Remnant Review
"As to the history of the Revolution, my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps Singular. What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington." John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (1815)
America is now going through through the early stages of a political revolution. It began with the election of Donald Trump. It escalated with the voting results on November 4. It is about to escalate again.
An estimated 185 House members are circulating articles of impeachment to vote on today. They say he incited insurrection on January 6. They blame him for the invasion of the Capitol building by a handful of his followers. But Trump in his disjointed speech did not call for violence. He said he would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
This impeachment move is noise, judicially speaking. The Democrats don't have the votes in the Senate to convict. The trial could not begin until inauguration day, says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who will cease being Majority Leader when Vice President Harris is sworn in. So, the move would be symbolic. This is pure hatred. It is also politically short-sighted. It will permanently split Trump Democrats from the Democratic Party. But it is more than this. It will alienate tens of millions of voters from the national government.
A political revolution always involves the crucial issue of political legitimacy. Legitimacy is imputed by voters to a civil government. It is imputed to other forms of government: family, church, and businesses. But the crucial granting of legitimacy in the modern world is to national governments.
This legitimacy has begun to fade over the last decade. But, in the United States, there was a major break in this legitimacy as a result of this year's presidential election.
A RAY OF HOPE
I shall speak here of things that ought to be obvious. I wrote about this last September: "Who Will Be Holding the Political Bag in 2021-2024?" I wrote this in 2019: "When Nostalgia Undermines Hope." The establishment is now on the defensive. This is something new for it.
In an article that I wrote 10 years ago, I went into the details of what I called the desperation of the establishment. Lew Rockwell published it on his site. I have reprinted it here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/21771.cfm.
The establishment is facing a number of problems. The multiplication of communications media is one of them. Yes, Facebook took away Trump's account. So did Twitter. That was obviously going to happen. Trump was an amateur. He did not understand the media. He understood the TV network system, but he didn't realize that the networks of social media could be removed. He relied upon them to get elected. He relied upon them to get out his tweets every day -- aimless tweets that didn't inflict any pain on the media.
Yet his amateur status was crucial to what he pulled off in 2016: the defeat of Hillary Clinton. It began earlier in the year. He was able to get the Republican Party's nomination. He completely blindsided the Republican establishment. They hated him for it, but since so many of their elected representatives were dependent upon his verbal support, they shut up. They are now going to walk away from him without any sense of betrayal. That's because the function of all of the political establishments around the world is betrayal. This is what they do best. This is their specialty.
The battle between the two parties is about equally distributed electorally. In the Northeast, the Democrats are dominant. In the West Coast they are dominant. In the middle of the country, they are not.
California is heavily taxing the super-rich. So is New York State. So is New York City. The loyalty of these people is departing. They are departing.
Consider this statement by Margaret Thatcher in 1976, speaking of the Labour government: "I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."
The federal budget deficit is massive. It was $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020. It is not coming down below $1 trillion this year. I think it will probably be closer to $2 trillion this year.
There is no solution politically to the deficit. With the Democrats in power, they are going to spend money they don't have. This is bipartisan. Republicans in Congress voted for the deficit last year. There will be some resistance for the next two years because the Republicans will not have to take responsibility for the deficits. The Democrats will be left holding the bag. When Republicans are in the minority, they vote in greater numbers against the boondoggles. As soon as they are in the majority, they start voting for the boondoggles. This has been the pattern for a generation. It was pioneered by Ronald Reagan. It is part of the Republican Party's lack of principles. Nobody believes the Republicans when they say they're going to balance a budget. If anybody believed Trump in 2016, he was naïve. Trump ran the greatest peacetime deficit in history: $7 trillion.
His defeat on November 3 was close if it was a defeat at all.
From now on, his supporters will not be tied to his abysmal lack of economic knowledge. He raised tariffs. He ran massive deficits. He didn't care. But this does not matter politically. His followers will remember only his rhetoric against the Democrats and those in his cabinet who betrayed him.
