What comes to mind is that the Constitution is a bit like a marriage certificate . It symbolizes and codifies a relationship that already exists. A signpost.
In light of the current article I guess to extend the analogy…we (the citizens of this country) are in the throes of a bitter divorce with our government.
We're definitely in an abusive relationship; that much is certain.
The real question seems to be how do we handle our abusers and their enablers? Another piece of paper (like a protective order) - as this piece notes - only stops the abuse if the abuser respects it. When the abuser doesn't? Well, I expect we're headed for some form of "self-help".
I think there is a simpler explanation for why the original Constitution, in its unwritten and written forms, has fallen out of favor. Since at least the 1960s, and more likely the 1930s, Americans who identify as conservative and/or libertarian, be they voters, wonks, or politicians, have focused their efforts on the wrong target(s). They have attacked progressive ideas rather than progressive interest groups (the higher education cartel, nonprofits that advocate for group preferences, public sector unions, etc.). And make no mistake about it: many progressive interest groups are creatures of the state. They exist because of federal laws and regulations (The Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission), receive taxpayer money (the nonprofit-industrial complex), and/or are under state control (the K-12 public education system).
If the old Constitution is ever to see its power reestablished, right-of-center Americans must focus on eliminating the laws and regulations that create progressive interest groups and give them their staying power in public affairs. This will require a shift in mindset: Dispense with a mental model about policy best encapsulated in Milton Friedman's saying that policy only changes when the "climate of opinion" is such that "the wrong people do the right thing." Conservatives and libertarians must see that their adversaries are creatures of the unelected branches of the state and will not be dislodged without the affirmative use of power by the elected branches of the government. The "war of ideas" will always be with us, but the EEOC need not be.
Law/policy does shape culture- but the effects are not always the ones intended by the statutes and policies. There's typically a dynamic process working, and the results are quite often antithetical to the intent of the policies.
Consider alcohol Prohibition- which was intended to reduce the undeniable harms of alcohol abuse and elevate the moral values of the American nation. Its practical effect was very different: it elevated bootleggers and criminal kingpins to the status of folk heroes, introduced young women to the practice of binge drinking, led to numerous instances of political and law enforcement corruption nationwide, and produced a reaction of widespread disrespect for obedience to official authority, especially among the young.
Multiply that by around two orders of magnitude, and you get the War On Drugs. Which is still ongoing after over a century, in stark contrast to Alcohol Prohibition, which was recognized as a failure and repealed after only 13 years.
Additionally, those of us who have been paying attention find that the War On Drugs became one of the major rationales for the erosion of Constitutional protections- particularly Bill of Rights protections- by the Supreme Court. The process intensified as a result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that began in the 1980s and continue to redefine Bill of Rights protections (notably Gonzalez v. Raich, from 2005.) The legal rationale has always been based on some "overriding public interest in health and safety" that has never been explicitly defined in principle, and which has utterly failed in practice.
The dismantling began as far back as the early 1920s (soon after the passage of the Harrison Act, a "progressive reform" criminalization measure passed a couple of years prior to the 18th Amendment of Alcohol Prohibition) with Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians from prescribing opioids for the purpose of addiction maintenance, thereby conferring an informal monopoly over the supply to career criminals and organized trafficking syndicates.
So "law/culture does shape culture"- but by no means in the direction intended by those directing their efforts from the top down. At least this is the case in any society that hasn't been effectively corralled into obedience by a totalitarian regime.
In that regard, the examples of the USSR and the PRC are worth considering. The Russian effort at pooling production and distribution based on the dictates of central command economic planning foundered in practice; by the 1980s, the black market was estimated to constitute 1/4 of the Soviet Russian economy. But perhaps the Russians merely lacked the technology; the CCP of cyber-age 21st century China seems to have achieved a (largely) centrally directed political and economic regime without anything close to the complications and inefficiencies of the Russian example, which eventually sank under its own weight. Popular assent to the dictates of Xi and the CCP Central Committee appears to be practically universal- a cultural situation that has undoubtedly been assisted by the CCP control over their nationalized, officially approved Internet, and by a proliferation of surveillance technologies that offer a level of supervision (and targeting) that exceeds anything imagined in the speculations of 20th century writers.
This is an important point. Conservatives like to say that "politics is downstream of culture." That way, they have been able to remain high-minded and pure of politics. Meanwhile, the NGO shadow government developed apace, in symbiosis with unaccountable state organs. The great merit of Caldwell's book is that he reversed that politics-culture formula, showing that "political correctness" was not an organic social development, but a product of the legal and bureaucratic machinery of civil rights. As this awareness spreads, conservatives have been looking to Orban's Hungary for models of how to do actual politics. Which, of course, is why Orban must be demonized. See Lyons' recent post on Poland for a glimpse into how much energy is brought by the EU to the task of punishing governments that reject the new modes and orders.
Liberals are narcissists who want to believe they are smarter and morally superior to the haters, racists, sexists, bigots, etc. You need to study your adversary and understand their weak points. Intellectuals who are far better at writing than someone like me should be hitting them where it hurts. You need to damage their morale.
If normal white men really wanted to do something about modernism you’d exploit the existing weaknesses. You’d frame them to your advantage. For liberal donors – exacerbate the divide between blacks and liberal whites concerning Hamas and Israel. For feminists, black violence. For high-functioning single mom’s – black disfunction in schools that will drag their kids down. For property owners, diversity-forced public housing (now a huge issue in ultra-liberal Washington, DC), DEI hiring in aviation, etc.
Blacks are a weapon used against whites but they go off in any direction.
Other points: The rise in the price of real estate can be pointed out as caused by two things: single career women who live alone or divorce and require separate housing and thus increased demand; and the corralling effect of a shrinking percentage of white people into smaller and smaller enclaves.
Your comment qualifies as its own sort of narcissism. Paranoia and cynicism, pining for a restoration of the old regime. Of antiblack Racism, with a capital R.
Some of us don't share your fixation. We get that "blacks" are something other than a political pawn for high-minded nosey parkers to try to impose their social dictates- unsuccessfully, because "the blacks" are such loose cannons! Which is the way you frame it.
You're quite a piece of work, DC. You insult me and call me the worst, Racist, with a capital R no less. But you not only can't define the term, you can't even be bothered to show me what I wrote that makes me this horrible thing. You just sling a bunch of insults.
Hungary is overwhelmingly European. Orban was reviled as a racist for not taking in the non-white hordes. It's way too late for the US. Being called a racist is the worst possible thing. Whites are so afraid they can't even think about it while their opponents beat them to death with it.
I oppose hurling accusations of Racism at people for the slightest of perceived transgressions (at time including transgressions that occur only in the imagination of the accuser.) And I view the immigration policies of other nations as their own internal affair, and not to be dictated from outside.
"Being called a racist is the worst possible thing."
The "worst possible thing"? Compared to what? Physical assault, false imprisonment, murder?
But there are sound reasons why Racism has a bad reputation. No?
Apparently, yes, being labeled a racist, or Racist, IS the worst. Ask Derek Chauvin and Kneeling Nancy.
Anyway, what is your definition of this Racism? I honestly dob't know. It's just very, very bad and only white people have it, I guess. Is it some kind of disease?
Apparently you've concluded that Racism is a criminal offense that's worse than Murder. Notwithstanding your insistence, you are mistaken.
Derek Chauvin wasn't convicted on the basis of someone's capricious, inchoate accusation of the offense of Racism (not a criminal offense in the US.). Derek Chauvin was convicted of Murder, following a jury trial in open court.
If you have a problem with that conviction, feel free to discuss it here https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd-part-382 I'm fairly sure that fellow Substacker Rodney Balko will allow a 7-day trial subscription to enable you to express your opinions. I have no interest in recapitulating Balko's numerous factual points on the case in some off-topic subthread of a subthread. Which is why I wasn't the person to bring up Chauvin's name.
