Peisistratos

In the late 7th and early 6th century BC, ancient Athens fell into crisis. As is often the case with the classical period, historians disagree about the particular causes. One issue upon which everyone agrees is that economics played a part. The wealthy families had become an oligarchy, owning the majority of the land. Debt-bondage was common in the classical period. The collateral for loans in that age was the person. This meant that if the Athenian tenant farmers did not pay their rents, they and their children could be seized as slaves.

The way it worked is the farmer would borrow to finance the operations of the farm. If the farm did not produce enough to pay the debt , he would fall into debt bondage. In theory, he literally worked off his debt, so it was a temporary status. There was a special status in the law for someone in bondage for a debt, versus the normal type of slave. The reality at this time was that debt bondage was becoming a permanent state for a large fraction of the population. The result was increasing social strife between the classes.

Rivalry between the leading families was also a problem. As is always the case when there is social unrest, some factions tried to take advantage of it and gain power for themselves at the expense of their rivals. An Athenian nobleman named Cylon, made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power in Athens in 632 BC. Many Greek city-states had seen opportunistic noblemen take power on behalf of sectional interests. Factions sought to gain control of the state, in order to gain an edge over rivals.

There were also regional rivalries that exacerbated the personal and economic turmoils of the age. The rural population had different interests than the urban population. Traders had different interests than farmers. Since most Athenians lived in rural settlements, and debt bondage was an increasing problem, Attika was increasingly resembling Sparta, where a small elite ruled over a large population of helots. This exacerbated the personal and economic rivalries convulsing Athens at the time.

Regardless of the causes, Athens was at a crisis point and fear of a tyrant rising up to impose order, led the Athenians to turn to the wisest man in Athens. That man was Solon, a statesman, lawmaker and poet. He was of noble birth, but he was sometimes described as a self-made man, suggesting his family was of modest means. In 595 BC Solon had led the Athenian forces against the Megarians, resulting in a heroic victory. Allegedly, it was the power of his poetry that inspired the Athenians to carry the day.

By the time the Athenians turned to Solon, he was rich, a famous poet and a famous military leader. Solon was awarded temporary autocratic powers by Athenian citizens on the grounds that he had the “wisdom” to sort out their differences for them in a peaceful and equitable manner. His task was to find a way to resolve the factional rivalries. The result was a series of economic, legal and moral reforms that are remembered to this day as the Reforms of Solon. Once instituted, Solon gave up his position and left Athens.

The Athenians agreed to abide by these reforms for a period of ten years, but within a few years the old problems and rivalries were back. In addition to the old problems, the defects in the reforms created new problems. Some officials refused to perform their duties as described, while other posts were left vacant. The reforms worked as long as Solon was around to to lend his name to them. Once Solon was gone, the result was worse than before the reforms. As a result, the people blamed Solon for the break down of order.

Eventually one of Solon’s relatives, Peisistratos, ended the factionalism by force, becoming tyrant and confirming what everyone feared would happen prior to Solon’s reforms. Solon was still alive and he mocked the Athenians for allowing Peisistratos to seize power, by standing outside his home, wearing his uniform. Despite being driven into exile twice, Peisistratos was eventually able to impose order on Athens and he ruled as tyrant until his death. His sons succeeded him and ruled until 510 BC.

Solon gets positive treatment from history for having tried to preserve Athenian democracy and for having some success at curbing the power of the aristocrats. On the other hand, Aristotle credited Peisistratos with laying the foundation for the eventual rise of Athens. He changed the economy to be based on trade and he reformed agriculture, away from grains to olives. He did this by offering loans to farmers so they could make the transition. He also built a water system capable of sustaining a large population.

The lesson here is that reform is rarely successful, unless it is imposed by force. The reason is the status quo will always be preferable to those in power. Any reform through mutual consent must involved trade-offs that do nothing to alter the fundamental power arrangements. That was the defect of Solon’s reforms. While they temporarily alleviated the results of the power arrangements in Athenian society, they never attempted to alter them. The result of Solon’s reforms was nothing more than a pause in the factionalism.

This is something to keep in mind in the current age. The problems we see are not caused by errors in voting or mistakes in public policy. There is an underlying systemic problem that cannot be voted away. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, similar problems existed, but the political class was strong enough to impose reforms on the industrial barons and alter the power relationships in American society. That was possible because politics was a power center, one with the monopoly on violence.

