A decade’s long refrain from principled conservatives and civic nationalists has been that the problems of America could be cured by returning to the constitutional principles as defined by the Founders. The principled conservatives have, of late, be much more enthusiastic for the alleged principles of the Declaration, while the civic nationalists stick with the Constitution as written. The trouble is, the cause of the present troubles, the source of what ails current year America is the Constitution itself.
Constitutions can be written and unwritten, positive and negative. American has a mostly written constitution, while the UK has an unwritten one. By unwritten, it is understood to mean there is no single controlling document. Instead, there are customs and precedents that have been in place for so long that most citizens think these are, in fact, laws yet they are not. There are laws originating from these customs and precedents, but ultimately, tradition is what frames the political order.
Then there are negative and positive constitutions. A positive constitution is one that details the duties of government. These duties could be to the citizens or they could be the duties of the defined entities within the state. The negative constitution, in contrast, lists the powers of the state, the division of power within the state and the limits of the power of the state over the citizens. The American constitution, as originally conceived, is a negative constitution. It sets limits on the government.
That’s the theory, but in reality, constitutions are a blend of the written and unwritten, as well as a mix of positive and negative law. In the American system, traditions and customs have arisen that seem like laws. Legislatures have passed laws obligating the government to perform certain duties for the citizens. Of course, there is the that divide between those who see the constitutional order resting on the Gettysburg Address and those who see it still in the Bill of Rights. Ours is a blended system.
There’s something else about constitutions that goes unnoticed. That is they define of the roles of the power centers of society within politics. For example, the Founders understood that real power in America was local. In each of the former colonies, there were local elites who welded real power. Because they were sane men, they knew real power always rested in the upper reaches of the natural hierarchy of man. In the new constitutional order, those power interests needed a defined role.
The Senate, which was the body representing the local elites, was given an important role in the new political order. Since there was no such thing as a national elite, and no one wanted such thing, there was no role for a national elite. Instead, the Senate was the body that would represent the states, which were controlled by the local elites. Through the state legislatures, senators would be chosen to represent state interests in the new federal government. The Senate is the rich people’s house.
There is the first problem with the Constitution. In the 18th century, a national elite came in one form and that was a king and the aristocracy. The king had national interests, as he technically owned the society over which he ruled. He also had the power to exercise his rights, either directly or through the network of aristocrats, who were often his kin. This was not something Founders had or wanted. They had just fought a long war with the king to establish their local rule over their domains.
Therefore the idea of a national or global elite was anathema to the Founders, so there was never a role defined for this type power center. Further, subsequent changes to the Constitution have stripped the states of their power in government. The Senate is another democratic body. As a result, local elites have no voice in national government. Compounding it, there is no definition and therefore no limit on the national elites. National and now global interests operate outside the constitutional framework.
That’s the other defect in the constitution. An unwritten political order requires those with power to exert their power. In order to maintain power, elites of all types must actively assert their privilege, often with calls to tradition and custom. In a written system, the bias is toward defending prerogatives and privileges. The law becomes the ultimate source of authority, because it is the lines separating the various power interests within the political order. Everyone has to be a lawyer.
Because the American written constitution never defined a role for national and global elites, they are free to exert their power as much as nature will allow. Because they only confront resistance from those constitutionally limited institutions, playing defense within the law, they have been free to expand to the point where they now transcend the political order. It is why appeals to the law to restrain the aggressive behavior of woke capital is pointless. The law is constrained from acting.
It is why, as absurd as it may sound at first blush, a third house of Congress could be created to resolve this asymmetry. The moneyed interest bribing Congressman and Senators would be prohibited from that practice, but be provided a chamber of their own with power to counter the House, Senate and Executive. The new house, perhaps, would be given the power of the purse, since they pay the taxes, while the House would be given power that reflects the interests of the modern citizen.
This would be resisted by the elite, so it would never happen, at least not without a revolution. This is why efforts to curb the flow of money into politics have failed. The people giving the money have no reason to support such a change. It’s why abolishing corporate taxes would be most resisted by the corporations themselves. It is through the tax code that corporate interests can most influence Congress. Without a reason to lobby Washington, they can’t be there to exert their power over politics.
The expansion of democratic elements into the American constitutional system has added another set of problems, the illusion of choice and the illusion of power. Voters think the parties offer real options, when the options are controlled entirely by the undefined elite. They also think the power of their vote has real value. This blinds the citizen to the reality of his political order. Democracy magnifies the defects of the written constitutional order, resulting in the current instability.
This is why calls to return to the old order or even the order of the second founding is a primitive response to the problem of design. Even if it were possible to roll back to such a system, the power relationships would not change. In fact, a smaller government, as originally intended, would be weaker and less able to fend off the predations of the power elite elite. Put another way, if the roots of the problem are the defects within the Constitutional order, fidelity to that order is the problem, not the solution.
Of course, if the plan is to revolt in order to put the old political order back on the throne, then that leaves open the option of revolting and creating a new political order that reflects the realities of the current age. The original Constitution was about codifying the victory of the Founders, who revolted against the old order. A revolution against the old order of today, a successful revolution, will inevitably result in codifying the victory of the victorious revolutionaries. The new principles will reflect their sensibilities.
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Rexford Tugwell proposed third elected house as check on the bureaucracy. FDR kicked him sideways from economic advisor to governor of Puerto Rico.
” In fact, a smaller government, as originally intended, would be weaker and less able to fend off the predations of the power elite elite. Put another way, if the roots of the problem are the defects within the Constitutional order, fidelity to that order is the problem, not the solution.”
Exactly why the Left, for all its flaws, has a better handle on the situation than the “muh Constitution” types. The Nation-mag readers can see that “small government” today would just be stripping away whatever small protections the public has obtained against Big Biz. Hence the Koch Bros. support for such projects as the Tea Party. Hence, the cuckservatives muttering “muh free market” when someone dares to suggest that Big Tech is a public utility and should be regulated as such (eg., no censorship or deplatforming).
OT: The model minority in action
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/09/16/exclusive-fbi-hunts-chinese-spies-in-american-hospitals/#77c77db720f8
Maybe the military should turn in the access codes to Area 51 to the PLA. Model Minority don’cha know.
