One of the first awakenings people have on the road out of the liberal mental order is the realization that libertarianism is nonsense. It is why you find so many former libertarians in the dissident space. Many of them started to see conservatism as a pointless trap, so they went searching for another answer and landed on libertarianism, only to discover that it was just a ridiculous version of conservatism. This sent them off on the journey that led them over the great divide.
While libertarianism has collapsed, conservatives continue to struggle with why their cause has slowly been marginalized, despite billions in funding. On the one hand, they have no answer for the post-liberalism that has swept the ruling elites. They struggle to even understand that there is a ruling elite divorced from the ballot box. On the other hand, they cannot bring themselves to join the populist reaction to the post-liberalism that is executing a revolution from the top.
Other than chanting about their principles, these people have had no answer for why they oppose the populists. Part of the conservative delusion is to assume that you are part of a temporarily out of work alternative elite. Once radicalism has run its course and everyone has returned to their senses, you will once against be a part of the cultural if not the political elite. Therefore, joining with those icky prols in the populist movement means abandoning the dream of restoration.
From Burke to the present day, this has been the personalized conceit of what passes for conservatism in the Anglosphere. On the one hand, the conservative is compelled to oppose radicalism in the name of culture and tradition. On the other hand, he must defend the system, even as it absorbs the values and principles of radicalism, because he imagines himself one day in the leadership of the system. The ratchet effect exists because conservatism exists.
At the most basic level, politics in the West has been driven by the internal political dynamic of the United States. That dynamic is a dance between those who operate on the assumption that the ends justify the means and opposed by those who argue that the means justifies the ends. The reason this has been a lopsided struggle in favor of the former is they have a wider range of action. To win, they just have to learn what the opponent will not do and then do that.
A good illustration of this is the Biden administration’s war on the court system in the person of Jack Smith. The courts knock down his spurious legal arguments, but he keeps coming back with new versions of the same arguments, always with the purpose of jailing enemies of the regime. Thousands continue to sit in jail after the Supreme Court shot down the legal claim against them, because as far as Jack Smith and his lieutenants are concerned, any means necessary is justified.
It is the one thing reactionaries understood. The antidote to people like Jack Smith is not obsessive rule following but a radicalism far more violent and deliberate than that practiced by Smith. You do not dig up the corpse of Cromwell and put his skull on display as a deterrent. You do so in order to get comfortable with what must be done to the next lunatic that slips thorough he defenses. In order to defend the law, one must go outside the law to destroy those who live outside the law.
Another way of thinking about it is the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Marvin. In the film, set on the frontier, Stewart represents law and the order. Marvin is the frontier, the forces arrayed against the law. This is the central conflict of the story, which is settled when Stewart finally agrees to confront Marvin. Wayne, the man with a foot in both camps kills Marvin, but lets people think it was Stewart.
This is why conservatism is about to be run out of town. Like Stewart in the film, it has always refused to accept that the law is not the answer to the radicalism that seeks to destroy the very idea of law. Anyone or anything that rose up to face the radicals was met by the conservatives as a greater threat than the radicals. Imagine Jimmy Stewart having John Wayne arrested before the big fight. Conservatives imagine themselves as the defense of order, when in reality they are its chief opponent.
All is not yet lost for conservatives. Billions in financial support have allowed them to survive their audience leaving them. While the older generation is happy to sit around playing make believe until the sweet relief of death, the younger generation is looking around wondering if conservatism is worth saving. You see it in this interesting essay by someone calling himself Henry George. It is of the same tone you saw with libertarians a decade ago before they had their awakening.
All of those cultural sentiments captured in words by conservative writers over the years will only live on if the people moved by them are willing to fight. They can either be pleasing thoughts as you slip into the darkness of death, or they can be an inspiration to be far more ruthless and radical than the radicals who promise to condemn your culture and people to the dustbin of history. Some young conservatives seem to be creeping up to this realization.
In the end, the sentimentality that is conservatism is a luxury item. It can be indulged in times when there are no great threats to law and order. That law and order, however, must be ruthlessly enforced by those who cannot and will not allow their virtues to be turned into vices by the enemies of law and order. If conservatism is to survive it must transition from a comforting death into an inspiration for a violent revolt against radicalism and the societal death that leads from it.
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Social order on this side of Adam’s revolt against God is based on violence. This will never change until the great unveiling at the end of the world.
I know you focused on the US, but the GAE creates this dichotomy all over the world. A good example of this exact scenario is playing out in El Salvador with Nayib Bukele. El Salvador had the highest violent crime rate in the western hemisphere 20 years ago. That’s right, higher than Haiti. Now it’s one of the safest. Progressive politicians in their country, supported by GAE NGOs like the NED continued failed policies in that country for 30-40 years. MS-13 are animals that would rape, murder, and rob everyone. The situation was far beyond fixing with liberal ideas of law and order. Bukele came in and was ruthless to the gang. It was effective. His party now consists of 95% of their congress because the people so overwhelmingly support him and how he’s improved their lives. How does the left feel about this?
They are trying endlessly to undermine him and slander him. They don’t care about the countless number of people whose lives he’s helped. He did it the wrong way according to them, and a few innocents were rounded up with the bad guys. I beat my head against a wall arguing this with a lefty friend who couldn’t come to see it and said, “well it’s complicated.” No it’s really not. Bukele is even too kind in my eyes. Take every one of those gang members and dump their bodies in the Atlantic Ocean. Period.
From what I can gather, overhearing talk radio at times, is that Israel defeating its enemies “by any means necessary” is now a conservative principle. It’s right there in the Bible, somewhere, if we are to believe Glenn Beck et al. Instructions in the use of the nuclear Holy Hand Grenade are right there, in scripture, I guess…
Everyday Americans, however, threatened from every direction and reviled by their own government, must not do anything rash and stupid, however justifiably angry and frustrated they may be. The ur-commandment of Coninc: We are better than they are; we will not resort to their methods.
Has any one of these conservatives studied the “methods” of strategic victory in World War Two? The kind of methods – carpet bombing civilians, for instance – that even sickened Herman Goering? Don’t get me wrong, I am glad “we” won that war – but holy jeebus, the methods… which of course dovetails with Z’s point: You want a society that is organized around your own principles? Then sometimes you have to play rough.
Which leads back to the fanaticism surrounding Israel among conservatives. As a purely international legal matter, Netanyahu’s government has gone rogue: attacks on a foreign capital, ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the killing of Lebanese nationals using “this one simple trick” aka the pager caper, and so on.
Meanwhile…
When is the last time you heard a conservative praise Pinochet, or Franco, or Chiang (“the Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart”) Kai-shek? How many Enoch Powell fans out there among the uncanceled conservatives?*
The outrages of George III detailed (and grossly exaggerated of course) in the Declaration of Independence, even taken at face value, are trifles when compared to the depredations now openly practiced by our rulers. His – G3s – tyranny was about as burdensome on the average colonial as Andy Taylor’s was in Mayberry. Yet these outrages inspired a bloody revolution – a revolution that the likes of Michael Anton regard as a sacred foundation for a “covenant”.
*Derb and Mark Steyn are effectively canceled, they do not count.
Addendum regarding Anton: Good writer who supported Trump back in 2016 (“The Flight 93 Election”). The problem is, Anton will never address the race question honestly: Like his soul brother Victor Davis Hansen, his training requires that he promote this “City on a Hill” fairy-tale that progresses from the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution (never mind the Articles of Confederation – too awkward), thence to the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the rest of it: 19th Amendment, Brown vs Topeka, Civil Rights Act, MLK. All so tiresome…
But not for Anton. His professional status requires from him ex cathedra disquisitions on the “American political tradition” via his mastery of the documentary history of the United States, with its familiar European antecedents (Locke and Montesquieu primarily). As long as the fiction that the USA of 2024 somehow rests on a “tradition” of any kind, Anton and his ilk can go on making a living writing essays and doing seminars at places like Hillsdale.
Men like Anton and Hansen remind me of the shadowy men who still LARPed as literary and philosophical geniuses in the last years of the Western Roman Empire, men obsessed with Virgil, the Roman rhetorical tradition, poets and satirists who’d been gone 500 years, even as the Empire was collapsing around them (Consult Samuel Dill’s indispensable Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire).
Point being: Guys, all that is over, as over as over can be.
At least Theodoric was a man of action, who probably did more to sustain the Roman tradition as best he could than did ciphers like Petronius Maximus and Libius Severus.*
*Two late emperors named at random. Maximus, Gibbon tells us, was thrown into the Tiber (an honor reserved for only the most contemptible of emperors; if memory serves, Elagabalus was another recipient of this honor… Caligula maybe? No, it was Vitellius I think. Fuck, just consult Gibbon or Wiki or whatever). Severus? Who knows. To my way of thinking, “Harris/Walz” may as well be “Maximus/Severus”.
Exactly right
Isn’t that one of the main functions of law, though? To destroy (or at least confound) those who would violate it?
I think hes summarizing the illegal maneuvers of the left.
I guess the left or Jews or progressives or whatever you want to call them filled the heads of our people with principles that they said were good and needed to be all of our peoples principles.
principles like equality of women abs colored people. To achieve this principle the law based on white supremacy must be eventually defeated cause it’s evil. So they propose a higher law that extra legal violence and lying achieve.
it worked and is still working because they are headed for utopia which is never sated. More lying and extra legal violence forthcoming
So, basically, a Franco is the answer to arrest the march of the radicals? I think the US elite is afraid of this and for a long time now has been selecting incompetent kiss-butt generals (like Mark Milley) who are genetically incapable of even thinking the name “Franco”.