As for the definition of Racism that I hold with, it's the one that's found in English dictionaries that are generally held to be authoritative, like the OED, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage editions.
Political influences on culture are a dynamic. At least in any society that doesn't march in lockstep, or that hasn't been coerced into conformity and silence.
When efforts to restore rights and opportunity to populations that formerly lacked citizenship rights morph into oppressive Political Correctness, I oppose them. Bearing in mind that I haven't found a single instance where such unfairness comes close to de jure segregation of nonwhite people that was the law of the land in much of the US between 1876 and 1966. It's worth pointing out that it was much more dangerous for a white man in the South- any many other parts of the country- to oppose the all-pervading apartheid regime of that era than it is for anyone to oppose CRT and affirmative action in the present day.
These controversies are now being addressed and settled in the courts- and not always in favor of the "politically correct", either. Not even close. So I'm not getting the panic and doomsaying that I'm hearing in some of the comments. I'm not getting the tacit insinuations that black Americans are unanimously in favor of every measure designed by Institutional Liberal Paternalism to benefit them, either; it's manifestly not the case.
Finally, the example of Hungary has a very limited application to the US- a nation with an entirely different history, a mix of disparate ethnic groups (which it's always had) and a polyglot culture (which it's also always had). I don't have much of an opinion on Hungarian domestic politics; I don't know enough about the place. I know a lot more about my country. I'm US-centric in that regard, one might say.
I'd say that generally speaking politics is downstream of culture, but not everywhere and always. It might be better to say, where the culture goes politics usually follows. Of course this doesn't mean that the political isn't at times the driver, but that seems to be more the exception than the rule.
Note, for instance, that while capital latched on to the sexual revolution very early, the political realm took a while to catch up.
I was active in Republican politics for 3 decades. The fiction that "all we have to do to convert liberals is demonstrate better ideas" pervaded my time in the party. It was 90% of the grassroots and at least 60% of the donor class that I can into contact with in CA.
I do not know the internal Democratic structures and attitudes personally, but based on their public statements that have been gradually equating larger and larger swatches of the GOP with Nazis and Klansmen while simultaneously entrenching themselves in what most people think are apolitical institutions.
Bottom line, the Republicans had the wrong strategy. It didn't work.
The Republicans I know from the 1970s for all practical purposes disenfranchised any American who had ever smoked a joint, while also insisting on a social consensus that consigned anyone who had ever been known to take psychedelic drugs to a loony bin in the public mind. And the Congressional leadership of the Democrats played follow-along.
Democratic Party leader Joe Biden--now President--was at the vanguard of that "both kindsa politics" effort. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden did not get over his head with cocaine as part of a Democrat Party plot, or because his daddy was leading the Culture War on the side of irresponsible liberalism. That isn't the history. The narrative doesn't work out to be some Grand Unified Theory of Republican Virtue defeated by unscrupulous Democrat Vice. To the extent that Joe Biden has moderated some of his his views on drug policy in recent years, it's because his original knee-jerk prohibitionist extremism didn't survive extensive contact with the reality of the issue.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich--having effectively capitalized on his repentance as a one-time lawbreaking potsmoker turned Drug Warrior demagogue in the 1980s--took to leading political workshops funded by his GOPAC in the 1990s, focusing on the unscrupulous personal demonization of Democrats and Democratic Party leaders per se, and emphasizing every effort to link them with depravity and decadence. As if the Republicans--the party of Roger Stone, Henry Hyde, et alia--were going to be the saviors in some Purity Crusade.
Eventually the Democrats followed along (again), and we got a propaganda race to the bottom. That's the sum total lasting legacy of former Representative Newton Gingrich, Republican from (Lockheed Martin) Marietta, Georgia. This is not to defend the Democrats, because I'm familiar with their ham-handed exploitation of American race issues to turn it into a partisan crusade. Which is, at its worst, no less phony and sanctimonious than peddling Trump Bibles. (Trump Bibles. It's like something out of a Dave Barry satire.)
I'm on the outside of all that. I want ranked-choice voting. I've wanted it it ever since I heard of it 25 years ago.
But until someone with the Name Recognition of George Clooney or Whoopi Goldberg or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or Oprah, etc., begins talking up Ranked-Choice Voting, few of the Americans who have even heard of ranked-choice voting will give the actual passage of the reform a second thought. It hardly matters who champions an Issue in this country, as long as it's someone Famous. With Star Power. A Thought Leader.
And that's one of the biggest problems with American politics, right there. Good Ideas should be enough, on their merits. Open source, and partaking of reasoned dispute and discussion to winnow the chaff and the extravagance and distill the signal from the noise. But very few people appear to be able to effectively Question--whether questioning Authority, or questioning otherwise--and then to go on to assess matters of politics and history for themselves, ethically, honestly, and coming from bedrock of factual historical knowledge. Instead, most Americans seem to require a Star. Maybe it has to do with our quasi-monarchical Presidential system, like the only thing needed for the system to work every four years is to elect King Santa Claus (in reality, the process consists of being cornered into electing whoever is subjectively perceived to be the least worst of the two Major Party candidates.)
Or maybe that problem is more extensive, and extends to the current state of Human Politics in general.
I don't have final wisdom on that last score. But I don't find the signs to be encouraging.
In retrospect, the significance of 2016 is that, because the bad man posed the first genuine threat to the de facto, emergent new regime, it was forced to bare its teeth and reveal itself. And then with Covid and especially the unforgettable summer of 2020, it cast aside all pretense of continuity with the rump Constitution. Lyons directs us to Caldwell's important book, which anatomizes the process by which the new regime came into being.
If history has been a continual cycle of forgetting, followed by rediscovery, of those principles and affections that lead to human flourishing, I suppose it is our misfortune to live during a time of peak forgetfulness. This is a brilliant analysis. I was surprised and puzzled when Covid emerged and the default reaction by every institution was anti-liberty. The barn was on fire and no one in power insisted that we should set the horses free. Coupled with the pathological reaction to Trump's election, it was an unwelcome education about our state of affairs.
The Christian Nationalists are fond of saying "It's Christ or chaos", which is a kind of shorthand, I suspect, for the point that John Adams was making. But it is not apparent to me that, even knowing the choice is between moral restraint and chaos, that moral restraint would win out at this time and place. There is a (generational?) gap between those who want to be left alone to pursue their own way in the world, and those who want to be cared for. If the gap is generational, then soon we will see the loss of any significant cultural bias toward self-reliance or belief in human agency. The consequences of chaos are of much less concern to those who expect to be cared for (they're delusional) than for those with more self-sufficient expectations of themselves.
You're right to point out that the fix is more arduous than the destruction. There is no short-cut here I'm afraid. A counter culture, and probably even an underground economy, is going to have to be built. It will be a multi-generational endeavor if it happens at all.
All of which will have to be preceded by recovering the memory of what actually leads to human flourishing, along with cultivating affection toward those things. I have learned through hard experience that what people love is more formative than what they know. Unless there is a widespread recovery of a love of virtue, we will inevitably suffer the fate that Burke predicted -- our passions will forge our fetters.
I generally think this essay is correct, for a long time we have out-grown- through a kind of secular version of theological extension the reality and even the functional practice of governance as outlined in the Constitution. I do wonder a few things though - isn't it also true that the Articles of Confederation were in many ways more accurately reflective of our nation and its tradition in 1787 than the New Constitution? One can see the conspiracy that used the revision of the Articles to reframe the government as an act of both correctly bringing government more into line with the Anglo/American tradition as it really was - or perhaps also as transformational of that tradition.
