Remnant Review
The #1 error of the Left is this assumption: "Politics is the driving force of civilization." This is also the #1 error of the American Right.
It is understandable that the Left believes this error. The Left believes in power. It believes that mankind can be remade by the imposition of political power by the centralized state. This faith goes back to classical Greece -- Athens as well as Sparta. The Left is not equally committed to the maintenance of independent institutions such as the family, churches, businesses, charitable associations, and all the other institutions that make civilization possible and that provide liberty because they provide defenses against the coercive state for their members.
The Left's hostility to independent institutions became clear in the French Revolution. In the French Revolution, the revolutionaries called each other "citizen." But this had already been clear to anyone who had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract (1762). His theory of the General Will remains the basis of Left-wing politics today. The General Will is the hypothetical will of the body politic that would manifest itself if there were no intermediary institutions interfering with it -- rival loyalties that must be eliminated by the state.
The person who understood this outlook best was the founder of philosophical conservatism, Edmund Burke. This was why, in November 1790, his book, Reflections on the French Revolution, predicted that the French Revolution would become ruthlessly tyrannical. I know of no other book of political forecasts that has ever been as accurate as this book. Burke understood that the French Revolution was overwhelmingly committed to the reconstruction of mankind and man's civilization by means of centralized political power.
Sadly, American political conservatism has bought into the French Revolution's outlook. There is almost no trace of the thinking of Edmund Burke in the thinking of conservative political activists in the United States. This has been the point of vulnerability for the American conservative movement ever since 1948: the Chambers vs. Hiss confrontation in Congress. American conservatism is overwhelmingly political in its focus.
POLITICS IS BIPARTISAN
Very few people are committed to politics as a way of life. Most Americans get interested in politics once every four years when the presidential election is held. They become briefly obsessed with details about the campaigns. But the overwhelming majority of Americans have never attended a precinct meeting. They do not donate money to political candidates. They do not put their time and money where their mouths are.
Today, the American body politic is paralyzed. There is almost an even split between Republicans and Democrats in terms of electoral outcomes. The system is gridlocked. But far more important is this: Congress is essentially bipartisan in terms of big-spending programs. There was no battle over the $3.1 trillion deficit in fiscal 2020. One congressman opposed it early, when it was a mere $2 trillion: Massie of Kentucky. For his opposition in March, Trump savaged him in one of his tweets. CNBC reported:
President Donald Trump on Friday lashed out at Rep. Thomas Massie, calling him a “third rate Grandstander” after the Kentucky Republican signaled he would oppose a $2 trillion relief bill intended to soften the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.“He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay, which is both dangerous & costly,” Trump said of Massie in a series of furious tweets.
Trump said that while Republicans had to “give up some stupid things” through negotiations with Democrats “in order to get the ‘big picture’ done,” the bill was “90% GREAT!”
“WIN BACK HOUSE, but throw Massie out of Republican Party!” Trump added.
Massie's resistance did no good. "The House passed the bill by a voice vote early Friday afternoon, sending it to Trump to sign."
The battle for the soul of America is not at bottom political. This is a battle over these issues: social status, fundamental ethical issues, family authority, and whose standards should prevail culturally. The battle is manifested politically, but it is far deeper than politics. That is what Angelo Codevilla said in 2010. You would be wise to read his article. This battle is manifested in political rhetoric because politics is the Left's means of imposing its will on the vast majority of Americans, whom the Left despises.
The Left does not understand that politics is peripheral in the lives of most Americans. Americans do not run their lives in terms of politics. They do not give much thought to the details of politics. They care who gets elected President, but then they forget. The Left has made Trump a constant issue for over four years. That was a strategic mistake. This converted millions of his followers into political junkies. This has not happened since the Civil War.
Politics is also peripheral to the actual administrative system that runs the country. Politics has almost no impact on the actual operations of American government. Then what does? The massive federal bureaucracy that runs the country. This has been true since the end of World War II. This doesn't change. Again, I keep harping on this, but it doesn't sink into the consciousness of some members of this site. Politics is peripheral to it because politics barely affects the administrative system at the top. Even when there are political changes at the top, they are implemented by the bureaucracy, which continues to grow. It is administrative law, not the laws as interpreted by the nation's independent system of state and federal courts, which controls the direction of the United States and every other Western society. That was Harold Berman's point in Law and Revolution (1983). He was correct.
