looks like a brain-dead Groper and odds are not an any term President. Trump might be a “narcissistic” ass ( the authors stupid “monster” comment describing Trump just points out how stupid the author is) and I didn’t vote for him but he is head and shoulders above any DemocratSlaveryParty Scum Pol.
SG
Seumas Gibson
3 years ago
I chuckled when “defenestration” was used to describe what happened to the NY Times editor, but not the person who was actually flung out of a window. Odd editorial decision.
Seumas: No one was flung out of a window, of course, but there is no doubt the radical leftists, at the NYT and everywhere else, would love to do that to any heretic they come across. The term “defenestration” was only used metaphorically. One could also say that the leftists — who could not abide that a letter to the editor by a Republican United States Senator was published by their employer — are “eviscerating” their own paper’s once august history of publishing “all the news that’s fit to print”, as their masthead once truthfully indicated they did, long ago.
JH
john.hurley2018
3 years ago
It is a cultural revolution. You can see it at social gatherings:
“M” was in HK. On a harbour cruise she was disgusted to see a woman washing a babies bottle in the sea”; “A” was disgusted at “M”‘s point of view. “We travel and we get amongst the locals”.
“A” thinks that at a social gathering you don’t bad mouth foreigners. “M” thinks they are foreigners and that is O.K. Donald Trump bad mouthed Mexicans – Mexicans are foreigners. So it comes down to who are we in relation to our territory and who is and isn’t us. There can be no us without an other.
“M” thinks the Barbarians should stay at the gate; “A” thinks “M” is racist. It is a revolution in so far as a section of society forces it on another:
In New Zealand, meanwhile, the traditional sources of authority ““ media, politicians, the judiciary, etc ““ are largely speaking with one voice against the far-right.
Spinoff
H is married to someone who worked for the Economist. She says the Spectator is “ultra far right”?
Another example an organisation Local Government NZ tells us (in a brochure) some community issues. They list changes; one is diversity. They say that social cohesion is important and that moving from a neighbourhood of high to low social cohesion is as bad on your health as taking up smoking. Inequality leads to low social cohesion they say.
I notice a tweet from a local journalist The Press about Christchurch and whiteness. A respondent comments: “but it still feels very white at times”. I look her up, she is a Phd , a speaker and does work for the Mental Health Foundation and Age Concern.
BG
Bill Gaffney
3 years ago
About the only correct thing this apparent whateverheis said in this screed is that the pendulum swings. All the rest is claptrap and just another anti-Gub’ment screed.
DS
Dave Smith
3 years ago
Years ago I imported Chinese antique country furniture( 1980s ) The real stuff not what is around now. Many of the traditional pieces were damaged where the Red Guards had attacked them. These would have been the children of the villages. What used to happen was that the Red Guards would make the villagers bring out their family pieces and set to work smashing and burning them .This is why so little real stuff is left. The marriage coffers were a particular target along with the wonderful beds that were like little rooms. The idea was the usual . Destroy the past to control the future. It all ended of course in tears. The fine quality imperial stuff survived . That was for the elites. When our children start invading homes and taking out our furniture to burn then we will be in trouble. The only thing is 95% of houses are now full of mass produced rubbish so there is little point. They will come for our books. The very best thing we could do now is shut down our universities for a while. The rot starts there.
Dave Smith — Public education and academia are two of the most dysfunctional and destructive pillars of our society. Greedy leftwing-controlled colleges/universities should be shut down but only because they are, overwhelmingly, nothing more than expensive borstals and indoctrination centers.
DH
D Herman
3 years ago
Excellent article Mr Kalder.
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
Really enjoy Daniel Kalder’s articles. So refreshing. We are in very polarized times, but I live in hope that things will indeed ‘re-set’ in the way he describes.
NR
Nicholas Rynn
3 years ago
I would observe that Mao had the Chinese Army and police as his enforcers of last resort. The Radical left have neither.
Plenty of BLM/ ANTIFA enforcers trying their best in places like Portland and Seattle. Keep observing, you might notice!
GC
Greg C.
3 years ago
BLM good for Trump. And vice versa.
BM
Bill Marx
3 years ago
“Things that are happening right now are not happening.”
GC
Geoff Cox
3 years ago
So even if the revolution succeeds it will only be like the Communist revolutions in China and Russia and just temporary – tell that to the millions who died, were tortured, imprisoned, starved …..
Furthermore, I would have hope for dear old Blighty if we still had a population of English people living here doing things in the way Hobbits do them. But the fact is the demographics are against us and we can no longer expect a return to pragmatic, unexceptional, quiet rationalism to bring this movement back to its senses.
RS
Robert Sieger
3 years ago
Daniel Kalder is too optimistic and/or naive. What is happening now is sounding the death knell for our constitutional Republic. (USA is not a democracy.) Surprising for a Texan. Maybe he’s in Austin.
Report this comment
This site is registered on wpml.org as a development site. Switch to a production site key to remove this banner.
A very good read. My thanks to the author.
The only quibble I would have is the description of China as not particularly communist. In everything except its economic system, it displays all the worst features of a communist state including, in a recent development, a president who will stay in power until he kicks the bucket (or is overthrown in an internal party power struggle).
‘And things will get better’. This is a nice idea, but not how history works. Empires have their time in the sun, and then they decline. And the decline is not pleasant for those who live in them.
Absolutely correct, Julian. The Salem witch trials lasted a little over a year. WWII/Holocaust lasted six years. McCarthyism a decade or so, same as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But they all ended because sane people managed to get back into control or in power (not always the same thing). “The pendulum always swings back” is not an axiom you can take to the bank regarding American politics, which, on the Left, becomes ever more radical, illogical, and violent. The pendulum can only swing back if the mechanism (clock) in which it exists functions as it should. Who can say that about today’s American politics?