Anglo culture in general seems to have a pathological fear of military revolts, even justified ones.
Since you touched on Libertarianism, I will post something I read a few days ago and it was a question being asked.
interviewer: “Give me your best description of libertarianism in two or less sentences.”
Interviewee: “House cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate, or understand.”
So Carl Schmitt and Mao are right. “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”
Fantastic column today. Thanks.
Now hold on. I’ve only made it through the first paragraph, but you’re going to have to make a distinction between the original libertarians, who wanted a return to the State’s Rights of the 10th Amendment before Prohibition and the New Deal Federal agency system, and the post-Buckley ‘libertarian’ shills screeching “Corporations can violate the Bill of Rights!”
I get it, we’re weak pussies appealing to process and authority. The Left, corraling the labor racketeers of the union vote, successfully made welcome the strong sigmas willing to do criminal acts to get what they want.
Okay. Reading the rest, I see that just as Buckley conservatism (which you taught us about) was to derail the Birchers from Noticing the UN,
Rothbard-Freidman “economic libertarianism” was to defang and derail the Constitutional libertarians, replacing Anglo sensibilities with blank-slate Kalergi Merchant consumerism…leading to the absurdity of Reason magazine quacks and Skeptic Society deniers.
In other words, it was in the interest of certain folks.
My inner antisemite is thus mollified.
Now on to the rest of the article. Will avoid triggering.
Oh damn. I abase myself.
This is really, really good. This is why They win.
And, this is how they subvert the Aryan honor system, as demonstrated through millenia.
They can mold us to be slaves, and have, but the good news is that we, too, revert to the mean.
Nattering nabobs of negitivity.
The sky is always falling
All hope is lost, ad nausiem.
Yes The systeem is too corrupted to fix, whatever that means to you.
One other old chesnut that actually is true. There are no revoltionaries with a full belly or some such.
No one is willing to take up axes & torches. Guess we all gotta suck it up then.
Where is William Wallace when you need him ? Not here.
It’s too early for him to get a following. Patience, young grasshopper, until conditions get much worse.
Ill be dead & gone if that ever actually happens.
In the mean time I’m dropping out to live as I please, thanks anyway.
Yes, you and I will both be dead before things get better. And, depending on your age, things will get noticeably worse than they are now before you die.
Nothing wrong with dropping out, you don’t have a chance to do much of anything at present anyway. No point thinking about axes and torches. It will take a while before conditions are bad enough for our peasants to revolt.
We just haven’t advanced from the Warning to the Willing.
Excellent work today, Z.
And the comments are too.
You no longer see stuff like this in the mainstream.
This site has the best comments section I’ve ever run across, but the upvoters and downvoters aren’t quite as … selective. It seems unfair that those who don’t have the imagination or the intelligence to write a comment get to determine whose comment “rises to the top” of the comments section. It’s one of the things I regret about the changeover from the old comments display system to the new one.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Conservatism is simply dorky white dudes wishing that it could be “morning in America” again with Ronald Reagan ascendant in 1985. In the following years, all they are now is a stalking horse for the regime, the Washington Generals of politics.
They are stuck in a time loop and have nothing to offer people. They believe in magic dirt and that anyone can come to America from a Third World hellhole and become a flag-waving, patriotic “American.”
I think people are slowly waking up to the demographic future of this country. We are quickly headed to a one-party state like California and once that happens, maybe not with Harris, but likely the next election, the gloves will be off.
The regime will crush dissent violently. The Biden-Harris days will seem like salad days.
Until more whites wake up to the demographic age, things will only get worse.
Somebody once observed that it is always 1932 for the Democrats and always 1980 for the Republicans.
It’s definitely always 1938 in the GAE. Just the other day Susan Rice came out and compared Trump to Chamberlain. I’m starting to wonder how long normie can keep falling for this schtick.
Does anyone in Gen Z really care about WWII?
Zoomers like the guy with the funny mustache and think he’s based. That’s one of the main reasons why they are banning TikTok.
The biggest problem with the American conservative movement is that they have accepted the enormous lie of egalitarianism, first propounded by avowed communists like Boaz and furthered by more recent Harvard communists like Stephen Jay Gould…The attending lie is “racism”, which lacks a definition but is used to make whites and asians submit to the invasion and promotion of dumber and much more violent blacks, average IQ in America being 85….There is really no way out of this mess as long as those lies are dominant in Western culture…
“There is really no way out of this mess as long as those lies are dominant in Western culture…”
Sure, but those lies are harder and harder to sell these days. The two characters you cite, were of the height of such nonsense. Data is accumulating and technology advancing and the results cannot be denied or suppressed much longer. Never have I spoken with anyone in industry that does not decry the decline in employees they hire or work with. They know, but dare not speak it. They await the right time, the right person to put their thoughts into the everyday conversation.
Sam Francis was wrong, and so was Bob Seger. There is nothing beautiful about losers and losing.
From George Will to Jared Taylor, conservatives are losers.
If you are old enough to have been a conservative when it supposedly mattered, you are not only a loser you are too old to matter.
Old losers should retire and write memoirs describing their failures and the means by which they failed
Jared Taylor put up a good fight. To put him in the same category as George Will is ridiculous and insulting.
At the very least, there is something resembling truth in his utterances. Which cannot be said for Will.
It is. It is ridiculous and insulting. To besmirch Jared, is to insult all of us.
No man should allow an insult without answer.
Exactly. Taylor expresses a simple plea for White unity and homeland and provides a valid rationale for such. There is no fault in that and Taylor is very good at it. There is no short coming wrt the man nor his contribution.
If you (Vegetius) don’t think so, then reply with Tylor’s shortcomings and how he should improve himself in your mind. Then we can have a discussion. Slurs and name calling are not discussion, only little men trying to tear down better men.
You never become a saint on another man’s sins.
I disagree. A principled stand, not for spurious but genuine reasons, is beautiful, even in defeat. Just read Beowulf, if you need an example. The monsters will always win (in this realm), but defeat is no rebuke.
That’s not fair to Jared Taylor. He’s been fighting the good fight for 30+ years. He’s still at it. I don’t ever remember him cucking to the leviathan in many meaningful sense. His job certainly is not, like George Will, to get people on the side of progressive liberalism. If it was, he would be on Sunday morning TV shows like George Will, and be far richer than he is.
There are times, at a given moment, where victory looks simply impossible. Think of Jesus on the cross. But if you are on the side of truth, then the truth will win out, even if it is long after you are dead.
Pingback: Repost: Fighting In A Cage Using The Queensberry RulesRepost: – Dissident Thoughts
American conservatism is just a variety of liberalism which accepts the liberal philosophical assumptions but is unwilling to follow through to their logical ends. That is why the ratchet works. The liberals engineer some outrage, the conservatives complain but go along in the end because they recognize the logic of liberalism is against them. Soon, the outrage is the status quo and is defended by conservatives. We will see a gigantic test of this ratchet effect in November. The Dems have souped up their steal the election strategy and we will see a repeat of 2020 with the Dem-controlled metropolitan areas in the swing states manufacturing enough votes for Harris to overcome the rubes in the rest of the state. It will be the end of legitimate elections in the USA and the end of the liberal pretense that elections reflect the will of the people. It will not be reversed by courts, as they want nothing to do with election disputes. Some sort of violence is the likely result.
In the end, if the ballot box isn’t a place for redress of grievances (and white people have plenty) against our illegitimate and immoral “government,” the cartridge box is the only logical next step.
I think elections are pointless this late in the game, but I’m convinced even normie grillers with their Trump flags will start to cross to our banner once they see 2020 play out again. When the vote counts stop for “some random reason,” we’ll know the fix is in.
The smart play for the Leftists is to allow a Trump win, then play Trump for the CivNat he showed himself to be in the 2016 election and Presidency. They have 4 years in Congress to obstruct Trump, watch America decline, and then run on Trump’s (bad) record.
The “smart play” by {{leftists}} is to allow Trump to win and allow him and his evangelical voters to take the blame for the greater Israel project.
Did I say different?
Trump and many of the people who vote for him ARE to blame for that, though.
Nothing quite makes me want to puke so much as an alleged conservative piously intoning “that’s not who we are” when nut cutting time arrives.
Odd, but the only memory I have of that saying used consistently in public life was from Obama—and he was no conservative.
The phrase became popular among cucks in 2015-2016 when Paul Ryan used it to attack Trump
Off-topic, but can someone let me know where Abe Lincoln is buried?
This has already been tried.
Grant’s tomb?
No – in 1876, some people tried to steal Lincoln’s body and ransom it.
Weekend at Abe’s!
A favorite trope of old westerns:
Give him a fair trial, then hang ‘m
We see that scene play out in real life all the time. Most people understood that while the police were letting BLM and Antifa running wild, they would not hesitate at all to bring the full force of the state down on you if you resisted BLM and Antifa.
Did they understand? Default American ideology allows an out: say “follow the money” (or “muh pension”) then think no more of it.