Today, the political class is composed entirely of hired men, speaking on behalf of the interests that back their political careers. In fact, most are just actors, hired because they fit the right profile and look good on television. They have no power. This is the problem Trump is confronting as he tries to push through reforms. It’s not that Congress opposes these reforms. It’s that their paymasters oppose the reforms. He’s dealing with flunkies and errand boys. We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratos.

59 thoughts on “Peisistratos

  1. /\ /\ /\
    THIS !

    Like the man says the left hates us anyways.

    The time to be reasonable with them is over.

  2. There’s a way to re-balance interest without firing a shot, calling in a Dictator or any other such radical proposals. While I really could care less about the Whites being “Supreme” if someone is going to be Supreme it might as well be us. Better to crush them than they crush us. If we were to stop worrying about what the Left thinks of us, they will hate us no matter what so…, we could wrap this whole thing up in our favor in about 6 months and we should. They will use every bit of power they have to suppress us. I’m actually not in favor of us doing the same philosophically. But in this case there’s unattainable moral goals and there’s the practical aspects of attaining and keeping enough power to be free and the two sometimes conflict. We must be practical if the other side is going all out for complete controlling power then we must counter it to save ourselves. How to do this.

    The overarching principle in all these it to balance cities and rural interest. We’ve had trouble with this before, (Civil War), the urban interest won and have been consolidating power every since.

    1. First we make sure all voters have some qualifications, high school diploma or equivalent, maybe pay a certain amount of property taxes, the actual numbers are not so important. The idea is that the voter have some skin in the game. Be a taxpayer or retired taxpayer who has put into the system instead of just receiving. This was ruled against by the Supreme court but this ruling can be tossed in the trash by a 51% vote in the House and Senate. Federal judges can be told what their jurisdiction is. It’s written right into the Constitution.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii

    “…In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…”

    “…with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…” The important part. The earlier part declares what powers they have but it ends with control of these functions by Congress. Congress could tell them to butt out of any Homosexual marriage rulings. They could do that with with lots of stuff they keep ramming down our throats. They could be stuck with only deciding water rights cases between States if they push too hard to SJW the Constitution to death.

    2. Federal judges, once again, have ruled that in the States there can only be representatives based on proportional representation of the population. Before they had representation in the Senates of most States based on regions and population based in the House. Just like the Federal government structure. This change gives more power to urban areas. It too can be thrown out.

    3. Make sure all votes are by real registered and documented voters. Voter fraud is at extreme levels in the cities. They have more people voting than there are even voters in some districts. With the other two rules in place we would have the power to just call all their votes illegal and ignore them. We could have an electronic voting system that is foolproof against fraud, (this can be done I’m 100% positive and I even have a simple cheap way to implement). The votes could NOT be changed and each person and organization could 100% check each vote for themselves. The only problem with any of the systems is you must control who gets to vote in the first place and who is authorized to vote. With the two other powers in place this could be assured.
    If most States changed to the older method designed to protect minority rights, rural areas, then it would vastly improve our position. These two changes would insure that we could not be rolled over legislatively. Now some States may be lost already like California but they will lose power anyways because of the complete stupidity and incompetence of their Representatives like Detroit and other minority run cites. In California the destruction of the spillway caused by not repairing cracks in it raising the cost from maybe $2 million to repair the cracks to as much as $500 million is illustrative of the way they run things. Not to mention they destroyed a valve in the damn that should have let the water out and they didn’t move heaven and Earth to repair it even knowing the record water level coming.

    All it would take is willpower to do this. The Republicans by party line vote have the power to do this right now and so do most States. I would say the majority. If pushed we could force the same on the other States with Constitutional amendments after power is consolidated.

  3. “We need a Peisistratos.”

    What you need is often not what you get, when it comes to politics. A small city state is easier for a Peisistratos to disrupt and lead than a sprawling empire with a very complex and vast military and “intelligence” apparatus.

    Alas, Trump is neither a Solon or a Peisistratos. He had never even fully made the transition from brash New Yorker taking to Twitter for social media wars to the most powerful man on the planet capable of forcing through an agenda if he so desires.

    When we do get a Peisistratos, it will be because the elite just can’t take off the uppity rabble having any say in how – what they mistakenly believe to be their – country is run.

