Monday, October 31, 2022
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Monday, October 17, 2022
Salvador Dali's "Evolution of Neo-Liberal Globalism"
From:
To:
 |
To Today:
Perhaps it's Time to Start Over:
...but first we may need to examine a few eggs.
...and then tragically "choose" which one's to break and which to give birth to.
Then put them ALL into a Museum:
So that others may learn to one day, do likewise"
Rene Magritte, "The Flowers of the Abyss"
Saturday, October 15, 2022
Friday, October 14, 2022
Attention Harford County Voters...
The 2022 Gubernatorial Election
Voter Registration DeadlineThe deadline to register to vote is Tuesday, October 18, 2022 by 5 pm.Register to vote today!
Vote By Mail BallotIf you want to vote by mail you must complete an application. An updated application will be posted in the coming months.
If you want your ballot mailed to you: you must return the application by November 1, 2022 at 8 pm (or 11:59 pm by fax or online).
If you want your ballot in person: Applications can be returned, at our office, until November 8, 2022 at 8 pm (Election Day).
Early VotingEarly Voting will run from Thursday, October 27 through Thursday, November 3, 2022 from 7 am to 8 pm.
Early Voting sites are TBD.
Election DayElection Day is Tuesday, November 8, 2022 from 7 am to 8 pm.
How it Ends...
Slavoj Zizek, "'Goodbye Lenin' in Ukraine: accept it, leftists, Putin is a conservative nationalist"
At a press conference on February 7, 2022, Putin noted that the Ukrainian government did not like the Minsk Agreements and then added: "Whether you like it or not, it's your duty, my beauty." The saying has well-known sexual connotations: Putin seemed to be quoting 'Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin', from Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mould: "Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crawled and fucked her. Whether I like it or not, my beauty sleeps." Although the Kremlin press representative claimed that Putin was referring to an ancient folkloric expression, the reference to Ukraine as the object of necrophilia and rape is clear.
транслитерация
Monday, October 10, 2022
Signs of Britches WAY Too Big?
Laissez-faire economics in the US is slowly being replaced by a more intensive policy focus from start to finis
Over 40 years ago, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was born. Taxes were slashed. Unions were squashed. Markets were deregulated and global capital unleashed. But economic pendulums swing. And over the last couple of weeks, it’s become quite clear that anything remotely related to trickle-down theory is now political Kryptonite.
The most obvious example is, of course, the backlash against UK prime minister Liz Truss’s bizarre plan to lower taxes on the rich after announcing major spending on energy subsidies. Trussonomics is now off the table, and the prime minister’s own leadership is in jeopardy.
But it’s not only the UK that is facing the downhill slope of neoliberalism. I recently met a senior Biden administration official who told me that many chief executives are now coming to Washington and asking for “a signal from government — where should we invest? Should we be in Vietnam or Mexico? Which sectors do you want us in?”
While the government isn’t yet in the business of picking winners and losers, the White House has already made the shift to a post-neoliberal era — and many in the business community are preparing for it as well. CEOs may not like the idea of a deglobalising world with more regulation, greater state control and growing labour power. But they can usually find a way to make money as long as they understand the rules of the market.
So what are the new rules? The Biden administration recently put out a clear blueprint of the economy it wants, which included five key elements. One is empowering workers, which it has endeavoured to do by using federal budgets to support unionised labour. Another is leveraging as much fiscal policy as is possible in a polarised Congress to bolster working families in areas such as healthcare and childcare, which are increasingly unaffordable for many Americans.
But as commerce secretary Gina Raimondo put it to me a few months ago, government should be about more than just cutting taxes and redistributing wealth. This administration wants to play a bigger role in directing the supply side of the private sector. In particular, it wants to encourage the making of things, not just via the push to “Buy American”, but through a more fundamental shift in policy focus from distribution to production.
That means industrial policy. And while there isn’t yet a fully articulated strategy in Washington, there are clear signs that laissez-faire economics is over.
One of these is the fact that many companies will soon have to choose between the US and China. Formal decoupling between the two countries is gaining steam — there are a record number of American jobs being reshored from China, and calls for stricter rules on technology transfers.
Another is that resilience and redundancy in crucial supply chains is becoming ever more important. Just a few days ago, Micron became the second big business (after Intel) to announce a major semiconductor investment in the US, putting $100bn into a new foundry in upstate New York.
Federal investment in electric vehicles is also bringing new jobs to beleaguered parts of the South and Midwest. While the strong dollar may become a headwind to the administration’s hopes of growing a larger manufacturing and export economy, the lower cost of energy inputs in the US relative to Europe at the moment is a tailwind.
Support for economic “patriotism” is now the operating principle on both sides of the political divide in Washington. Robert Lighthizer, former US trade representative under Donald Trump, was famously a fan of getting rid of America’s trade deficit. But recently, Democratic California congressman Ro Khanna — a rising figure in progressive circles — called for the same thing, advocating that the US achieve a trade surplus with the rest of the world by 2035.
