Inside the Country & Western Civilisation Trojan house was a cabal of obscenely rich Americans that has managed to get so many of the poor working class on their side politically in the United States. .
The Trojan bucking horse of Country & Western Civilisation reared up in Australia in 2026 via One Nation party in the South Australian elections. Inside the Country & Western Civilisation Trojan house was a cabal of obscenely rich Americans that has managed to get so many of the poor working class on their side politically in the United States. They have managed to do this despite the USA’s huge unfair wealth disparity, with the top 1% of households controlling about 35% of wealth; the bottom 50% about 2.5%. That bottom 50% in the US live without services such the universal health care – a common feature of most other Western democracies.
A variation on an old strategy was needed to keep the USA’s working class – poor, unhealthy, uneducated – in check without providing them with civilised services. The strategy was to convince them that, despite their struggles, they were among the chosen ones if they were white, Christian and spoke English – the language, after all, that Jesus spoke: read the Bible, with the Donald Trump version available at $99.99.
The Trump phenomenon itself epitomises the American susceptibility to the P. T. Barnum showbiz/celebrity/guns/church/hamburger/sports syndrome – all the distracting components that add up to the Country & Western Civilisation of the poorer sector of society.
Australia has elements of that Country and Western Civilisation but, thankfully, a better social structure. But that isn’t stopping the rich elite’s push – for all its damn worth or tam worth – to use the Country and Western Civilisation ploy to win over the Aussie battlers and battleaxes and fit them out with MAGA-style baseball caps and trumpface-orange T shirts as One Nation voters.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. The One Nation party, beyond Pauline Hanson, is influenced by one of Australia’s richest tax-hating individuals, Gina Rinehart, a regular guest at Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Largo, the glitzy bad-teste epicentre of the Country & Western Civilisation grift. The “Country & Western Civilisation” concept ties in with the associated banner of “Western Civilisation” being promoted by the more intellectual conservative forces who want a return to the tradition of wealthy elites in charge of society as the natural order.
Mahatma Gandhi, asked by a reporter during a visit to England in the 1930s, “What do you think of Western Civilisation?” reputedly answered: “I think it would be a very good idea”.
At that time, Winston Churchill had no doubt about the supremacy of Western Civilisation as his rallying cry for victory in World War II (aka The Big Replay). Churchill was surprised immediately after the war to be voted out as prime minister. What happened next was one of the great moments that went against the whole traditional notion of civilisation: universal health care was introduced to Britain. This was a moment of turning civilisation from top-down control to meaning a bottom-up civilised better standard of living through a fair sharing of a society’s resources.
The historic pattern of most so-called civilisations was to be run top down by the, unkindly but rightly called, kleptocracies. Even Gandhi’s India was entrenched in the top down by its caste system. Perhaps it’s the natural order for an inbred elite, gathering around the symbolic divinely ordained royal family, to run society’s show.
The version of traditional Western civilisation, touted as superior, was stitched together long ago by the power alliance in symbolic overload of princes and priests. (Witness that vividly in the coronation ceremonies in Westminster Abbey.)
But history shows that Western civilisation is not superior. It’s Western culture that’s superior. This is culture as meaning the whole gamut of elements allowed to bloom in a society. In Western culture, science and technology bloomed to make the whole superior.
Western Enlightenment allows new ideas
Western science and technology owed a debt to Arab science that was galloping along until it was killed off in Baghdad in the 11th Century by an alliance of Muslim priests and prince equivalents.
Western science ironically benefited from the Reformation, breaking the stranglehold of the Catholic Church on controlling knowledge. The church supressed ideas, for prime instance, that the Earth moved around the Sun and also the knowledge and ideas from ancients such as Anaximander, Democritus and Epicurus – instead promoting the more convenient Plato and Aristotle.
From Europe’s 30-years and 100-years wars between Catholics and Protestants came the refuge of the Enlightenment’s reasoned emphasis on the free search for knowledge and ideas that added to building Western culture and proper democracy. For the 21st Century purist carriers of the Western Civilisation argument, the Enlightenment is most hated.
The elites hiding behind “Western Civilisation” were never comfortable with the masses being exposed to uncontrolled new knowledge and ideas from sources such as Shakespeare (even a Bowdlerised version) or the opening of art galleries.
The middle Ages were the golden age of Western Civilisation when everyone knew their place in society. OK, the peasants lived in squalor but, by God, they were happy with the promise of Heaven and tamed by fear of eternal Hellfire.
The Middle Ages were a pre-Protestant era dominated by the holy Roman Catholic church. The Protestant Reformation unleashed the new force of capitalism. The United States of America was forged in a fusion of capitalism, old-time Protestant religion and B.T. Barnum trickery. The USA’s controlling elite, through untethered capitalism, became the likes of Elon Musk whose fortune, it’s been calculated, would take 13,000 years to count. For Musk and his fellow obscenely rich US oligarchs, afraid of ideas that might lead to more bottom-up democratic controls on them and a fairer society, a Country and Western Civilisation suits them just fine.
Abigail Disney, from the USA’s wealthiest families argues in The New Republic for the rich to pay a fairer share of tax.
It’s about class warfair
Highlighting wealth inequality in society is not class warfare but class warfair. As Abigail Disney, herself a millionaire, argued in a recent edition of American magazine, The New Republic, the rich should pay more through a proportionally fairer tax system. The rich have a whole accountancy industry backing their efforts to minimise their tax on income to a level way below that paid by the ordinary wage earner.
Arguments for not making the rich pay their fair share include the supposed benefits of the “trickle down” effect. The rich have taken that literally and only a trickle comes down from on high – and often with a tax dodge.
Enterprising individuals who get off their butts and create benefits for society (as distinct by creating wealth by playing the stock market or lounging on inherited wealth) should be encouraged, treasured and not begrudged their earnings. But that doesn’t excuse those individuals from paying their dues back to the society that enabled their wealth to be created.
The great myth is that individuals achieve their wealthy rank without using the infrastructure of society supported by ordinary taxpayers. But, as Abigail Disney says, the rich become gripped by a psychology of “entitlement, impunity, narcissism, isolation, inability to share power, unwilling to take criticism”. They became the leading critics of government, representing and responding to the needs of the whole of society, for running up a national debt – a debt fuelled by the oligarchs failing to pay their fair share.
The tax-dodging oligarchs are not patriots in avoiding their obligation to the whole society. In contrast, Abigail Disney is an enthusiastic member of a group calling itself the Patriotic Millionaires recognising that, instead of VIP passes, the best parts of life are lived with kindness.