@ Deana “I feel like a foreigner in this culture that we currently are forced to live in. I should not feel like a foreigner in the land that my family has been in for generations.”
– said every Native American forced on to a Reservation by the US Government.
Ironic, n’est pas?
Accept the fact your Constitution was doomed the minute Americans wandered beyond your own shores; invaded and imposed your will and forced “democracy” on other countries lesser than your own.
You love and praise the document but you ignore and refuse to heed the advice given by the brilliant men who wrote it – and yet you wonder why America is failing?
Americans cling to the Constitution like you cling to your flag, which is nothing more than a symbol. A holy relic. And like a holy relic, a finger-bone from some ancient cleric, it’s kept in a glass case for people to gaze upon as they pass by in amusement.
Your state and local leaders (who you elect) continue to make your Constitution irrelevant, backed by power of the courts (by appointed judges). and so the un-elected rule over the elected. Sound familiar?
This is why you are all so desperate to return to a time in which no one in this forum ever lived. You’re convinced that legend and myth are truth because your fathers have convinced you it was better “back in the day”.
Back in which day?
You make a valid point, but you Krauts have no moral ground to lecture the US. After all, the US taxpayer did bail your ass out after bombing you to the stone age in 1945. The US military could have upped and left leaving you in the rubble and groveling under Ivan’s bootheel.
Looking at Germany now, maybe that might have been the better option. Russian occupation would be better than the Islamic and African invasion.
nflation to today’s dollars, WW2 cost the US tax payer over $4 trillion.
Then your government paid the German government 12-billion in even MORE tax payer dollars under the Marshall plan to rebuild our economy.
Volkswagen Audi Group is now second after Toyota, as the largest car manufacturer in the world. And we Europeans have a higher standard of living, a better education system, and better health insurance than you.
Remind me again who lost?
Better you ask that question of the muzzie horde that your overlords — out of a lingering guilt over WWII — have invited in to rape your women and rob your spaces. But hey, Volkswagen’s a solid number 2. A really solid number 2. So, what are you gonna do?
As far as “better standard of living” viz. Western Europe and USA, the factoid tells the difference between the two.
https://mgmresearch.com/us-vs-eu-a-gdp-comparison/
Fact is the US is far wealthier on a per capita basis than Germany, France, UK etc. And while US healthcare system is bad, your socialist style system is crap. And you could sustain your government freebies only because the US took care of your defense from 1945 onwards. Most of the medical innovations post WW2, for example anti-cancer chemotherapy, immunotherapy, genome project etc. happened stateside. Heck, California’s GDP is 2x France with 50% the population despite of the Mexicanization of CA.
Frankly Americans are tired of ungrateful, supercilious Euro-peons pointing fingers and lecturing the US. Next time the Muzzies or Ivan invade to rape your women and cut your head off, don’t call the US military.
Up;
So far as I know, Germany has (or at least had) a two-tier medical system. That is, you can get the National level of care or you can upgrade at your own expense as a ‘private patient’. I don’t know how widespread this situation is in ‘socialist’ Europe but I was told it was similar in other countries.
The US, OTOH, wants to *require* only one tier of care. Naturally, this is heading towards shitty, particularly thanks to illegals. So, Obamacare is actually worse socialism than you find elsewhere. And it’s still here. (Thanks Paul Ryan, John McCain & uniparty.) All that needs to happen is for the Progs. to re-instate mandatory participation the next time they take power.
Correct, we have a two-tier system exactly as Al described. It works great, and it’s affordable to everyone.
NATO was completely necessary especially since Russia has never had an intention of invading Europe.
It was another cold-war American invention based on it’s long history of your collective paranoia about communism.
But evidently you seem to be okay with Chinese communists. In fact you like them so much you’ve outsourced all your jobs there and made them the most dominant economy on the planet.
Well done America!
European standard of living isn’t necessarily higher just different. Poor Americans have air conditioning; Europeans generally do not. Meat and Fuel is also more accessible to the American lower classes.
Keep beating Ford and GM, that’s what! 🙂
“A society’s first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today’s true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today’s Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.”
Walter Williams
Constitutional discussions may become moot quite soon.
Bolton’s Jewish replacement, Kupperman, discussed a “realistic estimate” of a nuclear exchange. “We lose 20 million, but they lose 150 million!”
Also, the corporation I’m subcontracted to has been shut down for 3 days by malware.
Anyone else have this?
Are the “intelligence services” escalating from street theater and ‘hate monitoring’ to active involvement?
My practice has been slowed to a crawl on two occasions for several days each time by malefactors holding the electronic medical records hostage. This affects all of the customers of that particular company and their patients. And all of the providers of this kind of service are on the list.
The FBI tells me, “They are in Russia, there’s nothing that can be done.” The advice is to pay the ransom. Of course, I have no idea whether that happened (it’s the EMR company that’s directly on the hook), but we get our bits and pixels back and go about business.
Nothing to do be done? We used to go to war over economic issues. Now, not so much: we only go to war to ruin our own economy.
Wait till we show Iran!
Our ‘nation’ is being forcefully teased apart from both inside and out. We are the suckers of the world.
One principle I’d like codified in the victory is citizen shares.
All “public” assets were bought and paid for by us, theoretically for us.
We should share in the dividends, like the oil payouts in Alaska.
Many positive fallout effects from this.
Pre-Bolshevik Russia of Tsar Nicholas, Europe’s greatest king, and pre-Ayatollah Persia of the good Shah Pahlavi are proof of concept. The banksters destroyed them as they destroyed Hitler’s Germany or Tito’s Yugoslavia, also proofs of concept. We prosper wherever the banksters aren’t allowed, they’re targeting Iceland now.
Ok, late comment, O/T but in regards to yesterday-
I have found a human universal.
Every culture, language, and people in history- even the preliterate primitives still extant in pockets such as the Amazon- use the same terms for the same things:
Gods, ghosts, heavens, hells, angels, demons, preknowledge and past memories: the super-natural.
(Thus my strange focus, as I am determined to define exactly what it is we all have been trying to talk about. I see the ineffable as entirely natural, as an immaterial yet physical ecology. Morality has a real basis as well.)