  4. It is still too early. Wait until after the mid-term elections. If the POTUS gets his butt handed to him by the “electorate” then he will have the choices of ruling by EO and running the risk of impeachment, or waffling on every promise which got him elected in the first place. Lose-lose, either way.
    Personally I have no dog in this fight. It has been stated over and over again at the WRSA site that we are not voting our way out of this mess. I live my daily life and order my personal and tribal priorities based on that. Should Mr. Trump somehow get a stronger mandate this November, then I have more time to plant, harvest, and sharpen the hatchet. Bleib ubrig.

    • “””…Personally I have no dog in this fight….””

      Well, I have cat who may die in the WW III with me when the cucked electorate votes for people who worship Israel and launch war with Russia and China and Iran and with the entire planet Earth.

      • Juri: My dogs, cats, and family will probably likewise be vaporized when the ignorant cucks endorse WW III because the Zionists and their useful idiots start it. I only try to deal with the things I can control. I give the rest to the Good Lord. It’s like Stonewall Jackson said: “…duty is ours. The consequences are God’s. Bleib ubrig, my friend.

  5. Speaking of archeology, I just learned that the Bronze Age ended in a giant collapse.

    When the lecturer below, Eric Cline, talked about this I was prepared for someone trained in the CM age of American academia so when he drew possible parallels from then to today, and mentioned that migration played a role, and that the modern ‘Sea Peoples’, the ppl contemporary clay tablets blamed for the collapse, could be migrants swarming into Europe, I was impressed.

    The point here is, above Z illustrates how decadence, discontent, a corrupt system run by cruel, pampered, entitled sissies, seems to grow like barnacles on a ship and this story of collapse around 1177 BC, a precursor to the fall of Rome (and to today’s news stories), it seems impossible to deny that history has cycles and civilizations have finite life spans. If this is so, it has to be biology. That meme, ‘hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create soft men, soft men create hard times’, got it right. This shit is hormonal. And we’re passengers on a testo crach, ie ‘soft men create…..’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4

  6. “We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratos.”

    Okay, I read that as ‘the nation/civilization cannot be saved within the confines of the system.’ So, translated from 6th century BC to 20th century terms, “someone page General P, the system can no longer be saved so the nation must be saved outside it.”

    I suspect this is true. Imagine if a FUBAR case like Sweden had both decent armed forces AND a general w stones. How would he understand ‘patriotic duty’? Isn’t America just a 20 times bigger version of Sweden? Ergo…

  7. Some of the political class may be hired men; but the ones in “power”, i.e., Republicans, are nothing so grand. They are merely terrified men. They would no doubt do the right thing if there were no consequence for their actions, but since there are consequences, they stand around shifting their weight from one foot to the other as they stare at their feet. And the “consequence” they so fear so greatly is nothing more than disapproval of their leftist-media overlords. Thus they are also pathetic men, unable to envision and bring about a social order where they do not sit at the bottom of the totem pole.

    Your narratives of power and and ruling classes are much too complicated. Our leaders operate much more like the social structure of high school in the 1970s. The cool kids rule. Republicans are nerds, and a sigularly pathetic class of nerds at that, who wear “kick me” signs on their backs in order to ingratiate themselves with elites. They stupidly think if they are nice to the cool kids they will be invited to sit at the cool kids’ table at lunchtime. It’s as simple, and pathetic and childish as that, and I suspect little more is actually going on. It’s a trivial reason to cede a civilization, but it’s all Republicans have in them.

  8. A covert war is raging in DC and it is deadly serious. The artificial comfort of our current age of affluence has masked the effects of this war, but we will soon live in the world of the victor and all that goes with it. The only real difference you can make in the interregnum is to improve your personal strength and robustness, and be alert for new kinds of threats.

  9. One of the paradoxes of democracy, or any type of factionalism, is that most participants are aware that the factionalism is causing the system to break down, but will also fight tooth and nail to preserve it because concentration of power generally implies they’d end up with less of it. This applies all across the spectrum, from billionaires to their congressional errand-boys all the way down to the voters themselves.

    Nobody can be objective about the status quo when their livelihood depends on the status quo.

