A superb analysis of the Trump administration and integration of Covid in US politics. (Must read)
Authored by Angelo Codevilla via AMGreatness.com,
The
United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. The clarity that
it has brought to our situation by recognizing this fact is its only
virtue...
"Either
the Constitution matters and must be followed . . . or it is simply a
piece of parchment on display at the National Archives."
- Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By
refusing to interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the
court archived what remained of the American republic’s system of equal
justice. That much is clear.
In 2021, the laws, customs,
and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the
18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and
interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted.
Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social
intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom.
Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and
social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving
directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the
arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with
them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations,
and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings
personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations.
While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or
otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate
sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience,
and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid
Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class
pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough
not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015,
Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s
rules flow from the people through their representatives.
In
2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared
experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions. In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.
Oligarchy
had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016
election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or
not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.” But how that election
and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life
depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified,
energized, and empowered our burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities.
These, along with the manner in which the oligarchy seized power between
November 2016 and November 2020, ensure that its reign will be ruinous
and likely short. The prospect that the republic’s way of life may
thrive among those who wish it to depends on the manner in which they
manage the civil conflict that is now inevitable.
From Ruling Class to Oligarchy
By the 21st century’s first decade, little but formality was left of the American republic. In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy described
the logic by which government and big business tend to coalesce into
socialism in theory, oligarchy in practice. But by then, that logic had
already imposed itself on the Western world. Italy’s 1926 Law of
Corporations—fascism’s charter—inaugurated not so much the regulation of
business by government as the coalescence of the twain. Over the
ensuing decade, it was more or less copied throughout the West.
In
America, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act’s authors had erected barriers
against private oligopolies and monopolies. By maintaining competition
between big business, they hoped to preserve private freedoms and limit
government’s role. But the Great Depression’s pressures and temptations
led to the New Deal’s rules that differed little from Italy’s. No matter
that, as the Supreme Court pointed out in Schechter Poultry v. U.S.,
public-private amalgamation does not fit in the Constitution. It grew
nevertheless alongside the notion that good government proceeds from the
experts’ judgment rather than from the voters’ choices. The miracles of
production that America brought forth in World War II seemed to
validate the point.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who
had come to understand large organizations that feed on government power
and dispense vast private benefits, was not shy in warning about the
danger they pose to the republic. His warning about the “military-industrial complex”
that he knew so well is often misunderstood as a mere caution against
militarism. But Ike was making a broader point: Amalgams of public and
private power tend to prioritize their corporate interests over the
country’s.
That is why Eisenhower cautioned against the power of
government-funded expertise. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s
scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of
money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded,” he said, because
“public policy could itself become the captive of a
scientific-technological elite.” Government money can accredit a
self-regarding elite. Because “a government contract becomes virtually a
substitute for intellectual curiosity,” government experts can end up
substituting their power for truth.
The expansion of government
power throughout the 1960s and ’70s in pursuit of improving education,
eradicating poverty, and uplifting blacks created complexes of
public-private power throughout America that surpassed the
military-industrial complex in size, and above all in influence.
Consider
education. Post-secondary education increased fourfold, from 9 percent
of Americans holding four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015.
College towns became islands of wealth and political power. From them
came endless “studies” that purported to be arbiters of truth and
wisdom, as well as a growing class of graduates increasingly less
educated but ever so much more socio-politically uniform.
In the
lower grades, per-pupil expenditure (in constant dollars) went from
$3,200 in 1960 to $13,400 in 2015. That money fueled an even more vast
and powerful complex—one that includes book publishers, administrators,
and labor unions and that has monopolized the minds of at least two
generations. As it grew, the education establishment also detached
itself from the voters’ control: In the 1950s, there were some 83,000
public school districts in America. By 2015, only around 13,000 remained
for a population twice as large. Today’s parents have many times less
influence over their children’s education than did their grandparents.