Sorry for the distraction. Fresh from rereading yesterday’s Z. Will try to keep my trap shut, pinkie swear.
I believe the founding fathers knew this day would come and wrote the Constitution to reflect that.
To take up arms against the tyrants . Unfortunately the warrior gene has been all but eliminated thanks to 2 Global wars and a couple of “police actions”.
Of course every beaten dog has its lashing out point. We just not there yet . Full bellies and cable television will do that. Should that day come will there be enough white men to take the country back ?
Our replacement program seems to make sure that will never happen.
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.~Lysander Spooner
The fetishization of “muh Constitution” is one of the most annoying things about the civnats. In another time they would be beating you over the head with the bible. Now it’s Madison’s irrelevant and reinterpreted beyond all recognition musty old parchment. Once you find abortion and gay marriage in the Constitution it’s time to move on.
We need a new paradigm, based on something real, like blood-and-soil. Rehashed 18th century liberalism is just more cancer. We need to cut the tumor out. The progressives and the prog lite-right want to smoke more cigarettes.
It’s the same with anything written – people read into it whatever they “feel” comfortable with. Try arguing (as I have) that the Bible is not anti-slavery and that Jesus nowhere condemns it – he merely observes there are mutual duties and obligations and just as one is to be a fair and considerate master, so one is to be a dutiful and respectful servant or slave. Yet even my fairly realist Christian friend could not accept that – she just ‘knew’ that Jesus did not approve of slavery. Not that I want that system or those people (antiquated farm labor) here; I’m merely noting that the Bible, like the Constitution and any other written document, always leaves wiggle room that people stretch out to infinity.
That’s why I can’t take any church seriously anymore. Apparently God is OK with buggery and women in positions of power over men, despite the clear text of the bible. Israel is the church, not the modern counterfeit. Your slavery example is a favorite of mine. Salad bar Christianity is bad enough. This “I believe ‘X’ so therefore so did Jesus,” is intolerable.
The cucks have a reverence for the Constitution (the bigger cucks the Declaration) like it’s a religious document. I doubt the founders expected it to become a straight jacket, or a suicide pact as some have called it. It’s a weird obsession, to put so much faith in it like it was divinely inspired.
The Bible is like one of those inkblot Rorschach tests – what do you see? Even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose.
Jesus, John the Baptist and Paul (at least first) thought the world was coming to an end very soon, a popular view in 1st Century Palestine. They didn’t concern themselves with trying to change society because God and the Messiah were coming very soon and would make the world right. It was pointless. Just get right with God as an individual and prepare for the end.
My experience, no matter which generation you’re encountering, is that the majority feel American history started in the year they were born; everything before that is a fuzzy story that’s ambiguous and irrelevant. That pretty much caulks all the nails in the Constitution’s coffin. Another is that words and language have become meaningless … thus “shall not be infringed” is appended with thousands of pages of laws and regulations that infringe. You can’t write a constitution with watertight standards when your language is a leaky hull.
The Constitution was framed for a moral people who held some truths to be self-evident, for the most part sharing a common language, culture and ethical standard. Of the many nails that sealed the Constitution’s coffin in the last 50 years, it’s the myriad of “rights” that have been discovered ex nihilo, from the 1964 Civil Rights Act to sodomite marriage to the discovery of new genders. Now nothing is self-evident, except that Constitution-thumpers are dimwits.
I have trouble seeing how a government with a role for the national and global elites would solve anything. Or that there is a fundamental flaw with a written, negative constitution. The “old order” is superior to what we have now. Repealing the 17th amendment moves towards restoring some power to the States. Local voters would likely have bigger voices by filling the Senate indirectly, through their respective legislature.
The old adage that ‘you cannot make everyone happy all of the time’ is always true.
What has happened in the US is that the people who get the ‘unhappy’ side of happiness/unhappiness equation are the vast majority of people in the country (of any race).
In the end, it doesn’t matter what your political order looks like, no elite can govern a territory when virtually everyone is unhappy with the decision that may you, the elite, happy.
Propaganda can only keep ‘false consciousness’ going for so long before things start to unravel.
The problem for the elites right now is that ethno-genetic nationalist sentiment is on the rise among all races in the US (though most worrying is, of course, White Nationalist sentiment) and they have yet to craft a message — other than ‘racist, anti-Semitic, fascist, white supremacist’ — to counter the sentiments, to maintain White people’s false consciousness about race and racial separatism.
From the perspective of the elite classes, the issue is no ‘solutions’ but control, but the problem with attempting to maintain false consciousness regarding race when virtually everyone is experiencing discomfort around ‘race’ is that the discomfort doesn’t go away, it just makes an appearance in some other unpredictable way, thus undermining the elite’s ability to maintain control.
Trump is a let-off valve for some of the pressure, but not all of it and the more the elites fight him, the less predictable the situation becomes.
As Z-Man points out, it is entirely within their power to make adjustments to maintain power after things have changed, but they’re not doing it.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make arrogant.
It’s why abolishing corporate taxes would be most resisted by the corporations themselves. It is through the tax code that corporate interests can most influence Congress. Without a reason to lobby Washington, they can’t be there to exert their power over politics.
Wait, what? If we didn’t tax corporations, they wouldn’t be lobbying Washington? I find that a dubious proposition.
There’s a truth to what Zman wrote. But it could be fleshed out by including regulations as well as taxation. The multinationals love regulation because they can always afford to comply, whereas the small guy can’t and gets shut out of the market or strangled before he can grow large enough to become true competition.
But it could be fleshed out by including regulations as well as taxation.
And government contracts and subsidies.
There is a lot of talk in dissident right circles about having a king and aristocracy. But the problem is that it would lock in the existing “elite,” who are mostly an artificial elite who would not be anywhere near power in a different system. This same problem is why I tend to be skeptical about granting “utility” status to something like Google, where that status basically locks them in as “THE” search engine, sanctioned by the state.
These are the people who were able to cheat the best and the beneficiaries of tribal nepotism. Even when controlling for IQ and using the self-serving inflated IQ score of 115 for Jews (a MAJOR inflation of the real number likely 104), they are still massively over-represented at places like Harvard. Not only that, but they are taking OUR (white) slots.