    • I work with a few DoD GS15’s. All in all, a pretty “conservative” bunch, mostly former military O-5’s and above. These are the guys who make the .mil function bureaucratically. They have a near universal hatred of “snowflakes”, SJW’s, and liberal democrats (but I repeat myself). Like the flag officers, most are hoping to coast into retirement without a major disruption of the status quo, but if/when the rubber hits the road, they would all take a Pinochet over a Felonia Pantsuit or Kamala Harrisment.

  10. I liked your article but technically the period you are describing isn’t classical but Archaic transitioning into Classical. Classical Greece is considered to be from about 480 BC (the defeat of the Persians and rebuilding of Athens) to around 323 BC (the death of Alexander).

    • Yeah, but when I wrote “archaic Greece” I saw right away that people would get the wrong idea, so I went with the more familiar.

    • Dupont, great example of how to be a bore. I mean, like, word-for-word pain in the ass perfection.

  11. I’ve been telling my wife (and a few others) for years that Caesar is coming. Trump is not he. What Caesar will look like, where he comes from is something to wonder about. A military man would draw a lot of the Armed Forces to his side, sympathetically, not necessarily as his private army. But is there a military man today (or near future), a general, capable of having such will, force of personality, ambition, and a vision?

    That seems rather doubtful, for great generals are produced on the battlefield like Lee, Grant, Patton who can then command the respect of his fellows, soldiers, and a people.

    There is no arena of combat to especially distinguish a general today. First Gulf War? General Schwarzkopf? Even I, no tactical genius, foresaw that the battle would be a frontal feint with a maneuver around to the Iraqi flank. A piece of cake. The second Gulf War? General Tommy Franks (anyone remember him?). Anyone could see the US would go through to Baghdad like a hot knife through butter. Some victory that was.

    A political Caesar? Men seek office for power and recognition. Not to put their heads on a chopping block, not to risk all for jail and humiliation, or becoming a fringe extremist.

    There are a lot of wannabe Hitlers always running around and they always look like abject losers inspiring no one.

    The vacuum of power is there, expanding every six months. Someone is going to make a play for it. Trump has prepared the ground for a true populist, and one who won’t let courts constrain him, nor allow states to defy him, nor let the Deep State maintain and prosper itself. I guess we’ll know him when we see him, but my fear is that such a wild card personality will be unstable and capricious. They usually are.

    • Why you want shoot anybody ? In the Russia, for example, nobody shoots anybody. Just sometimes white liberals known also as communists happen in the same dark gangway or remote place with Chechen muslim. Then white liberal commits racist assault, after that brave Chechen muslim launches nonviolent protest against racism and Islamophobia. And after that white liberal communist is gone. Probably feels great shame for enslaving blacks, taking the Indians Land or hating the gays. Police does not care because nonviolent protests are legal and because white race committed many crimes, it is normal that sometimes, somebody must held responsible. ….:D

    • I hate to bust your chops here but I don t think Trump is that other Greek guy. Trump is a pop culture icon. I dont think he’s made of the real tough, hard-ass hemp fiber. Even if he would I dont think he could be dictator.

  12. After factionalism caused a civil war in Rome, Sulla imposed order and much needed reforms. Those reforms lasted as long as Sulla lived. Once he was dead, the factionalism returned worse than ever. Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar exploited it to destroy the Republic for good.

    Reform imposed by force rarely lasts.

    • Sulla’s didn’t, but Augustus’ sure did. Agree we’re more likely to get a Sulla than an Augustus.

      • Augustus’s reforms worked because pretty much anything was better than another round of the nearly century-long civil wars. I’m sure the non-irradiated parts of ex-America will have their shit together when the fallout stops falling. I’d prefer not to get to that point. To get a Pinochet, we need a politically aware general. Do we have one of those? Or are they all too busy ordering Rangers to walk around in red high heels?

        • My point is that they also worked because the guy who would enforce them vigorously (the Emperor), never went away. When Solon and Sulla went away, the trouble-makers went right back to ignoring the rules and making trouble. Same with Ataturk and Franco, the historical jury is still out on Pinochet.