As Khanna put it, “Trade deficits some years are fine, when balanced by trade surpluses in other years. But the country has been in constant trade deficit since 1975”. He believes that the government should help rectify this by offering zero-interest loans for factories, and increased use of federal purchasing to underwrite markets.
I heard Khanna speak last week at the launch of “Reimagining the Economy”, a Harvard Kennedy School initiative led by economists Dani Rodrik and Gordon Hanson. It aims to replace neoliberal policy paradigms with something new and is one of several such programmes at major universities around the US. Many of these institutions are vying to become the epicentre of fresh economic thinking, just as the University of Chicago was the epicentre of neoliberalism.
Khanna summed up the challenge of the moment: “If we can’t get the economy right, we won’t have a multiracial democracy.” That phrasing itself represents something new — in the past, the conversations between racial equity and class inequality in the US have been separated. But Democrats are increasingly trying to link the two together, as they work to find the contours of a post-neoliberal economics.
That was the topic of another big shindig last week, sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute, in which progressive politicos (many from within the administration) gathered to discuss the details of America’s industrial policy. While these aren’t completely clear yet, one thing is — all of this is the opposite of trickle-down.
Saturday, October 8, 2022
Madness & Insanity Escalate....
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According to Russian news agency Tass, an explosion occurred in early Saturday morning on one of Putin’s prestige projects and Europe’s longest bridge, which connects Russia and Crimea.
“An object believed to be a fuel storage tank has caught fire on the Crimean Bridge, but the viaduct’s navigable arches sustained no damage, an aide to the head of Crimea, Oleg Kryuchkov, said on Saturday,” according to the news outlet.
According to preliminary information, a fuel storage tank is on fire… Navigable arches were not damaged. It is too early to speak about causes and consequences. Work to extinguish the blaze is underway,” Kryuchkov wrote in his Telegram channel.
Crimean Bridge, also known as Kerch Strait Bridge or Kerch Bridge, is a pair of parallel bridges, one road, one rail, spanning the Kerch Strait between the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar Krai in Russia and the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea in Ukraine.
After annexing Crimea at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia built the bridge. It is the longest bridge ever constructed in Russia, at 19 kilometers (12 miles), and the longest bridge in all of Europe.
Besides transportation, Russia’s motivation for building the bridge was to legitimize its territorial claims in Crimea.
The Guardian reported:Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke, and one half of the parallel road bridge collapsed into the Kerch Strait.According to Telegraph, Russia’s investigative committee said it had “initiated a criminal case in connection with the incident on the Crimean bridge,” adding that “a truck was blown up.”
The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place before 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge.
It was not immediately clear what caused it, however Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, appeared to suggest Kyiv’s responsibility, tweeting: “Crimea, the bridge, the beginning. Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything belonging to the Russian occupation must be expelled.”
Damage to the road section of the bridge showed the carriageway appeared to have been cleanly severed with no obvious sign of a missile strike in the first images to emerge, leading some to suggest the attack on the bridge might have been a spectacular act of of sabotage.
“Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee says a truck bomb caused seven railway cars carrying fuel to catch fire, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.” The committee didn’t immediately apportion blame,” the outlet reported.
BREAKING: Surveillance video shows massive explosion on the Crimean Bridge pic.twitter.com/jo3yZK3L0I
— BNO News (@BNONews) October 8, 2022
Closer look at the collapsed road span of the Crimean bridge pic.twitter.com/ZW1OOAKdns
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 8, 2022
Footage reportedly of the explosion that hit the Crimean Bridge pic.twitter.com/qQR6nhsb6B
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 8, 2022
Thursday, October 6, 2022
Entryism and the University
Isn't it strange that some of the smartest people in our society are socialists?
Albert Einstein was no dummy; if there were a contest for the brainiest man who ever lived, he might be not only a contender, but the winner. Noam Chomsky made important contributions to linguistics; he didn't just limit himself to parsing sentences. Bernie Sanders is an intelligent man. You don't get to be a U.S. senator if you have nothing at all upstairs.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the list of very bright individuals who are lefties, many of whom have made important contributions to science and mathematics. Others include Stephen Jay Gould, Peter Kropotkin, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, John Rawls, and Bertrand Russell.
In addition to mentioning specific names, the case that the "best and brightest" of us are oriented in a socialist direction can also be made in a macro manner. Although no evidence is available to demonstrate this, it is reasonable to speculate that the educational credentials (e.g., Ph.D.s) of people in the blue and coastal states are higher than those in the red states. (Apart from the University of Chicago, most of our prestigious universities are located on our two coasts). Ashkenazi Jews have the reputation of being very smart, yet they overwhelmingly vote Democrat. It is quite possible that university professors, particularly at the elite schools; journalists; and clergy are more credentialed on average than plumbers, carpenters, and mechanics — and are also much more likely to be in thrall to socialist nostrums.