Analogous
things happened in every field of life. Medicine came to be dominated
by the government’s relationship with drug companies and hospital
associations. When Americans went to buy cars, or even light bulbs and
shower nozzles, they found their choices limited by deals between
government, industry, and insurance companies. These entities regarded
each other as “stakeholders” in an oligarchic system. But they had ever
less need to take account of mere citizens in what was becoming a
republic in name only. As the 20eth century was drawing to a close,
wherever citizens looked, they saw a government and government-empowered
entities over which they had ever less say, which ruled ever more
unaccountably, and whose attitude toward them was ever less friendly.
The
formalities were the last to go. Ever since the signing of the Magna
Carta in 1215 A.D., the rulers’ dependence on popular assent to
expenditures has been the essence of limited government. Article I,
section 9 of the U.S. Constitution enshrines that principle.
Congressional practice embodied it. Details of bills and expenditures
were subject to public hearings and votes in subcommittees, committees,
and the floors of both Houses. But beginning in the early 1980s and
culminating in 2007, the U.S government abandoned the appropriations
process.
Until 1981, Congress had used “continuing resolutions” to
continue funding government operations unchanged until regular
appropriations could be made. Thereafter, as congressional leaders
learned how easy it is to use this vehicle to avoid exposing what they
are doing to public scrutiny, they legislated and appropriated ever less
in public, and increasingly put Congress’ output into continuing
resolutions or omnibus bills, amounting to trillions of dollars and
thousands of pages, impossible for representatives and senators to read,
and presented to them as the only alternative to “shutting down the
government.” This—now the U.S government standard operating
procedure—enables the oligarchy’s “stakeholders” to negotiate their
internal arrangements free from responsibility to citizens. It is the
practical abolition of Article I section 9—and of the Magna Carta
itself.
In the 21st century, the American people’s trust
in government plummeted as they—on the political Left as well as on the
Right—realized that those in power care little for them. As
they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public
officials and politicians while getting much richer, they felt
impoverished and disempowered. Since the ruling class embraced
Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant. The presidential
elections of 2008 and 2012 underlined that whoever won, the same people
would be in charge and that the parceling out of wealth and power among
stakeholders would continue.
Americans on the Right were
especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally united
in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in
particular. The cultural warfare it waged on the rest of America
inflamed opposition. But it also diluted its own focus on solidifying
profitable arrangements.
By 2016, America was already well into the classic cycles of revolution. The
atrophy of institutions, the waning of republican habits, and the
increasing, reciprocal disrespect between classes that have less in
common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more
different from one another, than did the 19th century’s Northerners and
Southerners precluded returning to traditional republican life. The
election would determine whether the oligarchy could consolidate itself.
More important, it would affect the speed by which the revolutionary
vortex would carry the country, and the amount of violence this would
involve.
The Trump Catalyst
By 2015, the
right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was
inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had
begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans
disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His
popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because
the other 16 Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever
had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a field so crowded depended on when
which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never was a
head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.
Trump’s
candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the
entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in
2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the
arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being.
Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost
certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty
narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as
easily as about Trump.
But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it
possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was
about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than
about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal
consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to
convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so
important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws,
and truth itself.
Particular individuals had never been the
oligarchy’s worry. In 2008, as Barack Obama was running against Hillary
Clinton and John McCain—far cries from Trump—he pointed to those
Americans who “cling to God and guns” as the problem’s root. Clinton’s
2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were “a basket of
deplorables,”—racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.—merely voiced what had
long been the oligarchy’s consensus judgment of most Americans. For
them, pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of
power, treating them as less than citizens, had already come to define
justice and right.
Donald Trump—his bombastic, hyperbolic
style, his tendency to play fast and loose with truth, even to lie as
he insulted his targets—fit perfectly the oligarchy’s image of his
supporters, and lent a color of legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate
collusion between the oligarchy’s members in government and those in the
Democratic Party running against Trump.
Thus did the FBI
and CIA, in league with the major media and the Democratic Party, spy
on candidate Trump, concocting and spreading all manner of synthetic
dirt about him. Nevertheless, to universal surprise, he won, or rather
the oligarchy lost, the 2016 election.
The oligarchy’s disparate
members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to Trump.