This is also a perfect example of why keeping foreigners out was necessary in the first place. Jews came at a time when there were already white ethnic interests fighting and playing “identity politics.”
Any transformation serious enough to involve aristocracy won’t include the present anything – it’s down the road. Even if it somehow happened tomorrow, I wouldn’t suggest we select on the basis of current elite criteria, and would probably preemptively disqualify anyone near a present lever of power. You’re hitting an issue I’m working on with the question of long term goals and present practicality.
Would we have a problem with the existing elite if they were suddenly fully accountable owners instead of shadowy manipulators? Formalism of this arrangement was Moldbug’s point. “Letter to an open minded progressive” translated as letter to my fellow Jews and other progressive elite people: We own this county now, so why don’t we act like owners? Why do we tolerate Detroit existing the way that it is? Even the anti-Semites might really like formalized Jewish rule, but the Jews want no part of it.
Yes we would. The existing elite are not Us, they are most distinctly Them. Most of the pathologies the Woke Left attributes to “White” culture are Fellow White (typical projection) – lack of out-group empathy, conspicuous consumption, environmental destruction, materialism/lack of spirituality, etc.. They have made the Enemy and the Enemy is what they’ve made of Us.
We were evolutionarily conditioned to deal with our normal White elite pathologies. The introduction of the viral pathologies of the Semitic out-group culturally devastated us the same way that Indians were devastated by Euro pathogens for which they had no evolution-developed immunities.
Fortunately, some of us are developing the skills to Notice & defend, and passing them to our successors via the blessing of linguistic evolutionary acceleration of the slower-speed genetic process.
Even the philo-Semites would soon learn to “not like” formalized Jewish rule. Imagine Emperor Moldbug. “1 do 109” would be 110 within less than that span of months with a vengeance that would make Luther cringe.
Our Elites sense that you are right and formalized elite rule would never be accepted if they were perceived as the other. They shut Moldbug up didn’t they?
He just made a brief appearance in Anton’s latest book review. I don’t think they shut him up, I think they lowered his profile and changed his job description. He’s now functionally serving as a covert social comfort Jew & a tripwire/final warning system for suspect influencers ala David “Cole.”
Do you agree that most Jews deep down hate whites as a group for millennia of oppression? Whites have committed unspeakable crimes against Jews throughout history for which they can never be forgiven, correct?
The DR is pretty f**ked up as to think a king and a aristocracy is a solution to our ills when it’s the white population itself that is the problem.
We lost our country because we lost the will to fight for it. We are not the men who fought at Athens, who fought and died against National Guardsmen and Pinkerton killers at factories and the mines during the last century. We’re just consumers with pretensions of being citizens.
Unless we fix this abject cowardice and inability to work together among white men our goose is cooked. it does not matter what our thought leaders emote because it won’t come to pass and we most likely will end up with a bullet in our heads when the Left finally comes for us.
Men fought the Pinkertons, but men also fought for the Pinkertons. Palmer’s railroad men fought it out with rifles in Colorado. Mother Jones and his men fought an army of scabs. Men fought because they were worried that their children would go hungry. There were exceptions, but hunger and desperation were a larger motive than ideology for most men prior to 1900. Today we have welfare…
We aren’t ready to demand guys go over the wire yet and a decades-long strategy leaves room for family men with low risk thresholds as well as everything beyond. 5 PT is something that doesn’t demand autistic level commitment.
One can dance around the whys and hows all day, but you are always going to end up in the same place, which is that without broad civic cooperation and rough agreement on understandings of what the pieces of paper actually mean for us, and the standards of behavior that are demanded from that understanding, we have nothing to work from.
That is where we are today. Basic differences in culture, behaviors, and expectations are fundamental elements of a polyglot society. Diverse elements only can live together when they subsume their own behaviors and preferences for those of the dominant culture. Our side has ceded dominance but refuses to buckle under. Our system is stalemated, corrosively so, until one of two things happens. We either buckle under, or retake cultural dominance. Pieces of paper, and various interpretations of them, are not going to be of use here. We are now at a place where arm wrestling will determine our future, and the strongest will prevail. Think and act accordingly.
i think this Game of Thrones clip sums it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHHlWyHdNc
Z Man;
Yet another excellent, provocative and insightful essay. To further your analysis of the evolution of the US elite social structure from local to national, it is possible to make the case that Progressivism originally arose as the ideological justification for *our* emerging national elite after the Civil War. No assertion of divine right of kings, etc. could be used to validate their right to rule. But a divine right of progress under their elite tutorage_? Now we’re getting somewhere._!
The German elite evolved naturally from feudalism but such was not going to work here, because of the American Revolution. So another basis of justification was needed. So they can about for one.
Recall that the original Progs, had a bad case of Prussia envy.* All of the ‘reforms’ they advocated were first put in place first, in Prussia, then the 2nd Reich under Bismarck. The Prussian list of firsts includes compulsory public education, national social security, national health insurance, compulsory national service, the publicly funded research university, etc. The Progs. were/are envious later adopters.
Whatever else we can say about the the 2nd Reich, for sure they had a highly distinct national elite. To begin with, if you last name started with ‘von’ you were presumed to be elite and all other people with any other surname were not.** So German social measures reflected and validated the elite rule that all good Progs. aspired to. And they could be sold here by obscuring their origins.
The problem today is, absent an appeal to return to the Constitution, there is, as you say, no current ideological basis to fight the poz (aside from Christianity). Thanks Buckley, et al. So, no surprise that this has rhetorical appeal to anyone on the right, of whatever flavor.
______________________
*Read some of Mark Twain’s travelogs and lesser known works for examples.
**To avoid stultification It was a regular occurrence for useful commoners to be given a ‘patent of nobility’ including a ‘von’ as reward for exceptional service. Strivers could even buy a ‘von’ via adoption by an elderly broke aristocrat.
“Even if it were possible to roll back to such a system, the power relationships would not change.”