The nature of the debates in Philadelphia, in the press, and in the ratification conventions would bear out that there was something new and innovative, and perhaps not fully as American as the older frame of government, that the people were only willing to accept this innovation with certain written promises of the older, deeper order - i.e. the Bill of Rights. I only bring this up because, are not laws forming and formative as well. Hence the transformations and disconnection between some of the later Amendments.
I don't think my shallow historical observations disapproves the thesis here, but rather that laws both reflect and shape. The problem is in order for laws to shape and in form they most be applied and followed. It would seem there is an additional tension here, between written laws - which can be as good as fiction/fantasy and which can also shape - is it not power that turns laws from ideas into reality?
Can a long march through the institutions be obtained and if not how does one bring about the revolution so proposed in order to change, let alone restore the American character, perhaps only suffering will provide the context to allow that to happen.
Right, there is such a thing as a "founding", an idea that emphasizes the transformational aspiration of Constitution-writing. A founder may wish to introduce "new modes and orders," as Machiavelli said. This doesn't vacate Lyons' important point that a would-be lawgiver must work with the material he is given, ideally in a spirit of love for what already exists, seeking to nourish and perfect it. Think Solon or Lycurgus, versus Lenin (who seemed to have a purely transformational or revolutionary project, and initially thought the Revolution stood a better chance in England than in Russia -- this indicates how abstracted from social reality the project was: willful, rationalist, idealist, uninterested in and contemptuous of Russians as a people).
During the lockdowns here in CA, I read Chernow's 800 page biography of Hamilton to my kids aloud (I realize how crazy that sounds -- possible child abuse). I came away from the experience rather disliking both Hamilton and his nemesis Jefferson. Jefferson was basically a philosophe in the French mold, a theorist who would soon become enamored with the Jacobins, thus putting him in direct opposition to de Maistre's comments, which Lyons rightly commends to us. I'll add that Jefferson had other, redeeming commitments too.
The conservative case against Jefferson has always been there for the taking. Instead the Left seized the opportunity to demonize TJ because of his views on race.
The Sage of Monticello might be our most expressly non-Christian president. I've always wondered whether his rejection of Christianity allow him to make peace with being a slaveholder with a teenage concubine who neglected his sons.
The research indicates that it was almost certainly not Jefferson himself, but a relative, who impregnated Sally Hemmings. I also have a copy of his Gospels, in which Jefferson assiduously cut out all references to the miracles attributed to Jesus and left only his moral teachings--in parallel columns of Greek, French and Koiné Greek. Jefferson seems to have sincerely believed in something similar to the case N.S. Lyons is making, that an ineffable, inexplicable and not directly communicable spirit was the a priori ground of all written law. He called it God, and while denying the divinity of Jesus he did accurately express one of the core messages of Jesus, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson did not understand that true happiness is found only in relationship with one's Creator, and so he was liable to error, especially in not sensing what was monstrous about the French Revolution.
I don’t know for sure but would assume not many would have been much bothered by either having slaves or young mistresses according to the social mores of the era. Loretta Lynn married at age 16 in 1948.
It's not ever going to be pc to say this, but I'll do it anyway. The nation was built on a moral code inherent in Christianity or at least, Christ-like teachings. And, it was written with and for Western European sensibilities. When the Statue of Liberty was given, the huddled masses were always meant to mean masses that would join us in upholding these values. It's one thing to have immigration or to choose to live with people who will always hate you personally, but it is quite another to live with those who hate the nation and its' values (in spirit if not in a religious way). We don't require assimilation. It's a mistake. We have no principles that guide us towards the common good because we can't agree on what is good. And, that leaves everyone, including judges, to rely on whatever suits them for the day.
Last I checked, placing a plaque with a poem at the base of a statue doesn't represent a binding referendum to surrender the country to foreign invaders. Did Congress even vote to place that? Doubtful. Yet, shitlibs constantly cite it as proof that the country actually belongs to foreigners who just haven't gotten around to arriving yet.
I would argue that Emma Lazarus’s poem to raise money to bring the Statue to the States takes artistic license with the immigration policies needed for the United States to flourish and continue to prosper.
I was teaching Nietzsche yesterday to my HS philosophy students. A Nietzschean world "values safety over freedom; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; narcissistic emotivism over duty [there's Mill vs Kant right there]; dreams of progress over transcendent truths". That's a perfect picture of Nietzsche's "slave morality". And our ruling class's willingness to wield raw power without legal or ethical constraints is Nietzsche's "master morality".
I suspect we're long past the point that a non-violent "sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution" is possible. Plato was very dismissive of democracy -- his "ship of state" metaphor is biting commentary even today. Aristotle thought collective self-government was possible... but only for a people who had developed internal, private self-government (virtue). It was Aristotle that Adams was channeling with his "only for a moral and religious people" quote. The evidence that large portions of Americans are no longer capable of individual self-government is exhaustive (fentanyl, hedonistic sex, financial crimes, etc...)
The post-liberals (whether woke-left or reactionary-right) have accepted that we live in a Nietzschean society now. The Left is further along the path, which is why we see them wielding state power to crush their enemies wile the Right is still writing editorials and filing legal briefs. But that will change. When the right finally gets there, I'm hoping it takes the form of a Franco-like figure rather than a Hitler-like one.
One way or another, liberal-democracy (which was always an oxymoron BTW) is dead. Nietzsche was right: we live in the abyss now and it's raw power all the way down. As a Cristian I don't like that; but being truthful about reality is the first step to possibly improving it.
Brian, don't know if you've read George Grant's little book on Nietzsche, 'Time as History,' but it's well worth a look. It's based on a series of lectures he gave in 1969, and it's amazing how prescient he was about some things.
Either a Franco or a Hitler like figure would fail (they both did fail after all). The "best" an American Franco could do is run the country during his lifetime, then whatever he did is erased with his death (and it would take a lot of bloodshed to end up with an American Franco too).
Rene Guenon once described the Catholic church as a man in possession of a treasure chest, but without the key to the chest: they couldn't actually use the treasure. That's really Christianity in general these days, they can't generate, adapt, so they can't create a 21st century spiritual revival, which is the actual thing the right needs. Neither can the left for that matter, since it lacks a spiritual core.
Christians, in particular, need to start leaning heavily on John 14:12. Figure out how to actually make that happen.
"The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson", --- is renowned for giving much harsher prison sentences to J6 political prisoners -- far exceeding maximum terms.
For that she was promptly nominated for Supreme Court....
We live under criminal fascist regime that supports two (2) Nazi-dominated governments (U and I) -- this lethal cancer is in metastasis and should be removed in free elections ASAP.
Free elections (liberal democracy) is what got us here. Free elections aren't going to fix it. I wish that wasn't true, but Lyon's (and Adams) point is only a collection of virtuous individuals are capable of sustaining a virtuous self-government. Liberalism requires a pre-liberal moral order. Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) believes liberalism also undermines that very moral order, thus devouring the very thing needed to sustain it.
We will never know since we don't have free elections and perhaps never did. Nevertheless, it did sort of work for a while but now we have hostile tribes inhabiting the same polity which can never work. The United States is finished as a republic though it may persist as an empire.
Lyons is correct in his diagnosis. In my opinion the actual power of the professional managerial class today derives from our existing material realities and is not the result of the propagation of anti-Constitutional ideas or declining national character. The existing unwritten constitution of Lyons is perfectly adapted to the objective conditions of today's America.
The Founder's Constitution reflected the aspirations of the Founder's class. That class was removed from power by Civil War. The national bureaucracy that emerged from that war solidified its grip on government and created an ideology to justify its power, named progressivism. The ideology of the progressive movement replaced the Founder's constitution. My point is simply this: you can't destroy the power of a ruling class without radically changing the material conditions that sustain its power. It seems to me that this would entail a certain amount of chaos.