Even economists, economics being one of the most free-enterprise disciplines in the academy, are biased in a leftward direction, albeit to a lesser degree than their colleagues in sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and black-queer-feminist "studies."
This is more than passing curious because whenever socialism has been tried, it has been a dismal failure — not only economically, but also in terms of the number of innocent people killed. This stretches all the way from the national socialism of Hitler and the Nazis to the international socialism of communists Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. In addition, we have on record two examples that constitute almost double-blind controlled experiments testing this claim: East and West Germany, North and South Korea. These peoples had in common the same two languages, cultures, histories, presumably intelligence levels. They were alike in any other dimension anyone would care to mention. They were separated solely by an adventitious act of war. One member of each of these pairs adopted a communist economic system, the other something more akin to capitalism. The subsequent migration patterns told the tale: virtually no one was trying to get into East Germany or North Korea. The traffic was almost entirely in the other directions, despite the mortal risk.
How can we explain this pattern? Hayek accounts for this correlation because the very intelligent people who favor laissez-faire capitalism have more opportunities outside academia, in the corporate and financial worlds. But this explains only why universities are leftist playgrounds. It ignores the fact that businesses, too, are now overrun by the politically correct. Schumpeter's explanation is that this imbalance stems from the fact that intellectuals have little or no business experience. This account, too, is vulnerable to the objection that the modern-day corporate world is now also a bastion of lefties.
Other elucidations include government subsidies for higher education: the G.I. bill; massive student "loans"; the fact that even private colleges attain immense funding, let alone the public ones; the alphabet soup of government agencies that hire highly credentialled college graduates, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USDA, the Federal Reserve System, etc. But what explains this system in the first place?
In my view, each of these explanations uncovers a part of the truth. However, I see Milton Friedman's contribution as one of the best. He claimed that the rise of leftism at universities stemmed from the U.S. policy during Vietnam war of exempting people in college from the draft. Leftists took advantage of this program to a far greater degree than rightists, and the former are now the leaders not only of academia, but of almost all of our more influential institutions. And why, in turn, was this policy instituted? It may well be that this was almost accidental and non-ideological — merely support for education per se.
I am tempted to say that these socialist intellectuals are "too smart for their own good." But this is not quite true. Their leaders, at least, make out like bandits compared to how they would prosper in a purely free-enterprise system.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Qui Bene?
Pepe Escobar, "Who profits from Pipeline Terror?"
Secret talks between Russia and Germany to resolve their Nord Stream 1 and 2 issues had to be averted at any cost
The War of Economic Corridors has entered incandescent, uncharted territory: Pipeline Terror.
A sophisticated military operation – that required exhaustive planning, possibly involving several actors – blew up four separate sections of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) gas pipelines this week in the shallow waters of the Danish straits, in the Baltic Sea, near the island of Bornholm.
Swedish seismologists estimated that the power of the explosions may have reached the equivalent of up to 700 kg of TNT. Both NS and NS2, near the strong currents around Borholm, are placed at the bottom of the sea at a depth of 60 meters.
The pipes are built with steel reinforced concrete, able to withstand impact from aircraft carrier anchors, and are basically indestructible without serious explosive charges. The operation – causing two leaks near Sweden and two near Denmark – would have to be carried out by modified underwater drones.
Every crime implies motive. The Russian government wanted – at least up to the sabotage – to sell oil and natural gas to the EU. The notion that Russian intel would destroy Gazprom pipelines is beyond ludicrous. All they had to do was to turn off the valves. NS2 was not even operational, based on a political decision from Berlin. The gas flow in NS was hampered by western sanctions. Moreover, such an act would imply Moscow losing key strategic leverage over the EU.
Diplomatic sources confirm that Berlin and Moscow were involved in a secret negotiation to solve both the NS and NS2 issues. So they had to be stopped – no holds barred. Geopolitically, the entity that had the motive to halt a deal holds anathema a possible alliance in the horizon between Germany, Russia, and China.
Whodunnit?
The possibility of an “impartial” investigation of such a monumental act of sabotage – coordinated by NATO, no less – is negligible. Fragments of the explosives/underwater drones used for the operation will certainly be found, but the evidence may be tampered with. Atlanticist fingers are already blaming Russia. That leaves us with plausible working hypotheses.
This hypothesis is eminently sound and looks to be based on information from Russian intelligence sources. Of course, Moscow already has a pretty good idea of what happened (satellites and electronic monitoring working 24/7), but they won’t make it public.
The hypothesis focuses on the Polish Navy and Special Forces as the physical perpetrators (quite plausible; the report offers very good internal details), American planning and technical support (extra plausible), and aid by the Danish and Swedish militaries (inevitable, considering this was very close to their territorial waters, even if it took place in international waters).
