In a recent post (“It's Springtime
for Trump and America!”), I speculated that “...we are a deeply
troubled, dysfunctional society on many levels, and that pathology
both percolates up from the citizenry and trickles down and impacts
them in their daily lives.” In other words, there is a vicious
circle at work here – and to try and find the end of that tangled
ball of yarn would be a daunting task. Of course, the adherents of
the “homo economicus” school (of which the current expression is
“It's the economy, stupid!”) would contend that, ultimately,
everyone “votes their pocketbook” (or, I would say, everyone
votes their pocketbook except those few who can afford to do
otherwise) – and that idea has to be qualified by pointing out that
people vote for whatever, or whomever, they think
will most benefit their pocketbook. (According to that model, even
the otherwise ordinary citizen who claims to believe in, and who
supports, communism has his pocketbook in mind above all –
the general welfare being a secondary consideration if it even comes into
play.)
The original pathology of voting in
such a way as to increase one's personal income or standard of living
is two-fold. One is the notion that it's the government's job to
provide, and insure, a certain standard of living for the citizenry.
Needless to say, this idea does not appear anywhere in the
Constitution, unless we take the phrase “promote the general
Welfare” from the Preamble and stretch it way beyond any imaginable
breaking point (which has, of course, been done on a chronic basis
since at least as far back as the New Deal). The second point of
pathology is the oft-overlooked fact that in order for me to have
more, someone else has to make do with less – not that it's always
a zero-sum game, but that at any given time you can't put money into
one person's pocket without taking money out of another person's.
(Simply printing more money is not an exception to this, because that
causes inflation which makes everyone poorer.) But this is generally
considered to be perfectly acceptable – i.e. the substitution of
government coercion (at the point of a gun if need be) for more
traditional charity – to the point where the government is
currently engaged in putting “private” (religiously-based)
charities out of business when they fail to fall into line with
government “guidelines”.
One can even make the claim (as I do)
that the history of modern economics is based on a single central
question – how much in the way of liberties and freedom are we
willing to give up in order to achieve economic leveling, i.e.
economic (and therefore social) Utopia? And if this is true,
then economics simply becomes a subset of politics – the
implementation part, if you will – and, sure enough, this has
clearly been the case, again, since the New Deal if not since the
Progressive Era.
The libertarian, and more especially
the anarcho-libertarian, will contend that government (of any size)
requires some form of taxation (by that or any other name), and that
taxation is theft, simply because it involves the transfer of wealth
from people who neither want nor need government “services” to
those who do want, and do need (assuming there are no alternatives).
This can be seen as an extreme view, “extreme” not being a moral
judgment but simply a way of saying that it's on one end of a scale,
with the other end being totalitarianism (with no private property,
and everything collectivized as much as possible, which means there
is no need for personal income or resources).
I won't, at this point, go into the
question of which of these extremes nonetheless provides a better fit
with human nature, but it's a very interesting issue. But of one
thing you may be quite certain – the opposition or “Resistance”
is populated mainly – I daresay overwhelmingly – by people of a
collectivist mindset, and their behavior says much more about their
totalitarian impulses than it does about their economic
sophistication, sense of history, education, and just about
everything else. We suddenly – seemingly overnight – have a
large part of our citizenry seriously campaigning in favor of
eliminating national boundaries and unlimited immigration – and
those aren't even the “Bernie” supporters, who, basically, want
the government to provide everything to everyone for free (you might
call this totalitarianism with an occasionally smiling face –
“occasionally” being as often as Bernie smiles, which isn't very
often).