The realization that the presidency’s awesome powers now rested in his
hands fostered a full-court-press #Resistance. Trump’s peculiarities
helped make it far more successful than anyone could have imagined.
“Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite”
Applying
this observation to candidate Trump’s hyperbole suggested that
President Trump might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the
most self-destructive of habits, combining “the unbridled tongue with
the unready hand.” And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and
referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials
who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let
himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national
security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’
plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the
documents associated with their illegalities.
Four years later,
he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized
officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who
likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in
office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal
of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the
Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the
entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he
appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.
He
acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state,
secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly.
At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a nationally televised speech
in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had been
wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall
Street but left untouched the tax code’s “carried interest” provision
that is the source of much unearned wealth. He railed against the legal
loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor content without
retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January
2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By
the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.
Nor did
Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of
being ordered to attend workplace sessions about their “racism.” But
not until his last months in office did he ban the practice within the
federal government. Never did he ban contracts with companies that
require such sessions.
Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating
the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump
had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor
pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.
#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing
encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as
does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob—especially when
all can be sure they are acting safely, gratuitously. Success
supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the
ruling class’ members that they are more right, more superior, and more
entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel
bigger and better about themselves than they ever had.
Logic and Dysfunction
Disdain
for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society
that, apart from their profitable material connections to government,
have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That
hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by
treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds,
say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of
public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of
administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on.
#TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and
privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to
their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.
Ruling-class
judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump
Administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed
every charge, every insinuation, non-stop and unquestioned.
#TheResistance made it ruling-class policy that Trump’s and his voters’
racism and a host of other wrongdoing made them, personally,
illegitimate. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these
presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2018, the
ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the
protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set
upon in the streets, prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even
for defending themselves.
Because each and every part of the
ruling coalition’s sense of what may assuage its grievances evolves
without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It
is also inherently destructive of oligarchy.
Enjoyment of power’s
material perquisites is classic oligarchy’s defining purpose. Having
conquered power over the people, successful oligarchies foster
environments in which they can live in peace, productively. Oligarchy,
like all regimes, cannot survive if it works at cross-purposes. But the
oligarchy that seized power in America between 2016 and 2020 is engaged
in a never-ending seizure of ever more power and the infliction of ever
more punishment—in a war against the people without imaginable end.
Clearly, that is contrary to what the Wall Street magnates or the corps
of bureaucrats or the university administrators or senior professors
want. But that is what the people want who wield the “intersectional”
passions that put the oligarchy in power.
As the
oligarchy’s every part, every organ, raged against everything Trump, it
made itself less attractive to the public even as Trump’s various
encouragements of economic activity were contributing to palpable
increases in prosperity.
Hence, by 2019’s end, Trump was likely to win reelection. Then came COVID-19.
The COVID Fortuna
The
COVID-19 virus is no plague. Though quite contagious, its
infection/fatality rate (IFR), about 0.01 percent, is that of the
average flu, and its effects are generally so mild that most whom it
infects never know it.
Like all infections, it is deadly to those
weakened severely by other causes. It did not transform American life
by killing people, but by the fears about it that our oligarchy packaged
and purveyed. Fortuna, as Machiavelli reminds us, is
inherently submissive to whoever bends her to his wishes. The fears and
the strictures they enabled were not about health—if only because those
who purveyed and imposed them did not apply them to themselves. They
were about power over others.
COVID’s politicization began
in February 2020 with the adoption by the World Health
Organization—which is headed by an Ethiopian bureaucrat beholden to
China—and upon recommendation of non-scientist Bill Gates, of a
non-peer-reviewed test for the infection. The test’s chief
characteristic is that its rate of positives to negatives depends on the
number of cycles through which the sample is run. More cycles, more
positives. Hence, every test result is a “soft” number. Second, the WHO
and associated national organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control reported COVID’s spread by another “soft” number: “confirmed
cases.” That is, sick persons who tested positive for the virus.
When
this number is related to that of such persons who then die, the
ratio—somewhat north of 5 percent—suggests that COVID kills one out of
20 people it touches. But that is an even softer number since these
deaths include those who die with COVID rather than of it, as well as those who may have had COVID.