Great comment. I have always taught Lincoln as a mixed bag to my civics students. He may have believed he was "holding the country together", but in reality he was creating a new one. Note: I don't teach them he was wrong; slavery was an evil that may well have deserved that level of censure. However, the British Empire did manage to eradicate slavery mostly bloodlessly. Given a few more decades, perhaps we would have too. Can you really imagine slavery being economically viable in the age of the internal combustion engine?
Thanks, and I'll add that Lincoln seems to me a reluctant midwife to the new America that emerged after the war and I'm not inclined to turn him into an historical punching bag. On the other hand, the war was a disaster and in my opinion slavery was only an excuse for the nationalist maximalists of the north to grasp control.
The war was an unnecessary evil. Of course, slavery is wrong and those of us who cast longing looks backward at secessionist ideas don't do so because we yearn for a restoration of slavery. In my opinion the only real flaw in the Founder's Constitution is the absence of a mechanism for legal secession which today could act as a de facto veto on Federal overreach.
I will let Lincoln's own words describe his goals. This is from his letter to Horace Greeley.
" If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. "
Lincoln actually freed no slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to those areas under Confederate control leaving out not only the slave states that didn't secede but also portions of Confederate states under Union Army control. The man who actually freed slaves during the war was Ben Butler by the simple expedient of declaring them to be contraband. Lincoln was dead by the time the 13A actually freed slaves. Of course a lot of slaves self-emancipated.
Not only the British Empire but also Russia, Brazil and practically every place in the world did emancipation without civil war.
Slavery--defined narrowly--yes, in the UK itself. But only because the Empire benefited from slave labor, or let's just say very low cost labor (as America does today, indirectly with the Chinese and directly with the South Americans and others).
Bloodshed was required to make fundamental changes, and ironically the British Imperial regime proved to be a better deal for many locals than the subsequent local regimes that superceded the Brits. But the moral calculus Lincoln enunciated in the Second Inaugural was correct and ineluctable: "every drop of blood drawn by the lash" must be paid for "by a drop of blood drawn by the sword."
Lincoln was correct, and knew what he had to do. There was no other option for preserving the United States of America in a form worth preserving other than war as these great historical tectonic plates ground against one another.
As Lincoln famously said, "And the war came . . ."
I agree that the moral calculation was correct. However the price was the end of federalism practically -- states rights are pretty much moot when you've just invaded half the states to bend them to your will. It's called "The War of Northern Aggression" in the Deep South to this day for a reason. And William Wilberforce and John Newton and others made the same case in Britain without guns... and won.
I agree they won--with a moral (Christian) argument within the UK itself--but in another sense they simply displaced the exploitation of under-paid labor to the British working classes and to the natives in Britain's Colonial Empire. The UK also continued to benefit from American slavery by buying cheap cotton from the American South for decades after slavery was abolished in the UK itself.
Anyway, it's a complex situation and reasonable people can disagree about it.
My main position is that Lincoln could not have abolished slavery, which was protected by a wealthy, physically aggressive, and politically dominant Southern slave-owning class, without a terrible war. Wilberforce's and Newton's strategy, successful in the UK (and BTW a warning to American slaveholders of what might come to them, too) would not have, and could not, work in the USA of the 1860s.
Lincoln did what he had to do, or America would have been spiritually and morally eviscerated.
He could have abolished slavery in the US by letting the South go and then purchasing and emancipating slaves in the remaining slave states. While slavery is a moral evil, we didn't go to war with Brazil or Morocco to abolish slavery there. Alternatively, he could have purchased and emancipated all the slaves that existed in 1861 for less than the war cost, even excluding 1,000,000 deaths and who knows how many maimings and the destruction of the Federal republic.
So if words, whether spoken or written, can never be real laws. And I agree that the law is “written on the hearts of … men”, written by the Author unseen. Then the inner convictions of leaders and those led, it is these that coalesce to form the living but intangible constitution, if I understand correctly. With which I also wholeheartedly agree. How then are fundamental conflicts between parties of equally strong convictions and assertiveness to be resolved? By what means? A “sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution” is needed, without question. But these too are words. By what concrete means and steps is such a revitalization to be achieved, or even begun?
History suggests these differences are usually settled by the losing side accepting it has lost, economic collapse followed by a reordering, or violent revolution.
People make the place. People choose what the rules are. People enforce the rules. The Big lie that really got America off track is the idea that America is an "idea," a "Proposition Nation," and that anyone can be American. I'm not sure for how long that idea has been infecting American minds, but that's really what has led us astray. America, and all nations, are People. The Declaration references the need of the people to dissolve their political bands. The Constitution declared that it was established to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Our posterity, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Founders. Up until 1965, America was a WASP Nation, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Nation. Today, the American People are vastly outnumbered on our own land, and we're being ruled by Foreigners.
I completely agree except for the last bit. Americans are doing this to themselves just as they are in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Yes, I remember your excellent article. I myself am moving more to the idea that the elites are possessed by evil demons. The Chinese are mercantile managers par excellence but to my knowledge aren't pushing the sexual stuff, nor do they have, as you say, such a loathing for their own people.
What transpires today would be considered madness only a few years ago and makes colonialism appear logical and quaint by comparison.
Now, I suppose you could say it's part of the plan to demoralize the subject population, but it seems wildly excessive doesn't it? There's a kind of sadistic pleasure taken in the defilement of innocence. To me that indicates something else is going on.
I mean, it could be demons, assuming demons have been in charge of every empire in the history of the world that we know of. Or, it could just be sinful men seeking power and money. Six one way, half a dozen the other. The Empire is run by Foreigners. The American People, all People want to run their own nations. As the author says, People want self-determination.
The billionaires are a nation unto themselves. That kind of money does weird things to human psychology. Billionaires tend to think they're near-gods, and become deeply hostile to any limits of any kind, including their own countrymen and national interests. The citizenship of the billionaire is fairly irrelevant.
It's techno-gnosticism, also known as transhumanism. The end game is replacing homo sapiens with a new and improved species. They consider homo sapiens to be entirely unsatisfactory in multiple ways.
I recall arguing there the conservatives need to adopt the attitude that we are colonial subjects of a ruling class located in the big cities and pursue an anti-colonial struggle. Most of these were resolved peacefully.
What comes to mind is that the Constitution is a bit like a marriage certificate . It symbolizes and codifies a relationship that already exists. A signpost.
Ooh. Very interesting analogy.
In light of the current article I guess to extend the analogy…we (the citizens of this country) are in the throes of a bitter divorce with our government.
We're definitely in an abusive relationship; that much is certain.
The real question seems to be how do we handle our abusers and their enablers? Another piece of paper (like a protective order) - as this piece notes - only stops the abuse if the abuser respects it. When the abuser doesn't? Well, I expect we're headed for some form of "self-help".
I was thinking we are in a bitter divorce with each other, as Jesus prophesied.
I think there is a simpler explanation for why the original Constitution, in its unwritten and written forms, has fallen out of favor. Since at least the 1960s, and more likely the 1930s, Americans who identify as conservative and/or libertarian, be they voters, wonks, or politicians, have focused their efforts on the wrong target(s). They have attacked progressive ideas rather than progressive interest groups (the higher education cartel, nonprofits that advocate for group preferences, public sector unions, etc.). And make no mistake about it: many progressive interest groups are creatures of the state. They exist because of federal laws and regulations (The Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission), receive taxpayer money (the nonprofit-industrial complex), and/or are under state control (the K-12 public education system).