A bad system run by good people is superior to a good system run by bad people because any juvenille delinquent, much less a decent lawyer, can work around any black letter set of rules. Gaming the “spirit of the law” requires more (((expertise))), but I give you Judeo-Christianity & Globoshlomo’s “electing a new people” as a prime example of its feasibility on a long enough timeline
John Locke was the Dr. Spock of political philosophy and the U.S. Constitution was a baby-book blueprint for “permissive” civc parenting.
Contra Dr. Spock, if you don’t punish your child when he does wrong, he keeps pushing the envelope and loses respect for your authority with each failed parental shit-test. If your child hangs out with friends who take advantage of his naivete, selfishly exploit him, get him mixed up in their troubles & subvert the spirit of your teachings, the delinquency happens much faster and the results are much worse.
250 years on, the vast majority of Woke wreckers currently infesting the Federal judiciary and Executive Branch know they’re disregarding both the spirit and law of the Constitution when they Resist with facially lawless rulings, gross insubordination and treasonous dereliction of duty.
But as Z pointed out on FTN, nevertheless, they persist, because no one ever punishes them. I’d add that they’ve grown to despise their e pluribus parents and only look out for numero unum. The’ve pushed the envelope past gays to trannies and are probing Planet Pedo in a desperate search for someone to finally tell them “enough” and give them a civic ass-beating.
Trying to reform a 250 year old civic delinquent is as fruitless as putting your 50 year old son in rehab for the 11th time. Sometimes you have to accept failure, cut ties, figure out where you went wrong & go make another kid. Let’s raise the next one better.
If you have any experience in local government — particularly in “diverse” areas or states — you already know that the constitutional order is long dead. Most city councilors or government workers from our diverse and inclusive population do not regard public monies or revenues with any sense of obligation, stewardship, or even respect. That’s white people’s money.
These are harsh words to hear, but it is largely true. The more that municipalities like Baltimore are tolerated — and of course they will be; any actual solutions lie outside the realm of the political, for now — the more this will spread into other cities and medium-sized towns. As the money runs out in the 2020s, the confiscatory schemes will become even more predatory and violent as all of these community activists and womyn wonder where all the money has gone. Seems like every day some 30-year-old superintendent of a “charter school” with “Success” in the title is caught having pocketed hundreds of thousands. It won’t end. That money just sits there and they want it. The impulse control is nonexistent. Two, three, many Kwame Kilpatricks.
The intellectual vacuum in thousands of dying American cities and medium-sized towns has hollowed out this country, and left local government to illiterates, grifters, developers, and mentally-ill activists with no understanding of how anything works except their mouths. It is dire. Well-educated people on sites such as this may know this in theory, but on the ground — once you observe it — it is jarring. We really don’t have that much time left.
Exactly right. My county is nearly all white; after I retired I was courted to run for local office. Naively I played with the idea … the more people I talked with the more I realized that people don’t want sound, responsible governance, they just want the gravy train to keep showing up on time. Further, rural counties are ADDICTED to grant money. Grant money has strings attached. But county government keeps coming back for more hits, about as smart as the meth addict. I told county commissioners and the Sheriff that the Feds aren’t taking our sovereignty, we’re just giving it away. Crickets, blind stares.
“We don’t have much time left.” Concur. General Quarters Condition 1 … this is not a drill.
Did I read this correctly?
Because the primary ptolemaic circles didn’t take into account certain relevant and necessary structures…the secondary ptolemaic circles have only exasperated those initial shortcomings…thus the solution to this problem is yet a new set of ptolemaic circles to right the whole structure…?
Apparently not.
What passes for an American elite in 2019 is frightened, aging, and divided. Doubtless some non-cosmopolitan natives have begun to see that there is no way out and no going back and the only way forward is through us.
Written Constitutions are pointless, as proven by Liberia. As Z often says, get the people right and things generally work out. A constitution is only as good as the people reading/interpreting it.
Here’s my Constitution for my homeland:
“This land is explicitly for the people living here as citizens today and their posterity. No person who is less than 90% derived from the current citizens of this country will be allowed to become a citizen. Only citizens of this country will be allowed to vote, own land or derive government benefits – direct or indirect. The country’s population will never be allowed to become less than 90% derived from its current citizens; if that level is reached, no immigration will be allowed, including spouses and children of citizens, until the population reaches 91% derived from our current citizens.”
It’s all about the people. My homeland and my people will be one entity, just as my home and my family are one entity. That’s why it’s called a “homeland.”
If you’re going to apply your Constitution to the United States as it currently stands ( This land is explicitly for the people living here as citizens today ) ….. you’re still going to be screwed.
You have to start with a homogeneous population or it doesn’t make sense. The United States is no longer a nation. It’s just a reasonably run bizarre.
I don’t think that they’re pointless; I think they’re particular to the people who created them and for whom they were intended. (The Founders were specific about this.) Nothing prevents imitation except the willingness and ability of the people (Liberia had neither.)
Ten percent Black is not White and will likely not act White. You theory is flawed at the theoretical level. And ten percent Black means vast ghettoes, riots, rapes, crime, etc – just like 1950’s America. If we had the power to make America 90% White, we would also have the power to make it 100%. Why wouldn’t we want that?
Z: “… a third house of Congress could be created… the moneyed interest would be provided with a chamber of their own…”
Such a chamber already exists. It is called the Knesset.
Reported for anti-Semitisms, goy. Well played.
The Industrial Revolution rendered futile any idea of “democracy”. As long as a land-owning aristocracy/merchants prevailed, the 18th century vision of a republican form of government could flourish. But industrialization brought with it a mushrooming population, enormous urban areas and block voting. The old dream of equality and similar communities of interest died under the smog of factory towns and multiplying ethnic neighborhoods. The pioneer territories and the agrarian states held out the longest. But they have been absorbed. Without a commonality of purpose, of language, of history, or culture, of what point is the pursuit of “democracy”? The old “who/whom” issue arises under a different guise.
How did we get a “mushrooming population” – with declining birth rates?
You seem to be missing some of the vital pieces that explain the puzzle.
Factory fueled immigration. And they’re still at it.
The United States wanted immigration because at the same time as the industrial revolution was spreading thruout Western countries – the US was expanding westward and the government wanted people to fill up all those empty spaces.
The industrial revolution started in Britain. That revolution led directly to population growth – because it was so much more efficient to support a higher population.
