Where did all of the Anglo leaders and upper class go in the west? Unz had an article quite a while back saying they died out. Moldbug claimed they got absorbed into the modern culture. Did they get pushed out, did they bend the knee, did they die off, what happened to the families and people who used to run the Anglosphere?
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Driven out for not being progressive enough. Look at Churchill, 70 years ago.
That’s one hell of a long “...go broke” swing of the pendulum. Still as accurate as ever though.
Britain has never recovered and only slowly declined.
Until recently, where they've quickly declined.
Dude, Britain prior to Thatcher and after Churchill wasn't exactly "slow" decline, it was probably the most starting collapse of an empire anyone had ever seen.
In 1940 they went from a world spanning empire that had some of the largest and most powerful forces in the world, with the wealthiest society, and only recently being challenged by the US ...
To 1960 where not only was trash over-flowing in the streets, perpetual riots in Wales, a communist-nationalist insurgency in Northern Ireland, a total evaporation of that empire, and socialist policies so bad that morgues were over-flowing with bodies and being placed outside to rot in the street because the morgue-workers union was striking.
Rome had a slower collapse.
Fuck, the Assyrians had a slower collapse.
Hell, Macedon had a less destructive collapse, at least.
I wonder if the American government had a hand in that...
Hand in it?
They damn near required it.
I forget the name of the treaty, but FDR gave Churchill an ultimatum: American involvement in the war would require Britain to cede all technological and intelligence information that the British possessed. Churchill would have known even at that time, there was basically no chance the British Empire could keep up with the shocking industrial might of the US, and this was still at a time where most Americans were still rural. Then, they were going to give all of their technological knowledge to them. It meant that the US was certain to be the global hegemon going forward; something the Europeans had been (frankly) expecting since the late 1800's prior to WW1, and weren't really sure how to handle it. With Germany on the loose, National Socialism having allies in Scotland, Ireland staying out of the war, France already collapsed faster than anyone predicted (even the Germans), and England genuinely under threat of invasion, it looked like he had no other choice but to guarantee the loss of the majority of the British Empire in order to save any of it.
After that, the American government (having seized their own citizen's gold supply), also became the world reserve currency because they were really one of the only developed countries to have had a massive supply of gold and not suffered massive structural damage during the war. They became a creditor nation to every country in Europe, guaranteeing that there was no chance anyone from Europe could take the Americans on... but jesus-christ-almighty that's better than the looming threat of Soviet conquest of Europe. The Soviets may have been utterly exhausted by 1945 with twenty million dead, but they were still an active and ongoing threat.
But, the Americans weren't the only cause. Fabian Socialism had been developing very well in England prior to WW1, and when Churchill lost his election, the Socialists seized power in Britain, and there was no chance the Empire could be saved, because it was their goal to destroy it. They had allies in the US State Department (and still do), but it's not like the Americans wanted Britain to lose the war. The Labour Party absolutely would have preferred that Britain lose the war because she 'deserved it'. Even Orwell noted this.
Nice history lesson. Were all those deals with the Great Satan really worth it in the end?
Considering how quickly the sheep accepted it, nah, they've just become more open about it.
Authoritarianism prevents leadership.
Fundamentally, authoritarianism pathologizes trust by replacing it with dependency. Normally, dependency on vice. You look for people who are criminals, thieves, sex pests, degenerates, or incompetents; and you put them as your direct underlings, and in positions they could not have achieved without you. Those underlings are now loyal to you because they are already above their "Peter Principle" limit (they are above the level of their incompetence). Moreover, if they have a vice, and you can control access to that vice, they can't help but keep themselves incriminated in the vice to you, guaranteeing their loyalty. On top of that, your underlings will also recognize the racket for what it is, and then police each other, to make sure no one steps out of line to threaten the system.
And this might work once, but the problem is that this attitude creates a positive feedback of degeneracy to foster dependency. Your underlings replicate the same strategy with their underlings as you did with them. You hired an underling who was a goof ball, because he wasn't a threat. But then he hires a dummy. That guy hires an idiot. The idiot hires a moron, the moron hires the buffoon, the buffoon hires a retard, the retard hires a genuine mental invalid. Suddenly, the bottom of your organization is filled to the brim with only the most medically crippled mental invalids the world has ever seen, and the normal person who interacts with your system doesn't understand why everyone he interacts with is functionally retarded.
The same thing happens with every vice. You like to smoke pot on the weekends, and suddenly the lower echelon of your system is filled with meth heads. You like to physically intimidate people, and suddenly the lower echelon of your system is filled with terrorists. You like to go to the strip club, and suddenly the lower echelon of your system is filled with furries.
Now you take this to the institutions of power, leadership, and aristocracy. The oligarchs have basically already run through 3 generations of this kind of dependency institutionalization. Each generation being worse than the previous at the highest levels, and each generation's institutions being more fundamentally broken each time.
Now we get to the end game: weak men make bad times. There are no leaders because everyone trusted in the system, while the system was already authoritarian, and it's nature to degenerate out of control continued. The longer people trusted it, the worse the degeneration of the system got until it became totally unavoidable. There are no leaders in politics because the system is now fully off-the-rails and would kill itself before tolerating leadership of any kind (regardless of politics). The system is now intentionally self-policing to ensure that no competence, integrity, or initiative disrupts the racket. If it did, it would cause the whole thing to fucking implode in a massive cascade failure which would destroy every single part of the system at the same time
...
and it's about to.
So, that's where being a leader comes in for the rest of us. Someone's going to have to rebuild as the system dies.
That's assuming the system survives in sufficiently substantial structure to be present on the far side of what's coming.
The aristocracy has been decaying a lot longer than three generations, but if you want to argue that something functional will replace these institutions, in any sort of timely manner, evidence is required. Left to their own devices, these institutions will collapse, often violently.
On the contrary, as with the Soviet System, I expect a full on cascade failure, so we'll have to rebuild from the collapse.
Additionally, when I say "aristocracy", I'm not talking about the Hapsburgs and Bourbons. I'm talking about the current elites.
Parallel institutions are already being pushed within America, the situation is worse for Europe, but they will develop. And Left to their own devices, institutional collapse is rarely ever violent at all. Violence typically only happens as the previous rulers attempt to use force to guarantee their position against rivals. At most, after a collapse has taken place, you get violence from invaders. Instead, if you have a genuine collapse from internal failure, the collapse is rather non-plussed. The Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Spanish Empire, the Sweedish Empire, the Soviet Union/Empire; these things collapsed from internal pressures (subversive or self-inflicted), without much in the way of extreme violence. Even the Roman Empire's collapse was limited in it's violence. By the time Attila showed up, Rome's power had already functionally been sacked. Rome, as a city, was a shadow of it's former self.
Sounds like the Mafia.
Unironically yes.
The Mob is actually a key component to state control. The state can't properly monopolize violence, but the mafia absolutely does. Any part of economics you regulate out of the legal market, the mob latches onto in the black market. The more the mob controls the black market, the more control (as a politician) you have over the black market. You also get to use them for political violence, rather than state forces which get to pretend to be legitimate.
Unfortunately, gone are the days when the Democrats would simply be womanizers and drunks. Now, they're full on pedophiles and crack heads; so the type of criminals they support are even worse. No longer are they getting behind the scenes support of the Cosa Nostra; but are instead taking kickbacks from cartels, MS-13, and violent fucking street gangs, that they protect with lax law enforcement.
This is what I call: Criminalism. An ideology dedicated to the support of crime as a mechanism of control over the population and economy.
Some died, some were killed, some converted, some never had our interests in mind, the rest have their fun playing with their upper class toys.
Don’t some of those families have super leftie descendants?