Probably the best analysis of 2020 America and the Covid saga I have read to date.
Guest Post by Angelo Codevilla
“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.