The hypothesis perfectly ties in with a conversation with a top German intelligence source, who told The Cradle that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or German intelligence) was “furious” because “they were not in the loop.”
Of course not. If the hypothesis is correct, this was a glaringly anti-German operation, carrying the potential of metastasizing into an intra-NATO war.
The much-quoted NATO Article 5 – ‘an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us’ – obviously does not say anything about a NATO-on-NATO attack. After the pipeline punctures, NATO issued a meek statement “believing” what happened was sabotage and will “respond” to any deliberate attack on its critical infrastructure. NS and NS2, incidentally, are not part of NATO’s infrastructure.
The whole operation had to be approved by Americans, and deployed under their Divide and Rule trademark. “Americans” in this case means the Neo-conservatives and Neo-liberals running the government machinery in Washington, behind the senile teleprompter reader.
This is a declaration of war against Germany and against businesses and citizens of the EU – not against the Kafkaesque Eurocrat machine in Brussels. Don’t be mistaken: NATO runs Brussels, not European Commission (EC) head and rabid Russophobe Ursula von der Leyen, who’s just a lowly handmaiden for finance capitalism.
It’s no wonder the Germans are absolutely mum; no one from the German government, so far, has said anything substantial.
The Polish corridor
By now, assorted chattering classes are aware of former Polish Defense Minister and current MEP Radek Sirkorski’s tweet: “Thank you, USA.” But why would puny Poland be on the forefront? There’s atavic Russophobia, a number of very convoluted internal political reasons, but most of all, a concerted plan to attack Germany built on pent up resentment – including new demands for WWII reparations.
The Poles, moreover, are terrified that with Russia’s partial mobilization, and the new phase of the Special Military Operation (SMO) – soon to be transformed into a Counter-Terrorism Operation (CTO) – the Ukrainian battlefield will move westward. Ukrainian electric light and heating will most certainly be smashed. Millions of new refugees in western Ukraine will attempt to cross to Poland.
At the same time there’s a sense of “victory” represented by the partial opening of the Baltic Pipe in northwest Poland – almost simultaneously with the sabotage.
Talk about timing. Baltic Pipe will carry gas from Norway to Poland via Denmark. The maximum capacity is only 10 billion cubic meters, which happens to be ten times less than the volume supplied by NS and NS2. So Baltic Pipe may be enough for Poland, but carries no value for other EU customers.
Meanwhile, the fog of war gets thicker by the minute. It has already been documented that US helicopters were overflying the sabotage nodes only a few days ago; that a UK “research” vessel was loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; that NATO tweeted about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage. Not to mention that Der Spiegel published a startling report headlined “CIA warned German government against attacks on Baltic Sea pipelines,” possibly a clever play for plausible deniability.
The Russian Foreign Ministry was sharp as a razor: “The incident took place in an area controlled by American intelligence.” The White House was forced to “clarify” that President Joe Biden – in a February video that has gone viral – did not promise to destroy NS2; he promised to “not allow” it to work. The US State Department declared that the idea the US was involved is “preposterous.”
Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades...then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022
Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since...the project is in Germany's control?"
Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC
It was up to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to offer a good dose of reality: the damage to the pipelines posed a “big problem” for Russia, essentially losing its gas supply routes to Europe. Both NS2 lines had been pumped full of gas and – crucially – were prepared to deliver it to Europe; this is Peskov cryptically admitting negotiations with Germany were ongoing.
Peskov added, “this gas is very expensive and now it is all going up in the air.” He stressed again that neither Russia nor Europe had anything to gain from the sabotage, especially Germany. This Friday, there will be a special UN Security Council session on the sabotage, called by Russia.
The attack of the Straussians
Now for the Big Picture. Pipeline Terror is part of a Straussian offensive, taking the splitting up of Russia and Germany to the ultimate level (as they see it). Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal, by Paul E. Gottfried (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is required reading to understand this phenomenon.
Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago, is at the root of what later, in a very twisted way, became the Wolfowitz Doctrine, written in 1992 as the Defense Planning Guidance, which defined “America’s mission in the post-Cold War era.”
The Wolfowitz Doctrine goes straight to the point: any potential competitor to US hegemony, especially “advanced industrial nations” such as Germany and Japan, must be smashed. Europe should never exercise sovereignty: “We must be careful to prevent the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO, and particularly its integrated military command structure.”
Fast-forward to the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, adopted only five months ago. It establishes that Kiev has a free lunch when it comes to all arms control mechanisms. All these expensive weapons are leased by the US to the EU to be sent to Ukraine. The problem is that whatever happens in the battlefield, in the end, it is the EU that will have to pay the bills.
US Secretary of State Blinken and his underling, Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, are Straussians, now totally unleashed, having taken advantage of the black void in the White House. As it stands, there are at least three different “silos” of power in a fractured Washington. For all Straussians, a tight bipartisan op, uniting several high-profile usual suspects, destroying Germany is paramount.