You’re screwing up cause and effect.
Cheap labor is the drug of Capitalism. In South Africa, Blacks were used to destroy white mining unions. Arabs were brought (back) into Israel in the 60s to shore up labor threatening the Jewish nature of the country. Big tech demands more coolies, robbing an entire generation of American boys their dream of supporting themselves through coding. Japan is threatening to open its borders to wider Asia to man its construction industry. The agricultural interests of America have always demanded more Mexicans. Of course, there’s slavery man the plantations.
You have to choose between having a Nation and being a Capitalist powerhouse. America thought it could be both and chose wrongly. And people like you continue to defend the selfish Elite cuz you dream of being rich like them. You identify with them and that’s why you defend them.
The Constitution is a mere scrap of paper. Your bill of rights is too. The worst third world chit holes have constitutions with lofty sentiments and notions as grandiose as those in the American document.
There is one thing we need to learn from the third world – especially of late when their human trash is swarming over our borders by the truckload: in the real world, the only rights and freedoms you have, are those that you can defend – with lethal force if necessary. This is why liberals want your guns.
The DR doesn’t want to hear this ugly fact of life.
If we are not willing to fight and die for what we want, it’s not going to happen let alone survive in the coming decades.
The liberals also want our guns for another reason. They intend to kill us off. Whites are in f**king denial to believe otherwise when the elites are openly destroying the society we built and importing savages by the millions to replace and demonizing whites in the process.
There isn’t a future for us if we don’t fight only a boxcar ride to a incinerator or quarry.
“There isn’t a future for us if we don’t fight, only a boxcar ride to a incinerator”
You sound so glib when you say that,
but it actually happened to my great-grandparents and many cousins.
my cousin’s husband shivved a soldier, stole his uniform & motorbike, then went around liberating people from the SS.
You got the balls to do that?
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” – Mao Zedong.
Lethal rhetoric is self-defeating and feeds trolls. We’re decades short of what you’re talking about if we manage ourselves responsibly. Use your head and your mouth not your trigger finger
A NRx joke: God made Switzerland to show the world a republic could work and he made America to warn everyone else.
If Brazil Norte is to survive we dont need more power to the states, we need entirely new cantons.
He made Athens a warning to everyone that big democracies don’t work. Nobody gets the lesson any more.
No, we need to kill the welfare/police state first and foremost. This can be done by simply denying power to the blue hives in which the brownskins and their white liberal masters congregate and let nature take its course.
Any other solution will just make it worse for us.
Rod and I each have our competing theoretical solutions. He thinks our primary goal must be to dismantle the welfare state and I believe it is to work towards a white ethnostate. I don’t know how to measure which is more unrealistic.
I do know that I’d prefer to live in a white socialist state than a multi-racial libertarian state, although I’d prefer to have more choices than that.
The proposal to create a third house of Congress reminds me of the old joke about how we should make Israel the 51st state, because that way they’d be limited to only having two Senators working for them. Ha-ha and all, but that’s not the way things really go in Washington. Trying to adjust the current system is, at this point, just Gorbachevism, and will inevitably end the same way. Even if you chase all the current elites out, like Jesus expelling the moneychangers from the Temple, you’ll just end up with a bunch of new ones taking their place. Globohomo will grow them in a vat, like the Dominion growing endless Vortas to impose their will on the galaxy.
You’re not going to want to hear this, but the only answer is to tear the Enlightenment out of our society, root and branch. You can keep (most of) the nifty machines, but all of its social thinking has to go. All. Of. It. Then we have to go back to what we know works, which, as Count Evola put it, is merely what every well-bred man before the French Revolution considered same and normal. Patch it up a little to prevent another 1789, and go right back to what we were doing before it.
Yeah, yeah, I know. “It’s outdated! It won’t work in The Current Year, because iPhones… or something!” Uh huh. It’s the baseline normal of mankind, and the basis of functional human societies. “I’ve got a better idea I’ve been working on!” Cram it. The scourge of our people for the past 250 years has clever men with innovative plans for creating a better society. We’ve had all of that we need, thanks. As the great philosopher Popeye the Sailor once put it, I’ve had all I can stands; I can’t stands no more!
Revolution has been a disaster for our people. No more, thanks. What we need is Restoration. Only then can we heal.
“…how we should make Israel the 51st state”
There was always the trope that NYC should be the 51st state;
there even was a public affairs TV show called “The 51stState”
https://www.thirteen.org/the51ststate/history.html
(channel 13 was NYC’s Public TV station)
During the past 40 years, the NYC City Council has grown to 51 members, previously it was a much smaller body (I can’t remember how many councilmen there used to be).
** One consequence of having such a large body is that once it leans too much towards one political party (Dems in this case), it becomes irreversibly single party. **
For the past 20-30 years it has become 90% Democrat, which is a larger proportion than the roughly 75% of the populace which is Democrat.The Repubs have no ability to counterbalance the Dem’s leftist policies.
It is amazing that Guiliani was elected 25 years ago, and amazing that his reforms continue to work… the murder rate is 20% of what it had been, auto theft is 25-30% of what it had been. What Guiliani accomplished was not due to the City Council passing laws; it was due to his Administration doing what had to be done.
Republicans have zero power in the City Council, nearly zero power in the media. Other than acting as an ombudsman for local constituents, they’re virtually useless.
Decades ago, the Dems “adjusted the current system” to enable them to have a permanet lock on Council seats. We must figure out a way to adjust the system again, to prevent the emergence/continuance of a single party state. There are lessons here for the national political scene also.
If you broke NYC, Long Island, and the inner suburbs off of New York, the rest of the state would be deep red.
Many of us upstaters dream of the day when we build a wall between NYC and the rest of us. Plop it just north of White Plains and you can’t go wrong. Yeah, we’ll still have the ghettos of Buffalo and elites in Ithaca, but for the most part we’d be very red. As it stands now, we can’t frack on our lands because the upper West Side and the hipster enclaves of Brooklyn think it’s yucky. We have to subject ourselves to the SAFE law because they think the rabble can’t be trusted with guns. It all ties back in to the local/distant balance of power that Z-man addressed.
BTW, power is “wielded”, not “welded”.