Thus we circle around to what is
motivating many of these people – and no, it did not start with
Donald Trump's now-legendary ride down the escalator. (You'd almost
think he could have arranged it so he rode up,
but whatever... ) It started... well, like any “trend”, you can
trace it back as far as you like. “Modern” communism, or
communalism, on a mass scale (as opposed to small, and voluntary,
communities holding everything in common, which have always been with
us) began, in spirit at least, with the French Revolution. The
theoretical underpinnings were supplied by Marx and Engels, and then
the first “experiment” on a national basis was Soviet Russia
(followed soon after by less-successful ventures in Bavaria, Hungary,
and other locales). But at the same time, you had “socialism”,
which is watered-down communism and thus more palatable to the timid
among us, and that got its start in the U.S. with the Progressive
Era, which receded a bit in the 1920s then came back with a vengeance
in the form of the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society, etc., right up
to the present day. (Please note that the “ratcheting effect” of
governmentalization has resulted in a permanent bureaucracy, AKA the
Deep State – and that the vast bulk of most government programs
initiated from the Progressive Era on are still very much with us. It
helps to keep that in mind when budget arguments at the margins flare
up; we're never talking about more than 1% or 2% of the federal
monolith.)
Now, I've often
thought about what an amazingly durable thing national character is.
Russia survived 70+ years of communism and yet Russians are still
Russians. The Chinese are still Chinese even after the cultural
auto-genocide of Maoism, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Red Guard. The minute the iron hand of
totalitarianism is lifted, old ways, customs, and traditions come out
of the woodwork where they have been carefully hidden and preserved,
sometimes for generations.
But can the same
thing be said of America, i.e. of the U.S.? Well, for starters, we
have to think about whether there is, or ever was, an American
“national character”. There are certainly sufficient iconic
quotes, ideas, concepts, and characteristics – and any number of
adjectives – available to constitute a national character or at
least an image of one – or so it would seem. But these
collectively constitute a vision or an ideal... or, let's say, a
shared opinion. And it may have been the opinion of the majority at
one time, but that is clearly no longer the case. Now, every
American iconic word, phrase, or image – if expressed in public or
exposed to public view – is immediately met with argument,
contradiction, hostility, and scorn, and that type of response
extends right up to the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution (the Bill of Rights in particular) – not to mention
the flag and the National Anthem. So among many of the things one
could say, or claim, about the American mindset, “unanimity” is
not among them – nor, I suspect, has it ever been.
And what, after
all, is a national character other than a mindset – not that there
aren't other components (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.), but the
sum total of attitudes about one's nation and one's role in it, about
one's fellow citizens, about the history of the nation and its
significance on the world stage, about its current role in the
world... even about its ultimate fate – this has to be the
foundational aspect of national character if we are really talking
about “nation”, as opposed to race, tribe, or religion.
It's also true that
at the founding, the American national character was not only assumed
to already exist, but was fully expected to override all other
considerations, particularly that of social and economic class. The
irony here was that the Founders were all, or nearly all, landed
gentry, and yet they seemed – on top of a good deal of
self-congratulation – to be including all other classes and
occupations in their vision – merchants, craftsmen, farmers,
hunters, trappers, etc. It was to be a unified America, but with
them in charge, of course – a premise which went unchallenged until
the time of Andrew Jackson.
But did the
non-landed gentry – the non-elite – worry too much about not
having a sufficient “voice” in the running of the country, the
way countless aggrieved minorities do now? It seems that they
didn't, and I suspect it was simply because, one, they did have the
right to vote (never mind, for now, that said right has become more
and more illusory over time), and two, the federal government and its
scope of action was minuscule compared to what it has become.
Somebody one commented that the only time, outside of war, that the
average citizen ever encountered the federal government in earlier
times was at the post office. Now its unavoidable, as the regulatory
state has enabled the government to intrude into every imaginable
aspect of life, and into every nook and cranny of the environment.
The citizenry is now reduced to a life of timidly walking on eggs –
of the legal and regulatory sort as well as the more obvious
political-correctness sort.
Another way of
putting it is that the dreaded “government shutdown” would
probably have been noticed by very few people, say prior to the
Progressive Era; some might have gone months without noticing. Now
it would take about ten seconds. And of course, the collectivists
and totalitarians among us will applaud this fact, and say that this
is the way things should be – “mission accomplished”. But what
on earth it has to do with the intentions of the Founders is anyone's
guess. Their premise – implied if not always spoken – was that
Americans would continue to be self-sufficient... free and
independent within the very broad limits set by the Constitution.