Angelo Codevilla was correct in 2010: "America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution." Tucker Carlson was correct last week: the Republican establishment hates Trump's supporters. This is a bipartisan war by the political elite against voters who are at last waking up to the threat to their liberties posed by the elite. This has been a long time coming. It began in 1912, when all three candidates for President were statist Progressives: Wilson, Roosevelt, and Taft. Murray Rothbard wrote the definitive book on this. You can download it for free: The Progressive Era.
This battle is about the social and political dominance of a ruling class that has nothing but contempt for the masses of American voters. The Republicans figured this out, or at least some of them did, and they voted for Trump. He persuaded some of the Democrats. Reagan did, too. These were the blue-collar Democrats. They became blue-collar Republicans under Reagan's administration, and they returned to the fold under Trump's.
The establishment is probably going to go after citizen Trump. I think the IRS will investigate his tax returns. New York state has begun. Everything he did to save money legally will be challenged by the tax men. There are probably going to be endless lawsuits against him. He is going to spend years hunkered down and bunkered down in Mar-a-Lago. His enemies will be ruthless. They will show no mercy.
Every time they attack him personally, they will enrage his followers. But the power brokers don't care. They have contempt for his followers.
Their main motivation for defeating Trump in 2020 was to humiliate his followers. His policies were not radical. The Left was not going after his policies. It was going after him as the representative of what Hillary Clinton called the deplorables. She hates them. Obama hates them. As he said, they believe in religion and guns. He was correct. They do.
MILLIONS OF SUPPORTERS
These people will know exactly who cut off access to Trump's accounts on Facebook and Twitter. They will know that this is a political move against them. They will take it personally. They should take it personally. The move was against them.
Facebook and Twitter don't care about a 74-year-old defeated politician. They don't think he's coming back. They think they have taken away his means of coming back. He didn't prepare for this for four years. He didn't set up his own independent communications network. He could have asked his followers to move from Twitter and Facebook to his system during these years. He didn't understand the social media that elected him. His son-in-law, who supposedly did understand it, did not organize the transition to Trump's own privately held database. Trump trusted Facebook and Twitter to get his message out. That was naïve.
Google has stopped selling the Parler app, which competes with Twitter. Apple and Amazon did too. The site is gone. Too late.
His followers will not completely disperse. Some of them will get active in local politics. Not many of them will, but it will not take many of them to begin to re-shape local Republican politics. When the money stops coming from Washington when Medicare and Social Security payments overwhelm the budget, as they inevitably will, his followers will be in a position to exercise leadership locally and at the state level in some states.
The big cities are lost to the Democrats. But they can't function if the money ceases to roll in from Washington. The cities are not going to be able to pick up the expenses of Medicare and Social Security.
Whatever the welfare state looks like in a decade or two, it will not look like the centralized welfare state that exists today. But the establishment has bet the farm on the city of Washington, D. C. The system is supported by the Federal Reserve System, life insurance companies that buy long-term T-bonds, and investors whose mutual funds buy government debt. It all hinges on the ability of Washington to bring in money sufficient to support the ever-growing deficit that will get vastly worse because of Medicare and Social Security.
Trump's presidency showed tens of millions of Republican voters and ex-Democrat voters that they exist. They are not alone. They did not know this before he was elected. That will prove to be his greatest legacy to America.
He is an afterthought at this point. What matters is the fact that he was able to get at least half a million of them to come to Washington last week. What matters is the fact that he had over 80 million people on his Twitter account. He no longer has the access to those people. It doesn't matter.
The political battle is no longer about Trump the politician. Trump is now a symbol. He is a symbol in the thinking of his hard-core supporters, and he is also a symbol in the thinking of his enemies. The key fact is this: tens of millions of people who were completely behind him, and who now feel betrayed by the American electoral system. They will no longer grant legitimacy to the national political system. This constitutes the first revolution since 1861. This is the real deal.
