It's your fault: How our 'tribes' help create gridlock in Congress … If Congress has danced at the most perilous edges of brinkmanship, we the people helped push them there. We did it by voting lawmakers out of office when they work with the other party to craft legislation but then claiming we want Congress to compromise and seek bipartisan solutions. We're doing it by sending to office those who promise to toe the line and continue the partisanship we say we despise … "We the people do bear responsibility," said CNN senior political analyst David Gergen. "It's often been said we get the government we deserve. The polarization has come in part because the middle has fallen away and engagement has been left to the far right and far left." – CNN

Dominant Social Theme: It is up to you individually to change the direction of the US Empire – with your vote.

Free-Market Analysis: This is one of those definitive articles – a lengthy one – that is obviously meant as a positioning statement for propounding an increasingly important elite dominant social theme having to do with why government CAN work if people are responsible citizens.

The government in question, of course, is the US$3 trillion US Leviathan – as much an empire as a government and run, from our perspective, out of the City of London and elsewhere by a tiny top power elite that could give less than a damn about participative democracy. We'll get to that in a moment.

The main point the article makes – and it is one we make, too – is that individual responsibility is most important. In this case, the individual responsibility that is being touted has to do with making bureaucracy more responsive.

The subdominant social theme is that the right people have to be elected to Congress in order to make the legislative environment less conducive to gridlock and more amendable to bipartisan governing.

Lost in all of this is why a handful of people ought to be making decisions for 300 million to begin with. What seemed logical at the time – representative republicanism – now seems more questionable, given our greater knowledge about how economies work.

Adam Smith had it wrong, as Murray Rothbard pointed out. Wealth does not belong to NATIONS. It belongs to people.

Likewise, there is no reason why people cannot make viable decisions for themselves and their communities without the interference of a vast government hundreds or thousands of miles away.

What Austrian economics shows us clearly is that human action is preferable to coercion and that truly healthy societies allow the Invisible Hand to provide competitive regulation. The United States currently is based on bureaucratic regulation.

The difference is that one coerces via force while the other preferable paradigm involving competition gives people choices about how to conduct their lives and allows them to make their own decisions without overt confiscation of resources or the constant threat of incarceration.

CNN doesn't see it that way, of course. The article is preoccupied with the argument that the current system needs to be actuated by motivated citizens. Here's more:

We [created political dysfunction] by allowing our state legislatures to draw congressional districts that are so starkly red or blue that there's little room for any other hue or viewpoint.

We did it by congregating in neighborhoods and communities with like-minded people who share our views on politics, religion, and social mores and, as a result, largely electing lawmakers who echo those views.

We the people have always tended to live, work, and play with and around people who have similar values. So no matter how many ways you slice many of the nation's neighborhoods into districts, the outcome is the same—homogeny. That's because you can't redistrict social attitudes …

"Given the breakdown of traditional institutions and the traditional ways people mix, how do you govern this new country?" asked Bill Bishop, co-author of "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart."

"How do you create one country out of a country that is becoming increasingly a collection of communities?"

Increasingly, people live in communities that are carefully crafted political echo chambers …Across the nation, people are self-sorting into neighborhoods and cities with likeminded peers, political experts and demographers say.

"We don't think people move to be around others who vote like themselves. They are moving to be around people who are like themselves in every other sort of way," Bishop said.

"Young white people moved to Austin. Young black people moved to Houston, Atlanta and D.C. Every time we looked at a measure on the country level, differences began to appear," Bishop said. "Civic groups became more specialized. Churches began to organize around lifestyles. Lifestyle characteristics began to line up with the vote."

In looking at election data from 1992, 2000 and 2002, political scientists Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt University and Jonathan Weiler of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that places where spanking is more likely to be used to discipline children tend to lean Republican. Areas where timeouts are the norm tend to trend Democrat.

Women in the Northeast who married and started families later in life tended to vote Democrat while their Midwestern peers who got a head start on marriage and family building often voted Republican, Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe found.

… "This is polarization based on choice and self-selection," Bishop said. "Being an adult is accepting lots of different ways of being. We are so unsure of our own identities that we are not as accepting as we could be of people of different identities. In a sense we are getting what we deserve.

We can see so many memes being propounded here. First of all, there is the intimation that Democrats are more inclusive than Republicans (and less violent since they don't spank). This is important because Democrats in the US are seen thematically as socialists while Republicans are seen as more free-market oriented. By emphasizing the utility of diversity, the article makes the case that the more successful party is the socialist one.

And that brings us back to the power elite itself, which is ultimately interested in expanding the power of government. Socialism suits this elite – that evidently and obviously wants to build world government – because it provides more levers of control. The top elites, funded by central banking, utilize government power to reshape the world.

Without an effective government, the mercantilist tool used by the top elites to consolidate their power and steer the world toward global governance would be of little value. And this is why the powers-that-be are so concerned about failing government in the United States, which is the armory of the globalist conspiracy.

We can see in this CNN article how different dominant and subdominant social themes are being marshaled. Government DOES work if people of good will are willing to compromise. But in order to compromise, those who are doing the electing need to become less "tribal."

Everyone needs to compromise a bit and then government will work better.

Lost in this analysis is what kind of government the US has become and who REALLY runs it. The US government is evidently and obviously being run by a tiny, unaccountable clique of impossibly wealthy individuals who inhabit various independent jurisdictions such as the City of London, Washington DC, the Vatican and eventually, Israel.

There is plenty of documented evidence for this conclusion, most of which has arrived on the Internet over the past decade. These individuals, their families and their associates and enablers are constantly using the power of government to advance their goals. Economic ruin, war and regulatory authoritarianism are increasingly the preferred tools in this Internet era.

But the elites also use dominant social themes – scarcity promotions – to frighten middle classes into giving up wealth and power to the aggregate facilities (UN, World Bank, IMF, etc.) that provide the engine for increased centralization.

What we call the Internet Reformation is making these promotions tenuous, indeed, as people are coming to see how manipulated their lives and belief systems really are. The entire 20th century was a kind of directed history and as more people realize this they are less likely to respond to elite memes.

And yet, the elites try desperately to reignite a belief structure that is failing because there is no other tool kit available to them except the infliction of chaos and raw authoritarianism. Those in power are intelligent enough to realize that such approaches are uncertain and even dangerous. Much better to persuade people than overtly force them in a certain direction.

The CNN article can be seen as yet another effort to propagandize for government. In an era where up to 75 percent of all US citizens do not believe in government processes, according to recent polls, we wonder if those creating these promotions really believe in them.

We believe in our paradigm. The Internet Reformation is changing the world, in our view. And repeating that empires are actually responsive to individual initiatives is a kind of non-starter.

Even if people cannot verbalize what is wrong with the concept, they know instinctively that the solution does not match the problem – which is one of individual freedom not government-granted rights.

After Thoughts

If the best the power elite can do is proselytize the virtues of Leviathan by urging people to support regulatory democracy, we would propose that they are running short of ideas. And that's a fraught conclusion, indeed.