The main threats to this freedom in the first century-plus of our
existence were those caused by war and the early, gradual growth of
what is now called the “warfare state”. This was followed, out
of sheer necessity, by the regulatory state and the taxation state;
if “war is the health of the state” it is also, in the long run,
the death of freedom, independence, and the self-sufficiency of the
citizenry.
It's an interesting
question whether gradual growth of any government is an inevitable
process – one of the iron laws of history – or whether it was
somehow built into the Constitution in our case, or whether it was
(and remains) an inevitable consequence of our national character, or
whether it's a consequence of human nature in general. Arguments can
be made for any or all of these, but right now I'd like to get back
to the development of our own national character (or lack thereof)
and the consequences.
Given that we
started out with a relatively benign class structure with the landed
gentry on top (add rich merchants and shipowners if you like), we
could at least brag that we had lopped off the topmost layer that the
rest of the world was so prone to – namely royalty and rule by
inheritance. (One can quibble about whether our landed gentry were
the American equivalent of European nobility.) And for a while we
could boast a relatively uniform culture – the colonists were,
after all, Englishmen either by inheritance or adoption, and remained
so in many respects even after the Revolution. And of course there
were always minorities of various sorts – Dutch, Catholics, and,
yes, slaves – in the mix. But the great American quilt became more
of a patchwork over time, as it continues to do... and the success of
“assimilation” (AKA the “melting pot”) came more and more
into question. At this point in our history, it would
appear that the melting pot, assuming it ever existed in reality, has
grown cold and is no longer functioning – and that, or course, can
only be bad news for anyone who wants to claim that the “American
national character” still exists in any coherent or significant
way.
That's one major
trend. The other is in what is termed “class consciousness”.
Now, there has always been such a thing as class consciousness; I
consider it a part of human nature for one thing, and for another,
all attempts to eradicate it down through history have been miserable
failures. The most that ever happens is that an old social/economic/political
hierarchy is replaced by a new one.
So in
our case, the first significant eruption, if you will, of class
consciousness was Jacksonian Democracy, if I correctly recall my high
school history. And events from that point on have served to
amplify, diversify, and in many cases aggravate things – to name a
few: Irish immigration in the early 19th
Century, mass immigration from other parts of Europe later in that
same century, industrialization and the rise of unions, concentration
of wealth, communications, technology... and, oh yes, the abolition
of slavery. These have all been fragmenting influences, against
which the ideals of the Founders have been weakened almost to the
point of non-existence in our time.
And
what influences, if any, have been unifying? I can think of only one,
namely war. And this, by the way, is not an insignificant motivation
for governments to go to war – the Regime is well acquainted with
human nature, and knows that nothing unites people, and serves to
mask or put off all other issues, like war. So the increased
frequency of wars in our time, which have now converged into
continuous war (the current term being “the War on Terror", which is designed to be unwinnable),
is no accident; as the nation fragments more day by day along
countless fault lines (race, social class, occupation, geography,
gender, etc.) war is seen as the only reliable counterbalancing force
(although it would appear that it can't keep up with the
fragmentation process – at least not until it becomes much bigger
and more difficult to ignore).
Now, some might
argue that economic crises (depressions, stock market crashes, etc.)
are also unifying forces, and it might seem that way in that everyone
is impacted to some degree (most in a negative way, but some in a
positive way). But in the balance, I think economic crises tend to
bring class distinctions (the doers-to vs. the done-to) into sharper
relief; witness how readily blame for these crises is heaped on not
only government, but also big business, the stock market, and the
banking industry (both national and international) – and deservedly
so, I might add. So no, good economic times might unite to some
extent, but bad economic times can only divide.
