This post by Steve Sailer is good reminder that social conservatives are not small government people. In fact, they are not even conservative in the modern sense of the word. To be a conservative today means being in favor of small government, low taxes and free markets. You can throw in a bias toward global corporation over national small business. Social conservatives are none of those things. Some social conservatives are in favor of those things, but most are not all that interested in these issues.

I’ve always suspected that a major defect of the Republican coalition is that the social conservatives are in favor of big government, when it comes to their issues. They want the state to ban abortion and put prayer back into schools. That’s why they are engaged in politics in the first place. In the 1980’s when Farewell and Robertson were going strong, the argument they made was that good people will lead to good government. If they could get their guys in office, government would enact their agenda.

The trouble is the social conservatives are largely ambivalent about the small government, pro-business stuff, so they are not engaged in those issues. This allows the GOP to play a double-game on a major segment of the base. They promise to address the social issues and fight the culture war, but only after they take care of the tax cuts, sweetheart deals for business and so forth. Throw in the warmongering agenda from the neocons and the GOP is basically a long con by neocons and the chamber of commerce.

The Bush years proved that this formulation can’t work forever. Even social conservatives eventually figure out they are being conned. They got one of their own, George Bush, into the White House. He was the first Evangelical since Jimmy Carter and unlike Carter, he made his politics conform to his religion. He was supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Instead, the Bush years were nothing but giveaways to big business and trillions spent attacking half the world. The social conservatives got nothing for their support.

We are seeing it again with immigration. Evangelicals, Mormons and Catholics think the ticket to filling the pews is to bring in 30 million Mexican peasants. I see vans all over my part of the world for Baptist churches painted with Spanish and English writing. The local Catholic church does a service in Spanish now. Immigration is good for business if you’re in the church business.  At least they hope it is, just like they hoped Bush would fill the bench with pro-life judges. The Evangelicals are now for open borders.

The trouble is, open borders are suicide for the party and probably suicide for the religious establishment. When the church members are seeing their towns ruined by immigration, they will have little patience for sermons in favor of open borders. The result will be what happened to main line Protestant churches once they sold out to the Democrats. Their pews are full of degenerates and the clergy is gays and lesbians. The Evangelicals are headed for a world where the pews are full of peasants looking for free stuff.

A good thing to ponder is how America has gone this long without falling into an autocracy of some sort. That is the natural end of democracy and it is something the Founders understood. They were educated men and that meant knowing their Greek and Roman history. The Greeks would regularly appoint a dictator to deal with emergencies like war or social unrest. The Romans eventually succumbed to autocracy. The French Revolution eventually gave us Napoleon. The Germans gladly accepted Hitler as the Fuehrer.

The natural course of popular government is to give way to some form of authoritarianism, either supported by the masses or imposed by the elite. Even today, we see European countries slowly turning over their national sovereignty to an un-elected bureaucracy. The strange truth of democracy is it eventually votes itself out of existence. The people, it would seem, simply tire of the responsibility. Perhaps it is just a phase societies go though as they swing from disorder to order. Maybe people are just incapable of keeping it.

In a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in New York, Alexander Hamilton said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” This attitude was representative of the Founders as a whole.

The puzzle is how has America slowed this process and still maintained some sense of self-governance. One reason is the constraints of the original Constitution. Today, it is the Bible of conservatives or maybe the Ten Commandments. It is a “who we are document” for the civic nationalists. In reality, it was a strongly anti-democratic documents that sharply limited popular participation in the federal government. The early American republic was much closer to Sparta than it was to Athens and that was deliberate.

The Spartan nature of the document a natural hostility to power within the ruling elite of America into the 20th century. In other times and places, the strong man arguing against democracy, promising to cut through the clutter and solve the problems, had no emotional barrier like that to overcome. American rulers have to swear to live within the Constitution to get a purchase with the public. Opponents of the “man of action” promising fix things in a hurry, therefore had a ready weapon to check their path to despotism.