Revolutions begin in the minds of men and women who have the vote. Trump's revolution has begun. It is not a revolution over specific governmental policies. It is a revolution over social inequality: status, not money. It is over this: who has a right to rule? Whose cultural standards will prevail: the elite's or the great body of Americans?
Democrats may think it's a revolution about economic inequality. It isn't. The Washington establishment has never tampered with the ability of the super-rich to get much richer. In fact, the institutions of the establishment support this increasing inequality. But the increases in this inequality have been marginal. The Pareto distribution 20/80 is basic. For well over a century, in every Western nation, about 20% of the population owns 80% of the wealth. No one can explain this, but it rarely varies. The rhetorical fight over inequality is really over a few percentage points one way or the other at the top. The public doesn't understand this. I don't think the establishment understands it.
That's why the key battle is exactly what Codevilla and Carlson have said that it is: a social war. At the top is a tiny elite that uses federal spending policy and Federal Reserve policy to make their class richer. They dismiss anyone in the bottom 80% as irrelevant except rhetorically at election time. They hate the middle class. Codevilla had it right a decade ago.
The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side — especially the ruling class — embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.
The clash has now escalated to a level never imagined by the ruling class. Millions of Trump's voters in the middle class and even the lower-middle class now understand this. I don't think they understood it prior to Trump. That was because Trump did not hold any political office beforehand. The establishment did not care about him. Then they couldn't stop him. They hate him because he did this to them. They do want to get even with him personally. Why? Because he is representative of his supporters.
They can't do anything to get even with his supporters. The people who voted for him are not going to forget this. They now realize to a degree that they did not realize in 2015 that the entire political system is rigged against them.
A STOLEN ELECTION
Presidents are remembered for only one or two policies in their administrations. Clinton is only known for one: Monica. There is no way that he will ever be remembered for anything else. He is stuck with this for the rest of his life.
He was impeached. People don't really remember that. They are confused about the difference between impeachment (House) and conviction (Senate). They remember only Monica.
Trump is going to be known for only one thing: the stolen election of 2020. He was impeached over something or other about Russia. It was all nonsense. It won't matter.
Of all the things that he could be remembered for that will keep his supporters from ever trusting the political system again it is the legend of the stolen election. There is sufficient evidence to persuade his followers that it really was stolen.
When it comes to electronic voting machines, I think they should be guilty until proven innocent. I drew this conclusion back in 1980. I read Adam Osborne's Running Wild (1979). He warned about this. I was told by my own computer geek in 1980 that he could determine the outcome of local elections if he was put in charge of the computer that counted the votes. I believed him.
It doesn't matter how many articles for and against the theft get published on websites. People read the websites they believe in. That is the main result of social media. Facebook will of course attempt to block all such articles. It doesn't matter. People already have websites in the Favorites list at the top of their browsers. Facebook cannot get them back.
If the Democrats in the House impeach Trump as a final gesture -- there is insufficient time Constitutionally for him to be convicted, and the Senate will not convict anyway -- they will alienate Trump voters even more. Could Pelosi be that far out of touch with political reality? Doesn't she see that this will have permanent effects on the body politic? There will be no reconciliation in her lifetime.
If the Democrats after January 20 make it illegal to say the election was stolen, that would be perfect. It would expose the party as morally corrupt. They could not enforce such a law. But they might try.
It is creating permanent distrust in the national political system for tens of millions of voters. The Trump bloc will now be the biggest bloc in the Republican Party. National politics will henceforth be for getting even, not for getting anything done.
The Left always overreaches. That is its legacy, from the French Revolution to today. The crazies always take control in a crisis. The Democrats are making a mountain out of a molehill, just to get even with Trump as a symbol of his supporters.
There will now be passive and even active resistance to federal laws on a scale not seen in American history. People in both parties will see the electoral process as both corrupt and illegitimate. Both sides will say "not my President." This means "not my electoral system." Political legitimacy has departed from the thinking of millions of voters.