Pyramiding such soft numbers, mathematical modelers projected millions
of deaths. Scary for the unwary, but pure fantasy.
For example,
the U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which
modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were
based, also predicted COVID-19 deaths for Sweden, which did not lock
down. On May 3, the IHME predicted that Sweden would suffer 2,800 COVID
deaths a day within the next two weeks. The actual number was 38.
Reporting on COVID has never ceased to consist of numbers as scary as
they are soft.
Literate persons know that, once an
infectious disease enters a population, nothing can prevent it from
infecting all of it, until a majority has developed antibodies after
contracting it—so-called community immunity or herd immunity. But fear
leads people to empower those who promise safety, regardless of how
empty the promises. The media pressed governments to do something. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy
Noonan screamed: “don’t panic is terrible advice.” The pharmaceutical
industry and its Wall Street backers salivated at the prospect of
billions of government money for new drugs and vaccines. Never mind the
little sense it makes for millions of people to accept a vaccine’s
non-trivial risk to protect against a virus with trivial consequences
for themselves. All manner of officials yearned to wield unaccountable
power.
Because the power to crush the general population’s
resistance to itself is the oligarchy’s single-minded focus, it was
able to bend fears of COVID to that purpose. Thus, it gathered more
power with more consequences than the oligarchs could have imagined.
But only President Trump’s complaisance made this possible. His
message to the American people had been not to panic, be mindful of the
scientific facts—you can’t stop it, and it’s not that bad—while
mitigating its effects on vulnerable populations. But on March 15, Trump
bent, and agreed to counsel people to suspend normal life for two weeks
to “slow the spread,” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Two
weeks later, the New York Times crowed that Trump, having been
told “hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country
reopened too soon,” had been stampeded into “abandoning his goal of
reopening the country by Easter.” He agreed to support the “experts’”
definition of what “soon” might mean. By accrediting the complex of
government, industry, and media’s good faith and expertise, Trump
validated their plans to use COVID as a vehicle for enhancing their
power.
Having seized powers, the oligarchs used them as
weapons to disrupt and disaggregate the parts of American society they
could not control.
The economic effects of lockdowns and
social distancing caused obvious pain. Tens of millions of small
businesses were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. More
than 40 million Americans filed claims for unemployment assistance.
Uncountable millions of farmers and professionals had their products and
activities devalued. Millions of careers, dreams that had been realized
by lifetimes of work, were wrecked. Big business and government took
over their functions. Within nine months, COVID-19 had produced 28 new
billionaires.
Surplus and scarcity of food resulted
simultaneously because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels.
As demand shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution
networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly, millions of gallons
of milk were poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of
eggs, and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle were destroyed, acres of
vegetables and tons of fruit were plowed under. Prices in the markets
rose. Persons deprived of work with less money with which to pay higher
prices struggled to feed their families. This reduced countless
self-supporting citizens to supplicants. By intentionally reducing the
supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined
the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
But
none of these had ever shut down a whole nation’s entire medical care
except for one disease. Hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the
decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Emergency rooms were
closed to the poor people who get routine care there. Forget about
dentistry. Most Americans were left essentially without medical care for
most of a year. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding
holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this
lack of medical care has caused and will cause yet.
The
oligarchy’s division of all activity into “essential”—meaning
permitted—and “nonessential”—to be throttled at will—had less obvious
but more destructive effects. Private clubs, as well as any and
all gatherings of more than five or 10 people, were banned. Churches
were forbidden to have worship services or to continue social
activities. The “social distancing” and mask mandates enforced in public
buildings and stores, and often on the streets, made it well-nigh
impossible for people to communicate casually. Thus, was that part of
American society that the oligarchy did not control directly
disarticulated, and its members left alone to face unaccountable powers
on which they had to depend.
Meanwhile, the media became the oligarchy’s public relations department.