          • I get you. I just wanted to point out that the “material conditions” for Augustus, as Marxists would say, also enabled him — he had far less challenges to his rule than he probably otherwise would have, given that the alternative was “another round of empire-wracking civil war.” Had Solon stayed on, he probably would’ve been assassinated — part of being the wisest man in Athens was knowing when to leave Athens. 🙂

    • And Sulla proscribed his enemies (or anyone he thought might become one) more aggressively than any other…and it was still not enough

  13. Great essay. One additional consideration on the take-away lesson:

    A city-state (e.g. Athens) is a far different thing than a sprawling empire (modern America). What my rural county might happily accept under the Athenian model (force/fiat) would cause mayhem in urban counties. And the sovereign state of Wyoming will have differing socioeconomic policy needs than the sovereign states of Hawaii or Florida. In other words, ancient city states had a unified culture, language, history, ancestry. Those things are necessary for a bloodless “imposition by force.” (Key word – “bloodless.”) I’d personally welcome some tyrannical improvements, if and only if they’re imposed by a local tyrant, or even a state tyrant. But a benevolent tyrant with empire-sized edicts, stationed in Washington DC? No thanks. That’s why America won’t change for the better until it’s balkanized.

  14. We are going to a Peisistratos but he/she/it wont be from the right. We live in a turnkey totalitarian state. We have all the elements needed for a totalitarian system, but no one has turned the key yet. That’s why the left is so freaked out about trump..they recognise this and fear he will ‘turn the key’. But they are fortunate in that trump is not really a budding dictator. In addition trump is opposed by the system itself. The power elite oppose him.

    Eventually a Democrat is going to be elected. And when she is, The state. the institutions, bureaucracy and corporations will all be lined up under a single ideology and party. And then that person will turn the key and we will get Peisistratos.

    • I disagree. The kind of person you just described is like an Obama or a Hillary. They are not the kind of people who impose reforms. It is usually a powerful outsider, which is what a Peisistratos, a Franco, a Mussolini, a Lenin, Hitler, etc., etc. is.

      The kind of person, or group of people, I’m thinking of the senatorial class in Rome leading to the dictators and the princeps here, whose level of corruption leads up to the kinds of transitions Z is talking about is what you describe. They are the ones who, in the words of Trump himself, make things so bad that they create openings for people like him.

      Remember what he said to Oprah. Things would have to get really bad. Obama did it. If it had been Hillary, maybe we would have ended up with some popular general from one of her wars.

      • Not at all. Imagine all deplorable White men made into slaves for Bezos and their property given to vibrants. That’s a reform Kanala Harris would mandate.

    • First heard that term over lunch with Jacob Appelbaum, right after he got into a public knock down, drag out with the ex-NSA CIO at a cyber-sec conference down in Arlington. He felt that while it was “creeping”, more that a few people in government were simply waiting for another 9/11 like pretext to go whole hog. On a more positive note, need to grab a copy of George Gilder’s new book “Life after Google”…there may be some hope after all…

    • Exactly. We have a turnkey totalitarian state. Built by progressive leftists. And this is likely a good part of the reason why they’re so freaked out about Trump.

      For probably a couple of decades now this has been getting pointed out by paleocons and *some* libertarians. Typically the mainstream conservatives and left winger Clinton/Obama supporters would pooh-pooh objections to power aggregating up to the Executive branch because of children, or war, or safety – or some other excuse.

      Many years I go I resorted to taunting left-wingers by telling them that their stupid endorsement of Executive power (in recent years usually because the Magic Negro was in power) – was eventually going to end up in the hands of somebody they didn’t want it in.

      Enter Trump.

      Trump is old. If he’s going to rule as some sort of Emperor that’s a time limited offer. What comes after that? You’ve got to be complete dumbass to think that some leftist loon who is ten degrees worse than Obama doesn’t stand an EXTREMELY good chance of getting his (or probably even worse – her) hands on those levers.

      • This is precisely what I was talking about. Reform is an outside phenomenon. Everyone has been trained to think the opposite in school, because the left has been in charge for over 100 years.

  15. I have read, over the past 12 months, the Military intelligence apparatus supports the President and on the opposing side, CIA-Justice Department and FBI support the Democratic Party money people. A crude reductionism, but certain facts and actions remain after the distillation. Z, do you think this notion is far fetched?

    • There it is. If the Revolution comes pre-collapse, the military and law enforcement apparatus will have to be involved as combatants somehow. What’s the army like these days? It’s colonels, captains, and corporals that lead revolts; how are they doing? (I wrote about this the other day, but few among our 7 readers wanted to discuss it). The army’s effective fighting units are all overseas; stateside, we have reservists, Millennial girls cosplaying as platoon leaderettes, and the fightin’ fightin’ 503rd Daycare Battalion. Unless Trump gets the real army home posthaste, or builds himself up some Brownshirts pronto, it’s hard to see a “right wing” revolution taking off. (of course, if the Revolution comes post-collapse, who knows?)