With all due respect to those few genuinely red-pilled folks in NY, my attitude towards NY is the same as my attitude towards CA – cut it off and set it adrift, or nuke it from orbit. It hasn’t been “American,” in any real sense, since about 1850.
We’ll always have elites the same way we have cockroaches. They are a package deal you get with civilization.
Your only safeguard is a active and educated citizenry who understands that concentrations of power and wealth occur naturally and that system requires a cleaning out every so often – IOW we kill the SOB’s and their supporters.
This is what the 2A was for. Except whites traded their balls in for a new SUV and a crappy job with no future and where most of them get to work until they are sick or crippled. wow, talk about suckers and patsies.
I’d say the DR are the worst in this regards with their fetish for kings(tyrants) to fix everything so they don’t have to get up out of their recliners.
Robert Heinlein suggested a House of Repeal as the third house. Any law a member suggests for repeal gets a vote – no committees or filibusters. Any law that gets more than 1/3 of the votes for repeal is repealed.
It’s how he envisioned keeping a federal government small and most of the governing local.
Better, any law made by the Congress only applies to the States who Senators voted for it for 20 years. That will cure the issue real quick. Second, anyone who changes his/her state of residence is ineligible to vote in the statewide/mid-term elections for 20 years.
Robert Heinlein also wrote a short story in which to kill someone for any reason became legal. I wish I could find that damn story. Anyway, I recall he wrote that after murder became legal it took about 30 days for all the assholes to be dead.
Worth a try?
We already have that…’Repeal as a third house’…it’s called nullification. That’s our third house.
No being the key word.
Most “civic nationalists” are full of crap. They want nothing to do with the country that the Founders envisioned. They want the 50’s back – the country that existed AFTER a couple of decades of New Deal socialism,. They still want their social security, Medicare, and all the other goodies a giant federal government hands out in return for power and votes.
They want the ambiance of the 50’s back without somehow restricting minorities and feminists.
“Ambiance” is a great word for what they desire.
Exactly.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been berated by civic nationalist types about how it’s “unconstitutional” for a state to secede from the Union.
They’ve fully swallowed the BS and lies fed to them by their progressive leftist handlers and get really upset when you tell them that a different world exists on the other side of the cage door.
The way I see it – if you’re going to argue that we need to return to a country more along the lines of what the Founders envisioned , then you must also accept that there’s a number of things that have forced upon us by the progs – that you’re going to have to give up. I’ve gone thru that mental exercise myself – and come to grips with it.
I always go back to the free shit army references – because to me , believing in a world defined by the Founder’s vision, means there are likely going to be a whole bunch of things you simply can’t have. And you had better come to grips with that – or at a very basic level you’re just a liar with the soul of a thief.
The document said “Pursuit of happiness”. It didn’t guarantee it, it didn’t say you would ever find it, it didn’t say you could steal it from the future, and it didn’t say you could steal it from somebody else, and it didn’t say you were entitled to government funded mental health care if your own mental defects were the obstacle to your ultimate happiness.
But go try and have this position back around the time of the Obamacare debates. Tell some of the free shit army that you’re not “entitled” to have government run health insurance – and you’ll get the screamers yelling about how if you don’t have health insurance – you’ll be a burden on everybody else.
Now tell them : “No – I won’t be, if I get really badly injured or sick and can’t afford to pay for treatment – LET ME DIE”.
The response you’ll get is: ” We can’t do that – what kind of people would we be if we let people die in the streets!!?”.
The same kind of people who are FORCING me at the business end of a government held gun to buy grossly overpriced health insurance – that’s who.
I used to watch Downton Abby. My wife one day made a comment about how she didn’t think she could live in that world. After going thru a mental exercise – I came to the conclusion that I’d have no problem living in that world. I could read a book instead of watch TV, trashy whore women with their boobs hanging out all the time has gotten more than a little bit tedious as I’ve gotten older. Yeah – the cars were rudimentary – but they were also simple. People made do somehow – I’m sure I could do the same.
To me – the same type of thought process applies to a world more in line with that Republic envisioned by the founders. I’m not going to miss the foreign wars, social security, the surveillance state, military equipment worship, all the groids funded by welfare dollars making everything shitty, women trying to tell me what to do, I’d figure out how to live without a Federal highway system, etc.
And you won’t have to watch Thomas the under butler lock lips with his boy toy, and all the wammin viewing and cooing, “Ahh, that’s so sweeeeet!”
I would have more tolerance for their degeneracy if they could forbear from rubbing it in my face.
And making me pay for it………….
Tolerance of degeneracy is a problem, however indiscreet.
We could sure use more of the two most redoubtable Downton characters, Violet Crawley and Charles Carson.
One upstairs, and one downstairs. They both knew and understood the natural hierarchy of humanity.
Come to think of it, Julian Fellowes made sure to poz them up as the series “progressed.”
Calsdad-
I can’t begin to count the number of times I have thought the same thing. I would much rather live in a world that the Founders envisioned than what we have today. The “goodies” are not worth it.
I feel like a foreigner in this culture that we currently are forced to live in. I should not feel like a foreigner in the land that my family has been in for generations.
Socialism works just fine in homogeneous white or Asian countries. It’s not maximally economically efficient, but people feel a greater sense of security and often prefer it.
Economics, while not unimportant, is a red herring to distract you from the more impactful issue of race.
I’ve met some Chinese and Cambodians who would beg to differ.
Some, not all. Also there are various degrees of socialism and a nation can be highly socialist with a strong welfare state and still have markets , families and a life we might enjoy
This requires a homogeneous high trust population something the US doesn’t have and really never did even in the 50’s
A nation of economic refugees and grifters founded by traitors, cop killers, tax evaders and smugglers so addicted to cheap labor they could form a nation without slavery, that nation big or small cannot and will not be able to become anything like the Nordic Model
The other option, Roosevelt’s Authoritarian Socialism simply failed.
