By Wayne Allensworth
America is quickly shifting from being a high trust society with lots of “social capital” to a condition much more common around the world, one in which ordinary people don’t trust institutions, don’t trust the government, and increasingly don’t trust one another. Professor Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, reluctantly concluded that some time ago. In an atomized, hyper-diverse society, people tend to hunker down in their private worlds. Civic engagement declines, and so does trust.
Watching the reporting about the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Helene, particularly in North Carolina, makes clear that residents are quite unhappy with the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s response to the disaster. Unsurprisingly, accusations of incompetence and worse, that the money that was supposed to go to hurricane relief was going to illegal aliens, followed. Also unsurprising was the establishment media’s furious flurry of “fact checking” and denials, as its job is to defend the regime against its own citizens.
The aftermath of the hurricane’s landfall sparked a wave of satirical and bitterly angry memes circulating on social media that raised serious questions about just what the Blob’s priorities are. One meme listed the tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine and Israel and asked where that kind of money should have gone. Another displayed a map of the U.S. Eastern seaboard, with North Carolina’s spot conspicuously taken by Ukraine.
In the wake of the hurricane, Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute noted that aiding Americans after a natural disaster is a form of national defense, but that the establishment apparently does not share that sentiment. After surveying the damage done by Helene, Lieven asked, “How many American citizens have the Russian or Chinese states killed over the past generation? Have they killed anybody in the United States itself? How much physical damage have they done to the United States? Indeed, how much physical damage could they do, short of nuclear war? How much do they even want to do?”
As I’ve written before, it is not Vladimir Putin who is imposing woke lunacy on our country. And it is not Putin who is flooding the country with “migrants” meant to replace us or narcotics that are killing our people.
On Friday, October 4, Lieven reported, with perhaps 600 Americans dead and parts of Southern Appalachia still cut off from the outside world, news of the misery and devastation did not even make the front page of the online editions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. At that time, the Federal government had allocated just $20 million for survivors of the disaster, or less than 0.25 percent of the latest $8.7 billion aid package for Israel. Lieven noted that “The U.S. institutions that are in the frontline of disaster response are grossly underfunded compared to the U.S. armed forces.”
The point of the memes and Lieven’s article was clear: The Blob does not view America or Americans as its first and foremost responsibility. It treats America as nothing more than a platform for its utopian design of spreading woke corporatism around the planet. We have reached the end of history, with “democratic capitalism” the developmental endpoint for humanity. That’s a fundamental ideological precept of the pod people who man the Blob’s bureaucratic, media, academic, and corporate battle stations.
Conservatives used to say that liberals wouldn’t take their own side in a fight. But globalists don’t have a “side” in the way that patriotic Americans understand that term. Undermining and eventually dissolving the normal ties that bind is a requirement for the globalists. Attachments to an actual place, to a particular people and culture have no place in globalist ideology. There’s no grounded sense of home for them. Globalist pod people are “based” in one urban megaplex or another. They are no longer “from” anywhere. They are people from nowhere, often hatched from ideological pods — institutions of higher education, for instance — implanted in real places inhabited by normal people.
Like all idealogues, the pod people believe that the ends justify the means. Thus, the parade of lies, distortions, half-truths, and “gaslighting” in which the critters who inhabit the Blob’s alternative reality engage. “Who, us?,” they ask, as if the Middle Americans they despise and look down upon had no reason to distrust them. Psychological projection is what the pod people do, accusing their opponents of engaging in precisely the behavior they themselves are exhibiting. Russiagate, for instance, was a complete fabrication, a fantasy spun together out of malice and a sense of entitlement. Trump wasn’t one of them, so he could not be president. Yet those who questioned the narrative were accused of spreading “misinformation,” a favorite term of the pod people for any claim that does not conform to their narrative.
In the postmodern world we inhabit, pod people create their own reality, their own truth, and they stick to it with fanatical zeal. For them, there are no constants. When they accuse Trump supporters of “fascism” they really mean it. It’s not mere cynicism. Pod people believe with absolute certainty that normal human attachments to place and culture constitute “extremism,” and that any kind of particularism, such as the idea that we must take care of our own first, is a sign of “fascism.” Thus, a Trump presidency would be a “dictatorship,” since all “fascists” are “undemocratic,” that is, they do not accept the Blob’s view of democracy as a radical rejection of all limits, and “freedom” from conformity to all traditional norms, especially sexual norms, as unrestrained sexual license is such an effective solvent of the social bonds they disdain. Thus, questioning our current sexual free-for- all is “hate” and “bigotry.”
Which brings me to another observation: The pod people defending the Blob’s ramparts need fellow travelers, passionate militants, the revolution’s vanguard — the Blob’s “boots on the ground” among us. The bureaucratic managers who can delight in the destruction of, say, Springfield, Ohio, as a just punishment for America’s alleged sins, also see it as an essential step in the revolution. But they need helpers, mouthy ideologues who can act as the defenders of the “migrants” who have created chaos in the town.