      I’d keep my eyes on Sweden, Germany, and France. The rot is far more advanced there than here. At some point — and I really thought it would’ve happened already — the whatever-you-call-the-Wehrmacht-now will be called upon to suppress a big riot. Given their political leadership, they will be ordered to fire on their citizens, on behalf of rapefugees. Will they do it? Will it matter, i.e. do they have the strength to overthrow anything? I doubt Wehrmacht 2.0 has the manpower to occupy Dusseldorf, much less the whole country, but even an attempt will be instructive.

  16. Well that’s what many of us been thinking. We’re going to get a dictator, might as well be a guy like Trump instead of…well, I can’t think of any strongmen on the left at the moment.

  17. I’m not sure what to make of this, Mr. Z. You’re saying that reform is not enough, that a reformer is not enough…so we need a dictator? Maybe an ancient city state like Athens could work reasonably well under a competent dictator, but I think a modern state can’t be run by one man alone. Not successfully, not for any extended time. King Louis XIII needed a Richelieu to run his government, and the Cardinal was successful because he knew how to organize a bureaucracy. Sure, he put his personal stamp on French policy, but he knew that government was a job for specialists–many specialists.

    Can you name any example in the last 200 years of any large country run successfully by a dictator? Hitler had such good ideas…but he could not juggle the multiple roles of statesman and warlord that he assigned to himself. His method of control was basically to create a network of conflicting bureaucracies that he played off against each other. In the end, he miscalculations were fatal to both leader and led. Stalin…well…who would want to live in his Russia? Stalin understood what makes people afraid, and used that profound understanding to hold on to personal power. I don’t think you’re going to argue he was successful in any meaningful sense of the word. And you think we can find a really competent dictator to run our affairs? I don’t think such a man exists.

    My opinion is that the solution lies in simplification. This is not a solution that we need work toward–it will come upon us whether we like it or not. In response to the ever-increasing demands made upon them, the mechanisms of government have grown too complex, as have the major institutions that determine to course of our country–the financial and business enterprises have grown to cancerous proportions; the educational system is itself a harmful cancer on the body politic. I said before that it takes a bureaucracy to run a modern state, but there are limits beyond which no organization can grow. We have hit those limits.

    To an extent, a government or other institution can meet challenges by growing more complex. But there is a price: the larger an organization grows, the more complex it is, the greater the friction it creates. By “friction” I mean inefficiency: you reach a point where any amount of added growth or complexity adds more inefficiency to the system, but yields no benefits. When the structure produces nothing but friction, it starts to consume itself. Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is instructive in this context.

    I think what is in the cards, whether we like it or not, is a retrenchment. That’s an innocent, harmless word for something that will be terrible to live through (for those who survive). It will be painful, and millions will die. If God is good, we will be able to stop the collapse before it is total. This will probably mean a reversion to smaller governments (e.g. a breakup into regional units made up of the former States of the Union), a great reduction in government services, and a steep fall in the survivor’s standards of living.

    Lest I come across as being too negative, there’s this: when starving people are fighting over rats to eat, then at least we will be rid of vegans.

      • Or Pinochet in Chile, for that matter. But a dictator is always a difficult to take back roll of the dice.

        • Picking a good dictator 101: first, make sure NOT to pick a leftie (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, maybe even Hitler and Mussolini).

          Second, do NOT pick a muslim either; islam always fucks it up.

          Rightist dictators like Franco, Salazar and Pinochet have a better record, especially if you count the fuhrer as his own Alpine version of leftist.

    • Lest we forget, the American Republic was imposed by force of arms. We remember that episode as the revolution.
      I do agree that to be successful a reconstitution will be necessary to have a substrate of peoples, cultures and general view of life the universe and everything that is amenable to such a form of government.

      Of course, isn’t that what the founders did in the beginning? We just need to replicate the process with a few tweaks here and there.

    • Side;

      You can only judge a leader’s success or failure by looking at their goals. While Hitler clearly failed drastically at his goals of re-establishing the semi-mythical Grossdeutchland (great (er) Germany, I’m not so sure you can say the same about Stalin. IOW, you seem to be saying that Stalin’s goals were mainly concerned with making Russia a nice place to live. One does not coldly kill off millions of your own people with that sort of objective anywhere near top-of-mind.