It’s not really conservatism. Every claimed forefather of the American right understood that what makes a man take a truncheon to his neighbor on behalf of bankers (or whoever) isn’t the paycheck.
Republicans are still complaining that Trump wanted the Guard brought in on January 6th to back up the capitol police and Pelosi didn’t allow it. Overlooking admission #785 that Trump was outside the chain of command—bring them in to do what? The civilian body count disappoints you? “January Sixth” is a lame name compared to The Great Capitol Massacre?
They understand nothing.
Those calling themselves “conservatives” have long been trying to wage a gentlemanly war against people who are waging a war of annihilation. We bring better arguments, they bring Molotov cocktails. Unless our hatred and extremism matches theirs, we will lose and civilization itself will perish with us. The “right” has been in a cage match but trying to abide by the Queensberry Rules. https://www.arthursido.com/2019/03/fighting-in-a-cage-using-the-queensberry-rules.html
In listening to Trump’s statements lately it seems to me that we are going to war no matter who wins the election. IMHO that should be the hill we die on. No more sending young people to be maimed and killed for Israel of the bankers.
I mean or the bankers.
You were right the first time
had it right the first time
You guys are right. It is pretty much the same thing.
The rules of engagement are in reality set by our enemy. A good start is to follow their example and “one up” them.
And “conservatives ” stupidly follow them. Why did Trump agree to debate on their terms and turf? Why not refuse to debate unless moderated by Tucker and Julian Assange? That would be fun.
I know, it’s all f and g.
This could be a glorious competition. Let’s meet the Great Replacement with the Great Escalation! Hey, WWII got us to the Moon, after all.
My example would be, meeting the “Great Replacement” with the “Great Deportation”. In short, violation of rule of law as in illegal entry or false statement of persecution would be met with immediate deportation with no legal recourse from within the borders of the US. Go home, plead your case there at the nearest American Consulate.
PS…if I heard correctly, “fear of crime” is not a legitimate claim to refugee status. In that case every single one–almost—of every border crosser claiming refugee status is ineligible.
It is darkly hilarious to read National Review types of late. They are absolutely, positively convinced they will be in the catbird seat if/when Trump and MAGA go down in flames come November. They are like the meme of yore of the old Confederate officer holding a Rebel flag and announcing the South will rise again. Each time there is any indication that Trump would win a fair election, as if such a thing even were possible, the despondence is palpable among Con, Inc.
While I remain convinced this is the last election in which the GOP will remain nationally competitive, Con, Inc., is going down hard and first. There are green shoots of political maturity and realism among what we call the “Right,” but it seems highly unlikely a traditional political solution remains viable. If a willingness to employ extralegal violence to combat extralegal violence actually is emerging (I’m unconvinced although less so recently), others have come to the same conclusion that the system no longer works. It still seems the best solution is simply to survive and wait out the collapse but those who muse about how to react to obvious fraud and cheating seem to have embraced, rhetorically at least, another option. It will be interesting to watch because the most interesting part about this election is what happens afterwards.
If we’re going to look to the future, we have to do what the communists and the cartels did: we have to organize the violence, to reap its rewards.
Spot on.
Righties are materially comfy in a post-feminist (radical) society that’s imploding. Not willing to stand against the Chaos, much less willing to fight. That’d be unchivalrous!
Would rather chasten and silence those who are willing to stab the beast down.
Conservatives (those who actually believe the rhetoric not the grifter whores like Lindsey Graham) suffer from “Anton Disease.” It’s the belief that your laws spring from God or nature and thus are not laws designed by and for a specific group of men at a specific time but the embodiment of a higher power.
This belief gives them a false faith that other races and genders will eventually see the light (and your goodness, btw) and accept those laws. Conservatives are childish and vain – and will fail.
I think this issue goes further: Their arrogance leads them to believe that the dirty work should be done by the proles; they would not sully themselves with such base matter as violence.
Agree. The conservative establishment is well-heeled and views populism as low class. They see those pick-up trucks and regular folk and feel zero connection, indeed they’re embarrassed to be put in the same category as them. Naturally, this is because they’ve accepted the morality of the Left.
The conservative establishment is culturally and politically the conservative wing of the Left. It’s why they want to talk about blacks and not poor whites.
How ironic that conservatives are far more sympathetic to the 300-pound bulldagger with green hair, tattoos on her neck, and metallic acne than to good old boys in Silverados with gun racks and a case of Shiner Bock in the cab. They shun their fellow travelers and embrace their natural enemies. At the end of the day, I’m left to conclude they’re just flaming idiots.
Almost none of them grew up around normal people, or, if they did, they felt much more comfortable with the people that they met in college.
I used to work around Capitol Hill. The backgrounds and way that they conservative staffers lived their lives was indistinguishable from the Dem staffers. Sure, the conservative staffers were either libertarian types or religious (but as in “we’re all God’s children” super CivNat religious). But they were very comfortable around the Dem staffers.
Ironically, even then, the Dem staffers were openly hostile to the conservatives and mocked rednecks and Hillbillies in front of them. The conservative staffers would just nod along. Losers even 30 years ago.
“We’re all God’s children”…. Uggh, I hear that from some acquaintances who refuse to acknowledge race realism. I can’t stand it.
Christians do believe we are all God’s children, and this naturally follows from their Christian beliefs about God and people What they fail to notice is some of those children are mentally retarded and some are intolerably wicked brats.
Satan is one of God’s children too, right?
Yes. The thing Christians seem unable to understand is that not all children are good children.
The Bible teaches that only the born-again are God’s children, and that unbelievers are the children of the Devil.
Those who despise government are “natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed.”
Not true, at least not for those who know correct Christian doctrine. Christians believe we are all God’s creatures. Only those received into the Church are God’s children.
“Only those received into the Church are God’s children.”
Which church?
The synthesis here is that the Law, whether divinely inspired (as I think) or from man (as you and Zman think), exists to preserve the People. If it’s anything, it’s first and foremost a tool to preserve what we’ve built and provide a foundation for posterity. The Conservatives fetishize the Law while happily watching the people founder and imported savages destroy what’s been built. This is the fundamental problem with “conservatism” and why it’s a spent force. What comes next is about biology and civilization. The Law without the People and civilization is meaningless.
Well, there’s a difference between divinely inspired in the sense that God create different peoples and those people create different societies with rules to maintain those societies and divinely inspired in the sense that there is one God and one set of laws that reflect that God. Anton and conservatives believe the latter. I believe the former.
Hmmm. I’d like to partially take issue with that. You’re essentially arguing for a Hobbesian sovereign (“a mortall [sic] god, to keep men in awe”), not a Lockean one, and I’m not 100% on board with that.
I think laws SHOULD, very loosely, reflect human Nature as created by a higher power.
The problem is that the Enlightenment debate between Hobbesian and Lockean sovereignty has been bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and Modernity. The role of the sovereign today is to use technology to impose human will upon nature. This is exactly what we see with with the transgender and feminist and racial equality nonsense.
I think Nature will ultimately reassert itself and human hubris will cause a massive bursting of the bubble… but when?
Whether law is divine or not, it should apply to the nature of the specific volk and not to humanity in general. God did not create a legal regime that comprehends Icelanders and Melanesians equally, and the descendants of Montesquieu cannot.
You know, I can’t help but think that a lot of the enlightenment thinkers were pretty parochial in nature—that is to say, having little contact with other races and cultures. Spending you life in Paris and taking a side trip or two to England and Germany might not be the best way to view the world and create a philosophy of “man” there upon.
But what do I know, I’m just a 21st century racist typing away at the internet…. 😉
As the PoMos would say, they were Eurocentric. Most of the time that’s a good thing, but in this case it led to flawed philosophical principles that continue doing untold damage 250 years after the fact.
I’m arguing that laws are downstream from biology. They embody the beliefs and culture of a certain group of people at a certain time. They are divine only in that God create that people.
Conservatives like Anton argue that the laws reflect God or nature and thus apply to all peoples at all times. It’s why they don’t fight back. They believe that the natural (or divine) power of their natural laws will win the day for them.
They are basically saying that anyone who doesn’t agree with the Constitution is like a person holding a chair over their head. Eventually gravity will win out and they’ll have to put the chair down. No need to grab the chair from them yourself.
Anton is guilty of a Lincolnian misreading of Jefferson’s Natural Rights argument. Jefferson wrote “to secure these rights, governments [plural] are instituted among men.”
Jefferson simultaneously believed that slavery was a violation of the Natural Rights of Africans, and also that when freed, they should be deported to form their own government to secure their Natural Rights as they saw fit.
So, yes, there are God-given universal natural rights… but it is not up to me and MY government to enforce them for everyone.
If the negroes want to have a different system of property rights to determine how a hunter shares a monkey he shot out of a tree in the jungle with a blowgun, fine. If they want to have a different system of justice where the chieftain settles disputes instead of Article III courts, fine. In their own country.
Pretty much all the influential white politicians in the antebellum era with maybe the exception of Calhoun believed this.
If Jefferson’s conception of natural law applies to all people, why is a subset of european white men and their descedents the only group who ever expressed them or fought for them?
The Chinese appear to be smart. Why didn’t they discover these natural laws? Their collectivist instincts are the opposite of Jefferson’s individualism.
Would the universal “natural right” consist of nothing more than the ability and freedom to constitute a system of governance that accords with that group’s biological and cultural development?