Distrust is growing. Distrust destroys legitimacy.
The national political system has cracked.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS
Until the social media, the vast majority citizens were not interested in politics on a day-to-day basis. But, once every four years, they get interested. This has changed. The social media are followed for their slant on politics. This is a social revolution.
From this point on, Trump's supporters will be the largest single voting bloc in the Republican Party. They probably will not be well organized. They aren't agreed on policies. They are agreed on one thing: the system is corrupt, and it is rigged against them. That is the belief that matters politically. This belief is going to shape American politics from this point on.
The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Beginning on November 4, tens of millions of voters became convinced that the American political system is corrupt.
The textbooks have tried to teach them otherwise. The mainstream media tried to teach them otherwise. Over the last two months, that faith has been shattered.
The system has been rigged in favor of the American establishment since at least the early 1890's. It began with the Republican Party. Benjamin Harrison hired the first of the Dulles family fixers in 1888. That was the grandfather, John W. Foster. Harrison appointed him Secretary of State in 1892.
The last serious attempt to stop the fixing was in the second term of Grover Cleveland, a Democrat. He vetoed over 600 bills in his two (split) terms, most of them involving spending. But the nomination of William Jennings Bryan by the Democrats in 1896 made both of the political parties part of the establishment's call for big government. It was too late for Calvin Coolidge to restructure the system in 1923-29. Hoover consolidated it, as Rothbard made clear in America's Great Depression (1963). Roosevelt made it his own.
Something fundamental has taken place in the last decade. Facebook has made people alert to political activities to degree that had never been true in American politics before. Facebook has created hard-core special-interest voting blocs that are committed to specific people in specific ideas. It has politicized American life and even life in the Third World to a degree that has never been seen before. This was not what the founder of Facebook intended, but he has created it. I agree with Karen Kwiatkowski:
Elite panic is all we are hearing and seeing on mainstream media. The logarithmic explosion of memes, articles, audio and video all questioning, challenging, ridiculing, and laughing at the government as a class is our new politics. It’s shallow, it’s reactive, and it produces cynical angry men and women, not statesmen. Thanks to the wonderful world we live in, that anger leads some of those cynical and angry people into the territory of new ideas, and builds a new awareness of both history and future possibilities. For every misunderstood marxist, we also get one agorist, a constitutionalist, a future member of the Leave Me Be Party, and a couple of people whose profiles say “loves chickens, gardening and making my own bread.” There is very little room in the future for parasitic elites telling us to sit down, shut up and do what we are told.
The implications of this are spelled out in the brilliant book by Martin Gurri, The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. The latest edition, published in 2018, brings up-to-date the insights of the first edition, which was published in 2014, before the Trump movement.
Codevilla is correct: this is a political war over legitimacy.
Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.
Today, the widespread loss of incumbent elitist legitimacy is not being matched by a rise of any other form of political legitimacy. That is what makes this era different. Martin Gurri understands this. This visible defection is being spread by the new communications technologies. It is happening all over the world.
CONCLUSION
Historians love to talk about watershed events: decisive turning points in history. Every historian has his favorites.
I believe that what has happened in the United States since November 4, 2020 will be regarded by future historians as a watershed. It has to do with the political system's loss of legitimacy among tens of millions of voters. I don't know how many people are hard-core Trump supporters, but I think it is safe to say that it is over 20 million. They don't constitute a voting bloc today because they have no leaders. They are unorganized. But their hatred for the establishment that hates them back is going to affect American politics from now on.
After the Great Default, when Medicare and Social Security bankrupt the federal government, we are going to see a shattering of trust in the national establishment. Tens of millions of additional voters will follow today's Trump voters' lead by ceasing to impute legitimacy to the central government's welfare state. That is when the next American Revolution will escalate. I do not think it will be violent. It will be functional. It will transfer power away from Washington. It will follow the money.
Be patient.
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