The Establishment (1946-2016)

Well it's over. Whatever happens from this point forward, we are certainly in a new era of history.

I was writing as much last year, in anticipation of this, knowing it was about to happen, but now I am only one of many thousands saying these words.

So it is incumbent, if my statement has any meaning at this point, to remind people of what I meant when I first said this, and why I was so sure of it last year and last spring, and why I am so sure of it now.

By Establishment, I mean the international, and eventually global, system of political, financial, and personal relationships that formed the power structure of America, and eventually the world, in the wake of the Allied victory in the Second World War, and which came to dominate the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century, and which became increasingly unstable after the turn of the Millennium.

Moreover, by that term I refer, especially in the early years, to specific nameable individuals who formed the nucleus of power around which this structure was consciously organized and preserved.

This kind of system was unique in human history, and it did not arise spontaneously, but was the fruit of many years of planning by individuals who cooperated to create exactly this kind of power structure. The individual who planned and organized the original birth of the Establishment at the end of World War II were varied in character, but shared many similarities in their philosophies of the world.

Nevertheless, it is fair to assert that the Establishment as it came to exist in the late 1940s, and carried forward for the next seven decades, reflected in large measure the character of the individuals in whose care this system was entrusted by fate and by design.

As I've mentioned before, the Establishment can be described in many ways, but I think without argument one must assert that it was enormously successful. The fact that the second half of the Twentieth Century is regarded as one of American dominance, characterized by a global peace, eventually yielding to a pan-globalist "New World Order" of international cooperation, is the irrefutable proof of the success of the design of the Establishment.

To believe that this all came about by the chaotic zigzags of history is, in my view, one of the ridiculously naive notions that one could hold. Yet this is the view often proffered to the common people. I have friends who assert this. I don't try to correct them. I just nod along as they tell me I'm foolish for saying the things I do. I realize it's very difficult to explain certain things, so usually I don't try. That's what writing is for.

The Establishment failed at this point in history because it could no longer be sustained. The original genius that created it, for whatever combination of good and evil one can ascribe to those people, is long gone. We have been living in the last wave of people who knew the original founders, and who shared the life experiences that formed their vision.

Mostly in recent years the Establishment has been running on sheer inertia, and the cooperation of millions of people simply doing what they see is their duty, their role, their job, to preserve it, even as they can't quite articulate it exactly as that.

But now it is over. The Establishment was not the first "world order," just the first of its type. It won't be the last. It's fall doesn't mean that human nature will change. It doesn't mean that will live automatically in either a dystopia or a utopia.

It just means the Establishment is over, and is never coming back. For some folks, that's a huge trauma.