The Buggy Professor

The Buggy Professor has an outstanding series of articles on politics and economics explaining why the anglosphere is doing so much better economically than the EU and Japan. You should read them all starting with the first. Let me just quoute an outstanding bit explaining what is wrong with the American left:

....no one can deny that another left-wing has emerged, centered in universities and the media, with support among grass-roots Democratic activists even if not much enthusiasm among the voting public.

Its name? As just mentioned, the familiar pc-left --- Aka The School of Resentment and Grudge, a term originally directed at them by Harold Bloom, formerly one of Yale’s most prominent deconstructionist critics before he moved on in disgust; and subsequently adopted and elaborated on by Richard Rorty, the only original thinker of import to associate with the tenured left- radicals before he too decamped and among other things agreed in print that they’re “creeps”. . . "semi-literate, politically useless, and odiously self-righteous and self-congratulatory.”

Who Are They?

Generously put, little more than a mishmash of aging mouth-eaten Marxists, their eyes still straining to find a decent Marxist state anywhere; that’s what; plus . . . lots of cloud-chasing Pacifists and Globalists, likewise creaky at the hinges and ardent chanters of Noam Chomsky crackpot tirades on the evils of American Neo Paleo-Imperialism, responsible for all the world's ills right down to explaining why your girlfriend or boyfriend --- or husband or wife --- are all lousy lovers who are as skilled in bed as a Water Buffalo, and as exciting to the same degree. Then, too, there're all the bustling hordes of Post-Modernist Space-Cadets and Critical Theorists who admire the writings of Nietzsche, the Nazi Heidegger, several windbag French irrationalists, and Theodore Adorno, the icon of the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory . . . a very in-guy now who saw jazz as portending the imminent triumph of Fascism in America. For all of them, obscurantism counts a great deal; clear arguments and concerns for evidence --- a bourgeois fetish, a hangover from what Derrida calls logocentric fallacies --- are brushed aside as superficial. And don’t overlook all the anal-compulsive deconstructionists stumbling around in the PC-mists too . . . men and women in literary studies of no less tangled thought and style who spout cryptic mumbo-jumbo even in their sleep; never mind whenever they’re perched high up on their lecterns and rap and jive their recondite gibberish amid all the blackouts and loud hallucinating outcries that their heavily snoring, zonked-out students emit now and then in their nightmarish captivity. None of which is meant to short-change the hyperkinectic swarms of Outer Space Queer-theorists, likewise flipped out and monomanically meschuga . . . and all but lacking their Buck Rogers helmets and ray-guns to complement their daily climb into their mental spaceships and subsequent lift-off into their Inter-Galactic skyhootings.

And finally, to end a catalogue of obscurantist and dogmatic pedants that could run on and on --- not enough mental hospitals in the world to house them all --- we have to mention the multitudes of monomanical feminist scholars down with a life-long case of antsy indignation and utopian longings. To a person, convinced that the human mind is a total blank at birth and hence not just wholly malleable, but malleable in ways that fully accord with their own pious hopes . . . at any rate, with non-stop socialization and an occasional beating with whips and knees-to-the-groin administered by you-know-who. (Not admittedly a new doctrine; rather, one pioneered by Lenin and Stalin as well as Mao, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro and all the other heroes of the mothballed Marxists around the world, all equally convinced that the mind’s a complete blank and in need of revolutionary change and brainwashing before the New Communist Man emerged, able to appreciate just how much their revolutionary forebears had done for them.)

When the professor is on a roll he cuts deep. Not all his prose is this good but the ideas he develops are worth a read because he shows how economics and politics intertwine to produce the world today and the world of tomorrow.

The essence of the EU/Japan problem is state capitalism. The professor doesn't cover it but I believe that that model will also hobble China once its explosive growth phase is over. These countries have bought domestic peace at the cost of stagnation. Not stagnation in the absolute sense but relative to the dynamic economies of the anglosphere. In addition demographics may lead in the next twenty years not just to stagnation in relative terms but an actual slide backwards.

As I said. Go read the whole thing. The professor reprises his arguments in each section making for some redundancy but also making understanding easy if you start in typical blog order - last article first.