One serious working hypothesis places them behind the orders to conduct Pipeline Terror. The Pentagon forcefully denied any involvement in the sabotage. There are secret back channels between Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
And dissident Beltway sources swear that the CIA is also not part of this game; Langley’s agenda would be to force the Straussians to back off on Russia reincorporating Novorossiya and allow Poland and Hungary to gobble up whatever they want in Western Ukraine before the entire US government falls into a black void.
Come see me in the Citadel
On the Grand Chessboard, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan two weeks ago dictated the framework of the multipolar world ahead. Couple it with the independence referendums in DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye, which Russian President Vladimir Putin will formally incorporate into Russia, possibly as early as Friday.
With the window of opportunity closing fast for a Kiev breakthrough before the first stirrings of a cold winter, and Russia’s partial mobilization soon to enter the revamped SMO and add to generalized western panic, Pipeline Terror at least would carry the “merit” of solidifying a Straussian tactical victory: Germany and Russia fatally separated.
Yet blowback will be inevitable – in unexpected ways – even as Europe becomes increasingly Ukrainized and even Polandized: an intrinsically neo-fascist, unabashed puppet of the US as predator, not partner. Vey few across the EU are not brainwashed enough to understand how Europe is being set up for the ultimate fall.
The war, by those Straussians ensconced in the Deep State – neocons and neoliberals alike – won’t relent. It is a war against Russia, China, Germany and assorted Eurasian powers. Germany has just been felled. China is currently observing, carefully. And Russia – nuclear and hypersonic – won’t be bullied.
Poetry grandmaster C.P. Cavafy, in Waiting for the Barbarians, wrote “And now what will become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of a solution.” The barbarians are not at the gates, not anymore. They are inside their golden Citadel.
Saturday, October 1, 2022
On "Conservatism"
Roger Kimball, "Liberty Wept: The fate of conservatism in an age of illegitimacy"
- Conservatism, in any normal understanding of the word, depends upon a generally acknowledged and widely shared sense of legitimacy if it is to survive.
- Absent the authority of legitimacy, conservatism has nothing to conserve. It floats anchorless. In so far as its habits, rituals, and formalities persist, they contract into increasingly antiquarian gestures, detached from the vital pulse of lived experience. In such situations, conservatism degenerates into a largely rhetorical exercise. It mouths the same pieties that once rallied the troops, but it does so nervously, either without conviction or with that brittle belligerence that substitutes for conviction in decadent times.
- There are several ways in which a regime can declare its illegitimacy. One way is when its governing apparatus becomes detached from or is at odds with the laws and mores that define it. This can happen, in fact it usually does happen, even when a soothing political rhetoric assures the public that everything is just fine, that the canons of our forefathers are just as operative today as they were in the past.
- Examples are not far to seek. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison said a lot of lofty things about the nature of the proposed Constitution of the United States. Perhaps their descriptions of the structure of the governing apparatus were accurate when they wrote at the end of the eighteenth century. We still give lip service to the dispensation they described and helped to devise. But is that dispensation still alive? Or is it, like virtue according to Falstaff, mere “air,” words without a corresponding reality?
- In Federalist 45, Madison noted that the powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government were “few and defined.” Those powers, he said, pertained mostly to “external objects” like war, peace, and foreign commerce. Somehow, neither climate change nor transgender bathrooms nor “unlawful acts of hate”—the latest wheeze from the executive branch—made the cut when Madison was enumerating the powers of the federal government.
- He did, however, have a lot to say about the powers delegated to the individual states. Those powers, he said, were “numerous and indefinite,” extending to “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” Is that still the case?
- It is worth acknowledging that the Founders, although deeply concerned with limiting the sphere of government power, were also concerned with forging a strong and efficient federal government. The Federalist Papers, after all, took aim at the abundant anti-Federalist commentary that opposed the proposed U.S. Constitution precisely because, so thought the anti-Federalists, it arrogated too much power to a central authority at the expense of the states.
- But just this, the Founders argued, was the price of creating and maintaining that “more perfect union” of which the Constitution speaks. “The vigour of government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the very first of the Federalist papers, “is essential to the security of liberty.” The goal, he put it later on, is “a happy mean” which combines “the energy of government with the security of private rights.”
- So much for acknowledging the requirements of “the vigour of government.” I promise not to say another word in its favor. For our problem today is not to assure the “energy of government,” but quite the opposite, to redress the balance, to reestablish that “happy mean” Hamilton spoke of by asserting the legitimate jurisdiction of private rights against a rampant and engorging bureaucratic Leviathan.