If the old Constitution is ever to see its power reestablished, right-of-center Americans must focus on eliminating the laws and regulations that create progressive interest groups and give them their staying power in public affairs. This will require a shift in mindset: Dispense with a mental model about policy best encapsulated in Milton Friedman's saying that policy only changes when the "climate of opinion" is such that "the wrong people do the right thing." Conservatives and libertarians must see that their adversaries are creatures of the unelected branches of the state and will not be dislodged without the affirmative use of power by the elected branches of the government. The "war of ideas" will always be with us, but the EEOC need not be.
Yes, I'd say that law/policy does shape culture, and culture shapes law/policy. It's not a one-way street.
Law/policy does shape culture- but the effects are not always the ones intended by the statutes and policies. There's typically a dynamic process working, and the results are quite often antithetical to the intent of the policies.
Consider alcohol Prohibition- which was intended to reduce the undeniable harms of alcohol abuse and elevate the moral values of the American nation. Its practical effect was very different: it elevated bootleggers and criminal kingpins to the status of folk heroes, introduced young women to the practice of binge drinking, led to numerous instances of political and law enforcement corruption nationwide, and produced a reaction of widespread disrespect for obedience to official authority, especially among the young.
Multiply that by around two orders of magnitude, and you get the War On Drugs. Which is still ongoing after over a century, in stark contrast to Alcohol Prohibition, which was recognized as a failure and repealed after only 13 years.
Additionally, those of us who have been paying attention find that the War On Drugs became one of the major rationales for the erosion of Constitutional protections- particularly Bill of Rights protections- by the Supreme Court. The process intensified as a result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that began in the 1980s and continue to redefine Bill of Rights protections (notably Gonzalez v. Raich, from 2005.) The legal rationale has always been based on some "overriding public interest in health and safety" that has never been explicitly defined in principle, and which has utterly failed in practice.
The dismantling began as far back as the early 1920s (soon after the passage of the Harrison Act, a "progressive reform" criminalization measure passed a couple of years prior to the 18th Amendment of Alcohol Prohibition) with Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians from prescribing opioids for the purpose of addiction maintenance, thereby conferring an informal monopoly over the supply to career criminals and organized trafficking syndicates.
So "law/culture does shape culture"- but by no means in the direction intended by those directing their efforts from the top down. At least this is the case in any society that hasn't been effectively corralled into obedience by a totalitarian regime.
In that regard, the examples of the USSR and the PRC are worth considering. The Russian effort at pooling production and distribution based on the dictates of central command economic planning foundered in practice; by the 1980s, the black market was estimated to constitute 1/4 of the Soviet Russian economy. But perhaps the Russians merely lacked the technology; the CCP of cyber-age 21st century China seems to have achieved a (largely) centrally directed political and economic regime without anything close to the complications and inefficiencies of the Russian example, which eventually sank under its own weight. Popular assent to the dictates of Xi and the CCP Central Committee appears to be practically universal- a cultural situation that has undoubtedly been assisted by the CCP control over their nationalized, officially approved Internet, and by a proliferation of surveillance technologies that offer a level of supervision (and targeting) that exceeds anything imagined in the speculations of 20th century writers.
This is an important point. Conservatives like to say that "politics is downstream of culture." That way, they have been able to remain high-minded and pure of politics. Meanwhile, the NGO shadow government developed apace, in symbiosis with unaccountable state organs. The great merit of Caldwell's book is that he reversed that politics-culture formula, showing that "political correctness" was not an organic social development, but a product of the legal and bureaucratic machinery of civil rights. As this awareness spreads, conservatives have been looking to Orban's Hungary for models of how to do actual politics. Which, of course, is why Orban must be demonized. See Lyons' recent post on Poland for a glimpse into how much energy is brought by the EU to the task of punishing governments that reject the new modes and orders.
Okay, let's get down and dirty:
Liberals are narcissists who want to believe they are smarter and morally superior to the haters, racists, sexists, bigots, etc. You need to study your adversary and understand their weak points. Intellectuals who are far better at writing than someone like me should be hitting them where it hurts. You need to damage their morale.
If normal white men really wanted to do something about modernism you’d exploit the existing weaknesses. You’d frame them to your advantage. For liberal donors – exacerbate the divide between blacks and liberal whites concerning Hamas and Israel. For feminists, black violence. For high-functioning single mom’s – black disfunction in schools that will drag their kids down. For property owners, diversity-forced public housing (now a huge issue in ultra-liberal Washington, DC), DEI hiring in aviation, etc.
Blacks are a weapon used against whites but they go off in any direction.
Other points: The rise in the price of real estate can be pointed out as caused by two things: single career women who live alone or divorce and require separate housing and thus increased demand; and the corralling effect of a shrinking percentage of white people into smaller and smaller enclaves.
How's that for not being high-minded?
Your comment qualifies as its own sort of narcissism. Paranoia and cynicism, pining for a restoration of the old regime. Of antiblack Racism, with a capital R.
Some of us don't share your fixation. We get that "blacks" are something other than a political pawn for high-minded nosey parkers to try to impose their social dictates- unsuccessfully, because "the blacks" are such loose cannons! Which is the way you frame it.
You're quite a piece of work, DC. You insult me and call me the worst, Racist, with a capital R no less. But you not only can't define the term, you can't even be bothered to show me what I wrote that makes me this horrible thing. You just sling a bunch of insults.
– confused, lonely and freaked out
Hungary is overwhelmingly European. Orban was reviled as a racist for not taking in the non-white hordes. It's way too late for the US. Being called a racist is the worst possible thing. Whites are so afraid they can't even think about it while their opponents beat them to death with it.
I oppose hurling accusations of Racism at people for the slightest of perceived transgressions (at time including transgressions that occur only in the imagination of the accuser.) And I view the immigration policies of other nations as their own internal affair, and not to be dictated from outside.
"Being called a racist is the worst possible thing."
The "worst possible thing"? Compared to what? Physical assault, false imprisonment, murder?
But there are sound reasons why Racism has a bad reputation. No?
Apparently, yes, being labeled a racist, or Racist, IS the worst. Ask Derek Chauvin and Kneeling Nancy.
Anyway, what is your definition of this Racism? I honestly dob't know. It's just very, very bad and only white people have it, I guess. Is it some kind of disease?
Apparently you've concluded that Racism is a criminal offense that's worse than Murder. Notwithstanding your insistence, you are mistaken.
Derek Chauvin wasn't convicted on the basis of someone's capricious, inchoate accusation of the offense of Racism (not a criminal offense in the US.). Derek Chauvin was convicted of Murder, following a jury trial in open court.
If you have a problem with that conviction, feel free to discuss it here https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd-part-382 I'm fairly sure that fellow Substacker Rodney Balko will allow a 7-day trial subscription to enable you to express your opinions. I have no interest in recapitulating Balko's numerous factual points on the case in some off-topic subthread of a subthread. Which is why I wasn't the person to bring up Chauvin's name.
As for the definition of Racism that I hold with, it's the one that's found in English dictionaries that are generally held to be authoritative, like the OED, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage editions.
So, you are accusing me of being a Racist with a capital R (among other insults) but you can't tell me what it means?
I always say politics IS culture: neither exists in a vacuum apart from each other. Our culture has changed through both cultural and political means.
Political influences on culture are a dynamic. At least in any society that doesn't march in lockstep, or that hasn't been coerced into conformity and silence.
When efforts to restore rights and opportunity to populations that formerly lacked citizenship rights morph into oppressive Political Correctness, I oppose them. Bearing in mind that I haven't found a single instance where such unfairness comes close to de jure segregation of nonwhite people that was the law of the land in much of the US between 1876 and 1966. It's worth pointing out that it was much more dangerous for a white man in the South- any many other parts of the country- to oppose the all-pervading apartheid regime of that era than it is for anyone to oppose CRT and affirmative action in the present day.
