To Die For
Remnant Review
In 1980, I wrote this in the Introduction to Part 1 of Unconditional Surrender.
We all know that people don’t agree with each other about everything, not even people in a very small community. In fact, sometimes it seems that people don’t agree about much of anything. But, once in a while, we can find out what people do agree about. One of the best times to find out what people really believe is when they face a life-and-death crisis. “When the chips are down,” if I may use a gambling metaphor, we find out what people think is really important.Sometimes men have to die for their beliefs. Maybe there’s a war, or a revolution, or some sort of major crisis. What is a man willing to die for? What are a lot of men in a society willing to die for? God, country, and family? Fame and fortune? Honor? When we pin men down and ask them what really matters to them, we get some idea of who they are and what they are. We get some idea of who they think they would like to become. We find out what they want out of life when they face a situation that threatens their lives.
In our day, the vast majority of residents of the West would be hard-pressed to articulate an idea or a cause for which they are willing to die. A minority would invoke their religion, but in Western Europe, such people are rare. In any case, they do not associate their religious views with a specific social philosophy for which they would be willing to die.
WILLING TO DIE
The future is always captured by committed people who are willing to die for a cause. There are fewer of those people as a percentage of the American population today than at any time in American history. This is true of Western nations in general. This is not a uniquely American problem.
A movement must mobilize the troops. If the movement does not mobilize the troops, it is not a movement. It is a discussion group.
Where are those troops today? Missing in action. Where are the leaders who articulate such a vision of the future? Pat Buchanan does, but he is as much of a dinosaur as I am. He is lamenting the loss of the old American Republic. His most articulate political book is The Suicide of a Superpower. Its subtitle is not suitable for building a political movement: Will America Survive to 2025?
You cannot beat something with nothing.
Jordan Peterson has served as an articulate critic of the Progressives' view of man. But being a critic is not sufficient. It is easy to be a critic today. There are so many clowns in high places. He is a clinical psychologist by training. He is not a social philosopher. He does not articulate a worldview suitable for organizing the lives and institutions of a nation.
Angelo Codevilla calls for a transformation, but he does not think we can go back to a comfortable bygone era. He insists that the old constitutional order is gone. He is not clear on what is going to replace it. He thinks it must be decentralized. He wants the ruling class to self-destruct. I am with him on this point. But that will take a long time.
The West is adrift. That should be obvious. There are few organized groups within the West that have developed a social and political philosophy, let alone one that is tied to a supernatural order that guarantees success to the righteous. That was the basis of political order and political philosophy in the West for 1200 years. But that vision faded in the middle of the 17th century. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the restoration of Charles II to the English throne (1660) ended the religious wars.
A crucial political fact today is this: the legitimacy of the government in Washington is under attack from multiple sides. Internally, the unfunded liabilities of the federal government are such that, at some point, the government will no longer be able to sustain the welfare state for the oldsters. At that point, legitimacy of the federal government is going to erode even faster. There is nothing on the political horizon to replace it. That is why I think decentralization lies ahead.
What is missing is a cogent, well-developed social philosophy that could serve as the foundation of a new civilization based on a decentralized social and political order. There are fringe groups that offer such a view. But if we are talking about any group that has the ear of intellectuals today, there is no such worldview. It would be opposed by the university system and the public schools if it were ever to gain a foothold in the thinking of even a small fraction of American intellectuals.
So, we are basically flying blind as a civilization. There are lots of special-interest groups trying to get their hands into the political trough in Washington, but there is no group that has a curriculum from first grade through graduate school that would serve as the foundation of the construction of a new, decentralized social order.
It is not good enough to offer a philosophy of muddling through. Muddling through gets you through a lot of crises, and most of the time it is good enough to keep the social system going. But, in a time of crisis, it will not work. It will not rally the troops.
Today, I see no social and political philosophy on the horizon that is likely to be able to mobilize the troops. Yet without mobilized troops in the broadest sense, a social order cannot defend itself.
There ought to be at least a bookshelf of books that would serve as the foundation of a new social order. Karl Marx wrote several like this. Adam Smith wrote a major one. Edmund Burke wrote several. But, in our day, there is no single philosopher who speaks for the nation in such a way that he can gain a following large enough to mobilize the troops, or even recruit troops.
I cannot think of any time in the history of the West in which there has been such a vacuum. Societies do not persist without a social philosophy tied to widely accepted principles.