Political operatives are specialists. They believe that politics, if not everything, is the basis of everything. This is true of conservative political operatives. They have bought into the Left's worldview. So have supporters of Trump. But Trump will be out of office on January 20. At that point, the lure of political renewal will recede in their lives. A few will become politically active locally, but most will go back to what they were in early 2015: uninterested in day-to-day politics.
If I am wrong about this, then we are about to enter an era of political fragmentation. Trump has no successor. He created no movement. He has no Twitter account. But he never did much with it. He just vented. He will soon be silenced. The Left has created the Trump movement. Trump didn't care.
DE-PLATFORMING
The leftists who run the major social media sites despise conservatives generally and supporters of Trump specifically. They would like to de-platform every site that favors Donald Trump. They want to harass Trump loyalists. A public call for this strategy is here. This will not be a problem after January 20 at noon. Trump is going to be gone at that point. But they still want to get even. They despise him. Yet his views on massive government spending are theirs. Then why this hatred?
Their hatred is a social matter. Trump verbally represented a majority of voters who are tired of being pushed around by the Left. They are tired of the social, moral, and sexual agendas of the tiny elite of both parties that has rammed this agenda through Congress and in the media. The public is in reaction. But the Left knows only coercion as the way of changing other people's minds. They don't believe in open debate. They control the public schools. They control the mainstream media. They want to control websites. They believe in control. But they can't snuff out the resistance movement that Trump has now made visible.
Their algorithms will look for certain keywords, such as "stolen election." But the heart of this battle socially and culturally is not the stolen election. That was the symbol of the underlying struggle, not the issue itself.
In the main area of this battle, the public school system, there is no battle philosophically. The conservatives are as committed to the public schools as the Democrats are. The Right is as committed to the public schools as the Left is. There really is no fight here. I have watched this for six decades.
In 1961, R. J. Rushdoony's book appeared: Intellectual Schizophrenia. He showed that there is a fundamental opposition between statist public education and voluntary Christian education. His book was not accepted by most Christians then, and it is not accepted today.
So, in the main area of the battle for the minds of men, the conservatives are on the side of the Left. It is only a debate over who will control the curriculum. The Left will always control the curriculum. They control the universities. They therefore control the screening process that certifies public school teachers. They control the publishing houses that supply the public schools. Five firms dominate all public school classrooms. The Left controls the Department of Education. So, the Left is always going to win this fight. The conservatives don't understand that they cannot win.
The American Right surrendered to the Progressives no later than 1911. The primary textbook to teach American history from 1911 until 1966 was David Saville Muzzey's. He was a theologically liberal Presbyterian, and he was a political liberal. He was a nationalist. He wanted centralized government. He taught at least half of all Americans whatever they know about American history. I was one of them. I didn't buy into his worldview, but I was an exception.
If the Right is ever going to reclaim the country, it will have to do it by means of fighting the battles that were not Trump's battles. That will be fairly easy to do after he is gone. He will fade from people's consciousness. When he is gone, the Left's algorithms will not be able to police the thinking of the vast majority of people who participate on Facebook. All of the Facebook groups cannot be blocked. That would cost Facebook too much money.
The algorithms are not particularly relevant to the outcome of this battle over ideas. What is relevant is the enormous decentralization of discussion of ideas that is taking place as a result of social media. All over the world, the bodies politic are fragmenting. Each group pitches its own gospel of political salvation or social salvation. Noise is winning this war. Noise is bad for the Left.
Yes, the algorithms can make trouble for certain sites. This will be a problem for those sites. But the solution to the problem is to fight those battles that need to be fought outside of the realm of algorithm-policed politics. That is the politics of the Left. It always loses.
The French Revolution consumed its own. Each group of radicals went to the guillotine. Finally, in 1795, a reaction took place, and by 1798, Napoleon was dominant.