These controversies are now being addressed and settled in the courts- and not always in favor of the "politically correct", either. Not even close. So I'm not getting the panic and doomsaying that I'm hearing in some of the comments. I'm not getting the tacit insinuations that black Americans are unanimously in favor of every measure designed by Institutional Liberal Paternalism to benefit them, either; it's manifestly not the case.
Finally, the example of Hungary has a very limited application to the US- a nation with an entirely different history, a mix of disparate ethnic groups (which it's always had) and a polyglot culture (which it's also always had). I don't have much of an opinion on Hungarian domestic politics; I don't know enough about the place. I know a lot more about my country. I'm US-centric in that regard, one might say.
I'd say that generally speaking politics is downstream of culture, but not everywhere and always. It might be better to say, where the culture goes politics usually follows. Of course this doesn't mean that the political isn't at times the driver, but that seems to be more the exception than the rule.
Note, for instance, that while capital latched on to the sexual revolution very early, the political realm took a while to catch up.
Conservatives thought it was a contest of ideas.
Progressives knew it was a contest of power.
That's so phony. Any bifurcation that self-exalting and demonizing is phony.
I was active in Republican politics for 3 decades. The fiction that "all we have to do to convert liberals is demonstrate better ideas" pervaded my time in the party. It was 90% of the grassroots and at least 60% of the donor class that I can into contact with in CA.
I do not know the internal Democratic structures and attitudes personally, but based on their public statements that have been gradually equating larger and larger swatches of the GOP with Nazis and Klansmen while simultaneously entrenching themselves in what most people think are apolitical institutions.
Bottom line, the Republicans had the wrong strategy. It didn't work.
I'm coming from a different perspective.
The Republicans I know from the 1970s for all practical purposes disenfranchised any American who had ever smoked a joint, while also insisting on a social consensus that consigned anyone who had ever been known to take psychedelic drugs to a loony bin in the public mind. And the Congressional leadership of the Democrats played follow-along.
Democratic Party leader Joe Biden--now President--was at the vanguard of that "both kindsa politics" effort. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden did not get over his head with cocaine as part of a Democrat Party plot, or because his daddy was leading the Culture War on the side of irresponsible liberalism. That isn't the history. The narrative doesn't work out to be some Grand Unified Theory of Republican Virtue defeated by unscrupulous Democrat Vice. To the extent that Joe Biden has moderated some of his his views on drug policy in recent years, it's because his original knee-jerk prohibitionist extremism didn't survive extensive contact with the reality of the issue.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich--having effectively capitalized on his repentance as a one-time lawbreaking potsmoker turned Drug Warrior demagogue in the 1980s--took to leading political workshops funded by his GOPAC in the 1990s, focusing on the unscrupulous personal demonization of Democrats and Democratic Party leaders per se, and emphasizing every effort to link them with depravity and decadence. As if the Republicans--the party of Roger Stone, Henry Hyde, et alia--were going to be the saviors in some Purity Crusade.
Eventually the Democrats followed along (again), and we got a propaganda race to the bottom. That's the sum total lasting legacy of former Representative Newton Gingrich, Republican from (Lockheed Martin) Marietta, Georgia. This is not to defend the Democrats, because I'm familiar with their ham-handed exploitation of American race issues to turn it into a partisan crusade. Which is, at its worst, no less phony and sanctimonious than peddling Trump Bibles. (Trump Bibles. It's like something out of a Dave Barry satire.)
I'm on the outside of all that. I want ranked-choice voting. I've wanted it it ever since I heard of it 25 years ago.
But until someone with the Name Recognition of George Clooney or Whoopi Goldberg or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or Oprah, etc., begins talking up Ranked-Choice Voting, few of the Americans who have even heard of ranked-choice voting will give the actual passage of the reform a second thought. It hardly matters who champions an Issue in this country, as long as it's someone Famous. With Star Power. A Thought Leader.
And that's one of the biggest problems with American politics, right there. Good Ideas should be enough, on their merits. Open source, and partaking of reasoned dispute and discussion to winnow the chaff and the extravagance and distill the signal from the noise. But very few people appear to be able to effectively Question--whether questioning Authority, or questioning otherwise--and then to go on to assess matters of politics and history for themselves, ethically, honestly, and coming from bedrock of factual historical knowledge. Instead, most Americans seem to require a Star. Maybe it has to do with our quasi-monarchical Presidential system, like the only thing needed for the system to work every four years is to elect King Santa Claus (in reality, the process consists of being cornered into electing whoever is subjectively perceived to be the least worst of the two Major Party candidates.)
Or maybe that problem is more extensive, and extends to the current state of Human Politics in general.
I don't have final wisdom on that last score. But I don't find the signs to be encouraging.
In retrospect, the significance of 2016 is that, because the bad man posed the first genuine threat to the de facto, emergent new regime, it was forced to bare its teeth and reveal itself. And then with Covid and especially the unforgettable summer of 2020, it cast aside all pretense of continuity with the rump Constitution. Lyons directs us to Caldwell's important book, which anatomizes the process by which the new regime came into being.
If history has been a continual cycle of forgetting, followed by rediscovery, of those principles and affections that lead to human flourishing, I suppose it is our misfortune to live during a time of peak forgetfulness. This is a brilliant analysis. I was surprised and puzzled when Covid emerged and the default reaction by every institution was anti-liberty. The barn was on fire and no one in power insisted that we should set the horses free. Coupled with the pathological reaction to Trump's election, it was an unwelcome education about our state of affairs.
The Christian Nationalists are fond of saying "It's Christ or chaos", which is a kind of shorthand, I suspect, for the point that John Adams was making. But it is not apparent to me that, even knowing the choice is between moral restraint and chaos, that moral restraint would win out at this time and place. There is a (generational?) gap between those who want to be left alone to pursue their own way in the world, and those who want to be cared for. If the gap is generational, then soon we will see the loss of any significant cultural bias toward self-reliance or belief in human agency. The consequences of chaos are of much less concern to those who expect to be cared for (they're delusional) than for those with more self-sufficient expectations of themselves.
You're right to point out that the fix is more arduous than the destruction. There is no short-cut here I'm afraid. A counter culture, and probably even an underground economy, is going to have to be built. It will be a multi-generational endeavor if it happens at all.
All of which will have to be preceded by recovering the memory of what actually leads to human flourishing, along with cultivating affection toward those things. I have learned through hard experience that what people love is more formative than what they know. Unless there is a widespread recovery of a love of virtue, we will inevitably suffer the fate that Burke predicted -- our passions will forge our fetters.
Conservatism, Inc. is not going to be much help, I'm afraid. (More on that here: https://keithlowery.substack.com/p/what-is-there-to-conserve )
Alas, the only way out is through.
Good piece. Lord save us all from the Planning Officers!
I generally think this essay is correct, for a long time we have out-grown- through a kind of secular version of theological extension the reality and even the functional practice of governance as outlined in the Constitution. I do wonder a few things though - isn't it also true that the Articles of Confederation were in many ways more accurately reflective of our nation and its tradition in 1787 than the New Constitution? One can see the conspiracy that used the revision of the Articles to reframe the government as an act of both correctly bringing government more into line with the Anglo/American tradition as it really was - or perhaps also as transformational of that tradition.
The nature of the debates in Philadelphia, in the press, and in the ratification conventions would bear out that there was something new and innovative, and perhaps not fully as American as the older frame of government, that the people were only willing to accept this innovation with certain written promises of the older, deeper order - i.e. the Bill of Rights. I only bring this up because, are not laws forming and formative as well. Hence the transformations and disconnection between some of the later Amendments.