Very much including ordinary commercial advertising, it hammered home
the oligarchy’s line that COVID restrictions are good, even cool. These
restrictions reduced the ideas available to the American people to what
the mass media purveyed and the social media allowed. Already by April
2020, these used what had become near-monopoly power over interpersonal
communications to censor such communications as they disapproved.
Political enforcers took it upon themselves even to cancel statements by
eminent physicians about COVID that they judged to be “misleading.” Of
course, this betrayed the tech giants’ initial promise of universal
access. It is also unconstitutional. (In Marsh v. Alabama, decided in 1946, the Supreme Court barred private parties from acting as de facto governments).
Since these companies did it in unison, they also violated the 1890
Sherman Antitrust Act. But the ruling class that had become an oligarchy
applauded their disabling whatever might be conducive to conservatives’
interests and inconvenient to their own candidates.
Private
entities wielding public powers in coordination with each other without
having to observe any of government’s constitutional constraints is as
good a definition of oligarchy as there is. Oligarchy had
increasingly taken power in the buildup to the 2020 election. In its
aftermath, it would try to suffocate America.
Sovereignty of the Vote Counters
The
oligarchy’s proximate objective, preventing the 2020 presidential
election from validating the previous one’s results, overrode all
others. The powers it had seized under COVID’s cover, added to
the plethora that it had exercised since the 2016 campaign’s beginning,
had surely cowered some opposition. But as November 2020 loomed, no one
could be sure how much it also had energized.
Few people were
happy to be locked down. It was a safe bet that not a few were unhappy
at being called systemically racist. The oligarchy, its powers
notwithstanding, could not be sure how people would vote. That is why it
acted to take the presidential election’s outcome out of the hands of
those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of its members who would count the votes.
Intentionally,
traditional procedures for voting leave no discretion to those who
count the votes. Individuals obtain and cast ballots into a physical or
electronic box only after showing identification that matches their
registration. Ballot boxes are opened and their contents counted by
persons representing the election’s opposing parties. Persons registered
to vote might qualify to vote-by-mail by requesting a ballot, the
issuance and receipt of which is checked against their registration.
Their ballots are counted in the same bipartisan manner.
The
Democratic Party had long pressed to substitute universal voting by
mail—meaning that ballots would be sent to all registered voters, in
some states to anyone with a driver’s license whether they asked for
them or not and regardless of whether these persons still lived at the
address on the rolls or were even alive. The ballots eventually would
arrive at the counting centers, either through the mail, from drop
boxes, or through “harvesters” who would pick them up from the voters
who fill them out, and who may even help them to fill them out.
Security, if any, would consist of machine-matching signatures on the
ballot and on the envelope in which it had come. The machine’s software
can be dialed to greater or lesser sensitivity.
But doing away
with scrutiny of ballots counted by representatives of the election’s
contenders removes the last possibility of ensuring the ballot had come
from a real person whose will it is supposed to represent. Once the link
between the ballot and the qualified person is broken, nothing prevents
those in charge of the electoral process from excluding and including
masses of ballots as they choose. The counters become the arbiters.
Attorney
General William Barr pointed out the obvious: Anyone, in America or
abroad, can print up any number of ballots, mark them, and deliver them
for counting to whoever is willing to accept them and run them through
their machines. Since the counters usually dispose of the envelopes in
which ballots arrive—thus obviating any possibility of tracing the
ballot’s connection to a voter—they may even dispense of the fiction
that there had ever been any signed envelopes. That is especially true
of late-found ballots. Who knows where they came from? Who cares to find
out?
Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal
vote-by-mail established by law. Elsewhere, especially in the states
sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election, mail-in voting
was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions.
Questions of right and wrong aside, the Constitution’s Article II
section 1’s words—“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—makes
such actions unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these
states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the counting of
votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of Democratic
Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.
To
no one’s surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by
super-majorities for the Democratic candidate precisely from these
counties in these states. Yes, Trump’s percentage of the vote
fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes
in 2020 than four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes
he received from blacks. The Democrats’ gain of some 15 million
votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their victory in the
Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in
these corrupt counties—the only places where Trump’s share of the black
vote was cut by three-quarters. Did people there really think so
differently?