Natural law makes sense; natural rights divorced from natural law do not. For instance, natural law allows people to marry and procreate, since the chief object of marriage is procreation. Parents have a natural right and obligation to educate and nurture those children. They have no natural right to have them destroyed either in utero or afterward because this violates their duty to nurture their offspring. The bottom line: you have a right to do what you are obliged to do by moral law or what is not contrary to natural moral law but no right to violate that natural moral law. All the rights invented by liberals are no rights at all: sodomy, obscenity, pornography etc..
The collectivist mindset is the result of well over ten thousand yrs of slightly different DNA evolving in an isolated area of the globe.We are not the same.
This is one of the rare cases where the various sides of the above debate are all mostly correct because the differences resolve at a higher level of complexity.
Laws exist because the universe is objectively just. An objectively just universe means that successful actions to harm or bless cause harms or blessings respectively. Most have a morally relativistic view of a just universe in that they believe the universe owes them harms or blessings depending on their actions, which violates something like the conservation of actions where the universe would have to generation additional moral actions and then treat itself to an infinite series of harms and blessings in response to its response.
God claims to be all good which, philosophically speaking, means that God is the executor and embodiment of a Divine Law for which all actions eventually resolve to the good in an objectively just universe.
The laws of a nation exist as the attempted minimum code of conduct required to pursue that nation’s conception of the good, regardless of how an objectively just universe arbitrates the outcomes of said laws.
The Christian approach that serves as a foundation to the West is to try to create a body of national laws fit for the nation, as it exists, to the good of the nation and in pursuit of the spirit of the Divine Law to the shifting degree that it does not break the nation in practice. The laws of Moses allowing divorce against the spirit of the Divine Law is a good example. Many of the purity codes are illustrations of the spirit of the Divine Law as apposed to fitting laws for modern nations in modern times as well.
The question of an answer to death as it pertains to the law or Divine Law is the question of how to properly handle treason. The American Founders correctly separated the concept of treason from the Crown because treason is properly a crime against the nation and against the spirit of the Divine Law. The problem is that the sovereign must exist in a second tier of justice that handles the sword of treason but must also be subject to the sword of treason himself. The solution is that a council of bishops must hold the sword of treason over the sovereign, with the Supreme Court being the best that America could manage past and present. The Catholic Church was a previous and more primitive attempt at being such a council of bishops. That Europe and America have succumbed to treason is a testament to the flaws of both. The general concept follows after the role of Samuel and other faithful prophets in judging the sovereigns of Israel although I do not believe he is the perfect model, at least not for present times. No proper council of bishops could be formed in present times to begin with.
The hope of Trump is that he will be able to wield the sword of treason properly, and Musk being given the position to audit the government is the sovereign wielding the sword of treason by another name. Although I share the general pessimism in that I do not believe they would go far enough and will not be allowed to go as far as they might want. A JD Vance seasoned through a stint as vice president has a bit more possibility, although the general pessimism of the big picture remains.
When the laws of a nation break down in the face of treason, national death resolves the sovereign down to the individual, who then appeals to the spirit of the Divine Law in judging treason himself, ideally. In practice, it is often just another morally relativistic power grab.
“Laws exist because the universe is objectively just.”
Please show us some evidence of that claim.
Lincoln was actually in favor of the resettlement of black people outside the USA. Of course, despite rhetoric about negroes settling disputes in their own countries, the slave owners would never have given up the property that made them rich and powerful without a fight.
(Please give us a quickie on Hobbesian vs Lockean sovereignty.
Severian once delivered an excellent summary of the debate, but it is lost somewhere amidst thousands of notes on multiple devices and drives. I wish that Sev would re-post his summary too. Many thanks.)
Okay.
It’s a great question and pretty important. Students (and professors) of introductory political philosophy often make the mistake of conflating Locke and Hobbes and treating them similarly. Both wrote in 17th century England and were influenced by the Civil War. Both are regarded as “social contract” theorists. Both make an argument based on Natural Right. However, upon close examination, they are very different.
Both believe that man existed at one point in a pre-government State of Nature, and that men deliberately consented to form a government to escape the State of Nature. The formation of this government had specific terms and duties; thus, government was formed by “contract.”
The main difference between Locke and Hobbes is their differing views on what the State of Nature is like.
For Locke, the State of Nature is governed by God’s Natural Law. As we know from our founding documents, under Natural Law each man has the God-given rights to life, liberty and property, and no one has the moral authority to infringe on anyone else’s natural rights.
For Locke, this is an inefficient arrangement. People are generally peaceable, but they are authorized to protect and defend their own natural rights, such as their own property, from any and all takers. They might need to become violent over disputes, and there is no common, impartial adjudicator of disputes. So government is formed to provide an impartial judge – to help people maintain the rights they already have by nature.
Locke used “the Indians in the woods of North America” as an example. When I used to teach this, I used to say “Suppose the French fur trappers in 16th century Michigan cut a deal with some Indians in which they would trade four muskets for two canoe loads of beaver pelts. A month later, the Indians come down the river with one boatload of pelts and demand the muskets, and the French refuse. Who resolves this dispute? Was it a misunderstanding, a mistaken translation through sign language, or are the Indians trying to cheat the French? Who decides?”
For Locke, men enter into the contract to create a government specifically to help them preserve and maintain their life, liberty and property. By definition, government is limited to this purpose. As Jefferson wrote “to preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men.” If the government fails to fulfill its contractual obligations, or if the government becomes a threat to their life, liberty, or property, the contract becomes null and void and they have a right to return to the State of Nature and maintain their rights themselves.
Now let’s look at Hobbes’s State of Nature. He describes it as a “war of all against all.” Man does have Natural Rights, first and foremost is the right to survive. He is authorized by Natural Right to do anything he thinks is necessary for survival.
However, no matter what actions he takes, his life is always in perpetual danger. Even the strongest, most powerful man can be poisoned to death or stabbed while he sleeps by the weakest woman. All men are equal — insofar as they are all able to kill you somehow.
Thus, the State of Nature for Hobbes is completely intolerable. Nothing can be guaranteed — not your life, your property, nothing. It’s anarchy. It’s the ‘hood. It’s Mad Max. You can die at any moment for any reason.
For Hobbes, Man uses his reason to arrive at the ONLY solution to this problem: man must consent to create and empower a government so powerful that is a “mortall [sic] god” to “keep men in awe.” The only way to end the war of all against all is when men fear getting killed by the government more than they fear getting killed by each other. Government has 100% total authority to do whatever it thinks is necessary to prevent a return to the State of Nature, because even the worst government is better than that.
Sure, individual men retain the Natural Right to oppose the government, practice any religion they want, think or say or print whatever they want, but the government has the sole discretion to take whatever measures it sees fit if it thinks such speech or religion or opposition presents a threat to civil society. Thus, for Hobbes, all the benefits of civil society exist solely because the government makes it possible — by being willing to kill anyone who seeks to challenge it or kill anyone who deprives another of his life or property.
Needless to say, the U.S. was founded with a Lockean government… but now has a Hobbesian one.
I posted a question but later saw that you answered elsewhere. I’d still appreciate an answer to https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32833#comment-427484.
Well… couple of ways to address that. For Aristotle (and later Aquinas) lack of knowledge of a natural law does not invalidate the law. We can best see this with science and math proofs. The fact that the headhunters of Borneo were ignorant of the Pythagorean Theorem or Ohm’s Law or planetary orbit did not make those laws any less valid. Learning about nature and its laws takes effort and a will to do so. This is why Plato’s Socrates did battle with the mythmakers and the sophists. It is easier to believe an human lie than to learn natural truth.
In part, the Chinese (and Japanese, etc.) have adopted these laws of nature once they learned them (from the white man) which is how they were able to create advanced, industrial societies.
For Aristotle, ignorance and lack of knowledge was a sign of barbarism. For Aquinas it was caused by sin.
Now of course it is a bit more complex when we are trying to apply Natural Laws to political and social behavior because there is such a potentially wide variation. For instance, it is the Law of Nature that males and females marry to reproduce their race and their ethnicity. So all nations have had heterosexual marriage, but it has varied widely as to whether it will be monogamous or polygamous, arranged or voluntary, etc.
This is why the gay marriage thing is so bizarre, it is unprecedented in all of human history until the past 20 years or so in the West. No nation has ever had bastardy and single women whoring as the norm, either. Christian philosophers might argue that the West has been corrupted by Sin. Marxist and postmodern philosophers would argue that economic and technological progress has conquered nature, thus the “natural laws” of the Enlightenment no longer apply, and it is only a matter of distributing the benefits of Postmodernity to everyone to unshackle them from their natural chains.
They already have failed. And we’re living in the ruins they helped create.
Wait wait! If we show them another chart or graph with crime stats and police shootings, they’ll surely see the light this time, right? Right??
This x10,000. The Babylonian Hammurabi is often credited with developing the first written laws around 3900 years ago. Everyone back then lived in what would now be considered extremely ethnocentric societies that were not far removed socially from the all-against-all tribal hunter gatherer societies that were the pattern of all humanity for the 150-200 hundred thousand of years of human sapience that preceded the rise of settled agricultural civilization. How did people handle interpersonal conflict resolution before laws?
Each group developed social customs and standards of behavior that we call ‘mores’. These include social mechanisms for conflict resolution and enforcement of standards.