I don't think my shallow historical observations disapproves the thesis here, but rather that laws both reflect and shape. The problem is in order for laws to shape and in form they most be applied and followed. It would seem there is an additional tension here, between written laws - which can be as good as fiction/fantasy and which can also shape - is it not power that turns laws from ideas into reality?
Can a long march through the institutions be obtained and if not how does one bring about the revolution so proposed in order to change, let alone restore the American character, perhaps only suffering will provide the context to allow that to happen.
Right, there is such a thing as a "founding", an idea that emphasizes the transformational aspiration of Constitution-writing. A founder may wish to introduce "new modes and orders," as Machiavelli said. This doesn't vacate Lyons' important point that a would-be lawgiver must work with the material he is given, ideally in a spirit of love for what already exists, seeking to nourish and perfect it. Think Solon or Lycurgus, versus Lenin (who seemed to have a purely transformational or revolutionary project, and initially thought the Revolution stood a better chance in England than in Russia -- this indicates how abstracted from social reality the project was: willful, rationalist, idealist, uninterested in and contemptuous of Russians as a people).
During the lockdowns here in CA, I read Chernow's 800 page biography of Hamilton to my kids aloud (I realize how crazy that sounds -- possible child abuse). I came away from the experience rather disliking both Hamilton and his nemesis Jefferson. Jefferson was basically a philosophe in the French mold, a theorist who would soon become enamored with the Jacobins, thus putting him in direct opposition to de Maistre's comments, which Lyons rightly commends to us. I'll add that Jefferson had other, redeeming commitments too.
The conservative case against Jefferson has always been there for the taking. Instead the Left seized the opportunity to demonize TJ because of his views on race.
The Sage of Monticello might be our most expressly non-Christian president. I've always wondered whether his rejection of Christianity allow him to make peace with being a slaveholder with a teenage concubine who neglected his sons.
The research indicates that it was almost certainly not Jefferson himself, but a relative, who impregnated Sally Hemmings. I also have a copy of his Gospels, in which Jefferson assiduously cut out all references to the miracles attributed to Jesus and left only his moral teachings--in parallel columns of Greek, French and Koiné Greek. Jefferson seems to have sincerely believed in something similar to the case N.S. Lyons is making, that an ineffable, inexplicable and not directly communicable spirit was the a priori ground of all written law. He called it God, and while denying the divinity of Jesus he did accurately express one of the core messages of Jesus, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson did not understand that true happiness is found only in relationship with one's Creator, and so he was liable to error, especially in not sensing what was monstrous about the French Revolution.
I don’t know for sure but would assume not many would have been much bothered by either having slaves or young mistresses according to the social mores of the era. Loretta Lynn married at age 16 in 1948.
Under the Articles of Confederation, we were no more a country than the European Union is, and maybe less so.
Well, that was a thoroughly depressing read. All the more so because it's true.
It's not ever going to be pc to say this, but I'll do it anyway. The nation was built on a moral code inherent in Christianity or at least, Christ-like teachings. And, it was written with and for Western European sensibilities. When the Statue of Liberty was given, the huddled masses were always meant to mean masses that would join us in upholding these values. It's one thing to have immigration or to choose to live with people who will always hate you personally, but it is quite another to live with those who hate the nation and its' values (in spirit if not in a religious way). We don't require assimilation. It's a mistake. We have no principles that guide us towards the common good because we can't agree on what is good. And, that leaves everyone, including judges, to rely on whatever suits them for the day.
Last I checked, placing a plaque with a poem at the base of a statue doesn't represent a binding referendum to surrender the country to foreign invaders. Did Congress even vote to place that? Doubtful. Yet, shitlibs constantly cite it as proof that the country actually belongs to foreigners who just haven't gotten around to arriving yet.
Heavens yes, I’m thoroughly sick of that poem! Wretched refuse indeed...
I did notice the poem was placed in 1903, 20 years after the writer's death and 114 years AFTER the Constitution was written..
I would argue that Emma Lazarus’s poem to raise money to bring the Statue to the States takes artistic license with the immigration policies needed for the United States to flourish and continue to prosper.
I'll have to read that. Thanks for the recommendation.
I was teaching Nietzsche yesterday to my HS philosophy students. A Nietzschean world "values safety over freedom; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; narcissistic emotivism over duty [there's Mill vs Kant right there]; dreams of progress over transcendent truths". That's a perfect picture of Nietzsche's "slave morality". And our ruling class's willingness to wield raw power without legal or ethical constraints is Nietzsche's "master morality".
I suspect we're long past the point that a non-violent "sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution" is possible. Plato was very dismissive of democracy -- his "ship of state" metaphor is biting commentary even today. Aristotle thought collective self-government was possible... but only for a people who had developed internal, private self-government (virtue). It was Aristotle that Adams was channeling with his "only for a moral and religious people" quote. The evidence that large portions of Americans are no longer capable of individual self-government is exhaustive (fentanyl, hedonistic sex, financial crimes, etc...)
The post-liberals (whether woke-left or reactionary-right) have accepted that we live in a Nietzschean society now. The Left is further along the path, which is why we see them wielding state power to crush their enemies wile the Right is still writing editorials and filing legal briefs. But that will change. When the right finally gets there, I'm hoping it takes the form of a Franco-like figure rather than a Hitler-like one.
One way or another, liberal-democracy (which was always an oxymoron BTW) is dead. Nietzsche was right: we live in the abyss now and it's raw power all the way down. As a Cristian I don't like that; but being truthful about reality is the first step to possibly improving it.
Brian, don't know if you've read George Grant's little book on Nietzsche, 'Time as History,' but it's well worth a look. It's based on a series of lectures he gave in 1969, and it's amazing how prescient he was about some things.
Either a Franco or a Hitler like figure would fail (they both did fail after all). The "best" an American Franco could do is run the country during his lifetime, then whatever he did is erased with his death (and it would take a lot of bloodshed to end up with an American Franco too).
Rene Guenon once described the Catholic church as a man in possession of a treasure chest, but without the key to the chest: they couldn't actually use the treasure. That's really Christianity in general these days, they can't generate, adapt, so they can't create a 21st century spiritual revival, which is the actual thing the right needs. Neither can the left for that matter, since it lacks a spiritual core.
Christians, in particular, need to start leaning heavily on John 14:12. Figure out how to actually make that happen.
"The court’s newest and most innovative justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson", --- is renowned for giving much harsher prison sentences to J6 political prisoners -- far exceeding maximum terms.
For that she was promptly nominated for Supreme Court....
We live under criminal fascist regime that supports two (2) Nazi-dominated governments (U and I) -- this lethal cancer is in metastasis and should be removed in free elections ASAP.
Free elections (liberal democracy) is what got us here. Free elections aren't going to fix it. I wish that wasn't true, but Lyon's (and Adams) point is only a collection of virtuous individuals are capable of sustaining a virtuous self-government. Liberalism requires a pre-liberal moral order. Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) believes liberalism also undermines that very moral order, thus devouring the very thing needed to sustain it.
We will never know since we don't have free elections and perhaps never did. Nevertheless, it did sort of work for a while but now we have hostile tribes inhabiting the same polity which can never work. The United States is finished as a republic though it may persist as an empire.
Nice to see that you are being “virtuous” and “above” mere free and fair elections.
You sweet summer child, believing that this can even start to be fixed in 4...and that’s even if we can manage a squeaker of a win.
Lyons is correct in his diagnosis. In my opinion the actual power of the professional managerial class today derives from our existing material realities and is not the result of the propagation of anti-Constitutional ideas or declining national character. The existing unwritten constitution of Lyons is perfectly adapted to the objective conditions of today's America.
