I have been writing about the Sax Pistols and the Strangeloves; the two main competing Cultural Constituencies that dominate politics in the Saxon Axis. Last time I explained how the Sax Pistols were born out of the crisis of the 70’s and developed the radical outsider capitalist ideology that leads directly to Trumpism.
It seems that events have overtaken analysis. In the aftermath of the American Presidential election the Sax Pistols have seized the palace and the Strangeloves have fled to the alleys and the backstreets.
This profile has turned into something of an obituary even while being written. But it might not be wise to kiss off the Stangeloves just yet. Despite many crises in the years since the end of the Second World War they have proven to be both resilient and resourceful and it is doubtful that they are going to let 70 years of effort and planning go without a fight.
The Strangeloves came into existence as a social force on the NW Eurasian continent around 1946, virtually 30 years exactly before the Sax Pistols appeared in the Anglo Saxon world.
To be clear, the Strangeloves could not be regarded as a cultural constituency then, because the shreds of capitalist economics still hung on- albeit in a distorted form. The Strangeloves were the product of military and political dislocation just as the Sax Pistols were the product of economic dislocation three decades later. So both these groupings represent the mutation and change of capitalism -a process of transformation from a nominally political and economic system into an expressly cultural one.
The role of the state in organising and controlling the markets exploded in the years after the Second Germanic War. This is hardly surprising since the state effectively usurped the market and created a full command economy during the conflict. The Strangeloves emerged during this process both as beneficiaries of the state run system and as an elite who saw its purpose to expand the system both to guarantee the survival of Germanic societies and for the benefit of the world in general.
This international element is essential to understanding the central role that immigration plays in Strangelove ideology. It is the repudiation of a German identity that identified both sides in the two Germanic Wars of the C20th. And in contrast, it is the repudiation of Strangelove internationalism, globalism and multi-culturalism that defines the Sax Pistols.
The Strangeloves get their peculiar historical cultural character as Germanic survivors of the C20th wars. Just like the Peter Sellars character they are of dubious morality and character but necessary to the system because of their ‘scientific’ knowledge and planning ability. Their defects can be overlooked in the cause of rebuilding Germanic society.
Both the Strangeloves and the remnants of the ancien regime displaced by war did not foresee was the extent of the success of the planned economy. In the two decades after the Second World War there was a massive redistribution of wealth throughout North Western Eurasia that led to not only to the rebuilding of post war national (sort of), economies but their development and expansion at a level unguessed at.
For example, the efficiencies generated by nationally insured collective health meant that there was a surplus of personal wealth to be spent by ordinary people on discretionary products. This process in health and other fields was the beginning of the so-called consumer society.
Ironically, though often regarded as the golden age of the ‘American dream’, American 50’s consumerism is based not on the free market but on it’s denouement- state control of markets. Just as in NW Eurasia, the North Americans succumbed to a state maintained semi cultural model.
The welfare state was a concession to indigenous Germanic populations and just as importantly, to the international community. This was driven as much by a political cultural imperative as by an economic one. The reason for this is not hard to understand.
The elite of the western world had been discredited by their conduct in the first and second Germanic Wars, both through their incompetence and collaboration with fascistic regimes. So creating an effigy of the market system was always going to be primarily a cultural and political project. It follows that the Strangeloves who administered this system would have to be at least partially, a cultural grouping. Without this insight you cannot understand Keynesianism.
Keynesianism is culture and politics dressed up as economics.
The ubiquity and hegemony of welfare planning went unchallenged until the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s that gave rise to the Sax Pistols. But it is of the utmost importance to emphasise that this was NOT a general crisis but a crisis of the lower middle class and not primarily an economic crisis but in essence a political one.
The precise nature of the crisis was that lower middle class Anglo Saxons were losing their relatively privileged place in society compared to the classes below them. (see previous post on Sax Pistols.).
When the Sax Pistols had split from the consensus, the way was open for an alliance between the liberal elite of society, the very lowest levels of that self same society (including migrants refugees etc) and the Strangeloves. In other words we effectively had the new Saxon middle against both the top and the bottom or the centre against the edges.
And it was at this moment that the Strangeloves mutated fully from a economic cultural entity into a fully cultural one- a Cultural Constituency
You can think of the Sax Pistols as a congealed lump of resentment like a bowling ball falling through the middle of society and the Strangeloves as being like a thousand layers of wet tissue paper surrounding it. The tissue paper can slow the bowling ball down, but can’t stop it. In the end it is going to break free.
Of course this image of the bowling ball and the toilet paper explains the reality of Brexit- England physically leaving the EU.
So what now of the Strangeloves?
I can’t help feeling they are a little like the Romans who were left behind when the Roman Empire fell- sort of here but not here as it were.
The EU is already thinking of offering them a kind of associate membership…..
United States of Everywhere 