So if the fabled,
and fanciful, Great American Melting Pot has run up on the rocks, and
if class consciousness – a most un-democratic impulse – is
growing more with each passing day, does that exhaust the major
trends that we encounter in our search for the elusive American
national character? No – there is at least one more, and I will
term it conditioned helplessness, with the leading edge being the
“snowflakes” who currently infest our college and university
campuses – and who threaten to spread out into society upon
graduation, assuming they don't perish of fright first.
But where does this
pathology come from? – especially if we are carrying the same DNA
as did our forefathers – you know, the brave explorers, colonists,
pioneers, and settlers of song and story who opened up the West and
put the Indians in their place, etc.? Aren't we all pretty much
descendants of a bunch of rugged, bad-ass, no-nonsense ruffians who
found Europe much too stifling and so decided to try their luck in
the uncharted wilderness of America? Even these “snowflakes”
must have a few people with functioning gonads in their background.
What the hell happened?
Well,
one thing can be assumed right off the bat, and that is these sorts
of rugged, early-American attitudes are not
programmed in; they are not part of our DNA. Because if they were,
we wouldn't see the dramatic changes that have occurred in just a few
generations. People respond to their environment, after all – and
if your environment demands that you chop wood, hunt deer, and fight
off Indians... well, you either do it or you perish. And if your
environment demands that you do nothing more than sit on your flabby
butt behind a desk, eat junk food, watch TV, and trudge off to the
polls every couple of years to vote for the corrupt political hack of
your choice... well, you do that. Very few are inclined to rebel
against things as they are, in other words – even if it's the
rebels who get all the attention (and who, occasionally, manage to
change things for the rest of us).
But
if people are so conditioned by their environment (which includes
their upbringing, schooling, choices of entertainment, etc.) then how
do you explain change? How do you explain “progress”? Why
aren't we just all floating lazily in a warm bath of contentment at
all times? It's because – thank goodness – there are a few
rebels in our midst, just as there have always been... and they are
responsible for pretty much anything that changes, either for the
better or for the worse. (Whether their rebelliousness is in their
DNA or is a product of their environment is a good question.) And
you'll notice that in any given society only a certain number of
rebels can be tolerated; there's a sustainability issue here, if you
will. A society with no rebels will eventually sink into the ooze,
and a society with nothing but will self-destruct – so in an odd
kind of way there is an almost Darwinian phenomenon going on here. A
society with the right proportion of “trouble makers” – or
let's say within a certain range – with show a kind of vigor...
restlessness... inquisitiveness. Too little, and you get
stagnation... too much, and you get fragmentation and endless
infighting -- a "Mad Max" world, if you will.
That's
on one level. But these rebels are not content to simply sit around
in coffee houses talking revolution. They hit the streets (and the
airwaves) – they become demagogues, college professors, authors,
movie directors, talk-show hosts, comedians... they use any and all
means of persuasion to awaken the sleeping masses, and they succeed
to some extent – or at least to a sufficient extent to keep the
program going. And you'll notice they all wind up leading a mob of
some sort – a group of, basically, unthinking dullards whom they
have managed to stimulate by appealing to some generally
materialistic, if not explicitly carnal, motives. So yes, the
sleeping masses can be awakened – but not by “ideas”, as is so
often contended by the marketers thereof, but by base motives
disguised
as ideas. Also true – the masses can be put to sleep again through
any number of means... not as readily as they were aroused, but just
as effectively. This is the job of what is called propaganda.
Everyone assumes that “propaganda” is all about rising up and
revolting, but that's just half the story. It can also be about
relaxing and not worrying (“Nothing to see here, folks.”). What
are called the “mainstream media” in this country are currently
engaged in rabble-rousing to a degree not seen since the early days
of World War II, but if you think back to the 1950s they were,
basically, doling out tranquilizers and opioids. They will do, in
short, whatever fits the needs of the Regime. If the populace has to
be aroused from its slumbers, it will be; if it has to be lulled back
to sleep again, it will be. This is Job One for the media, and
always has been. (Someone once commented that “the media are more
snooze than news”.)
