Summary: Now, perhaps too late, the threats to the Republic become clear and can be simply stated. Will this paralyze us with terror, or spark us into action?
“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”
— Preface to Philosophy of Rightby G.W.F. Hegel (1820).
Politics is the key to understanding our peril
“The state is the soul writ large.”
— Plato in The Republic. To understand a people, begin with their politics.
Large elements of the American public have adopted politics inimical to the American Republic. They are concentrated in the Left, the Right, and the leaders of the Republican Party. Their combined efforts can destroy it, if not stopped soon.
Leaders of the Democratic Party have been the balanced core of America since Bill Clinton brought them to power. But they are losing control of their Party, as they did the 1970s. If that happens, which seems likely, American politics will become fully dysfunctional. Like a team of horses running wild while the driver drinks and watches TV. We will plunge into a situation much like the last days of the Roman Republic.
The Left awakes and finds the formula for victory
“The worse, the better.”
— One of the most powerful revolutionary insights, ever. Attributed to the Russian revolutionary socialist, Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1928 – 1889).
The Left in the West has often adopted revolutionary goals. Its current incarnation in the US has adopted methods and goals that are revolutionary, but few have explicitly acknowledged this.
For generations, Leftists in the educational system – first at universities, now increasingly in grade schools – have taught that the American project is illegitimate, and has been since the Founding. They focus on its racism, sexism, treatment of native Americans, imperialism, homophobia, and class structure. They project their hatred onto their foes, describing Republicans as seeking genocide, camps for Leftists, etc.
Leftists have fanned the fires most feared by the Founders: factionalism. They have fragmented the American people by race and gender, encouraging hatred among the shards. New goals, such as for reparations, will lead to further alienation and strife.
Leftists have pushed for generations to open the borders to people from very different cultures, often with radically different values. They have combined this advocacy of multiculturalism. The increasingly large numbers overwhelm our ability to assimilate them; their hostility to formal and informal methods of assimilation make it even more difficult (e.g., bilingualism, inevitably leading to a fractured society). The growth of a migrant underclass (more hostile to America with each subsequent generation) becomes another reason to condemn America, and provides both voters and activists.
Terrifying visions of apocalyptic climate change – with little support from the IPCC or major climate agencies – provides fear to supercharges their followers.
Our Plutocrats build a new America
The Republican Party’s leadership has become agents of the 1%, harnessing the Right as a team of useful idiots. When in power, they focus laser-like on tax-cuts for the rich, attacking unions, de-regulating corporations (e.g., allowing mega-mergers, exploitation of employees, and freedom to pollute). Trump is the classic example. He ran as a populist, promising to rein in our mad foreign wars, rebuild America, build a wall, and replace ObamaCare with something better. Instead we got the standard GOP playbook. Bob Dole with exciting tweets.
The Right has rediscovered it Confederate past (love of plutocracy, opposition to the Federal government and individual rights) , and worked to delegitimize the Republic. Taxation is theft. Most of the government’s growth since 1900 is unconstitutional. See “Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America“ by Sara Robinson at AlterNet. Libertarians say that the very concept of the Republic is illegitimate, assuming Heinlein’s fun story The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Now the game changes, as our plutocrats see our weakness. They have regained the much of the power they held during the Gilded Age, before the reforms of the progressive age and New Deal. Now they lay the foundation to gain even more power. One node of the plutocrats’ power is Silicon Valley, where the 1%’s dreams of power flower undisturbed – as described in this detailed and frightening essay by Corey Pein in the Baffler: “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich“. He examines the roots of Silicon Valley’s magnates’ belief in their unique fitness to rule America.
“It is clear that {Peter} Thiel sees corporations as the governments of the future and capitalists such as himself as the kings, and it is also clear that this is a shockingly common view in Thiel’s cohort.”
For more about this “Dark Enlightenment” see the articles by Curtis Yarvin (writing as Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land collected at this website. Intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan provide a philosophical gloss to the 1%’s lust for power: “Democracies end when they are too democratic” in New York magazine – “And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.”
“It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age – especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.”
In America even plutocrats need a legal justification to build a tyranny. Eric Posner (Prof Law, U Chicago; bio here) and Adrian Vermeule (Prof Law, Harvard) have obliged, with a book explaining that the Republic has died, and they are OK with that: Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. You can download the first chapter at Amazon. Summary: it’s necessary, it’s inevitable, it’s necessary, it’s inevitable. Here is Posner’s summary (from the Volokh Conspiracy) …
The book argues that the Madisonian system of separation of powers has eroded beyond recognition and been replaced with a system of executive primacy (which others have called the “imperial presidency”) in which Congress and the courts play only a marginal role. Most scholars who have recognized this development have called for a return to the Madisonian system, but we believe that the rise of the executive has resulted from a recognition among political elites that only a powerful executive can address the economic and security challenges of modern times.
The first casualty of their collision
“… the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
— George Washington’s First Inaugural Address (1789).
The Founders put their faith in the American people to run and defend the Republic. There is nobody else. No second line of defense. No winged saviors from the sky, no superheroes to protect us. The political machinery bequeathed us by the Founders remains rusted but decisive, needing only our work to set it in motion. Here are scores of ideas about how to begin. But let us resolve that, should we decided to remain passive and apathetic, let’s not whine about the outcome. Lie still and think of the America-that-once-was.
“Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Dr. Franklin ‘What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic, if you can keep it’ replied the Doctor.”
— Entry of 18 September 1787 in the Papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1887 (signed the Constitution, our 3rd Secretary of War, and namesake of Fort McHenry).
Other posts in this series
- Important: A 4th of July reminder that America is ours to keep – or to lose!
- Fear the rise of political violence in America. We can still stop it.
- America abandons the ideals that made us great.
- Visions of America if the Left wins.
- The Left goes full open borders, changing America forever.
- The key insight: the Left hates America and will destroy it.
- The Democrats will own America. Their past will sink them.
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Let’s learn from other’s tragedies.
Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933:
Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War.
By Dirk Schumann.
It can happen here. From the publisher …
“The Prussian province of Saxony – where the Communist uprising of March 1921 took place and two Combat Leagues were founded – is widely recognized as a politically important region in this period of German history. Using a case study of this socially diverse province, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of political violence in Weimar Germany with particular emphasis on the political culture from which it emerged. It refutes both the claim that the Bolshevik revolution was the prime cause of violence, and the argument that the First World War’s all-encompassing “brutalization” doomed post-1918 German political life from the very beginning.
“The study thus contributes to a view of the Weimar Republic as a state in severe crisis but with alternatives to the Nazi takeover.”