Another reason, at least in America, is that the Progressives always gets ahead of themselves and anger the public. The Right never wins by their own accord, but the Left does lose from time to time. The first example of secular madness in America was the abolitionist movement. The fanatics of the North agitated for the end of slavery ending in the slaughter of 600,000 white people in order to free 3 million pieces of farm equipment. Reconstruction foundered because the public grew weary of the fanatics.

Another useful example of this phenomenon is the Wilsonian Era. Many on the Right have declared Wilson as history’s greatest monster, but that’s nonsense. His opponent was the blood thirsty Theodore Roosevelt, so Wilson was not all bad. Still, he was a true believer and convinced he could redesign American culture. He was probably our first technocratic ideologue. Maybe he is best described a proto-fascist totalitarian.  Of course, he went too far and the reaction to Wilsonian Democracy was the Return to Normalcy.

In fact, the pattern that started with the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century has been periods of liberal fanaticism followed by periods of normalcy. The FDR/Truman years brought excesses and a snap back with Eisenhower. Then it was the Johnson years, that brought more excess and then a corresponding revolt by the “silent majority” in the election of Nixon. Democracy in America has been spasm of progressive excess followed by the long hangover, which is then followed by another binge of excess.

This phenomenon is well documents and called the ratchet effect. The nation moves toward despotism, then takes a small step back, followed by another great leap toward despotism and some small drawback. Maybe the reason America has not collapsed into despotism is that we’re only into a century of democracy. Maybe we’re just a few more turns of the wheel before the public demands a strong man to impose order. Perhaps the Progressive fanatics have just not gone far enough or crazy enough to break the system.

The other thing worth noting is the compression of the cycles. The pendulum is now swinging wildly between radical change and modest reform. When every political institution has an approval rate below 50% and the most democratic one, Congress, is down at 15%, the path is clear for a strong man to take over. When the lawlessness of the Obama administration is finally revealed, it is possible the public will simply throw in the towel on democracy. Black triumphalism could very well portend a looming snap back.

This story is getting plenty of run in the nerd and conspiracy communities. The short version is that a company running an encrypted e-mail service has shut down due to some involvement with the government. Edward Snowden reportedly used the service in his cloak and dagger work. The assumption is the Feds have forced the guy to reveal his encryption keys so they can rifle through the mail sent and received through his service.

Some people think the Feds may have tried to bully him into letting them read his traffic going forward. The owner chose to go out of business so we can assume the government made it so he had no choice or they were prepared to shut him down if he did not do something he is not free to discuss. It’s hard to know, but it is a good example of how the government is “partnering” with Silicon Valley to stifle alternatives to Big Tech.

This is not new. Way back in the olden times, there was an anonymous mail server in Finland. You did not need an account to use it and it had no logs. The way it worked is you sent the server an e-mail. The first line was the address you wanted to reach. The rest of the body was your e-mail text. The system would forward it to that e-mail and strip away all evidence of your identity.  Here’s the Wiki on it, which is mostly correct.

Even further back when encryption of internet traffic got going, the governments of the world began to freak out. The US government banned strong encryption or limited its use because they feared they could not spy on people otherwise. The United States classifies cryptographic products as munitions, believe it or not, and therefore bans the export of such technology beyond a certain strength. That’s how serious they take the subject.

Since the dawn of time, governments have wanted to prevent private conversations among the citizenry. There’s a reason why The Founders had a fetish for private association and freedom of assembly. When citizens can keep secrets from the state, they can be free. More important, when they can speak outside the ear of the ruling class, they can conspire to overthrow the ruling class. Privacy is the seed corn of revolution.

The fact is the real bad guys know how to avoid the Panopticon. They use strong encryption for electronic communications, but also deploy old fashioned techniques that are impossible to thwart. Government is always a blind giant swinging a mallet. The men and women at the NSA think they are the smartest kids on the playground, but that’s not the case. They simply have the force of the state to magnify their efforts.

That said, the giant swinging the mallet can cause a lot of damage. There’s a crazy Arab sitting in the Obama administration needed to conceal their shenanigans in Libya. On a fairly regular basis cops break into the homes of innocent people because they think they are dealing weed. Thousands of honest people are on terror lists, spending enormous sums to get their names cleared so they can get on a plane. The Giant wrecks a lot.