This is not the place to recount the list of
affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury by persons who observed
ballot stuffing, nor the statistical anomaly of successive batches of
votes that favored Biden over Trump by precisely the same amounts, of
un-creased (i.e., never mailed) ballots fed into counting machines, nor
the Georgia video of suitcases of ballots being taken from under tables
and inserted into counting machines after Republican observers had been
ousted. Suffice it to note that references to these events have been
scrubbed from the Internet. It is more important to keep in mind that,
in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits that crimes have been
committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial,
prosecutorial, or legislative investigations. But for the first time in
America, the ruling class dismissed them with: “You have no proof!” A
judge (the sister of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) ruled that even when
someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address
is still a lawful basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of
crime is impossible with such judges and without testimony under oath,
or powers of subpoena.
Just as important, Republicans in
general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy
responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the
executive actions and consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure
mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were being perpetrated in key
states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional violations
were undeniable.
Pennsylvania et. al. answered
Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes
that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting
stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the
Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had
held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without
comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the
oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come
well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically,
the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.
The Oligarchy Rides its Tigers
Winning
the 2020 election had been the objective behind which the oligarchy had
coalesced during the previous five years. In 2021, waging
socio-political war on the rest of America is what the oligarchy is all
about.
The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary
Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only
substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference.
Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered
irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate
victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But
permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed
approach to governing.
The Democratic Party had promised a return
to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s
several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference
as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as
some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of
communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air
travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find
bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature
legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s
economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war,
uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.
Perhaps most
important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some
74 million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy’s
corporate components seem to want only to adorn unchallenged power with a
reputation for “wokeness.” For them, causing pain to their opponents is
a pleasure incidental to enjoying power’s perquisites. The Biden
family’s self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this
oligarchy’s standard.
But the people who dispense that
reputation—not just the professional revolutionaries of Antifa and Black
Lives Matter, but “mainstream” racial and gender activists and
self-appointed virtue-crats, have appetites as variable as they are
insatiable. For them, rubbing conservative America’s faces in excrement
is what it’s all about. A Twitter video viewed by 2.6 million people
urges them to form “an army of citizen detectives” to ferret out
conservatives from among teachers, doctors, police officers, and “report
them to the authorities.” No doubt, encouraged by President Biden’s
characterization of opponents as “domestic terrorists,” any number of
“authorities” as well as private persons will find opportunities to lord
it over persons not to their taste. This guarantees endless clashes,
and spiraling violence.
Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, and the
people they appoint to positions of official responsibility are
apparatchiks, habituated to currying favor and pulling rank. They have
neither the inclination nor the capacity to persuade the oligarchy’s
several parts to agree to a common good or at least to a modus vivendi among
themselves, never mind with conservative America. This guarantees that
they will ride tigers that they won’t even try to dismount.
At
this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and
unofficial powers to exclude whomever it chooses from society’s
mainstream. Necessarily, however, exclusions cut both ways.
Invariably, to banish another is to banish one’s self as well. Google,
Facebook, and Twitter let it be known that they would exclude anything
with which they disagree from what had become the near-universal means
of communication. They bolstered that by colluding to destroy their
competitor, Parler. Did they imagine that 74 million Americans could
find no means of communicating otherwise? Simon and Schuster canceled a
book by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) critical of communications
monopolies. Did its officials imagine that they would thereby do other
than increase the book’s eventual sales, and transfer some of their
customers to Hawley’s new publisher?
The media effectively suppressed inconvenient news. Did they imagine
that this would prevent photos of Black Lives Matter professionals in
the forefront of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol from reaching
the public?
In sum, intending to relegate conservative
America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a
clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By
telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are
ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations
toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way.
Clarity, Leadership, and Separation
To
think of conservative America’s predicament as an opportunity is as
hyperbolic as it was for Machiavelli to begin the conclusion of The Prince by
observing that “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that
the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness of
Cyrus’s spirit that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to know
the excellence of Theseus, that the Athenian people be dispersed, so at
the present, in order to know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was
necessary that Italy reduce herself to the conditions in which she is at
present . . .”