The Founder's Constitution reflected the aspirations of the Founder's class. That class was removed from power by Civil War. The national bureaucracy that emerged from that war solidified its grip on government and created an ideology to justify its power, named progressivism. The ideology of the progressive movement replaced the Founder's constitution. My point is simply this: you can't destroy the power of a ruling class without radically changing the material conditions that sustain its power. It seems to me that this would entail a certain amount of chaos.
Great comment. I have always taught Lincoln as a mixed bag to my civics students. He may have believed he was "holding the country together", but in reality he was creating a new one. Note: I don't teach them he was wrong; slavery was an evil that may well have deserved that level of censure. However, the British Empire did manage to eradicate slavery mostly bloodlessly. Given a few more decades, perhaps we would have too. Can you really imagine slavery being economically viable in the age of the internal combustion engine?
Thanks, and I'll add that Lincoln seems to me a reluctant midwife to the new America that emerged after the war and I'm not inclined to turn him into an historical punching bag. On the other hand, the war was a disaster and in my opinion slavery was only an excuse for the nationalist maximalists of the north to grasp control.
The war was an unnecessary evil. Of course, slavery is wrong and those of us who cast longing looks backward at secessionist ideas don't do so because we yearn for a restoration of slavery. In my opinion the only real flaw in the Founder's Constitution is the absence of a mechanism for legal secession which today could act as a de facto veto on Federal overreach.
Excellent points
I will let Lincoln's own words describe his goals. This is from his letter to Horace Greeley.
" If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. "
Lincoln actually freed no slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to those areas under Confederate control leaving out not only the slave states that didn't secede but also portions of Confederate states under Union Army control. The man who actually freed slaves during the war was Ben Butler by the simple expedient of declaring them to be contraband. Lincoln was dead by the time the 13A actually freed slaves. Of course a lot of slaves self-emancipated.
Not only the British Empire but also Russia, Brazil and practically every place in the world did emancipation without civil war.
Slavery--defined narrowly--yes, in the UK itself. But only because the Empire benefited from slave labor, or let's just say very low cost labor (as America does today, indirectly with the Chinese and directly with the South Americans and others).
Bloodshed was required to make fundamental changes, and ironically the British Imperial regime proved to be a better deal for many locals than the subsequent local regimes that superceded the Brits. But the moral calculus Lincoln enunciated in the Second Inaugural was correct and ineluctable: "every drop of blood drawn by the lash" must be paid for "by a drop of blood drawn by the sword."
Lincoln was correct, and knew what he had to do. There was no other option for preserving the United States of America in a form worth preserving other than war as these great historical tectonic plates ground against one another.
As Lincoln famously said, "And the war came . . ."
I agree that the moral calculation was correct. However the price was the end of federalism practically -- states rights are pretty much moot when you've just invaded half the states to bend them to your will. It's called "The War of Northern Aggression" in the Deep South to this day for a reason. And William Wilberforce and John Newton and others made the same case in Britain without guns... and won.
I agree they won--with a moral (Christian) argument within the UK itself--but in another sense they simply displaced the exploitation of under-paid labor to the British working classes and to the natives in Britain's Colonial Empire. The UK also continued to benefit from American slavery by buying cheap cotton from the American South for decades after slavery was abolished in the UK itself.
Anyway, it's a complex situation and reasonable people can disagree about it.
My main position is that Lincoln could not have abolished slavery, which was protected by a wealthy, physically aggressive, and politically dominant Southern slave-owning class, without a terrible war. Wilberforce's and Newton's strategy, successful in the UK (and BTW a warning to American slaveholders of what might come to them, too) would not have, and could not, work in the USA of the 1860s.
Lincoln did what he had to do, or America would have been spiritually and morally eviscerated.
He could have abolished slavery in the US by letting the South go and then purchasing and emancipating slaves in the remaining slave states. While slavery is a moral evil, we didn't go to war with Brazil or Morocco to abolish slavery there. Alternatively, he could have purchased and emancipated all the slaves that existed in 1861 for less than the war cost, even excluding 1,000,000 deaths and who knows how many maimings and the destruction of the Federal republic.
Excellent, sobering, depressing piece. “Politics is down stream from culture “. Breitbart. That is a VERY heavy lift, I doubt it will happen.
So if words, whether spoken or written, can never be real laws. And I agree that the law is “written on the hearts of … men”, written by the Author unseen. Then the inner convictions of leaders and those led, it is these that coalesce to form the living but intangible constitution, if I understand correctly. With which I also wholeheartedly agree. How then are fundamental conflicts between parties of equally strong convictions and assertiveness to be resolved? By what means? A “sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution” is needed, without question. But these too are words. By what concrete means and steps is such a revitalization to be achieved, or even begun?
History suggests these differences are usually settled by the losing side accepting it has lost, economic collapse followed by a reordering, or violent revolution.
I know. I just wanted to hear someone say it :) In plain terms. I salute you!
Yes like in 1865. Also when the fed took primacy over the states...
Sadly, the good guys lost the War of Northern Aggression.
America: stick a fork in her, she's done.
Been done since 1911, or 1865 depending on your definition of "America."
I would say 1861 which is when Lincoln decided to use force. No matter who won CW1, there was no going back from that. He was the American Sulla.
The United States, as a Republic, is done. It may persist as an empire. I have some hope for America if we manage to separate.
We all know the usual response to some new outrage : We must put a system in place to ensure this never happens again.
People make the place. People choose what the rules are. People enforce the rules. The Big lie that really got America off track is the idea that America is an "idea," a "Proposition Nation," and that anyone can be American. I'm not sure for how long that idea has been infecting American minds, but that's really what has led us astray. America, and all nations, are People. The Declaration references the need of the people to dissolve their political bands. The Constitution declared that it was established to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Our posterity, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Founders. Up until 1965, America was a WASP Nation, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Nation. Today, the American People are vastly outnumbered on our own land, and we're being ruled by Foreigners.
I completely agree except for the last bit. Americans are doing this to themselves just as they are in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-wests-anti-colonial-struggle
Yes, I remember your excellent article. I myself am moving more to the idea that the elites are possessed by evil demons. The Chinese are mercantile managers par excellence but to my knowledge aren't pushing the sexual stuff, nor do they have, as you say, such a loathing for their own people.
What transpires today would be considered madness only a few years ago and makes colonialism appear logical and quaint by comparison.
Now, I suppose you could say it's part of the plan to demoralize the subject population, but it seems wildly excessive doesn't it? There's a kind of sadistic pleasure taken in the defilement of innocence. To me that indicates something else is going on.
I mean, it could be demons, assuming demons have been in charge of every empire in the history of the world that we know of. Or, it could just be sinful men seeking power and money. Six one way, half a dozen the other. The Empire is run by Foreigners. The American People, all People want to run their own nations. As the author says, People want self-determination.
Sure, but I thought the US had self-determination already. The Revolution and all. So, why or how did they let foreigners take over?
The billionaires are a nation unto themselves. That kind of money does weird things to human psychology. Billionaires tend to think they're near-gods, and become deeply hostile to any limits of any kind, including their own countrymen and national interests. The citizenship of the billionaire is fairly irrelevant.
Means to an end. Hastened, at that.
It's techno-gnosticism, also known as transhumanism. The end game is replacing homo sapiens with a new and improved species. They consider homo sapiens to be entirely unsatisfactory in multiple ways.
I call it techno-feudalism. You use AI and robots to provide the comforts for the ruling class without the risk that the serfs revolt.
Agreed. And it's delusional. The AI and robots are repaired by the serfs and programmed by the serfs.
I recall arguing there the conservatives need to adopt the attitude that we are colonial subjects of a ruling class located in the big cities and pursue an anti-colonial struggle. Most of these were resolved peacefully.
Yes.
Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box and Cartridge Box, looks pretty clear which one will be used here ain't it.