In pondering the current scene, I’ve started to think of our society as one that has been colonized.  Culturally colonized at a minimum, and in some sense/to some degree politically colonized.    Consider:

America today has two cultures (let’s leave aside the innumerable micro- and sub- cultures that characterize any large society).  There is, to borrow a term from our Native American friends, a dominant culture, and what I will call a remnant culture.

The dominant culture is the one that infests our education system in particular (more on that in a moment) and is widely held by members of our ruling class.  You all know it, as it is impossible to avoid.  It is the worldview that believes in (to use its terms) anti-racism, ESG, the mutability of identity and especially sexual identity, cultural relativism, the inherent toxicity of men, the whole bundle of beliefs that Right-Thinking People™ share.  It has a certain quasi-religious flavor, most on display in the millenarian belief in pending ecological/climate catastrophe.  Our Romanian friend did a nice job of summarizing the dominant culture belief system recently.

Remnant culture is, tautologically, the culture that it replaced.  I find it hard to describe, like a fish trying to describe water.  I suspect cultures are best described from outside.

In a typical act of projection, the dominant culture accuses the remnant culture of imperialism, when I can find no better example of cultural imperialism than the rise (and especially enforcement) of the dominant culture.

Why do I think of the rise of this dominant culture as a colonial event?  The dominant culture is, at its root, neo(?) crypto(?) Marxist and collectivist, in sharp contrast to the remnant culture.  This Marxist culture was imported, not an evolution of the remnant culture.   Marxism itself, of course, is European, and the roots of the dominant culture run especially to a group of Marxists known as the Frankfurt School.

What’s more, the spread of this culture in America was very much a conscious project (and not an organic evolution of the remnant culture).  It was always opposed to the remnant culture and was intentionally driven by its proponents to displace the remnant culture, as one would expect from imperialists.  It has been supported, financially and otherwise, by foreign countries – prominently Russia and China, both at least nominally Marxist countries.

So, the dominant culture is foreign in origin and propagated to replace the remnant culture.  So, it’s no surprise that the dominant culture has done two things that imperialists do.  First, it proselytizes the young through the education system.  America (and Canada) famously did this with their Indian school system, which were instituted to turn Indians into, well, not-Indians by prohibiting the use of native languages, ignoring or deprecating native history and religion, promoting the dominant culture of the time, and turbocharging this by separating children from their families.

The current education system in America does all these things.  Language is under assault, history is re-written, religion is deprecated, the family is under attack with educrats openly seizing power over children from parents, and the new dominant culture is relentlessly propagandized, even at the expense of basic skills.

Second, the dominant culture is ripping out American history by its roots.  Historical figures are slandered and/or erased, statues and artwork are destroyed, and American history is recast as a parade of evils, which the dominant culture will (somehow) redeem.  This is also the behavior of conquerors.

The rather shocking speed with which this dominant culture has risen from a set of fringe beliefs only reinforces my impression of it as colonial and imperialist, something imposed on the primitive natives.  The ruling class’s view of remnant America as backwards primitives, bitterly clinging to their remnant culture, is yet another point in favor of America as a colonized society, as this is how imperialists view the natives.

Which brings us to our ruling class.  As is typical of imperialists, the ruling class is increasingly closed and self-referential to the point of nepotism.  We’ve all marveled at how all the players in the government, the media, academia, etc. have innumerable cross-connections – family, business, social.  And they rely on these connections to ensure their continued wealth and status, regardless of how poorly they actually perform or what damage they do.  Political dynasties have become commonplace.  As has the use of political power to enrich family and hangers-on.  Pretty much how imperialists act in their colonies, and quite foreign to the remnant culture.

They view America, not as their home, a place to be nurtured and strengthened, but as a place to exploit.  They devote themselves mostly to extracting wealth, not creating it, via the financialization of everything and massive government spending on, mostly, themselves.  They are increasingly internationalists/globalists, who view themselves less as Americans, but as wealthy and sophisticated urbanites most at home with their fellow globalists regardless of origin or place.  Many of them are as much Davosians as Americans.   Their indifference to the flood of foreigners crossing the southern border is of a piece with this – they don’t really view themselves as Americans, don’t attach much value to being an American, and so see little reason to care that many Americans object to unlimited immigration or the erasure of American as an identity.

What political conflict we see in the halls of power is mostly intra-(uni)party maneuvering, with hot button issues generally used as a tool for fundraising and distracting the natives.  They are not answerable, as colonial rulers never are, to the natives.  Elections, even if not fixed, rarely disturb the ruling class as such.  As one would expect in a colony, the natives are mostly irrelevant to the course of political events.

The biggest difference between classic colonization and what has happened to America is that, while the dominant culture is an import, the ruling class is still home-grown, although increasingly non-, if not un-, American in any meaningful sense.

With all that in mind, ask yourself this:  If America were colonized by a new ruling class with a new dominant culture, what would be different?