      So what were Stalin’s objectives_? According to his biographers, Stalin rarely said what he meant clearly or entirely meant what he said. But his clear, overarching, long-standing goal since his first days as a revolutionary was the world-wide triumph of Communism. All of his cruelties were towards that end. The industrialization of the USSR at the point of a gun was towards that end. His corpse strewn centralization of Russian agriculture was towards that end. Both were done to empower the Red Army, his chosen means (plus subversion) towards his ultimate end.

      Stalin’s cynical deal with Hitler in 1939 was also towards that end. He expected Hitler to get bogged down against the French and British, just like in WW I, wearing each other out, leaving him to pick up the pieces. By 1949 with the fall of China, he was getting pretty close.

      And, his goal is not so far away in our own country now, sadly.

    • The Republic has failed. It’s either that or be ruled by the Corporations like we are now (Plutocracy). Or do you prefer the Corporations to take off the gloves and rule us via Communism (which they and the bankers funded). Fascism is a Philosophy of Man. Capitalism/Communism are philosophies of matter. Early and mid stage Capitalism contributed to the political freedom for the individual – but those stages are over now.

  18. I guess one of the reforms that put Americans over the barrel was the destruction of small-holding and basic family farms (there’s a reason that Grant Wood, Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and other “Farm and Fireside” stuff is as important to the American imagination as the cowboy). It’s hard to imagine now, but traditionally rural people have been more averse to war, empire, and adventurism than city people for the simple fact that they could not abandon their lands and animals for any length of time (I recently read a letter from a Bavarian soldier to his wife on the farm, complaining that he didn’t want to speak “Prussian any more than French”). What Steve Sailer called “the culling of the Red State whites” (in a review for that series “The Hunger Games”) was definitely not always quite so easy, since whites used to have a lot more skin in the game, and more of a reason to stay home. All of that energy is being …mis-channeled into pointless wars, but you can’t blame the young men for signing up: there is nothing in a lot of these towns except drugs and rust. Gus Hasford (the Vietnam writer) used to say words to the effect of, “You have a lot of Southerners in the Marines because the Yankees conquered us, destroyed our land, and the circus doesn’t travel this far down South.”

  19. One hundred years of decay could be reversed if the President suspended constitutional order, banished enemies and imposed the MAGA agenda by force. I am all for it. How many times have we heard, “Trump is a tyrant” in the propaganda press. If only is my thought.

    • If Trump was able to promote Article 5 amendments with the states, and we could get Levin’s slate of Liberty Amendments passed that way, it would be a lot healthier for all.

      • You can’t. Look at the election results to see that there is no possibility of ratification of these type of amendments. None whatever.

        • Consider how the 16th amendment got started. Conservatives, weary of hearing the prog bullshit eternally spewed, proposed the amendment to demonstate that it could never be passed.

      • Conservatism is not Libertarianism and in fact a Conservative state designed around encouraging larger families and a stable order may have to do a lot of taxing, regulating, controlling imports, controlling immigration ,spending and all that jazz as technology changes

        And while yes in theory there are nearly enough Republican controlled states to call an Article 5 , the results if called would probably end up in a civil war or national dissolution ala J.M. Greer’s Twillight’s Last Gleaming novel

        The divisions are far too great and the odds of ramrodding policy choices on speech, guns, abortion and a hundred other things that would demand immediate bloody redress of grievances is far too high

        We can never have a con con

        • Yes, Nationalism is Fascism. We don’t have to use the word, but we have to understand and be ready for accusations: they are correct. To do this, we have to undo generations of propaganda from the Tribe whom we foolishly allowed to gain dominance over our beloved Nation.

  20. I am planning to read on debt bomndage aka usury during history. Any source to advice about Athens during this period?

    • “Barren Metal” is a good book on the subject, though E. Michael Jones’ ken is a bit wider than you may be looking for.

    • I think most really good info on this is probably buried in journals or subsumed within ponderous texts. One of the few books on Greek economics I’ve come across is Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece, M.M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet. Some decent coverage of the interplay between the division of labor and politics can be found in the first volume of Republics Ancient and Modern by Paul Rahe.

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