To have any possibility of success, a revolutionary movement must be able to recruit people who are willing to die for the cause. There was a time when Marxian Communism attracted such people. But by the 1970's, Communists in both the Soviet Union and China were no longer committed to Marxism’s religion of revolution. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping abandoned Communist economics, and in 1991, Gorbachev shut down the USSR. Marxism has ceased to be a widely held social philosophy. Its influence is restricted to Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. These are failed states. They are clearly not the wave of the future. They do not inspire dedicated followers.
Those American movements calling themselves Communist or Marxist today are neither Communist nor Marxist. They are not committed to Marx's philosophy of the inevitability of the proletarian revolution against the capitalist class. They are surely not committed to Marx's theory that the mode of production governs the development of history. They are Progressives who want to organize riots in order to get government subsidies. That is not Marxism.
CIVIL WAR
There are people who think that the United States is headed for civil war. I regard this prediction as highly unlikely. Why? Because it is virtually impossible to find anybody in the United States under the age of 50 who is willing to die for a cause. If he is willing to die for a cause, he is not part of a movement that is systematically fomenting revolution or resistance based on a creed or a political philosophy. If there were such a movement, it would have more FBI informants than committed members.
The public school system does not inculcate patriotism. Certainly, it does not inculcate a level of patriotism which would lead individuals to volunteer for service in the American military. The hostility of the public school system to the military began in the late 1960's, and it has escalated ever since.
In the long run, societies are dominated by a limited number of ideas for which men are willing to die. These are usually religious ideas. They are religious in the sense that those committed to them believe that these ideas represent a cause or worldview that is supernatural in origin.
Modern revolutionary movements have been secular. But the era of secular ideological revolutionary movements is behind us. The new revolutions are like the Arab Spring a decade ago. They are anti-, not pro-. They are brief coalitions of the disgruntled. They are products of social media. They are ephemeral, like memes. Venezuela is still exporting a kind of Marxism in South America, but it is a failed state. It is not the USSR in 1960.
THE CONSTITUTION
Americans went to war from 1861 to 1865 in order to defend the union or leave the union. In this sense, it was a matter of political philosophy. That was the last time that Americans went to war for the sake of political philosophy. In any case, the average trooper could not articulate the political philosophy for which he was being asked to die, and for which over 700,000 of them did die.
I do not think Americans in the twentieth century went to war to defend the Constitution. Some went to war because they were drafted. Others went because the United States was attacked, most notably in December 1941.
The public schools since 1970 have undermined that kind of commitment. They have denied the existence of the supernatural realm. They have denied the legitimacy of the original constitutional settlement. They do not teach constitutional government and respect for it.
Today, critical race theory undermines the whole concept of legitimacy of American civil government, which is the product of white supremacy, the students are told. Critical race theory represents the most systematic assault on American constitutionalism in the history of the country. It is being implemented in the schools. In two decades, there will still be public school students who do not buy into CRT. There will also be students who still maintain a commitment to American ideals, although few of them will be able to articulate these ideals. But the percentage of students who have lost faith in American institutions will be dramatically higher than today. It is seriously high today.
This fact offers a tremendous opportunity for Americans who are not committed to the Keynesian establishment's party line. But they are divided. There is no unanimity of worldview among the critics of the critics of American institutions. There is a visceral hostility to these critics of American institutions, but even the best of the critics do not articulate a worldview. Tucker Carlson is an eloquent critic of the nonsense coming out of Washington, but he never says what he believes. He used to be a libertarian, but he has said that he is no longer committed to that position.
You cannot beat something with nothing. That is the problem.
In any case, the average person does not watch Tucker Carlson. He does not watch MSNBC or CNN. He watches reality shows that are overwhelmingly unreal. He watches sports events, especially professional football. He is annoyed by the kneeling. He is going to be even more annoyed by the so-called black national anthem. But he will still watch.
CONCLUSION
Civil War? Not a chance.
The bankruptcy of the federal government? Guaranteed.
The implosion of the American Empire? It is already beginning. Afghanistan was a 20-year experiment in futility.
It is not good enough to muddle through. Everyone should be muddling through towards a meaningful goal that will extend beyond his own lifetime. Every social philosophy that gains a following always has a list of goals that extend beyond the lifetimes of the members. Such philosophies are in short supply today.
This is why the West is in crisis. It is also why there is a great opportunity for developing a cogent worldview sufficient to mobilize the troops.