Mores developed over millennia in synchronicity and harmony with the evolution of their genome. The biggest constraint on said development was and is perpetuation. If an aspect of mores was detrimental then it was discarded or the group would be more likely to cease to be. Humanity had spread out to every viable biome and thus human groups were subjected to widely different natural selection pressure, and hence developed different mores in response.
There is always internal variation with a homogeneous (self-enclosed breeding population) group. When a group began to get large enough to have stability-significant disagreement over what should be in the group’s mores, written laws were a solution. They make mores explicit and systematize and standardize both behavioral standards and mechanisms for resolving disputes that arise from transgression against the standards. Laws are thus an extension of mores, and mores are an extension of genome.
What happens when you have more than one group, each with different mores, sharing a civilizational space? If there is only one set of law governing them all, then they will all be in competition to ensure that the shared law is an extension of their group’s mores, to the unhappiness of the losing groups. There is no one-size-fits-all set of laws that can govern everyone.
The whole point of federalism and confederalism is to allow different groups sharing a larger polity (a federation, for example) to be governed mostly by local (sub-federal or ‘state’ in an American context) laws that are an extension of local mores. Ideally, the only laws (at the federal level) shared by all would be the minimum subset necessary for handling disputes between the constituent members of the federation.
There are two ways in which this model can fail at sustainable successful governance. First, it only works if the individual people within each sub-federal polity or state have reasonably shared mores, which can be expected if they are all part of the same tribe or ethnonational group. Internal cohesion at the state level is not optional. Second, the constituent national members of the federation, each with its own sub-federal polity or state, must have enough overlap in their mores that disputes between them can be handled effectively at the federal level. One cannot make federations out of widely disparate peoples, no matter how much internal cohesion (ethnic homogeneity) they may have individually within their states, because widely disparate people will disagree at the federal level.
The ‘diversity is a strength’ lunacy (multiculturalism) pushed by the corporate left, inclusive of establishment Republicans, is deliberately corrosive to local governance and hence civilizational stability. One should make a distinction between multicultural and multiethnic. Examples of multiethnic societies are Switzerland and the old Czechoslovakia. Switzerland is composed of several different European ethnonational groups, each with its own geographic space and local laws extending from local mores extending from local genome. The different Swiss groups have enough in common with each other to sustainably share a federation. Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, had two primary ethnonational groups, Czechs and Slovaks. While they certainly had a similarity of mores, they decided to peacefully (if not amicably) separate so that each could have its own national polity. They were similar, but not similar enough. They were able to do this because each of these two groups were mostly segregated geographically.
Multiculturalism is geographically mixing up people from different ethnonational groups so that each does not have its own space. When this happens in each state or sub-polity within a polity, it makes resistance to misconduct by the managers of the polity (inevitably some manifestation of rent-seeking oligarchy) much more difficult to organize. Each group is attempting to impose their mores through law at the sub-polity or state level, instead of cooperating in resistance to the oligarchy. Multiculturalism is a weapon of transnational oligarchy. It is the herald of a civilizational pattern that will be a hellscape for everyone but the transnational oligarchy.
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Horace’s Rules for Optimal Federal Stability
1. Each national member of a federation of nation-states must have its own physical space governed by its own people.
Local sovereignty (including local dominance of one’s mores) facilitates investment into local commons. No one voluntarily invests into commons from which their own children will not benefit. Rootless peoples cannot be allowed because no one likes to be powerless, so they will inevitably gravitate to civilizational control nodes that properly belong to someone else. Misrule and resentment follows like rain follows a storm cloud.
2. All federation members must be the same race.
The diversity of having different ethnicities of the same race is the maximum that can be allowed. Any deviation from this rule will requires extra stringent application of rule 1. “Mores” are standards of behavior and traditions for sublegal conflict resolution of their violation. The mores of ethnicities within the same race are usually more similar, and hence a minority of a given ethnicity (ex: German) is more capable of living amicably within a polity controlled by a majority (ex: Hungarian) than more dissimilar peoples (ex: Eritreans and Swedes).
3. All federation members must be the same religion.
The diversity of having different denominations of the same religion is the maximum that can be allowed. Religion is a systematization of mores. Denmark can be an example. Most Danes are affiliated with the Church of Denmark. This should not be taken as a sign of their excessive religious zeal, but rather as a marker for the homogeneity of their mores which is holding them in better stead for resistance to lunatic foreign culture than multiculturalated Americans.
The Henry George essay was exquisite.
Thank you for posting it.
Great essay. This argument effectively encapsulates the thinking of the Founders. They were, at heart, English conservatives. They sought to apply the English Bill of Rights of 1689 to the Colonies — no taxation without representation, right to bear arms, free press, trial by jury, right to petition the government, religious toleration.
Because the Crown suspended the Bill of Rights in Boston and imposed martial law in 1775, the colonists resorted to extra-legal means to defend the law.
The problem with doing this today, of course, is that the “enemy” is not a discrete, identifiable group sent across an ocean wearing red uniforms. Rather, the enemy has been ostensibly “elected” by the “will of the people” and exists in every single institution of power.
Beyond that, the welfare state did not exist in 1775 and the Crown was not trying to bribe the colonists into compliance with Social Security, government pensions, disability and VA benefits. The was no mass entertainment in 1775 to distract the people, and there was no mass electronic government surveillance.
A lot of “conservatives” like to role-play and fantasize about George Washington and the colonial militias, but as the J6 Boomers found out even something as ridiculous as painting your face and wearing buffalo horns while the cops politely lead you into the Senate chamber will land you in prison PDQ, while your unarmed female co-protestors get fatally shot in the face on live TV by a negro who is not only not indicted, but hailed as a hero.
If it is possible at all to put a halt to this shitshow — and it may not be — it is either going to be from an unanticipated exogenous force, or from someone gaining control over the institutions in a perfectly legal fashion, as Uncle A did in 1933… not from crossing the Delaware and shooting the Hessians.
It’s going to take a crisis here for this to happen. People complain about the moustache man but Macron, Scholz, the a-hole in Spain and Starmer too are doing the same thing. They rig the Parliamentary system then rule by decree while importing savages to crush any resistance. As Erdogan famously said: “democracy is a bus we ride to our intended destination”. An entire generation of Western Elites has adopted this philosophy.
Jefferson was no conservative and freedom of press and religious tolerance are radical ideas.
people on “this side” want to keep their favorite liberal ideas too.
Dan Bongino is the epitome of insane contradictions embodied in modern Conservatism. He will proudly come to your house and beat you to death if you refuse to join him in his opposition to violence. And he espouses this dogma with the visceral religiosity of a Crusader intent on slaughtering all non-believers. And he is utterly oblivious to this hypocrisy. He considers himself to be a good and moral man who loves Jesus, and is therefore righteous. And he will not wake up until he and his family are third in line at the gas chamber door and his daughter looks at him as says “daddy, what’s that smell?”
Is Bongino worth mentioning? I assume he’s a showman/grifter making his living off of telling a certain segment of the populace what they wish to hear. But a thought/movement leader? What’s the difference say between him and Shapiro?
He has the most popular podcast in the US currently and reaches millions on his radio show (is effectively the new Rush Limbaugh). A large component of his audience is based, staunchly anti-woke, and represent traditional American citizenry. And he is the poster child for vote-harder. Most importantly, he keeps alive the illusion that Trump will be the messiah that saves us from Deep State damnation. Under his influence, normie cracks open another beer and shouts “damn straight” while remaining ensconced on the couch.
Hence my statement as to difference between him and Shapiro. None that I see. He tells his audience what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. He may be the new “Rush”, but he didn’t inherent Rush’s show spot/stations, nor is his audience larger wrt the numbers I’ve seen 9M+ for Travis and Sexton to Bongino’s 8M+. However both seem not to match Rushes oft touted 20M—if that was ever true.
I’d say the difference is Bongino is sincere but mistaken, Shapiro is disingenuous and a foreign agent.
200 wpm
I caught that one…. 🙂
The difference is he’s not…
Bongino’s the American Tokyo Rose. Sometimes ya just gotta vent.
_______
(The real American Tokyo Rose used her cover to smuggle medicines to our POWs over there, probably the same ones Truman incinerated. She was a true hero volunteering for the most dangerous duty, and never got the credit.)
The liberal order has the media on its side, the only weapon that matters. Rather than invest money in conservative think tanks and lost causes, the opponents to liberalism would be wise to fund their own media.
The wonderful thing about the media is that you can make money off it. There is a market for non-liberal movies, TV, and music that’ll pay to sustain the cycle of innovation. As the market sustains you, you can interweave your own political messages into your media offerings, the way Disney does with multicult films such as Mulan.
Anti-liberalism should find itself a city to use as a base for writers, stars, and producers, as L.A. is for mainstream film and Nashville is for country music. Location is critical. You need a critical mass of people working together to achieve anything worthwhile.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that the ideals of liberalism are repellent to a great number of men, some of whom would be useful in propagating a new media empire. Like all empires, it requires an emperor, a guy who is smarter than usual, more ruthless than usual, to run the show. Once you find him, all other pieces click into place.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Endlessly shilling oneself at others’ sites reeks of something odious.
Yep, poor form, which is why I try never to read postings from such individuals, nor visit their site.
