Merchants of Social Change

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

February 20, 2026

The Seattle Smirk

Lake Washington is Seattle’s Central Park. The refreshing sight of still water shines green for the glitter of houses speckled onto its shores. These properties generally command the highest values of the region, as do those of their Manhattan counterparts. Mount Baker is the name of one such micro, windbreaker-posh lakeside Seattle neighborhood. The inevitable local-chain coffeehouse, an independent bookshop, trattoria, and perhaps a small craft market or deli smugly tucked into plain sight. In a house behind this neighborhood’s Franklin High School a handyman was attempting to connect a water filter to a client’s kitchen tap, one crisp spring evening of 2018. A multi-leveled, fully-detached Seattle Box in the half-million-dollar range. Then. Now swollen into the million, well over a million-dollar category, indubitably. The client, a woman of vixen years, was asked what she did for a living. “I work for a nonprofit,” she boasted. “Oh, so your parents own this house, then?” “Oh, no, no, I bought it last year.” “Huh,” the handyman pondered elliptically. A meta memory of a piece of vocabulary spotted in a graduate school textbook crawled across his mental screen. It was a concept that attempted to frame the NGO/Nonprofit/QUANGO worker as a class of white-collar intendants. Professional indignants, it reminded him of those erstwhile classmates, boastfully dim, with Teflon moral righteousness. A few years on and this cohort has grown wealthy, it seems. Huh.

With a carefully tuned ear one of the few shibboleths the otherwise neutral Seattle accent offers can be discerned. Seattleites use the pronunciation See-ah-t(o)l, instead of See-ah-ttle (bearing some similarity to Chicago’s northside/southside endonymic distinction--Chi-cahhh-go, and Chi-caww-go). Often, a smirk of churlish content accompanies the Seattle local vocalization. A facial expression that has gone global, like most American memes of the last two decades. That glib Mona Lisa dimple is making its way around the country, and beyond, tracking the path of the San Fernando Valley “like” as it penetrated international market English, now the world’s lingua franca. The numismatic tender of American civilizational decay, gold glass medallion of Roman Alexandria. A Batman floodlight broadcasted as the resting smirk face perpetually waxed onto the gob of that mulleted weapons technologist, surnamed so fictionally as to tempt tragedy, the casual food saver and matching happy-hour metaphysics doing a number on reality. But one digresses.

The story here begins in Seattle because this is where liberal cognitive dissonance is visually the most voluptuous. After six penetrative years there, a class of putative liberals, hypocrite to their own lifestyles, was coming into focus. Libertarians who claim liberalism, a sense of reliance on the socially disadvantaged for their own smugness, those who’d rather protest than effect policy, just as loyal to the market, as to social change, the proto virtue signalers who leached the Democratic Party of its moral stuffing. So heavily staged this vintage of contradiction, the Party capsized from within, while Americans scrolled through it all with the muted sensation that characterizes the mediated zeitgeist of the moment. Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest, a highly-subsidized one.

Wealthy liberals have infiltrated the non-profit sector, morphing it into a cartel of zombie organizations brimming with well-paid sinecure positions. These collectives continue to thrive as virtue absolvers, spas that pamper away moral queasiness, the same way pre-modern indulgences were famously issued by the Roman Catholic Church (and still are, in fact) to members of a public who could afford such treatment. (A study of their parallel evolution, by the way, would be a worthy one.) The stage of onset irreversible decay has been reached, with stunning consequences for politics and culture. Cognitive dissonance of the political left has resulted in a gantry-crane platonic overreach such that their opposition has evolved into an impenetrable boomerang, pinning even the deftest pundits of ostensible compassion into a rakestepping Möbius loop. Or at least confined them into this suspended condition for a spell.

One would be remiss to not at least posit a genealogy for such phenomena. The heuristic of which would read: is private takeover of a public remit a marker of natural decay? The idea of nature assumes precedent, of course. So from precedent one can further specify: Is this an historical imperative, which marks the passage of civilizational adolescence, as it were? Or, merely gurgles of an eternal appetite for, perhaps necessary, even, self-destruction? That the field of social progress comes to be commandeered and marketed by and through private interest: is this ineluctable? Your correspondent used to wry about Americans smirking their way into the Parisian psyche of self-satisfaction. Now your correspondent is back in Paris and sees an odd parity brewing.