So, basically, if it weren't for the rebels of this world, nothing
would ever change. But if they just minded their own business
nothing would change either. They have to become missionaries, in
other words – and it is this missionary work that creates societal
evolution (again, for good or ill). So if you take a broad-brush
look at American history, what have the revolutionaries in our midst
been up to all this time – what have they attempted to do, and
where have they succeeded? Again, we have to go back to the
Progressive Era when, basically, the Constitution was turned on its
head. All of a sudden, it was not that the federal government had
certain strictly delimited rights and functions; now it turned out
that it could do anything it was not expressly forbidden to do –
and that covered quite a bit of ground. And this trend – this
mindset – has continued unabated up to the present day; government
gets bigger not only because the country gets bigger
(population-wise), but because new things keep getting discovered
that – why, of course – the government simply has to get involved
in.
Now – to the libertarian-inclined among us, this is a sad and
dismal trend, and a clear path to serfdom, collectivism, and
totalitarianism. But the populace in general is easily seduced by
notions of cradle-to-grave care, security, entitlements, and free
stuff... and yes, these are the descendants of the hearty pioneers.
Call it human nature, concupiscence, whatever – the Regime has a
way of tapping into the Seven Deadly Sins, Original Sin, and our “sin
nature”, and using them all against us, and it becomes easier with
each passing day to capitulate rather than resist. “Political
correctness” is nothing more than conforming our actions, speech,
and desires to the agenda of the Regime; it has no moral validity
whatsoever. And as government intrudes into even the most trivial
minutiae of our lives, political correctness becomes omnipresent, like
some great suffocating blanket that has descended upon us.
So
we have a classic example of the vicious circle here – take the
“gateway drugs” offered from the Progressive Era through the New
Deal and you create a nation of partly-addicted citizens. Drugs –
even “good” drugs – are habit-forming, and that dependence
leads to a kind of self-assumed and self-imposed helplessness: “I”
am no longer “the master
of my fate and the
captain
of my soul”;
I now depend on the kindness of strangers, like Blanche DuBois. And
– again like the relationship of the junkie to the pusher – this
dependency leads to a demand for higher doses, which the pusher is
only too happy to provide, in exchange for one's freedom, liberty,
and self-respect. So in the long run we wind up with a nation of
slaves – happy slaves, by and large, because the drugs have a
numbing effect – but slaves nonetheless. And because of this
conditioned (over time and many generations) helplessness, we become
easy victims of the Regime and of its propaganda apparatus (AKA the
media).
Every once in a while someone wakes up, like the cow in the Gary
Larson cartoon who hollers to those around her, “Hey, wait a
minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!” But
troublemakers like this are, at the very least, told to hush up
because they're upsetting everyone – and they may wind up on jail
(or in the cow's case, on the barbecue grill).
And at this point, you might say “But, but... what about all the
protests going on every day? Surely those people aren't asleep.”
Oh, but they are – no one ever said that their slumbers were quiet
and untroubled. Their problem is not lack of energy, but total lack
of insight as to who's in charge and who's manipulating and
exploiting them, and using them as pawns. They enjoy freedom of
speech all right, but just try and talk about the Regime and its
activities; no parade permits for you! And no more media coverage, no more
nothing. Consider the total blackout the media imposed on the Ron
Paul presidential campaign, for example. No – rioting, looting,
and burning in the streets are not anti-establishment activities;
they are precisely what the Regime wants, and the more the merrier.
Please note, for instance, that the “antifa” types who are always
in charge of these protests are very disciplined and very methodical.
They are clearly following a well laid-out plan. They are
well-armed. They even wear uniforms! They are inserted into the
midst of every group of “useful idiots” in order to facilitate
things; it's a classic tactic which has been around since the early
days of the anarchists in the 1800s, the Bolsheviks, and the Brown
Shirts. If the mob is the dynamite, then they are the fuse.