In the Soviet Union, the radicals became bureaucrats by 1970. The dream of worldwide Marxist domination faded. The Soviet Union committed suicide on December 25, 1991.
In Communist China, the oligarchs have their perks. They are officially Communists. But what they want is a form of social control that is based on people's spending habits. The so-called social credit system rewards people who buy the right kinds of products. There is nothing Communist about this system of control. This has more in common with Google than it does with Karl Marx.
Today, it's not that Google is going Communist. It's that Chinese Communism is going Google-ist.
Marx had a wonderful phrase: "cash nexus." This is the money system -- the profit system. He thought that this was dominant in the development of capitalist civilization. But, as we have seen in the USSR and Communist China, it is dominant in the development of all civilization today. The Communist bottom line is a capitalist bottom line.
It's time to watch Ned Beatty again. This is from Network (1976). He plays the CEO of a conglomerate that owns the television network on which Howard Beale, who really is crazy, has been ranting against the Arabs' latest investments. He calls Beale into a meeting. Beale has no idea what he is about to experience. He has never met the CEO before. He soon finds out.
COUNTER-REVOLUTION
The solution to the revolution that has been imposed from above politically, beginning no later than 1912, is a counter-revolution. It is a counter-revolution that is built, commitment by commitment, institution by institution, from the bottom up.
The Left is always committed to a reform program managed from the top-down. Conservatives ought to be committed to a program of reform from the bottom-up, but they aren't. They also are committed to a top-down revolution that captures the institutions dominated by the Left. This is the heart of the conservatives' problem.
I use this slogan: "Replacement, not capture." The goal should not be to capture the public schools. The goal should be to replace the public schools. This should be the conservatives' goal for every government-run welfare program.
Problem: American conservatives want control of the badges and guns. They want their agents to stick guns in the bellies of their neighbors. They want their programs to be funded by stolen political money. They want their share of political power.
This is why there is a bipartisan political establishment in control of Congress. The Democrats have offered to share some of the loot with Republicans. This is why newly elected Republican congressmen who go off to reform Congress within three terms have been captured by the old-boy network that dominates Congress. They start getting rich. They go to Washington with a net worth of $100,000, and they retire 20 years later with a net worth of $10 million. Then they become lobbyists. How does this happen? The system buys them off. The heart of the matter was articulated by speaker of the house Sam Rayburn six decades ago: "To get along, you have to go along." And so they go along.
There is now a possibility for conservative activists to begin to affect significant political change from the bottom up. That is because of the technological revolution offered by the World Wide Web.
The multiplication of activist websites is crucial. I do not mean activism in the sense of politics. I mean activism in the sense of replacing the institutions that are funded today by money that flows down from Washington. We need to get principled people in places of influence locally in our communities. We need to show the public that dependence on the welfare state is psychologically crippling to those who become beneficiaries of the welfare state.
Sites that show people how to help the poor, help children to learn, or help sick people get well will not be de-platformed. They will change the world for the better. They will create leaders. From these, we can move to changing our communities.
This is Burke's conservatism. It is Tocqueville's liberalism a generation later. It is ethically revolutionary. It is socially revolutionary.
If we will not do this, what good is political power? It is a snare and a delusion. It corrupts.
Conservatives and libertarians need to gain hands-on experience in the front lines of the social problems that are invoked by the Left as a justification for the expansion of the welfare state. It goes back to that old phrase: "You can't beat something with nothing."
CONCLUSION
Until conservatives switch their efforts from politics to social renewal, America will be trapped by the Left's paradigm. Politics can undermine social renewal, but only rarely contribute to it. The welfare state is proof. Anyone who has read Charles Murray's masterpiece, Coming Apart (2012), knows why. It has to do with status. There was a time when men who did not work suffered a loss in status. Those who did work gained status. That system of rewards has been undermined by the welfare state.
One more time: the separation in America is primarily social, not political.
Conservatives are fighting the social war on the national political battleground. They will lose this fight. They are fighting for control of a fiscally sinking ship.
It's time to head for the social lifeboats. It's time to make sure they float.
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