Dang, because it’s a great observation, if only it didn’t have the shilling attached to it.
I do note that Identity Dixie has a short series on a Southern filmmaker.
As someone once said, imagine if our media was based in Alabama instead of New York.
Everyone can “pimp” his blog, and some do. The appropriate way is to simply associate it with your name as Greg has done. Click on Greg’s highlighted name and you open his blog. Several of our commentators have done this with no complaints. Even Z-man does this. That’s how I first came over here. I saw and read Z-man’s commentary and thought/hoped he posted more elsewhere—he was that good!
To post your blog link at the end of each and every comment posted is poor form and narcissistic in the main. If what you comment is so important, astute, and influential, you can be sure folks will investigate who you are and where you post regularly and seek to join you. If not, you are simply seen as attempting to steal an audience you could not develop upon your own.
If you live somewhere long enough, it ceases to be a residence, business opportunity, or laboratory, and becomes your home. You develop a culture and a shared history. Law and economy come to reflect tradition. “How we agree to coexist” becomes “How we do things.” The social contract becomes a bond.
American Conservatism, which claims to be classical liberalism, can’t comprehend these things. It hasn’t failed, so much as it’s no longer useful. Many of us have outgrown it.
FWIW
Maybe I’m reaching a bit, maybe not, but the Enlightenment concerned itself with the state of nature, natural law, etc. It occurs to me that I’m talking about a state of culture.
I also talk about living closer to nature, being a civ skeptic, etc. Do I contradict myself, or is culture the state between nature and civilization? That’s probably it. I think nature is a lack of culture, and civ is corrosive to it. Nasty, brutish, and short, vs. deracinated and transactional. Small is beautiful.
edit: further, is basing civilization on natural principles an error? Can it possibly succeed? Does it create the lawful savage?
One more thing, which might be a stupid question. Was the Enlightenment, at least partially, the result of Europeans arriving in the New World, especially the wilderness of North America?
I’ve absorbed the critique of the Enlightenment, found much if it valid. Listening to EMJ, lately he’s been talking about American identity, its relationship to the wilderness and satanism (at least in his opinion, I gather). Yet the problem of building a society in this distant wilderness, while not completely from scratch, was a real one. Europe looked on interestedly. It had to have a big effect.
The Enlightenment occuring as our navies opened up the seas, and the world. New ideas for new conditions- rather than defending a homeland, we had many new somewheres to go.
There is an interesting trail to pursue.
Back in the frontier days, citizens sometimes took the law into their own hands – usually rightfully so – when the so called “law” failed in its basic duties. Today, our judicial system is failing everywhere all around us. Until “conservatives” pull their heads out of their collective asses and start playing big boy hardball, the west will continue down the path to perdition.
Vigilantism should fix it all up.
Vigilantism worked in my mother’s and my grandmother’s day, so it has proven itself.
If Trump somehow manages to prevail in November, that will be the easy part. The hard part comes after because all you have to do is listen to the other side and what they’re accusing us of: violence. insurrection. terrorism. etc. We already know what’s coming.
And a lot of it will be led by government bureaucrats and elected politicans, which means there is one and only one answer available to Trump: a purge. Maybe not Stalinesque purges, but an American-style purge. Firings, mainly. Revocation of security clearances is another. There’s some debate over whether the President can impound funding authorized by Congress, but it certainly is a power that has been claimed in the past.
The pardon power is another one he’ll have to use because when the violence starts, he’s going to have to reach into the ranks of his allies and forgive them their sins, so to speak.
And he’s going to have to go after judges in the court system, too. Those judges in NY need to swing, as does that judge in DC. Figuratively, of course. Imagine the IRS showing up at the home of the daughter of that NY judge, to inquire about the money she raised on her father’s courtroom antics.
A purge is what I recommended in early 2017 when the Government Party Civil War became a hot war to overthrow Trump. His inauguration speech then should have been about the pink-slips being delivered to 100,000 bureaucrats at 4pm that day. Instead, he tried to placate them, figuring they’d fall in line. They are NEVER going to fall in line.
So you fire them. And, thanks to the SCOTUS “unitary executive” ruling, Trump can pretty much do what he wants to Executive Branch employees.
Forget it. The recent announcements that counting the vote will take weeks are the regime’s assurance that he is not going to be declared the winner.
Also, the consistent claim of “a close election” is a part of this. What happens will depend on the margin, along with what Z describes periodically as emergent behavior, i.e., lone wolfing it. The wildest part is that literally no one will accept and/or believe the results. Pre-announcing it will take weeks to attain a result is not an act of confidence.
“Pre-announcing it will take weeks to attain a result is not an act of confidence.”
Ho hum…. In this State the majority of voting is mail in. The last election showed an average time to “verify” a signature of a mail in ballot of a bit more than 1 second by a poorly trained “volunteer” in the 2020 elections. Professional hand writing experts have decried the system of verification as ridiculous. When they were given a sampling of several thousand ballots, they rejected them at something like 12x’s the rate of the volunteers.
Recently, the head election official for the State announce that over 200k registrations had no proof of citizenship as per State law, therefore they all would be given the “long” ballot of both State and Federal offices and propositions.
And perhaps the worst, the wife still intents to vote claiming it’s her civic duty! ;-(
Like I said, winning is the easy part.
Well, the “count” must be ready by Dec 16 this year. So they have 6 weeks to complete ballot counts from each State.
If Trump were to win — (and he won’t) — he’d have to actually be the “fascist” they have been accusing him of being to enact any truly substantive changes.
And he’s not.
There lies my thinking. Does Trump have the cahonies to be America’s Pinochet? He did not in the past as he showed himself to be a believer in the system and followed the “rules”. In short, as I’ve said many times before, and Z-man has restated today: “he let his virtues be used against him”!
Pinochet tore up the book and settled the situation in a matter of months, then stepped down to (at that time) a restored conservative government of laws. On the other hand, my cursory following of Chilean affairs since would seem to indicate they have fallen into the same old habits as before.
So it looks like a Pinochet is not what we truly desire, as to return to the old America of our birth is not the solution for our future in a multi-culture, multi-racial society.
Agree with all you’ve said, except for Pinochet not being what was needed. What was needed, was a way to prime and perpetuate Pinochets, as Guardians of the nation. How do we prime protegés?
Pinochet can be seen as an ‘our bastard’ of the Chicago Boys, I get that, but half a loaf is better than somebody stealing the whole loaf.
This^^^ XMan. Even if he wins, he won’t do any of those things. Hillary would be rotting in jail right now if he were a man of his word. Instead we will get more platinum plans for negros and more juice power.
If we get somebody who’s halfway there, like Musk, like Trump, we stand a much better chance of taking them further. Remember, Trump is these kids’s Reagan.
Well, I’d love to hear Musk’s views if he gets an inside look at DC. However, he may be disappointed by the political realities of DC. He’s a dreamer, a builder of great corporations to turn his ideas into reality, but always he was in control as the CEO. At best, in DC, he’s an advisor to the President and at worst a beggar among many petty political dictators (Congress) beholding to special interests and few others.
Here’s a quick blast for the past (ChatGPT) of commissions formed to advise on government reform and efficiencies. I remember most, but fail to perceive their effect:
1. The Grace Commission (1982-1984)
• Formed by: President Ronald Reagan
• Mission: Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, it was tasked with identifying waste and inefficiencies in the federal government.
• Outcome: The commission produced over 2,000 recommendations, including reducing bureaucratic red tape and cutting government waste. Although many of the recommendations were not fully implemented, the commission identified over $400 billion in potential savings over three years.
2. The National Performance Review (1993)
• Formed by: President Bill Clinton
• Mission: Led by Vice President Al Gore, this initiative aimed to streamline federal operations, improve government performance, and reduce waste.
• Outcome: The review proposed over 1,200 recommendations, and while some were implemented (including reductions in the federal workforce), the overall savings were debated. It led to an increased emphasis on technology use and performance measurement in government.
3. The Simpson-Bowles Commission (2010)
• Formed by: President Barack Obama
• Mission: Formally known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, it was tasked with identifying ways to reduce the federal deficit and control spending.
• Outcome: The commission’s 2010 report proposed a combination of spending cuts, tax reforms, and entitlement reforms to reduce the national debt by $4 trillion over the next decade. While the full plan was never adopted, it influenced subsequent budget negotiations and deficit reduction efforts.
4. The Defense Business Board (2001-present)
• Formed by: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Mission: Created to provide independent advice on business practices in the Department of Defense, aimed at improving efficiencies and reducing waste in military operations.
• Outcome: The board has made numerous recommendations, including reducing the size of the Pentagon’s civilian workforce, improving contract management, and consolidating services. Some of these recommendations have been partially implemented.
5. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) Efficiency Reviews (Ongoing)
• Not a single commission, but the GAO has continuously produced reports identifying opportunities for cost reductions and improving efficiencies across various federal programs. The GAO’s annual High-Risk List highlights areas vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.
6. The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (2016-2017)
• Formed by: Congress
• Mission: To explore how to improve the government’s use of data and evidence to make more informed policy decisions.
• Outcome: The commission’s 2017 report recommended ways to better use data to evaluate government programs’ effectiveness and improve efficiency. This led to the passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act in 2018, which improved data sharing and analysis across agencies.
These commissions reflect ongoing efforts by U.S. administrations to streamline government, but implementation of their findings often depends on political will and the complexity of reforms.
