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Notes -
American Elites
https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf
I found this recent Rasmussen presentation, it focuses on subsections of the elite. It was funded by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a libertarian thinktank. One might consider them elite heretics or counter-elites (and sure enough they have a slide at the end saying ‘oh there are some elites who are good and trustworthy'). Us non-Gold Circle normies only get the slides, so it's a little unclear what they mean.
Anyway, they define elite as postgrad urbanite with 150K per year income. They further split elites into those who went to 12 top colleges and the ‘politically obsessed’ (definition unclear but I imagine it means they spend a certain number of hours reading/watching/discussing political media). For instance, I imagine we would be considered ‘politically obsessed’.
As you might expect, the elite are the ones who approve of Biden and Congress. They trust the government to do the right thing. I imagine that even if they don’t think the government’s doing a great job they’re friends with high ranking officials and feel a certain amity for them. In my experience, their brother might be an ambassador, they might have an AI regulator over for lunch. Even if they’ve been astonished by the stupid questions journalists ask them, they’ve still got fairly positive impressions of the prestige press and read at least two or three newspapers.
Elites are also much more likely to say ‘there’s too much individual freedom in the US’ than voters, especially the politically obsessed elites. Likewise, they favour strict restrictions on private usage of gas, vehicles, meat and electricity. It’s bizarre that 55% oppose non-essential air travel since this class is the most likely to go on overseas holidays, I don’t understand how this works. Anyway, they want restrictions on everything except border security, which they couldn’t care less about. Plebs hold the opposite beliefs.
I was most surprised by how 29% of the elite thinks that China is an ally, compared to 9% of ordinary voters. I would’ve thought the elites were the hawks! Maybe some of them have commercial interests in China or they want to work with China on climate change or they’re ethnically Chinese, anyway this is really odd to me. The hawk faction may be in control but the doves haven’t been totally eviscerated. Does anyone have any explanations or observations on this matter?
35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all! Again, I don’t know the exact definition of cheat but I imagine many more would do something subversive like hold back successful COVID vaccine results until after the election or engage in various procedural manipulations. Edit for an example of what I mean for 'non-cheating' manipulation: https://twitter.com/stevenmackeyman/status/1764876192648499220
I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.
It’s not like it’s hard to close the US border. The US is a global power after all. The US seems to think it can defend Ukraine’s borders against the Russian army from the other side of the world and secure Taiwan’s borders against the PLA, it must be at least 1000x easier to defend the US border against stateless, unarmed mobs. They just don’t care, indeed their energy seems to swing the other way – see the recent US-Texas standoff over barbed wire and the border. The survey said not one respondent cared about the border as a priority, presumably some think immigration is quite a good thing and want more, illegal or otherwise.
On other fronts, we observe these creeping changes – everyone seems to need a college degree if they want to do anything. That’s not the will of the majority but it is what the elite want. You can see these articles that go ‘relax nobody’s coming to take your gas stove’, how they struck down the federal bill. But the state legislation in New York and other cities is proceeding, it’s clear that this is the path that the US is on. Likewise, the disputes over the 2020 election. I'm suspicious but can't prove that the election was rigged, or that Epstein didn't kill himself. Nevertheless, US democracy doesn't seem in very good shape if its elites are so willing to win by fraud.
First here's a map of The Emerging US Mega Regions
The Northeast is the home of America's traditional ruling class. During WWII and after the Great Lakes region was getting rich and powerful. Unfortunately the Great Lakes region (GLR) is in road trip distance of DC and NYC. The North-easterners didn't like seeing them drive up in nice cars throwing money around. They saw them as uppity. So various federal policies were put in place to economically devastate the region.
One of them was encouraging companies to offshore the GLR manufacturing to China. China made sure the Northeast elites got rich off of the deal in various ways.
So the elites see China as a nation of obedient factory workers who know their place and pay tribute to the right people. Things like the 2022 visit to Taiwan by Pelosi were about sending a message to Xi Jinping to stay in line.
Of course that doesn't really line up with China's plans for itself. But admitting that destroying the GLR manufacturing base was a colossal fuck up is too much for most of the elite's egos to handle.
Hawks and Doves is probably the wrong way to think about it. The "Hawks" see China as an economic rival, there's no appetite for violence. The "Doves" are the ones more likely to use military force to keep China in line.
The China threat doesn't really make much sense. China hasn't had any real colonial amibitions throughout its history, and is on the other side of the pacific. China isn't really a threat. A growing China is a large market for American products and the elite don't want to lose that market.
The working class hates China because of wage dumping. The military industrial complex is using the China hate for a military build up that aims to protect the wage dumping that caused the recruits to hate China. Rust belters are joining the marines to take revenge on the Asians for dumping wages by defending a wage dumping chip factory on Taiwan.
A more nationalist policy of bringing industry home doesn't jive well with America as a financial empire. The US can't have real estate speculation as a cornerstone of its economy while being a manufacturing center. If rents for apartments are at extortion levels, there is no way fridges can be manufactured in a major American city. American workers cost a fortune as they require expensive housing, expensive medical care and a car for commuting. Manufacturing toasters is incompatible with an economy built on finance, real estate and insurance.
It is also incompatible with the level of affluence America enjoys in 2024. Chainsaw Al ended American toaster-making around 2000, by which time Sunbeam was an outlier as a surviving onshore manufacturer of low-tech products. The country which reaches 2000-America levels of affluence with a manufacturing-driven economy is Germany, and they don't make toasters.
The "China threat" is that a Chinese attack on Taiwan that either seizes control of TSMC or knocks it offline is catastrophic for the semiconductor supply chain that is a critical dependency for so much of the modern economy, including several of America's most successful companies. If American did make toasters, then they would have chips in, and the American toaster industry would be critically vulnerable to a chip shortage caused by a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
High-end chips are so hard to make that it looks like the world is too small to support a redundant supply chain for them. America is definitely too small to support even a single autarchic chip supply chain.
It doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of billions a year to defend a 30 billion dollar factory. While building a fab is exorbitantly expensive, building a navy to defend it is slower and more expensive.
The Navy isn't there to defend one 30-billion-dollar factory. It's there to defend all the 30-billion-dollar factories, and the capacity to make more of them. Among many other things of course.
The important thing about TSMC is the tradition, not the 30-billion-dollar fabs. The current saga about TSMC seeking exceptions to CHIPS Act Buy American requirements strongly suggests that if America spent 30 billion dollars on a 3nm fab built and run by Americans, they wouldn't end up with a working 3nm fab. And moving the tradition to a non-Chinese-speaking country is hard because of the language barrier - Paul Graham says you could definitely transfer the tradition that makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley by bringing over 10,000 people and you could probably do it with 500 people, but he is thinking about moving it to another English-speaking city. The other problem bringing the tradition to America (although not to a hungry middle-income country like Malaysia) is that America is still too proud to let in 500-10,000 Taiwanese and treat them like authority figures to be learned from - and a political culture dominated by MAGA populism and left-populism optimised as a foil to MAGA populism is even less able to do that.
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Presumably, the thinking of the pro-manufacturing Americans is that the economy can go back to being built on making things as opposed to "number go up."
And while China has never had colonial ambitions, we presently see the tinge of revanchism in their words and deeds. A different flavor, but one that still slides over the tongue in the same way.
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Interesting idea. Reminds me a bit of the plot against Mercia in the UK, how the British government (which I'm sure is all London based) imposed crushing anti-development rules on the North, the traditional heartland of British manufacturing. Officially they wanted to spread out development to other regions, yet I somehow doubt they would've hit London with similar suppression. Sufficient stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
https://unherd.com/2020/09/the-plot-against-mercia/
I recall some of the US negotiators/influential people found young, attractive Chinese girls in their hotel rooms and in interview/later recounts of their lives they said something like 'oh yes I thought it was my natural charisma and charm'. As if balding, fat diplomats are known for their rizz.
This is incorrect. Both conventional wisdom and the linked article say that the government imposed crushing anti-development restrictions on greater Birmingham (which is in the Midlands, not the North) in the false belief that this would benefit the North. These policies worked, in that Birmingham's economy was levelled down to the point where you can now lump the Midlands in with the North and not look like an obvious idiot. The 1950's governments also tried to level down London in the same way (again - click the link), but it only partially succeeded (they did ensure that the population of Greater London fell by 1.5 million between the 1951 census and the 1988 nadir) because office-based knowledge economies can work around building restrictions by repurposing existing space, whereas building-based economies can't. But the success story that is modern London doesn't kick off until Thatcher repeals these kinds of policies.
Loads of definitions of the North include Birmingham and parts of the Midlands, it's above the Severn-Wash Line for instance.
Anti-development restrictions in London weren't as severe as in Birmingham either, which is why 95% of the article talks about Birmingham and it mentions the South East in a single line. It specifically mentions how they banned office development in Birmingham for 20 years - they weren't permitting a knowledge economy or manufacturing. Click the link.
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Both Unherd and some other edgier British columnists (eg j’accuse on Substack) like to focus on this but the most damning impact on British manufacturing wasn’t from this kind of top-down planning, bad as it was, but from inheritance tax policy from the 1949 reforms onward.
While all postwar European social democracies imposed increasingly steep inheritance taxes, almost all had substantial exemptions or special policies for family-owned businesses. Britain alone did not, and so the British equivalent of the German mittelstand businesses of 20-400 employees in (particularly) skilled manufacturing was essentially destroyed, over a generation, by punitive inheritance taxes that didn’t only end long-termist family ownership but also made for low valuations and extreme difficulty raising capital (since bankers knew what was on the horizon), and which inculcated a reverence for and emphasis upon extreme profit-taking that affects British business to this day.
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Worth noting that this is the impact of most environmental regulations- encourage offshoring to countries that don't care means the middle class of your own country shrinks. I recall a similar claim made here in the past about [the wrong sorts of people getting rich] being a contributing factor in why nuclear power is illegal in all the countries that can afford to do it properly, as well.
Unfortunately for the US the Great Lakes region is not sufficiently geographically isolated from the Northeast, so it can't resist a full-scale military invasion even if its regional policymakers were able to see the writing on the wall once Nixon went to China and (totally coincidentally) created the EPA; it's also able to be blockaded by the Northeast since if the NE wanted to they could have a force attacking rebel shipping from the south bank of the St. Lawrence in a couple of days were they so motivated.
If they're deceiving us into thinking they're merely stupid when they're actually malign, they do a good job!
In Australia right now people are getting excited about 'green hydrogen' and 'green steel' to be produced with solar energy. This is to be done in the desert near the iron, where nobody wants to live. Our actual steel industry is at death's door, our car industry is dead, our plastics industry is shutting down due to high energy costs... and these geniuses want to:
The cold civil war against the middle class was over in Western countries 20 years before the losers realized it was even being waged in the first place. The last holdout was arguably Germany, and idiotic environmental policies and politicians (or perhaps those bought and paid for by rich Americans; only France seems to treat environmental NGOs like the Fifth Columnists they are) brought their economy to an end once the US got the war they'd been agitating for (at Germany's direct expense with respect to energy costs, and at America's direct benefit through LNG exports).
I'm sure all that's totally a coincidence though.
The last ~150 years of history make a lot more sense to me when I consider that certain factions never wanted Germany to be a country, period.
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That is a very bold claim.
Seriously. What a wild assertion to drop in like obvious fact.
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