Now, the provider of an e-mail service is out of business because the Feds can’t force him to violate your Fourth Amendment rights. No one is going to shed a tear for this guy, because most people are either blindly patriotic or they don’t understand the issues involved in technology. There’s going to come a time though, when it becomes clear to most Americans that the partnership of Big Tech and the Deep State is very bad for us.

This Steve Sailer piece on the looming amnesty of 30 million invaders touches on the heart of the amnesty push. Western elites have largely abandoned the notion of citizenship. That’s because they see pride in national heritage as the same as Nazi xenophobia. Seventy years after the end of World War II and the West remains haunted by old Adolph. Perhaps is a matter of projection or fear of their own tendencies.

Another explanation is it stems from self-loathing. These people hate themselves, they hate the society that produced them and they hate the antecedents that make society possible. They busy themselves trying to scrub away anything that looks like nationalism, in the same way someone tries to wash away a stain. Of course, This means your moral standing is then defined by how far one is removed from a national culture.

That’s why dullards like our president insist on pronouncing foreign words with a foreign accent. They think it makes them sound worldly. Obama struggles with English, yet we’re supposed to take pronunciation lessons from him. It really is amazing that a man with so many opportunities to master another language at a young age never learned a word. It’s almost impossible for children raised in other lands to not pick up some of the language.

Anyway, I think it is something else. Americans are always late to the party. For instance, church attendance is still common in America. In Europe, the churches have been turned into museums or turned into mosques as no one bothers to attend. American church attendance is declining here in the liberal strongholds and they regularly make war on the religious. But, we are a few generations from reaching European levels of religiosity.

The same seems to be true of post-nationalism, but we are working hard to catch up to our kinsmen across the sea. The Republican Party still does the flag waving stuff, but the Democrats pretty much hate America. They always have hated Americans, but now they hate the very idea of America. It’s why Obama ran on fundamental transformation. In his mind, America was always a rotten idea, so it needs to be eliminated.

Europe has had a different experience. The reformation and the collapse of Catholicism as the unifying force in Europe resulted in a series of wars, collectively known as The Thirty Years War. The war left much of central Europe in ruins. Parts of Germany were reduced to cannibalism. Noble families were destroyed and vast wealth was squandered, in an effort to either restore the Church or find some suitable replacement to unify Europe.

The fact that the world was set on fire by a lunatic, who ate his own poo, had to resonate with the rulers. What replaced universal Christianity as the organizing ethos in Europe was nationalism. It was given a good Christian coat of paint, thus allowing the hoi polloi to believe they were God’s favorites and their rulers were God’s elect. By the 18th century, The Church was a side show and nationalism was the faith of Europe.

The result was the The Peace of Westphalia that largely ended the wars of religion, but it set the stage for endless territorial wars and wars over monarchical succession. In the 18th century alone there were over 40 wars on the Continent. Then the 19th century brought the Napoleonic Wars, followed by endless wars of rebellion, annexation and consolidation, as the borders of Europe were reshaped. Endless war was the default.

Fast forward to the 20th century and we see the ultimate clash of religions. Within a 30 period, the powers of Europe had destroyed one another, slaughtering tens of millions of people and plundering the West. Like The Thirty Years War, it was a matter of belief that set brother against brother in a near suicidal conflict. Fascism, Nazism, liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism were the driving forces of the world’s first ideological war.

The lesson European elites drew from the bloodbath was that nationalism was no way to run a society. They set about erasing it from their ranks. The slow development of a pan-European super state, the end of trade barriers, a single currency and free movement of people are all about erasing national identity. They are trying to create the unified Europe of Christendom, without the religion, in order to maintain peace on the Continent.

American elites have slowly absorbed these ideas. The trouble is, they don’t fully understand the point of post-nationalism, so their version has become anti-nationalism, which means anti-Americanism. The result is a race to overthrow everything that defines a nation, like language customs, borders. The selling off of the manufacturing base, for example, means they get to buy and use products lacking the words “Made in America.”