The Balance

A potential harbinger for modern state breakdown is the proliferation of rent seeking activities, above all activities of the state in its representation of public interest. Post-feudal France, in fact, engineered itself in such a way, as outlined in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and Political Decay. Arguably the western world’s first modern nation-state, France created the blueprint for other aspirants to follow. (Whether a Commonwealth, as the case of England, shares the same features of development as a nation state, can be analyzed, implying the comparative relativity of Roman influence.) The mosaic of France’s progenitor Gallic nations needed yielding mechanisms in order to cohere to the Île de France state apparatus. To this end provincial agents of these nations required incentives to assuage the natural cynicism that accompanies the accession of their local interests to those of a collective center, a single public mandate. A mise en scène, as it happens, of the standard principle-agent problématique. Since the topic of this essay is the decay of American civil society, and France is being propounded as a reference case, one must accurately address the nuanced developmental peculiars that separate France from the United States, nations-state characteristics specific to their respective evolutionary tracks.

The French domain had existed well behind pre-modern times, providing a standing vanguard for a future nation-state project. Therefore, when the peace of Westphalia (the treaties of Osnabruck and Múnster) broke out in 1648, the idea of states being defined by the nations they comprised of now had codification. Monarchical Absolutism in Europe gained impetus from Westphalia, France’s Louis XIV being the oft-cited standard bearer of the age. The US., conversely, is a postmodern nation state from birth. Meaning, its establishment occurred well after Westphalia. So it began, arguably, pre-fabricated as a contract state, in the form of a collection of royal joint stock chartered companies, à la British East India, ready-made as a unity of market-state institutions, expanding territorially much the way Rome did. (Magna Graecia and the development of Rome, vis-à-vis the British Colonies/ United States beckons an exhaustive study.)

The American nation is inextricably linked to its market origins. America is really a market-nation state, or rather a nation born of the collective pursuit of market. Here the genesis of state and nation was concurrent (as much as history provides for concurrency). With France a French nation preceded the modern French state. The French comparison thus provides a clear point of departure, and therefore a useful mold against which our American case can be pressed. With this at hand, one can begin shaking out insights between pre-revolutionary France's nation-state construction, and the filling out of the American state, beginning with the Progressive Era of the fin de siècle leading into contemporary times. Times where one bears witness to its market nation suffering fits of seemingly indulgent, Bacchanalian autophagia, a condition brought on by the metabolizing of a new technology, here social media. The point at which the fuel tank, as it were, our French test case, having provided the thrust for autonomous flight, separates from the spacecraft, is the fulcrum of this essay. To what extent is the American case unique?

The Bureau Cats

When dealing with the decay of anything from an organism to an institution, process efficacy is the most telling metric. Does the process maintain an equilibrium of the energy spent versus the energy yielded? Or, in fact, does the process net an increase in energy? If neither of these is true, one can conclude the loss of energy and therefore a diminution of productive function. If the process carries on in such a manner, a gradual decrease of momentum through space occurs. In biological terms this represents an organism’s life cycle, its homeostatic arc, so to speak. Sociologically, institutions exhibit life cycles as well. At their micro, transactional level, economists can and do employ the concept of negative externalities to track the phenomenon of a process’s loss of vitality. The Coase Theorem within this discipline examines the parameters of transactions to explain the potential externalities they create. Externalities, negative or positive, are considered costs or benefits borne on agents outside the scope of a transaction. The practice of intentionally generating externalities is referred to as rent seeking, which is, effectively, siphoning off energy from a process. In other words, rent seeking is a function of externality par excellence.

Whether it be rent seeking in the sociological sense, or parasitic behavior in the biological, a phenomenological surplus can be deduced as the cause of this condition, and is therefore a logical corollary to the present inquiry. The degree to which this is true is the adjudication of such activity’s moral status. Though enticing, this ancillary topic would be handled more sufficiently at the monograph level, so it won't be focused on here, despite the aroma of this notion sensed throughout the present treatment. For the moment it's important to establish that rent seeking is a phenomenon that spans all levels of transaction, from grassroots micro, to institutionalized macro, behaving consistent with nature. And since nature precedes culture, rent seeking is an eternal feature of existence, a Natural Kind that inevitably finds its way into the Social. Appreciating this as a fact of life is instructive. Its bureaucratic implementation is the starting line here, so the advent of the term itself will be turned to next.