Machiavelli’s lesson is that the clarity of
situations such as he mentions, and such as is conservative America’s
following the 2020 election, is itself valuable. Clarity makes illusions
of compromise untenable and points to self-reliant action as the only
reasonable path. The people might or might not be, as he wrote, “all
ready and disposed to follow the flag if only someone were to pick it
up.” But surely, someone picking up the flag is the only alternative to
servitude.
What, in conservative America’s current predicament, might it mean to “pick up the flag?” Electoral
politics remains open to talented, courageous, ambitious leadership. In
Florida and South Dakota, Governors Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem have
used their powers to make room for ways of life different from and more
attractive than that in places wholly dominated by the oligarchy.
Texas and Idaho as well attract refugees from such as California and
New York by virtue of such differences with life there as their elected
officials have been able to maintain. Governmental and corporate
pressures on such states to conform to the oligarchy’s standards, sure
to increase, are opportunities for their officials to lead their
people’s refusal to conform by explaining why doing this is good, and by
personally standing in the way. They may be sure that President Kamala
Harris would not order federal troops to shoot at state officials for
closing abortion clinics or for excluding men from women’s bathrooms.
For more than a generation, a majority of Americans have expressed growing distrust of, and alienation from, the establishment. The establishment, not Donald Trump, made this happen. That
disparate majority, in many ways at cross purposes with itself, demands
leadership. Pollster Patrick Caddell’s in-depth study of the American
electorate, which he titled “We Need Smith,” showed
how the themes that made it possible for the hero of the 1939 movie
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” to prevail against the establishment then
are even more gripping now and appeal to a bigger majority. Trump was a
bad copy of Mr. Smith.
More than ever, an audience beyond the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump hungers for leadership. The
oligarchy came together by ever more vigorously denigrating and
suppressing these deplorables. Already before the 20th century’s turn,
the FBI and some elements in the Army and the Justice Department had
concluded that they are somehow criminal, and that preparations should
be made to treat them as such. The official position of the
administration taking power after the 2020 election is that domestic
terrorism from legions of “white supremacists” is the primary threat
facing America. No wonder those so designated for outlawry demand
protection.
The path to electoral leadership is
straightforward. Whoever would lead the deplorables-plus must explain
their cause to friend and foe, make it his own, and grow it by leading
successful acts of resistance.
Increasingly,
conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power.
Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic
rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous
acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands
in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his
grip on power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the
presidency in 2024, in the course of debunking the narrative by which
the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead millions to
violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he
pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory
racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and
private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given
sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be
fired or held back.
Such a persuasive prospective president, or
president, could finish the process that, beginning circa 2010,
initiated the process of reshaping the Republican Party into something
like Caddell’s Mr. Smith would have personified.
Electoral
politics, however, is the easy part. Major corporations, private and
semi-private institutions such as schools, publishing houses, and media,
are the oligarchy’s deepest foundations. These having become hostile,
conservative Americans have no choice but to populate their own. This is
far from impossible.
Sorting ourselves out into congenial groups
has been part of America’s DNA since 1630, when Roger Williams led his
followers out of Massachusetts to found Providence Plantations. In the
19th century, the Mormons left unfriendly environments to establish
their own settlements. Since 1973, Americans who believe in
unborn children’s humanity have largely ceased to intermarry with those
who do not. Nobody decided this should happen. It is in the logic of
diverging cultures.
As American primary and secondary
education’s dysfunction became painfully apparent, parents of all races
have fled the public schools as fast as they could. Businesses have been
fleeing the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt for generations. When Democratic
governors and mayors used COVID to make life difficult in their
jurisdictions, people moved out of them. When Twitter’s censorship of
conservatives became undeniable, Parler added customers by the hundreds
of thousands each day. Facebook and Twitter’s stock lost $50 billion in a
week. Much more separation follows from the American people’s diverging
cultures.
As conservative America sorts itself out from
oligarchy’s social bases, it may be able to restore something like what
had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have to
learn to coexist within our present boundaries. But that may be the
best, freest, arrangement possible now for the United States.