Military policy has been warped by this, putting the health and welfare of foreigners ahead of our servicemen. Of course, wholesale immigration is aimed at diluting the population. All of those pesky natives and their demands on government will be replaced with third world peasants happy for the hand outs. More important, being an American citizen will lose its value. The elites can be citizens of the world and the rest of us will just be the peasants.

I’ve taken to calling Obama “Obumbles” because it infuriates my liberal friends. Liberals have an emotional need to believe they are the smartest people in the room, so causally accusing their hero of being a dimwit offends them greatly. It is the hangover from the “scientific socialism” days when the Left swore their preferred arrangements were the natural order. In a better time, true believers would justify their actions by claiming they were doing God’s will. Today, Progressive fanatics believe reason is on their side.

Anyway, this article by Kevin Williamson touches on that a bit. Obama is supposed to be the smartest man in the room. He may have an above average IQ, I don’t know. Steve Sailer thinks his test scores were probably high average at worst and most likely above average. That’s not enough, of course. The Unibomber was a genius. Mao was probably genius or at least very shrewd. Personality is the hand that wields IQ. In the case of Obama, the personality is one that is disinterested and lazy.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

I would add that Obama is emblematic of the modern meritocracy. Accumulating credentials stands in place of accumulating accomplishments. Starting a business takes courage. Making it successful is hard work. Getting an MBA is relatively easy and it pays much better. The result is we have a lot of MBA-toting people who cannot run a lemonade stand and a shortage of honest entrepreneurs. A fair number of those credentialed professionals could never run a small business or dare try to start one.

That’s one side effect of managerialism. Getting credentials is a straight forward process with fairly clear instructions. If you have above average test scores, it means going to a good college and doing what you are told for four years. This opens the doors to elite society. Since the number of people meeting the minimum threshold exceeds the number of seats, the meritocracy quickly becomes a game of who you know and how to game the system. The result is a lot of credentialed idiots running around elite society.

Maybe that is self-correcting or maybe it does not matter. How much damage does a John Kerry really cause? Obama is president and he has proven to be fairly harmless. The bigger issue is that the ruling class, which depends on the ranks of the managerial class for talent, because incredibly narrow. The strivers at the bottom are motivated to emulate the people at the top, because that appears to be the path to success. Over time, the diversity of thought falls to zero. Everyone thinks and says the same things.

This happened with the Chinese exam system. Initially, it was a great way to find and cultivate talent. In time, the people entering the system saw that emulating those in the system was the golden ticket. The reason is the people in the system selected for people who would reinforce their position within the system. A few spins of this wheel and the imperial administration was staffed with men who only knew esoteric stuff like lines from old poetry and calligraphy. Something similar is happening to America.

Governor Tiny has the chattering classes talking about the brewing fight between “libertarians” and “conservatives” over the direction of the GOP.  Here’s a representative example of the coverage. The writer labels one side the establishment and the other insurgents, but calling the GOP conservative is serious error. That’s the official line, but that’s gratuitous nonsense. America’s ruling elites range from fanatically left-wing to mildly liberal. They agree on everything, except how fast to proceed. That’s the only dispute.

The Republicans are mostly a governor on the Democrats. The Democrats want to rush off and implement their latest fads right now, while the Republicans try to slow them down, but largely supporting them. These “cooler heads” used to be in the Democrat party, but they were chased off in the 1990’s. In every fight, the establishment types find some reason to give into the Left on most of what they want. Not everyone is happy with this arrangement.  As Michael Walsh noted on NRO, it is a good time to have the fight.

It makes for some good theater, but nothing changes until there is catastrophe. That’s why every epoch is book-ended by violent conflicts and great turmoil. The people in charge like the ways things are, so they will not fundamentally alter anything. It’s only when the system becomes unstable or untenable that change can happen. The old guard will not leave quietly, so that means a new guard will have to force them out. That’s the best case scenario, but that’s not the way to bet. What comes next is not going to be pleasant.