In late 16th century France rente represented the (Catholic Church inspired) statecraft practice of auctioning out public offices, for a regular sum of payments, or “rents"--effectively licenses to perform services on behalf of the government. As an instrument to systematically solve problems of government finance, administrative capital, and nation building, the institution of rente was established by the French state apparatus to cope with a parceled out polity that constituted geographic France as it was coming out of the late medieval period. Policies, at any period in history, it must be understood, don't materialize ex nihilo: they are responses to societal issues. The policy of rente was devised to fill a fiscal gap, and ended up seeing France through, from one epoch to the next. It was a creative solution for a program of nation building and the financing thereof. As a dual administrative instrument, it provided a channel of entry for class citizenship into a developing nation-state. An attractive prospect, as it offered access to a share in state interest, access that constituted the supporting revenue stream for the operation in and of itself. Quite an efficient mechanism, in fact, and highly modern and effective for its time. A sort of pre-modern administrative blockchain.

In Origins, Fukuyama dedicates a full, eponymous, chapter to this period’s hatching of “Rente Seekers”. Again, as a bureaucratic innovation, it reconciled the centralizing forces of nationalism with the feudally fragmented socio-political French landscape, and its attendant vassalage system. The rente system, indeed, shares memetic material with the system it succeeded. Fukuyama so regards it as the defining feature of the epoch, he contextualizes the Ancien Régime as a “Rent-Seeking Society” (pg. 353):

Ancien régime France was an early prototype of what is today called a rent-seeking society. In such a society, the elites spend all their time trying to capture public office in order to secure a rent for themselves--in the French case, a legal claim to a specific revenue stream that could be appropriated for private use.

Even today, the word rente in French translates to “annuity”. A subtle example of a faux amis, the French word aligns with the economic term used in academia because they share an etymology, as opposed to the broader use in commercial English: to be clear, the "rent" in "rent seeking" derives from the institution of the rente.

The right to collect a specific tax was considered a public asset, a commodity for the central authorities to hold and auction in times of fiscal need. Miilitary commands, and, among others, positions in the finance ministry, were also regarded as prime offices, according to Fukuyama. "Government, in other words, was privatized down to its core function, and public offices turned into heritable private property", he furthers. It's perhaps anachronistic to morally assess this period's governance using the public/private dichotomy. This sort of litmus isn't necessarily available to current researchers until the advent of liberal democratic capitalist republics developed in the centuries that followed the period under observation. The concept of venality was used as an intellectual criticism of the practice at the time, the moral contours of public/private as assumed today, though, were still gestating. So, as a contemporaneously conscious moral, it didn't exist. But rather as an ontological fact, it certainly did, of course. Fukuyama doesn't explicitly offer the ontological qualification, but with prejudices adduced here, public/private can be admitted into the present analysis. Incidentally, this provides a fine object example of the historical lag between ontology and ethics.

Interstitial eras of history are those in which aggregates of new human energies present themselves, as outbursts, dispersals, displacements, consolidations, etc. The martial texture of the medieval era was the product of societies finding themselves on the defensive end of persistent raids representing such incursive energies. But as the cloud of this force was exhausting its precipitant capacity in the middle of the second millennium, the epiphenomenological impact of generations of human capital seeding the lands of Western Europe, was that the succeeding genealogies from land and sea eventually stumbled into sociologies they didn't know they were looking for. With this the diaphragm of public interest naturally expanded into a grander polity, with the attendant need for a state apparatus capable and competent enough to administer a thickening relationship between town and country both near and afar. The rente, then, was an effective bridge from the feudal to the pre-modern, from mayors of the palace, to the courtiers, to the intendants (and finally to the beloved functionaries of modern times).

An enlarged polity necessarily implies an expanded administrative portfolio: states don't exist without records of the people and activities within their charge. What's more, the conceptual state is a spiritual thing, a corporate ouija ghost animated through the inclination of its stakeholders. For states are a function of their constituencies, and live and die in the minds of their subjects. (The Spanish participle estado captures this idea well; as does the Computer Science concept of 'executable image'.) In the time period under observation, the modernizing element of "nation" was being injected into the bloodstream of the state matrix. The notion that the interests and identities of its subjects mattered, and, in fact, comprised the state itself. In an inchoate form, these constituency interests were beginning to express themselves through the rente office vehicle, whilst providing the state with manifold intakes of its engine cycle: information (oxygen), and revenue (fuel).