- As an aside, let me note that conservatives, in the American context, anyway, have always been suspicious of Leviathan. They are for “limited government” and worry about the coercive power of the state intruding upon individual liberty. I know that these days some conservatives tell us that, when they finally get their hands on the levers of power, they will be energetic in exercising them to achieve their (presumably conservative) ends.
- Is that a contradiction or indication of hypocrisy? Maybe. Or maybe it is just a sign of how deeply anti-conservative sentiment has burrowed into the tissues of our society. No doubt I would prefer the policies promulgated by a conservative administration to the policies we are saddled with now. But my low opinion of human nature inclines me to distrust governmental power no matter who is in charge.
- Ronald Reagan is out of fashion these days, but I think that the fortieth President of the United States was right when he observed that “Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: A system,” Reagan continued, “of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.”
- Whether what Reagan says is true of democracy itself is something that we might, with Tocqueville, and with sadness, want to question. Too often democracy has been prey to deformations that encourage rather than retard the growth of government. That indeed was part of what the Founders had to conjure with as they combed through the graveyard of history’s failed republics in their efforts to frame a more robust and long-lasting system of government.
- But let me return to those signs of illegitimacy I mentioned. Can anyone read what Madison said about the Constitution delegating to the federal government only powers that are “few and defined” without a smile? How quaint it all sounds to our ears. And what do we make of the observation, from Federalist 57, that the people would never tolerate a law that was “not obligatory on the Legislature as well as on the people”? I have a call in to Nancy and Paul Pelosi on that one.
- Illegitimacy occurs when there is serious disjunction between precept and actual behavior. Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress. But for many decades now, Congress has been assiduous in avoiding that duty. As the political philosopher James Burnham noted back in the 1940s, laws in the United States were increasingly being made not by Congress, but by an alphabet soup of executive-branch agencies. And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of such monstrosities as the EPA, HUD, the CFPB, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative agglomeration that governs us in the United States today. More and more, we are ruled not by laws but by ad hoc diktats emanating from semiautonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force, if not the legitimacy, of law.
- Indeed, Americans today find their lives directed by a jumble of agencies far removed from the legislature and staffed by bureaucrats who make and enforce a vast network of rules that govern nearly every aspect of our lives.
- One of the most disturbing features of this phenomenon was exposed by Philip Hamburger in his work on the history and evolution of the administrative state. As Hamburger notes, the expansion of the franchise in the early twentieth century went hand in hand with the growth of administrative, that is to say, extralegal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. That was unacceptable.
- As Woodrow Wilson noted sadly, “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do? The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson. Therefore, Wilson welcomed the advent of administrative power as a counterweight to encroaching democratization. And thus it was, as Hamburger points out, that we have seen a transfer of legislative power to the “knowledge class,” the managerial elite that James Burnham anatomized.
- A closer look at the so-called “knowledge class” shows that what it knows best is how to preserve and extend its own privileges. Its activities are swaddled in do-gooder rhetoric about serving the public, looking after “the environment,” helping the disadvantaged, fighting racism, and similar performative kindnesses. But what they chiefly excel at is consolidating and extending their own power.
- It is interesting to ask how they accomplish this. Back in the 1770s, Edmund Burke criticized the Court of George III for circumventing Parliament and establishing by stealth what amounted to a new regime of royal prerogative and influence-peddling. It was not as patent as the swaggering courts of James I or Charles I. George and his courtiers maintained the appearance of parliamentary supremacy. But a closer look showed that the system was corrupt. “It was soon discovered,” Burke wrote with sly understatement, “that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.”
- That discovery stands behind the growth of the administrative state. We still vote. We still have a bicameral legislature. But the institutions that govern our politics are increasing decadent: that is, they are empty shells that merely look like their democratic originals. As Tocqueville noted in his analysis of governmental paternalism, “Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms.”
- This has been seen from the time of Augustus down to our own day. Rulers flatter themselves that they can combine the moral strength given by public consent with the advantages that only absolute power can give. Almost all have failed in the enterprise, and have soon discovered that it is impossible to make the appearance of freedom last where it is no longer a reality.
- I think that is more or less where we are now. You still hear people talk about the importance of individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, and so on. “Liberty and justice for all,” we declaim. But more and more, I believe, the slogans are delivered rote, shot through with a brittle cynicism.
- One sign of that decadence is the resignation that now greets every fresh assault on the impartiality upon which the rule of law, and hence liberty, depend.
- Consider Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who, in 2017, helped get the Russia collusion delusion going by altering a CIA email regarding Carter Page, one of the many pro-Trump figures who was harassed by that ironically misnamed entity, the Department of Justice. The CIA had identified Page as a CIA source. Clinesmith, part of the anti-Trump team that staffs the upper reaches of the FBI, changed the email to say that Page was not a CIA asset. This gave the green light for the Bureau to obtain a warrant from the FISA Court to spy on Page and, through him, on the entire Trump Administration.
