Codevilla's Vision for America
"The United States of America is coming apart. The only question is whether it finishes doing so to avoid violence, or as a result thereof." -- Angelo Codevilla
Codevilla has become something of a prophet for conservatives. He is the closest thing to Solzhenitsyn we have.
His latest article was Lew Rockwell's lead article.
The full article is here.
Given what he writes, I am amazed that Rockwell ran it.
In the 1860s, countless Americans pushed and pulled the country around. Lincoln provided such coherence, focus, definition, as America needed to get through its trial. His loss showed how important these had been. . . .The Civil War happened when the South sought to spread its peculiar institution nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision seconded that nationalization and turbocharged Northern abolitionism.
This raises the issue of leadership. Codevilla describes what is necessary to rescue the nation.
A defining leader’s presence is essential for the members of the enterprise to recognize themselves as part of something that is alive. Leadership provides a living intelligence and will in which they can place their confidence on safety and success. To lead, someone must prove he knows what he is doing, that he cares, and that he is going to make the whole thing work. At all times and in all places, persons personify enterprises.The greater the enterprise to be personified, the wider and more diverse the interests and passions to be focused on it, the more essential it is that whoever does try to do it meld himself into it. Charge of big things naturally tempts would be leaders to think of themselves in large terms, to seek commitment to themselves. There is no greater pitfall. Effective espousal of a cause means that the leader dissolves into the cause.
A serious attempt to rescue Americans from an alien regime at war with our way of life awaits the rise of a person to embody their sentiments, focus and lead them to act successfully in their own interest.
To which I respond:
Ronald Reagan had the rhetoric to inspire people. But, when in office, there was almost no connection between his rhetoric and his actions. He promised to abolish the Department of Education. He didn't. Codevilla is on target.
National-level involvement in K-12 education also having been a source of inflation and all manner of corruption, and attempts to use the Department of Education to remedy the harm it has caused having miscarried, today’s leaders should, like Ronald Reagan, promise to abolish that Department. And then do it, reminding parents that if they do not educate their own children, the government is sure to mis-educate them.
Problem: the public wants tax-funded education. Voters have no intention of funding their children's education.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were good speakers, although not inspirational. They, too, failed to accomplish much of anything administratively or legislatively.
Donald Trump talked a good line, but when push came to shove, he did not do anything significant. Texas Gov. Abbott says that Texas will have to finish the wall. Trump built 453 miles of wall, but most of that was in Arizona. Most of the 453 miles were replacement barriers. "Of the 453-mile total, 351 miles were replacement barriers, 47 miles were new barriers where none previously existed, and the remaining 55 miles were 'secondary' barrier." Abbott says he has raised $459,000 in private donations to complete the wall in Texas. He has said that the state will provide $250 million more.
National leadership has been conspicuously absent ever since the Johnson Administration, which ended in January 1969. That leadership was a disaster.
Who will articulate the American vision? There is no one on the political horizon.
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW
He is correct on this:
The oligarchy’s perversion of American law, its partisan seizure of the justice system, of the intelligence agencies, and of the military, is the deadliest weapon in the war of annihilation it wages against our Republic. Led and largely staffed by partisan Democrats, scarcely distinguishable from the private corporations and institutions it oversees, the bureaucracy legislates and administers against the rest of us. The Constitution? “Are you kidding?” asked Nancy Pelosi.
But this is nothing new. This has been going on all over the West for over a century. It is destroying Western civilization's concept of the rule of law. That was Harold Berman's point in his Introduction to Law and Revolution (1983).
He has hope in the growth in awareness of this process on the part of voters.
But wise leadership can circumscribe its effects as it prepares such an election. Depriving these perversions and seizures of any shadow of legitimacy is key. Any argument we make against bureaucratic, prosecutorial, or power-agency actions as if these actions were errors within our republican system only give credence to a falsehood, a lie. In fact, the bureaucracy’s, the intelligence agencies’, the armed forces’ actions against republicans are not errors. They are the oligarchic regime’s acts of war. As the majority of Americans grasp that reality, they deprive the regime’s powers of the legitimacy that gives them force.
This presumes a degree of sophistication on the part of voters that has never existed, not even before tax-funded schools.
I argue that the realization of failure must come when the money from Washington runs out. Nothing else will persuade a majority of voters that the system has failed. They want stolen money. For as long as they get a small percentage of the loot, they will not rebel. The bankers need not fear. The top 1% need not fear.
DECENTRALIZATION
At the end, he raises the issue of localism.
The U.S. Constitution’s letter gives nearly all powers of government to the states, and reserves unmentioned ones “to the people.” Surely that includes powers over bathrooms, marriages, who competes with whom in sports, etc. It certainly includes power over elections.
The Democrats deny that states have any such power. They are fighting re-counts. If they lose this battle, and the votes show that Trump won in Georgia and Arizona, the Democrats will lose legitimacy. So will Biden. He has precious little of it now.
Then he raises the issue that R. J. Rushdoony raised in The Nature of the American System (1965): county rights. Ever since the American Revolution, county rights have been an afterthought.
Customarily, we have regarded counties and cities purely as legal creatures of the states, enjoying only such autonomy as the states may concede.
This is true. States centralized authority. That was the slippery slope toward national sovereignty (1789). But he thinks this can be reversed. How? From the top.
Though a federal statute granting broad autonomy over such matters to the states’ constituted sub-units and giving enough likeminded people the power to form units that enjoy such autonomy would run against more than a century of court decisions, it finds no barrier in the Constitution’s letter. Congress and the president can do this.
Decentralization is greatly needed. But I do not share his optimism in Congress's wisdom in passing such a law. It has never happened since 1774.
He ends with this. I agree 100%.
Geographically, republican America will reign from shore to shore, from Canada to Mexico. Its birth rate, its educational system’s products, its economic vigor, its social stability, its degree of happiness will reflect how fit today’s republicans are for self-government. We cannot foresee and should not speculate how their successes and failures might affect Woke America. We can be sure however that radical de-centralization at home can only reduce the matters with which U.S. foreign policy deals, and hence increase the likelihood that they be dealt with soberly.
In short, the United States of America is not going to break apart. Then what does he mean here? "The United States of America is coming apart." It is coming apart politically, not geographically. It is coming apart because the elites demand that the rest of us conform to the latest leftist fads regarding sexuality, race, marriage, and a DNA-based definition of gender.
Radical decentralization is coming. It is going to come because local units of civil government are eventually going to have to raise their own funds. Legitimacy is going to be removed from the national government and transferred to those civil governments that provide basic services that the public demands. The federal government has bought subservience. It must continue to buy it.
When decentralization comes, the American Empire will shrink: "radical de-centralization at home can only reduce the matters with which U.S. foreign policy deals." That will be good for American taxpayers.
CONCLUSION
Decentralization will not come because of the rise of a principled national political figure who is elected and then surrenders power, which is what decentralization requires. It will come when Washington can no longer buy compliance.