The Western world has entered the Age of Mediocrity, a dull hour for which Joe Biden is the perfect man. We are ruled by a disconnected managerial elite that loathes much of its own citizenry and refuses to let those deplorables sit in judgment of its failures and inadequacies.
Mediocrity was inevitable once the elite abandoned all sense of duty to its own people. Anti-nationalism, globalism - whatever you call it, the dominant elite ideologies across the West say the Ruling Class has no special duty to their nation, which has no special identity.
Mediocrity flourishes in the absence of responsibility. There are no consequences for failure, or increasingly for outright criminal abuse. "Public servants" are almost impossible to discipline or fire. Failed government programs grow remorselessly LARGER.
In the U.S. we don't even pretend to do "budgets" for government anymore, so the Ruling Class never has to make hard choices about cutting one program to create or expand another. They just suck more money out of the productive private sector to feed their ever-growing ambitions.
The public has internalized these attitudes as well. Much of the electorate has given up on the idea of demanding more from its political class, holding them to high standards of conduct, or punishing them for failure and abuse. Our political system runs on autopilot.
The 2020 election was all about Democrats using the pandemic to disable all election safeguards so they could drill right past Low-Information Voters and dig into the buried motherlode of No-Information Voters: people who would only vote if they don't have to get off the couch.
That's the signature triumph of the Age of Mediocrity: harvesting votes from people who don't give a damn to overwhelm those who do. A political elite that devises such techniques clearly has no fear of being punished by the electorate for its failures.
The public can scarcely even imagine an alternative to mediocrity anymore. They've been terrorized into accepting the fantastically expensive subpar performance of Big Gov as the best of all possible worlds. Taking money and power back to do things for ourselves is unthinkable.
This is partly due to factionalism. We've been divided into warring factions fighting over scraps from the government table. As long as each faction gets paid off, the overall success or failure of the Ruling Class is irrelevant.
When you have infinite money to buy votes, you don't have to worry that much about *earning* them. You can scoff at the notion of angry taxpayers demanding value for their money. Keep your big-money supporters happy, pay off your dependent constituents, and you're all set.
Of COURSE we're ruled by useless politicians who couldn't handle working a slow shift at a fast-food restaurant, people who have never produced anything or faced the harsh discipline of bankruptcy. Our system BREEDS people like that. They dominate politics and bureaucracy.
Shielded from all consequences, nourished by a bureaucracy that believes it has an unlimited right to tax and spend, our intensely mediocre ruling class has only one real survival skill: managing the worst of its scandals. It has a parasitic partisan media to help with that.
It's not very difficult to outlast the short attention span of a demoralized public and survive a scandal. Trillions of dollars in spending means the Ruling Class has trillions of ways to change the subject. A LOT of 72-hour news cycles lie between today and the next election.
The Age of Mediocrity is sliding into authoritarianism because the corpulent Ruling Class thinks all of the big issues are settled, all of the big questions have been answered, the decline of the private-sector American nation is inevitable. There are no big ideas to discuss.
Literally every "political debate" among our ruling class boils down to "give us more money and we'll keep doing more of what we've been doing." They're good at marketing More of the Same as if it was radical, exciting "change" and "progress," but it's just plodding failure.
That's the essence of mediocrity: plodding onward, free from consequences, unable to think of anything better. No wonder our elites have developed a sweet tooth for silencing dissent. Turn off the intercom so you don't have to listen to the economy-class passengers scream.
In the Age of Mediocrity, the dullard in the White House abandons hundreds of Americans to terrorists who march around with captured American weapons, and it's not even a two-week story. We're being told to accept empty store shelves. We're being told it's WRONG to demand better.
The great enemy of mediocrity is the memory of excellence. The mediocre will now use their vast powers - their trillions of stolen dollars, their media sycophants - to bully and shame us out of remembering what competence and responsibility even looked like. /end
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