The elephant of the populace and the mahout of the establishment

From The Little Engine That Couldn’t by Roger Kimball. A tangled ball of observations but this stands out.

Those time bombs are indeed ticking, and even the Dems must be able to make out the tick-tick-tick above the fury of their anti-Trump skirling. Some people say that what we are witnessing is just an instance of hardball politics. They hate us, we hate them, let the game begin.

I think it is much worse than that. There were plenty of hints and adumbrations before, but it really took shape with Donald Trump. What we have seen over the last few years is an effort to render a large part (indeed, a majority) of the electorate illegitimate.

Donald Trump won the presidency in a free, open, and democratic election. And yet a sliver of the population—the Antifa thugs, the Hollywood brats, the media sissies, the beautiful people with expensive degrees, and, of course, the radical fringe of the Democratic Party—all refused to accept the results of the election.

It’s not just that they disliked Donald Trump. They declared him illegitimate. By implication, they declared anyone who supported Trump illegitimate, too. In essence, they bowed out of the social compact that underwrote the legitimacy of the American regime.

They adopted the extreme rhetoric and tactics of revolutionaries. “Jusq’au-boutisme” became their rallying crying: by any means necessary.

Indeed. From the very moment of his election, they have been itching to impeach him for anything they could muster. They had the tool of impeachment. They had their hatred. They just couldn't find a crime.

But who is the they? I would argue that this is larger than Trump. It is a global phenomenon. The They are the establishment interests around the world.

The past fifty years have been good for people. Increasing health, longevity, plummeting poverty, plummeting violence (crime and war), etc. The elephant of prosperity has been constituted of the aggregation of billions though hard work, freedom, free markets, and consent of the governed. Atop the elephant of prosperity has sat the mahout, a small set of established interests - politicians, academics, the fourth estate, some others. They have imagined that they are responsible for the productivity of the elephant when in fact, they have barely been hanging on and have often taken the beast down the wrong path.

The elephant knows and experiences the incompetence of the mahout establishment astride the elephant's neck.

In the US, the rebellion of the junior ranks of Republicans with their Contract with America, and then the self-organized Tea Party were the first signs that Jumbo was tired of the self-serving and incompetent mahout. The establishment class mahout banded together and suppressed the Tea Party but did not solve the problem of their own incompetence which was actually causing the restiveness.

Since then, we have seen similar dynamics in Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hong Kong, etc. The consent of the public is being withdrawn from the establishment parties and the establishment is in full panic mode.

There are efforts to generate fear and panic in order to justify the seat of the mahout astride the beast of prosperity.

The establishment interests are trying to intimidate their populations into submission, skirting the whole issue of consent. But the elephant is large and the mahout small. And famously, the elephant has a long memory.