We gradually revert to natural state is something more akin to a Banana Republic with that slide increased massively by mass immigration of people from actual Banana Republics
Long long term, a poor argarain backwater
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is America Nation of Nations
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Line;
I’d agree that cooperation is easier with people that look, talk and think like you, but I’d dispute that *voluntary* socialism can work at the state level. Voluntary socialism doesn’t work with strangers, even if they mostly look and speak like you, for the simple reason that they *are* strangers. For sure communism can’t work at the state level, long term, even with vast oppression. Let’s look at the ism’s from the angle of scale and consanguinity. This perspective describes the very common pre-industrial social structure pretty well.
A family really can’t function very well except as a communist dictatorship. The kids *can’t* be in charge. They don’t know enough to avoid lethal mistakes. So, the parent(s) *have* to be dictators. But that’s OK because they’re all closely related. Say about 10 people in size for a nuclear family and 20 – 30 for an extended family
You can then scale up to the clan level. Say a dozen or so extended families; Maybe 300 – 500, max, in size. There communism can’t work because some property (e.g. weapons, tools and shelter) are deeply personal and so can’t be communal. So much so that these personal items are often buried with the person.
Some resources are often communal, like pasture. But the fruits of them are owned by the family working the resource. So voluntary socialism exists for some resources, but ordinarily not for all production from them. There is usually sharing of production by type under defined circumstances (e.g. salmon run).
The clan chief has to take the views and wishes of the other adult family heads into account if there is to be productive cooperation (or they all starve next winter). So it can’t be a pure dictatorship like a family has to be. But there can’t be but one chief, either. But that’s OK because they’re closely related.
When you scale up to the tribal level, you have at least 2 and usually a one-hand kind of number of clans; Say 500 – a few thousand in size. There you have oligarchical semi-socialism. The oligarchs are the clan heads. Clans have their own means of production, like fields. Some tribal resources are common, like pastures, hunting or fishing grounds. Here voluntary socialism stops. The oligarchs are frenemies: That is rivals one-on-one but yet united against other tribes. One of the oligarchs comes to stand out, so he becomes the tribal chief who has a lot to say on many issues but not all of them. If he’s too dictatorial or incompetent, clans split off to form a new tribe. But that tribal structure is mostly OK since everybody’s related and the chief has earned his status.
And he needs to be respected and (mostly) obeyed if the tribe is not to be exterminated by rival tribes. So here actual consanguinity usually stops.
The next level up in scale is the state. States are formed when a tribe or a confederacy of tribes subdues their neighbors without exterminating them. But obviously the subdued ones are not voluntarily contributing their production and resources to the state. Whatever else a state is, it entails coercion of those *not* directly related to you. We all know about state socialism. What we all know is that it’s a sham made to look like family, run for the benefit of those few on top
There are two competing spirits within Europeans: one libertarian and one socialist. if I lived in a white ethostate that contained within it a libertarian region and a socialist region, I would honestly be torn.
I’m a fairly lucky guy whose skills command a reasonable compensation. I guess that should move me towards the libertarian region. Nonetheless, I wonder if the socialist region would feel warmer and more rooted.
I’d have to adopt a “wait and see” outlook.
And with good reason. The earlier private social programs collapsed during the great depression and were often strained to the limits during smaller panics and crashes
State welfare is far more robust and in a pinch, money can just be minted counteracting massive deflation from said crashes
Also the current global excess of currency , a partial cause of the current malinvestment is a product of nations with high savings
A nation where workers bought say Aflac and private health unemployment insurance and saved twenty to thirty percent of income as a nest egg maybe more will suffer from the paradox of thrift on a massive scale. All that money would be going into banks with nothing to use it on.
You get lower fertility rates since less state cannot guarantee the economic stability people in urban modernity need to invest in family formation , lower labor mobility (which is good and bad) and a much smaller economy since people simply aren’t going to buy as much till they are ready to stop working.
There is also a psychological issue , it’s a known common phenomenon that people used to thrift as a lifestyle often do not meaningfully increase spending with income
This means you have in every respect a poorer nation with much less material wealth and no real likelihood of higher fertility
It won’t be better and instead of DC you’ll get Facebook running your life
Now as for the 50’s , it was far from a stable period and we couldn’t have it back and wouldn’t want it if we knew what it was really like
We have to create something that works but to do that we have to have a consensus on what the problems are and how to fix them which we never will.
People might remember the talk during the Reagan administration about bringing the Federal budget under control. A now-retired hedge fund manager friend told me that she ran into Warren Rudman (Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balance Budget Act) at the time. He told her, “This is our last chance to bring the budget under control. If we don’t do it now, we never will.”
I’ve noticed that conservatives don’t have a problem with “socialism” when it benefits them or it’s something they approve of. They only have a problem with “socialism” when it doesn’t benefit them or it’s something they disapprove of. Many members of my parents generation, the much-vaunted Greatest Generation, turned into the Greedy Geezers upon retirement. Illegitimacy and welfare dependency are legitimitized in the name of being pro-life. So much for the supposed conservative virtues of self-reliance and responsibility for one’s actions.
The fault, dear citizen, lies not with the Constitution, but with ourselves.
“Ourselves” have been changed.
I’d argue we’ve been FORCED to change.
When was the last time you told someone to shut up and sit down? The modern male has lost all his backbone to stand up to even his wife or kids, let alone corrupt politicians. This didn’t happen overnight. It’s well deserved at this point.
Both. I’m over worshipping the Magic Paper but it was intended only as a framework for a national government, not as a scripture. Civic nationalism was forced to incorporate all sorts of aprocrypha like Jefferson’s “wall of separation” and statue-poem to make up for the lack of material, and ended up with an incoherent mess no one really believes in.
Only partially true. The founding fathers time had far more in common with the middle ages than modernity and our Constitution reflects that
While the Know Nothings were in fact correct , technology ranging from the railroad to the Internet made a constitution was designed for the 18th century obsolete just as much
Now that we are entering a world in which automation , No A.I required renders large amounts of labor superfluous of worth too little to ensure urban family formation , all forms of communication near instant and the spread of capital incredibly quick
Having a functioning society with that much less whatever choking hell the future brings means having a large active State not the lose oligarchy minarchy of the earliest eras
This sucks since our leadership, hell global leadership are mostly bad.
This means that we won’t be able to function, we will get a catabolic collapse and decline to whatever we can keep running. Hopefully this will be running water and electricity but its not guaranteed in all areas