- Remember what happened to Mike Flynn? He was set up by the FBI and then lost his job as national security advisor and was bankrupted trying to defend himself. What happened to Kevin Clinesmith? In 2020, he pleaded guilty to doctoring the email and was sentenced to probation. What Clinesmith did is a felony. Usually, a lawyer who is convicted of a felony is disbarred. Clinesmith got probation.
- It’s all part of our two-tier, which is to say, illegitimate system of putative justice. If you are a Deplorable, you do not have the same rights and privileges that the elite have. Compare and contrast, for example, the treatment accorded to Andrew McCabe, FBI malefactor and paid-up member of the protected class, with the treatment accorded to someone like John Eastman, a former member of Trump’s legal team, or Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official who thought it worth investigating the many questions that haunt the 2020 Presidential election. McCabe tries to foment a coup against the President of the United States and is punished with a gig at CNN. Eastman and Clark become pariahs, have their electronic devices confiscated and, in Clark’s case find themselves out in the street in their pajamas after a dawn raid by a squad of heavily armed FBI agents.
- Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall provided what he likes to call an “inflection point” in this saga. For one thing, it was a breathtaking example of what psychoanalysts term “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself. For another, its garish, neo-totalitarian staging—the red lights, the flanking military personnel, the madly gesticulating Joe Biden— made it one of the most minatory political performances in the annals of American oratory.
- A year or so back, I might have thought that the theatrics were inadvertent. I have changed my mind. Having watched Biden’s Justice Department morph into an American Stasi with the FBI conducting predawn raids against various its political rivals, arresting their aides and confiscating the mobile phones and other property of their lawyers, I now think that the tactics of intimidation are part of a larger strategy.
- The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago belongs in this category, as of course do the hundreds of indictments and incarcerations of January 6 protestors. Almost all of those unfortunate souls wind up being charged with minor torts like “parading” in or around the Capitol, yet are nonetheless thrown into a special D.C. gulag for months before being found guilty by biased juries and subject to enhanced sentences handed down by Trump-hating judges.
- None of this is adventitious. All of it is illegitimate. Like the intimidating and slightly unhinged theatrics of Biden’s speech, they are all deliberate scare tactics, warnings to us all of what can happen to those who dissent. The spectacle of 87,000 newly minted IRS agents waiting in the wings is another part of that “shock-and-awe” campaign.
- Biden’s speech in Philadelphia was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump.
- It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have keep the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents.
- What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse conservatism, embodied in such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose chief sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.
- That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy,” which really means “their prerogative.” As I note in a column for the October Spectator, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To such questions as, “was the election fair?” what you first need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen. Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams can fill you in on the details.
- There are two things worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the political distempers of the times. One concerns the hardening of the Left. Obama’s victory, followed by the incomprehensible victory of Donald Trump, has radicalized and emboldened the Left.
- Today, the Left says things they would hitherto only have thought, and does things that they would hitherto only have said. It used to be that there was a certain latitude accorded to opposing views. That’s all over now. What we see is the triumph not just of political correctness but also of visceral intolerance that nurtures a “by-any-means-necessary” attitude. Every issue is an existential emergency for which the Left’s shock troops are willing to go to the wall. Every loss demands that people scream at the sky. We win or we threaten to burn everything down. At least since Trump’s victory, the dominant attitude has been that only the Left is allowed to win. Any conservative victory is by definition illegitimate.
- The Right’s problem has been that it was too frightened by the Left to respond effectively. Deep down, many on the right secretly agreed that only the Left was allowed to win. In some precincts, anyway, that may be changing. Not among the Liz Cheneys and David Frenches of the world, of course. But there are more and more people who don’t mind shouldering the obloquy of the Left and the housebroken Right. And they have just been joined by a majority of the Supreme Court, which this summer handed down two major decisions, not just on Roe v. Wade but also on the Second Amendment, that are deeply unpopular with the regime consensus.
- The second thing worth bearing in mind is that this novel exhibition of backbone by the Right is down almost entirely to Donald Trump. The promiscuous desire to be liked is a common character flaw. Donald Trump does not suffer from that disability. What happened at the Supreme Court over the summer would never have happened absent Trump. And indeed the little eruptions of resistance to the Left and emasculated Right are possible only because of his example.
- This is a reality that many people have yet to take on board. But it is nevertheless an important truth about the political and moral configuration of the United States circa 2022. Donald Trump’s governing passion can be summed up in one word: winning. Similarly, his path to that goal can be summed up in one word: fighting. He showed the Right that it was OK to win and that the way to win was to stand up for the things you professed to care about.
- That prospect gives some people unpleasant palpitations. I file that under the rubric of collateral benefits. But as we contemplate the fate of conservatism in this age of illegitimacy, it is worth pausing over some particulars of Joe Biden’s Nuremberg-style speech in Philadelphia. In 1984, George Orwell showed how daily rituals of hate bind the party of Big Brother together. Biden’s hectoring attack on “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic” was clipped from the same playbook.