Which brings us back to the question that stimulated this post –
what is wrong with these people? Why the hate? Why the vitriol?
Why the raw fear? Why the borderline (or not so borderline)
psychosis? All referring to what is called the “Resistance” to
Donald Trump and his administration, which – amazingly enough –
includes large segments of said administration, particularly the FBI
and the Justice Department (and, I suspect, the State Department as
well). Can it possibly be that the Resistance rose completely
spontaneously “ex nihilo” on the day Trump declared his
candidacy? Of course not – the foundations had been laid for many
generations... the minds of many generations had been brainwashed...
the fears and anxieties had been stoked... the words, catch phrases,
and memes had been drilled into otherwise empty heads. You'll notice
that the dominant feeling tone of the Resistance is not indignation
(although there is plenty of that), or anger (ditto), but fear –
raw, cold sweat-inducing fear. And frankly, when I look at Donald
Trump I don't see a particularly fear-inducing character. I see a
loose cannon of sorts... a bit of a boor... an egotist, for sure...
but also a guy who's pretty damn smart and whose negotiating skills
can put to shame all the “diplomacy” those wimps in the State
Department can come up with. What I see is a winner in many areas of
life who decided there was one thing left to conquer, and dominate,
before he retired – namely the presidency. The presidency was on
his bucket list, in other words! (Frankly, I can think of worse
reasons to run for said sacred office.)
But the point is that, being the ultimate outsider and not by any
stretch a charter member of the Regime, or cabal, or what have you,
he is considered to be an annoyance and a roadblock – someone who
can thwart, at least for a while, the agenda of the globalists, and
who, in particular, can seriously slow down their momentum by
gumming up the works in the U.S., which is clearly the foremost
player on the globalist team (by which I mean the biggest, not the
smartest and not the one in charge). As Hillary said during the
campaign (channeling pretty much any black preacher you can name),
“We've come too far to turn back now.” This was her being a good
and faithful servant of the Regime, not of any oppressed minorities.
She was their mouthpiece – but in that she has plenty of company,
like most of Congress, most of the judiciary, and – once again
amazingly – much of the Trump administration, AKA the “Deep
State”.
So the reaction to Trump was, and is, no more than the Regime plowing
fertile ground – made fertile over the generations by successive
increases in the reach, scope, and power of the federal government
along with a myriad of entitlements designed to placate the citizenry
and make them forget (assuming they were ever conscious of) their
historical/political roots. It is, in the most general sense, a
phenomenon which partakes of fallen human nature – susceptibility
to temptation of the masses, and a lust for power of the ruling
elite. And as such, it has reduced this country to the questionable
status of being pretty much indistinguishable from any other country
or nation or empire, past or present. I have speculated before that
the American Empire is the ultimate – and possibly terminal –
expression of what is termed American Exceptionalism. The seeds of
what is going on now were sown over 100 years ago, but the fatal flaw
in our self-image as a nation has been there from the beginning. It
was supposed to be a secular Utopia, and it did get off to an
impressive start in that respect – but the cracks started forming
early on, the way they will in a poorly-designed and constructed
building. The Civil War should have been a wake-up call, but it
wasn't – and neither have all of the wars we have fought since.
Give this nation credit for depth and durability if you like! And
for the persistent resourcefulness of many of its citizens in the
face of overwhelming temptation from the Welfare State. Our strength
and dominance in the world only makes our decline more pitiable, in a
way – but what empire has ever easily moved off the world stage? I
can think of none, with the possible exception of the British;
everybody else had to be thrown out of wherever they had managed to
set up colonies. We were thrown out of Vietnam, but have managed to
hang on elsewhere – at least so far. But I suspect that those days
are numbered. And frankly, the end of spending more than the rest of
the world combined on “defense” (AKA empire) would be most
welcome – and yet you don't see these street protesters dealing
with that issue, precisely because they are working for the Regime,
and the Regime wants the American Empire to persist as long as
possible, regardless of its moral and economic impact on the American
citizenry.