The people most useful to them are pathological empaths. Without a sense of prudent restraint and proportion, passion can become compulsion; love, an obsession; normal patriotism, jingoism; and empathy a suicide pact. Empathy for other humans is a good thing, a decent emotion that connects us with others. But empathy, if unmoored from traditional virtues, a sense of proportion and limitations, and a grounded sense of responsibility can become destructive. In short, a pathology.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz strikes me as just such a pathological empath. During his clumsy, embarrassing “debate” with J.D. Vance, Walz seemed ready to cry over the plight of “migrants.” Vance had to remind the hapless governor that unrestrained immigration hurts ordinary Americans, for whom we as their countrymen have a primary responsibility. That did not seem to have occurred to Walz, who apparently sees no boundaries either around the country or on any sense of responsibility. That’s important, because if we are responsible to everybody, we behave responsibly toward no one. The same compulsion that prompted liberals to refuse to take their own side in a fight compels a pathological empath like Walz to deny any limits on our ability to render aid to anyone, anywhere, any time.
As a matter of practical virtue, of course, the best opportunity we have for expressing true charity is to those closest to us. Our own nuclear families are our first responsibility. Our other relations, then our friends, our neighbors, and our countrymen occupy a widening series of concentric circles of responsibility and obligation. Our country is our home. No person, and no country, has unlimited resources or energy. Those resources must be husbanded to perform our fundamental obligations. It’s as simple as understanding that you love your children over other children because they are your own. No finite human being has an infinite capacity to love every other person in the same manner as his own children. Our country is our own and is our children’s inheritance. What’s more, our personal responsibilities and mutual obligations lend meaning and purpose to our lives.
It’s worth noting that a Walz can pity a woman who does not want her unborn child. An unwanted child could, as the pathological empath sees it, wreak havoc on the woman’s life. Yet our passive-aggressive empath appears incapable of perceiving the ultimate havoc that is abortion. That’s to say nothing of the self-destructive behavior of “sexual minorities” the pathological empaths cannot allow themselves to criticize. Bathhouse morality is a “choice,” isn’t it?
Such garbled moral logic springs from a materialist and anti-Christian philosophy. Pathological empaths and globalist managers come from the same psychological place. Neither acknowledges the tragic nature of our existence, that failure and disappointment are the necessary poles of success and fulfillment. Neither acknowledges limits or tradeoffs, not just as realities, but as necessities. They reject all restraints on self-realization as unjust. Victimology underpins utopian leftist philosophy. And the cult of the sacred, morally superior victim is a useful propaganda tool for the managerial class. It can wave the bloody shirt of its designated victims to rally its militant wing against the “social constructs” of traditional society that inhibit the power of the Blob.
Leftist pathological empaths may be motivated by a seemingly soft and fuzzy naivete that beggars belief. Yet they can stomp opponents with a jackboot decorated by a smiley face. Others are motivated by resentment and existential rage. Leftists seek a utopia in which humans — or, quite naturally, “trans humans,” people who have altered or transcended humanity itself — can, like Satan and his fallen angels, dethrone God and “fix” the world, making it conform to their ideology.
The pod people, on the other hand, tend to see all the tragically intractable conflicts of our world as problems that can be solved by experts like themselves. Creating utopia is a technical matter. There is, nevertheless, considerable overlap among the pathological empaths and their pod people cousins. Both can be hateful to those who do not inhabit their mental universe. Yet it is difficult to picture a managerial pod person hoisting the black flag and joining an Antifa riot, driving to the event in a car with a “Coexist” bumper sticker. The combination of the pod people and the pathological empaths yields a Nurse Ratched regime that punishes us for our own good.
Throughout the modern era, the left has manifested a division between an anarchic, romantic, revolutionary wing in which pathological empaths are at home, and a managerial, bureaucratic realm of pod people. In his excellent book, The Red Flag: A History of Communism, David Priestland noted struggles within the Communist movement between what he called “technocratic” and “romantic” strains. The managerial technocrats stressed economic and social development via a centralized, rationalizing bureaucracy. The romantic revolutionaries dreamed of a utopia without hierarchy or distinctions between individuals.
Communists believed that their ideological precepts could be imposed on a recalcitrant reality either by a passionate revolutionary act of will or by the managerial rule of “experts.” Thus, the tensions between Stalinists and Maoists, between bureaucratic commissars and the T-shirted would-be Che Guevaras of 1968. Yet the two strains coexisted to one degree or another. Today, the hard left waves the black flag of anarchy and the hammer and sickle banner while spouting the sweet poison of pathological empathy. The globalist pod people’s high priests are found among the corporate managers who gather annually for their party congress at Davos. Communism is dead, but its spirit sought and found a new vessel.
We must have a clear understanding of what we are facing in order the threat to our people and our humanity.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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One of your best, Wayne!