“If Trump were to win — (and he won’t) — he’d have to actually be the ‘fascist’ they have been accusing him of being”
In other words, he’d have to behave like an AINO Leftist.
Yes, exactly. He’d have to have MAGA types destroying statues of MLK instead of Antifa and BLM tearing down Confederate monuments. He’d have to have every university professor or journalist who supported Hillary fired. He’d have to implement affirmative action in top corporate, university and government jobs for white MAGA dudes while queers and negroes work at Walmart for minimum wage.
He would have had Hillary and Comey under arrest on 100 felony counts by Feb. 1, 2017 instead of just talking shit and doing nothing. Instead he was the one who got arrested.
There is no solution within the system. Trump is part of the system. It’s mind boggling to me that people still don’t understand this.
I think there’s a Diocletian solution possible. But as Zman writes, it’ll be outside the law or in one of those penumbras and emanations the judges like to opine about.
I wonder what an AINO tetrarchy would look like.
Karine Jean-Pierre, Kanye West, Chuck Schumer, and the Bud Light Tranny.
Putin’s purported retirement palace on the Black Sea has distinct vibe of Diocletian’s Palace at Split.
Which is fair enough. Master P and Emperor D’s reforms and achievements kind of rhyme.
To turn the USA around, would have to pull off something like Chiang Kai Shek’s Shanghai Massacre of 1927 and then *not* go and @#$% it all up and lose through corruption and lack of focus.
I wonder if Putin likes cabbage…
I think that many already do understand this. And some also see that Trump is not the messiah; rather, he is like Moses — called to lead a fractious and flawed (group of the) people toward the promised land. However, he can not, and will not, lead the people across the river. He can only go up to it …
Note: Across the river is someone else’s job — the task for a different sort of human.
Excellent, excellent- not for nothing was that political lesson included. Up to the river, but not over it.
Now, Christian, who came next after Moses?
Who crossed the river, and beyond?
You would know, I do not- teach us.
Get the horn section practicing. There’s going to more than one Ai this time around.
Stonewall Jackson. Oh wait…
Trump’s recent trip to wailing wall with that vile rabbi and little Benji tells me nothing important will change. Still, imagine Harris and what they have in store for us. Only if one takes a real long view is there any hope to cling to.
Trump would have to go General Pinochet on them. I doubt he has that in him. He believes in the rule of law to his detriment. If he did find the strength he most likely would not have enough support from the foot soldiers in the system.
Oh, I think we could be talked into it pretty quickly.
He was openly talking about putting in place what would effectively be Commissars to police institutions against signs of wokeness and DEI at a recent rally.
Trump is playing that right. It keeps his base close going into the election. Once elected, fully expect him to bring hostilities to a close as he did the first time around. None of this would have happened if he was in Term 2. I think that’s why they did it last Fall…they knew they were running out of time.
I expect something similar with Taiwan to erupt before January 2025. The government has been very “leaky” about war with China by 2027.
They’ve jumped the gun. They’ve unveiled a superweapon.
Helene/Milton are weather war weapons, they’ve been working on this since 1947.
What Helene was was Hiroshima. I see Milton as Nagasaki. Most of the Florida landmass might get wiped today if it doesn’t stay below Cat 3.
I hope our recent Appalachian is okay…maybe I can end up working with the Zman, Sancho, and Urembe in the Company slave mines!
If they are capable of creating/directing a hurricane/typhoon, then what’s the hold up on hitting China with one?
I think I have an answer (never mind whether or not that’s possible). They don’t want to destroy China. They need China. They just want to bring China to heel and make it a cog in the globohomo machine, and they are intent on engineering a war that they believe can produce that result without too much damage to the Chinese manufacturing base which globohomo needs.
It’s been part of it ever since it was rebuilt by American investment in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
Trump is not going to do any of that, and I fail to think of something Trump has done that’d make you even hope so.
Yep. I do enjoy Trump in the sense that he causes people I hate so much pain and anguish, but that’s about all that he’s good for. Even after everything, he still wants the approval of the system and the ruling elite. He’s a good man but from another time.
Vance is a different character. He’s not one of us, but he’s also not comfortable with the ruling elite. Him and people like King Cobra are the rising elites who want more than to be well-paid help for the true rulers. They recite all of the conservative catch phrases, but I suspect that this is for show. They’d toss the rules if they thought that they’d get away with it.
Again, they wouldn’t do it to help whites, but it is interesting to see a new set of elites who will challenge the current kosher ruling elite.
The emerging alternative elite indeed is a very positive sign. There very well might be some overlaps with them in goals and aims, which is far better than what currently is available.
Yep. They may not be on our team, but I also don’t think that they hate us to their core and want to destroy us. The new boss isn’t always the same as the old boss.
And anything that disrupts the system is probably good for us.
Vance is not one of us, but he’s also not comfortable with the ruling elite.
“Not comfortable with the ruling elite”, is not exactly a good trade for “not one of us.”
Life’s a tradeoff. I want time to fight another day.
The country’s already finished, what exactly are you waiting for?
Better than a Jew who hates us and believes that he’s just one recession away from his khaki-wearing neighbor putting him into a cattle car. (Yes, they truly believe that story is true.)
If they’d toss the rules, but not to help whites, to what end would they toss the rules? Not an unfriendly question, just genuinely curious.
Someone once said, “I don’t want a seat at the table. I want to turnover the table.”
They want to be among the real rulers and the current rulers won’t let them join the club, but we’re run by an ethnic mob. Vance and Cobra aren’t (((Sicilian))) so they can never be made men. The only response is to start your own mob and muscle your way in.
A white mob would be hell on wheels…
Personnel is policy. I think he’s got the right people targeted for key cabinet positions. Many of them fought the impeachment wars in 2018-20, so there’s a revenge element at play here.
Getting shot at changed everything. Democrats literally just tried to murder him, and killed a supporter and wounded others in the process.
Don’t underestimate the revenge aspect of this.
I wish I could agree. He’s out there talking even more about abortion, endless war for Israel, wiping Iran off the map, stapling green cards to diplomas, locking up “antisemites”, so on and so on. We already know prominent tiny hats are going to be involved in hiring. He was just out there literally at Schneerson’s grave with Ben Shapiro. A more black pilling sentence I could not imagine.
Maybe he’s lying, maybe he is secretly based, maybe he will kick all these people to the curb if he wins. I wish that was the case, but at some point I have to take the man at his word.
To get close enough to kill the king, first you must gain his trust.
Oh good, more 4D chess to keep stringing along the rubes.
Again, I wish that was the case, but I can only hear stuff like “make Israel great again” (he literally said that) and “I will remove the Jew haters” so many times before I have to believe him.
I think he’s got the right people targeted for key cabinet positions.
His VP candidate is a bona fide neolib meat puppet.
The “impeachment wars” is theater to make you believe Trump is a legitimate dissident. If they wanted him off the board, he’d be in the cell next to Jeffrey Epstein by now.
Trump is an old man whose views are ossified. His instinctual civnattery will sublimate the revenge impulse, I’m afraid. But it’s all otiose because the closest he will get to the Anti-White House is in a passing Limo.
Jared Kushner controls his personnel, so I guess that means Kushner controls the policy? And that’s a good thing?
I have suspected for more than a year that the plan is to allow Trump to “win” and then plunge the country into chaos as a pretext to set aside the rule of law in order to “save democracy from Trump”.
That’s a fallback loser plan. Trump will not be encumbered this time around by a sense of fair play. Everyone expects that to happen. The problem the other side has is they can burn their own cities down as much as they want. Nobody on our side really cares.
Trump can pardon anybody who shoots a looter for example.
A lot of the coming war is going to be over the dismantling of the IC/FBI/DOJ’s power to harm us.
“Trump can pardon anybody who shoots a looter for example.”
No Trump can’t. He has pardon powers for Fed crimes. State crime pardons come under *their* Governor and some States have limited that as well through pardon commissions. Since most crimes committed come under State law, the Fed’s won’t even get a crack at trying them.
No. The President’s clemency power is conferred by Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States, which provides: “The President . . . shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Thus, the President’s authority to grant clemency is limited to federal offenses and offenses prosecuted by the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia in the name of the United States in the D.C. Superior Court. An offense that violates a state law is not an offense against the United States. A person who wishes to seek a pardon or a commutation of sentence for a state offense should contact the authorities of the state in which the conviction occurred. Such state authorities are typically the Governor or a state board of pardons and/or paroles, if the state government has created such a board.
The surer path to utter hegemony is to continue fortifying elections, jailing dissidents, censoring speech and canceling anybody who’s not a sheep. No reason to play the wild card of allowing Trump back into the Anti-White House.
“So you fire them. And, thanks to the SCOTUS “unitary executive” ruling, Trump can pretty much do what he wants to Executive Branch employees.”
Please elaborate on how this will work? 85-90% of the Federal workforce is under civil service protection. In short, they can’t be fired for political reasons or without cause. I don’t think such firing can withstand court injunction, nor would Trump be immune from prosecution for attempting such in defiance of Court injunction.
Trump can redesignate them as at-will employment, and then fire them. I forget the exact term for it, but he has executive authority to do this and did it in his last term. It was called “Schedule F”.