- A week earlier, at a speech in Maryland, Biden explained that the problem was [quote] “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the . . . semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.
- But what is the MAGA—or, as we are being taught to say, because it sounds scarier—the “ultra MAGA” agenda? When Donald Trump first proposed his “Make America Great Again” formula, he specified several things that it encompassed. At the top of the list were efforts to restore American prosperity, in part by exploiting our enormous energy resources, in part by abolishing mischievous and burdensome regulation, in part by cutting taxes and providing incentives for American business to hire Americans and produce their goods in America.
- Also at the top of the list was the integrity of our Southern border, stanching the flow of illegal immigration, and rebuilding a military that had been woefully neglected during the Obama years. Elsewhere on the domestic front, Trump battled against political correctness and what has come to be called “identity politics.” He largely remade the federal judiciary, seeing three Supreme Court Justices and hundreds of lower court federal judges installed, all of whom were nominated because they subscribed to a Antonin-Scalia-like judicial philosophy that limited the role of judges to interpreting the law in the light of the Constitution, not making law under their inspiration of their personal policy preferences.
- In the sphere of foreign policy, the MAGA agenda meant “putting America first.” He insisted that our NATO allies begin to shoulder their stipulated financial burden, challenged China on trade and military adventurism, and scuttled the disastrous Obama-era nuclear deal (since renewed) with Iran. Trump also stood firmly against the democracy-exporting policies of the Bush era. America would go to war not to promulgate democracy but only to defend its own interests. His Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East, a world historical achievement for which Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
- And how did all that work out? Pretty well, I’d say. By the time Trump left office, America was a net exporter of energy; illegal immigration had been slowed to a trickle; before the onslaught of COVID, his policies had resulted in the lowest unemployment in decades, the lowest minority unemployment ever. Wages were rising, especially at the lower rungs, and the stock market was booming. All-in-all, MAGA equaled American prosperity and success.
- It did not, however, bode well for the elite globalist agenda which rested upon endless foreign wars, the neglect of American workers, and a disdain for traditional bourgeois values like hard work, family solidarity, and local initiatives. And it is just this—the existential threat that the MAGA agenda poses to the entrenched wardens of wokeness—that tempts me to acknowledge that there is a sense in which Joe Biden was right to see the “entire philosophy” that underpins the MAGA agenda as a threat. From the point of view of the self-appointed guardians of the status quo, the populist upsurge that Trump represented really does appear as a form of “domestic extremism.”
- Where does that leave “conservatism in an age of illegitimacy”? It seems to me that conservatism has three main choices. One is outright surrender. One is the dhimmitude of the well-pressed but housebroken Right which exchanges its pampered place on the plantation for political irrelevance. The third choice is the perhaps paradoxical option of we might call Alinskyite conservatism, after the canny left-wing activist Saul Alinsky. This option eschews the quietism of surrender for the activism of what Trump called “winning.”
- How is this to be accomplished? One major goal must be to downgrade the place of Washington, the spirit as well as the city, in the metabolism of American political life. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people. As I have suggested elsewhere, we might start by moving the next presidential inauguration out of Washington altogether.
- Don’t laugh. There is no Constitutional reason to hold the ceremony in the swamp. Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office in his living room in Vermont. LBJ did so aboard an airplane in Texas. CNN and the New York Times would squeal, but so what?
- When Thomas Jefferson lobbied to move the capital to Washington, he did so partly to locate it closer to his home state of Virginia. But he did it also to locate the capital on more or less politically neutral ground. The capital of the republic was meant to be above partisan affiliation.
- Alas, as the years have gone by, Washington has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the regime party and its enablers in the administrative state. That political dispensation is defined by the progressive, Democratic agenda and its toxic philosophy of wokeness, but its overflowing ranks are stuffed to the gills with members of both parties. You see this, for example, in the January 6 Committee, which is about as straightforward a partisan attack machine as it would be possible to contrive. The reputation of the January 6 Committee on Main Street is in tatters because its antics are so clearly an expression of a wholly corrupt system, epitomized by the city which battens on the public treasure and the public trust.
- There are messy ways that other countries throughout history have dealt with a regime party that is thoroughly corrupt. The process is seldom edifying, even if, in the end, it is cathartic. A kinder, gentler alternative would be to treat Washington, D.C. as Hercules did the Augean Stables. I doubt that the Potomac, suitably diverted, would sport enough water to do the job, but moving the government, piece by piece, out of Washington, beginning with the ceremonial occasion of the inauguration, might be the least expensive, and least sanguinary, alternative.
Here’s ten minutes of every prominent Democrat denying Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016. These same people now tell us questioning the result of a presidential election is a direct threat to our democracy. pic.twitter.com/h428LRT8Tq
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 23, 2022
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