An Interesting essay and at least for me, a yet to be heard overview of events that rings accurate. However, I think you’ve got Trump and his role wrong or at least incomplete. For millions of Americans Trump is the antidote to the left’s craziness; putting a stop to ‘too fast, too many’ immigration to the extent that some communities couldn’t recognize their own way of life, the ‘woke’ culturalists which have little to offer the ordinary person who’s just try to earn a living & put meals on a table, the overstretched foreign policy of the past 50 years which has strained budgets & broken hearts. For these people, myself included, Trump will remain a national hero.
” If I were Joe Biden, I’d be worried about what I was letting myself in for…”
Agreed. Expect the Republican establishment to be even more half hearted in its campaigning, if that’s even possible, at this years election. Trump probably moved the party in the right direction but is a dead end himself. Biden looks like a one term President and is going to have to deal with a divided country and a radicalised Democratic Party, which is an embarrassment to many voters. A realigned, popularist centre right Republican Party should be able to capitalise and may well calculate they can do so better without the presidency.
If, heaven help you, Biden gets in, the Chinese will be ‘all over you!
Mr Trump isn’t dead yet, so as we used to say in happier days, “don’t count your chickens,,,,,”
Biden looks like a brain-dead Groper and odds are not an any term President. Trump might be a “narcissistic” ass ( the authors stupid “monster” comment describing Trump just points out how stupid the author is) and I didn’t vote for him but he is head and shoulders above any DemocratSlaveryParty Scum Pol.
I chuckled when “defenestration” was used to describe what happened to the NY Times editor, but not the person who was actually flung out of a window. Odd editorial decision.
Seumas: No one was flung out of a window, of course, but there is no doubt the radical leftists, at the NYT and everywhere else, would love to do that to any heretic they come across. The term “defenestration” was only used metaphorically. One could also say that the leftists — who could not abide that a letter to the editor by a Republican United States Senator was published by their employer — are “eviscerating” their own paper’s once august history of publishing “all the news that’s fit to print”, as their masthead once truthfully indicated they did, long ago.
It is a cultural revolution. You can see it at social gatherings:
“M” was in HK. On a harbour cruise she was disgusted to see a woman washing a babies bottle in the sea”; “A” was disgusted at “M”‘s point of view. “We travel and we get amongst the locals”.
“A” thinks that at a social gathering you don’t bad mouth foreigners.
“M” thinks they are foreigners and that is O.K.
Donald Trump bad mouthed Mexicans – Mexicans are foreigners.
So it comes down to who are we in relation to our territory and who is and isn’t us. There can be no us without an other.
“M” thinks the Barbarians should stay at the gate; “A” thinks “M” is racist.
It is a revolution in so far as a section of society forces it on another:
Spinoff
H is married to someone who worked for the Economist. She says the Spectator is “ultra far right”?
Another example an organisation Local Government NZ tells us (in a brochure) some community issues. They list changes; one is diversity. They say that social cohesion is important and that moving from a neighbourhood of high to low social cohesion is as bad on your health as taking up smoking. Inequality leads to low social cohesion they say.
I notice a tweet from a local journalist The Press about Christchurch and whiteness. A respondent comments: “but it still feels very white at times”. I look her up, she is a Phd , a speaker and does work for the Mental Health Foundation and Age Concern.
About the only correct thing this apparent whateverheis said in this screed is that the pendulum swings. All the rest is claptrap and just another anti-Gub’ment screed.
Years ago I imported Chinese antique country furniture( 1980s ) The real stuff not what is around now. Many of the traditional pieces were damaged where the Red Guards had attacked them. These would have been the children of the villages. What used to happen was that the Red Guards would make the villagers bring out their family pieces and set to work smashing and burning them .This is why so little real stuff is left. The marriage coffers were a particular target along with the wonderful beds that were like little rooms.
The idea was the usual . Destroy the past to control the future.
It all ended of course in tears. The fine quality imperial stuff survived . That was for the elites.
When our children start invading homes and taking out our furniture to burn then we will be in trouble. The only thing is 95% of houses are now full of mass produced rubbish so there is little point. They will come for our books.
The very best thing we could do now is shut down our universities for a while. The rot starts there.
Dave Smith — Public education and academia are two of the most dysfunctional and destructive pillars of our society. Greedy leftwing-controlled colleges/universities should be shut down but only because they are, overwhelmingly, nothing more than expensive borstals and indoctrination centers.
Excellent article Mr Kalder.
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
Franz Kafka
Excellent and apposite quote.
I was not familiar with that Kafka quote. Thanks.
Really enjoy Daniel Kalder’s articles. So refreshing. We are in very polarized times, but I live in hope that things will indeed ‘re-set’ in the way he describes.
I would observe that Mao had the Chinese Army and police as his enforcers of last resort. The Radical left have neither.
Not yet, which is why they are working hard to defund the current police force and replace it with one sympathetic to their political aims.
Plenty of BLM/ ANTIFA enforcers trying their best in places like Portland and Seattle.
Keep observing, you might notice!
BLM good for Trump. And vice versa.
“Things that are happening right now are not happening.”
So even if the revolution succeeds it will only be like the Communist revolutions in China and Russia and just temporary – tell that to the millions who died, were tortured, imprisoned, starved …..
Furthermore, I would have hope for dear old Blighty if we still had a population of English people living here doing things in the way Hobbits do them. But the fact is the demographics are against us and we can no longer expect a return to pragmatic, unexceptional, quiet rationalism to bring this movement back to its senses.
Daniel Kalder is too optimistic and/or naive. What is happening now is sounding the death knell for our constitutional Republic. (USA is not a democracy.) Surprising for a Texan. Maybe he’s in Austin.