Public and private as moral dimensions of society's administration can take the rente office as a progenitor, and therefore heuristic: without these frames, values of corrupt or honest governance are intractable. Thus the rente is the prototype for what societies with developed governments would use to shape their idea of institutional corruption. At bottom, policy success necessarily generates the forces of mission creep, as any policy implementation creates institutions filled with stakeholders that naturally extend out from the seed issue the policy was meant to solve. The creep of French rentes can be traced to the introduction of the paulette system in 1604, which allowed for rente-holders to convert their offices into heritable property for a fee (Fukuyama, pg. 341), thus committing to posterity both the practice, and the synonymy of rent seeking as a notion of corruption.

It's quite facile to envision that aligning interests in such a way--government offices serving as private security assets--ceteris paribus, orchestrates a tragic conflict of them. There does exist a corporative aspect of the genre of governance this arrangement begets. Though it's difficult to parse from Fukuyama's offering, and would necessitate further significant research. What can be said on the matter presently is that trust is, indeed,the keystone for any corporative system of government. Benefiting from historical hindsight allows for the following qualification: hardcoding outside interest into government institutions doesn't bode well for the stability and efficiency of operations when trust is out there roaming as a master variable. Again Fukuyama, citing Alexis de Tocqueville (pg. 337-338):

Liberty was interpreted as privilege, and the result was a society in which, according to Tocqueville, ‘there were not ten men willing to work together for a common cause’ on the eve of the revolution.

Immortalizing institutions of outside interests into an inheritable commodity loads the horizon with such malignant fracas that, if allowed to atrophy over time, a barn burning on the scale of the French Revolution will be required to untangle it. Myopic policies can result in sclerotic institutions that constrict a society's conduits of discourse, leaving only the most efficient and, incidentally, the most primal form of communication for redress: violence.

Finally, to add further mystery to this tale, there's a delightfully byzantine tautology to unscramble concerning the concept of "liberal". From the Latin liberalis, or "generous", rooted in an absolute ruler granting its subjects more liberties, capital L Liberal as an identity label has come to denote an open posture towards the individual, in the realm of economics for Europe, and the social for the United States. This distinction represents their respective evolutions. As noted in the previous section, the United States is a market-nation state, so it would be redundant, and boring, to hitch an assumed axiom to a superfluous term. Whereas in Europe the subject of public/private as it pertains to economics is still an active issue, an issue that stretches back to, and beyond the ancien régime. At a fundamental level, the poles of conservative and liberal represent those within and without the zone of privilege, respectively. Economic activity as a righteous endeavor, historically-speaking, is a very recent proposition, and as this examination will demonstrate, still not a settled one. In traditional terms, liberals have been the commercial class desiring access to membership into their society's, as it were, nobility, its establishment. As Fukuyama notes about rente office punters (pg. 341), "The single largest source of demand for offices came from the bourgeois members of the Third Estate, who hoped to better their condition through purchase of an official title." The liberal class has always craved prestige and security, for it has never been the supplier of these requirements of the human psyche. Wrapped up within nation building is status granting. This phenomenon is an historical constant.

The social and economic sub-groups of Liberal can be thought of as helices cycling in and out of each other throughout history in a dialectical fashion. The implosion of the Democratic Party in the mid 2010s represents a period of convergence, merchants representing (second-degree) agents of social change. The American case is more modern, and thus more diffused than the French one. Here de facto rente offices were created to represent virtuous public issues private citizens wished to hold a claim to, a certificate of virtue, a moral coat of arms. This was reaching runaway acceleration, before being checked by a populism movement it, in part, provoked. So, being precise about the etymology of Liberal here helps to assess whether this unconscious decay is natural, and how to treat it as a recurring historical malady, as it were. Or not. How far beyond the mission have these rente offices crept? How is this affecting society, culture, and the economy. Cui bono?

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II

The Quango Cats

The Machine Cats

The Baseball Caps

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