From a strategy point of view, I would stress the importance of cutting the heads off the hydra so the most senior people down 3 levels administration-wide. Death by 1,000 cuts.
The issue is the scale of it. He did not go far enough last time around. Security clearances are another very useful weapon. The Courts and Congress do not grant/refuse security clearances…that’s an Executive Branch function. That’s a big weapon because many jobs require a clearance as a condition of employment. No clearance, no job.
He can also control media access to Executive Branch facilities. Most of what we would call the “mainstream” or “state run” media is just an enemy force operating behind the walls of the fort. He can block access and declare it a National Security matter due to leaks. SCOTUS and the courts have gone crazy giving the Exec. Branch wide latitude to use national security as a reason to hide information. Use that weapon. Nobody comes into the WH Press Room from the major media outlets. Buh bye.
On the military side, SecDef controls military promotions, and this can be used effectively against O6 and GO/FO ranks as well as E8/9’s to clean house. Those nominations have to be sent to Congress for approval. No nomination, no promotion, early retirements galore.
Something Trump will need to do is identify what are called “burrowed in” SES and GS or NH government employees. These are political appointees who get hired into full time government jobs. It wouldn’t be terribly hard to find out who those people are and target them for removal. Those burrowed or tunneled in employees are part of the #resistance 5th column that operates inside the bureaucracy.
Search and destroy.
It can be done and it can be done without breaking any laws or even bending them. Just use that Unitary Executive power like a meat cleaver.
You’re just making stuff up. Nothing less than a grade B movie script. Trump is not allowed to break the law under any SCOTUS decision. Doubtful any employees under him would enforce such. What will happen is an immediate Court injunction followed by an impeachment—which will be the end of him.
Um, he did it before…all that stuff is easily accomplished within existing law.
Such as I imagine—which may not be as you imagine—is against Federal law passed by Congress a long time ago. Political patronage was at that time what they wanted to minimize. If Trump could simply reclassify all folks to be employed “at will” then the Federal act passed would mean little. I doubt it’s that easy.
But yes, there is much that can be attempted short of “your fired”. The problem will always be as we’ve seen recently illustrated—the next President rescinds the Executive orders of the previous President immediately upon entering office and we are back at square 1.
How it works is that he does it, he fires these people, and then dares anyone to stop him.
It’s how Democrats work, after all. It’s why we have DACA even after Congress rejected this exact proposal, for example. This is the way the system really works, and again, it’s only conservacucks tethered to things like rules and the law. Now, will be do that? I have serious doubts, but the point is, he can do whatever he wants.
I like that post. However, while Biden and Kamaltoe can do as they please, I’m not sure Trump would enjoy the same latitude.
Nope. He will wind up on the losing end of SCOTUS and be impeached—and convicted. Simple as that.
Well, now you’re thinking like a conservative. No, part of doing the job is making sure that doesn’t happen, and that is the nature of this power. There are hundreds of things that Brandon could have plausibly been impeached for, under different circumstances. For example, he is clearly violating law by arming the genocidal Israeli regime while it commits war crimes. But he’s not been impeached because the power structure supports that regime. It also doesn’t realltyt matter if you are on the losing end of SCOTUS, either. Brandon was on the losing end of SCOTUS when it came to debt forgiveness, what did he do? He kept forgiving debts. He’s not being impeached. So, really, whatever the law or SCOTUS says does not really matter. What matters is what you can get away with and how you can get to the point where you can get away with it.
Touche!
Even if he manages to get past the cheating, Trump has been absorbed by Conservative, Inc. The whole GOP establishment is behind him and has hooks in his team. He’s going to be surrounded by people who will tell him no on every important thing we support. They will work with his worst instincts on things like Israel.
They will fight him tooth and nail on deportations. Firing all the bureaucrats is pure fantasy. Reagan couldn’t even get rid of the then new Department of Education. The courts will fight him on every issue. Remember the reporter Trump tried to get rid of in the White House Press Corps? All this and more and he only has 4 years to do anything.
I don’t know if you’re paying attention to who he is surrounding himself with, but the neocons are persona non grata anywhere in his sphere. None of the usual backstabbing traitors (the Chris Christie types) are involved at all. And a lot of Conservative Inc. (e.g. Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, etc.) have shuffled back over to the other side where they belong. Others, like Mark Levin, got whipped into line in 2017-18 as their viewership/listenership cratered. Yeah, they’ll be out there, but they’re on the outside looking in.
There is a political realignment nobody is talking about, but it is CLEARLY happening. Nobody talks about it because it upsets the post Civil War, post WW2, post Cold War political order. What’s emerging is something I described in 2015. Basically globalist/corporatist/governmentalist on one side and nationalist/individualist on the other.
That’s why you see RFK in the Trump camp. He’s basically an anti-corporatist from a BigAg / BigPharma point of view. The other side is firmly in the Permanent War Party camp and think about all the people on the other side this alienates. It was years ago when I said Tulsi Gabbard would wind up in the MAGA tent.
Vote rigging may decide the 2024 election, but that job is made much more difficult because neither side of the old political order can depend on their core voters at this point. The new political order is emergent. This “election” is an attempt to maintain the status quo system, but that system truly is crumbling. How can we tell?
The increasing desperation and severity of their actions to try and maintain it. Up to and including jailing their political opponents and trying to assassinate them.
I didn’t say anything about the neocons. I also didn’t say anything about the voters and the realignment of Republican voters. The voters don’t matter anyway. The GOP has been ignoring the voters for decades.
JD Vance said Oct 7 was an attack on America. It most certainly was not. We don’t need to guess how Trump is going to handle Israel. Trump’s instincts are TERRIBLE when it comes to Israel. A large number of the displaced people are going to end up here.
RFK says anyone who denies climate change should be sent to prison. He’s a degenerate and a nut who has minor agreements with us.
They are going to block the good things Trump wants to do using the courts and moles in his adminstration. This is going to happen. They already have the lawsuits drawn up and ready to file. Trump is not the guy who is going to say “Fine, you have your court order, I have the military. Let the deportations continue!”
I am going to vote for Trump. Trump is the best we have and better than any Republican or Democrat likely to run. If nothing else, he can buy us time. But I have no higher expectations than that.
“A large number of the displaced people are going to end up here.”
For certain. A quick ChatGPT query estimates as many as 300k Israelis hold an American passport. They’ll come back and bring their family members. I’d say, we can expect perhaps a million immediate return. Then of course, we will start accepting refugees as they will have a better claim at that status than the last 10M we took in since Biden.
Don’t convert your spare bedroom into that office yet….
Off Topic:
Last December, the Z Man posted a link to a publisher in Texas called Falling Marbles Press. Some of their books are pretty good.
For example: this recent release about a kid who joins the Navy over 50 years ago is a reminder of how things used to be and good for some laughs.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBZ9TZD4
Z-man’s essay reminds me of this quote from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons:
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
I never liked the idea in these lines, although they do summarize present-day conservatism. Why does cutting doan the laws better enable one to “get after” a supernatural being in the first place? And why is one protected form a supernatural being by men’s laws? But if the adversary is merely human, then I suppose we have to say that we need not be bound by the laws any more than our adversaries are bound by them. We can reconsider the laws once we’ve won.
I believe the title of the Lee Marvin, Jimmy Steward, and John Wayne film was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. And the ending is definitely ambiguous, Jimmy Stewart not only gets the girl, he is wildly successful back east before deciding to return to Shinbone. John Wayne, the man who really shot Liberty Valence, dies more or less a broken man. And it’s not clear to me that either Stewart or Wayne was “outside the law” in confronting a violent felon who had every intention of killing Stewart.
Arguing about abstractions in lieu of arguing about facts is an old conservative tactic. They will happily debate how many trees it is proper to cut down in pursuit of the devil while the flesh and blood manifestation of evil runs wild in their ranks.
Fixed the typo. As far as how to interpret the movie, my view is that it is intended to be an unresolvable paradox. This comes up often in classic Westerns. On the one hand you have the absolute freedom of the pre-society frontier. On the other hand you have the lose of freedom in society, but the prosperity that comes with it. The men who sat in theaters watching that film when it was released understood that Valance was not without virtue and Stoddard was not without fault.
I tend to view conservatives less as Stoddard and more as the monks at Lindisfarne as the Vikings sacked the monastery and killed them indiscriminately. Conservatives can’t accept that other peoples might not accept their religion (the Enlightenment and natural rights) and don’t fear its wrath.
Let them get cut to pieces. Every pious normie conservative who gets his life destroyed or sent to prison because of his childish belief in the Constitution shakes hundreds from the same stupor.
“The men who sat in theaters watching that film when it was released understood that Valance was not without virtue and Stoddard was not without fault.”
And thus we have the beginnings of the now ubiquitous “antihero” portrayal in media, Doniphon (John Wayne).
Valance was nothing more than an animal in that film. Very little different from a hoodlum in deepest, darkest Baltimore. He had no redeeming characteristics–except the ability to use force–and was not portrayed as having any. Stoddard was principled and naive, the very spit and image of an American conservative. However, he was portrayed sympathetically. Doniphon was the dissident in the pack. He viewed Valance as a snake who would ultimately have to be killed, but also had contempt for Stoddard’s foolish adherence to principle in the face of elements who would destroy it. Doniphon was portrayed as the film’s true hero, albeit one who was rather coarse and slightly disturbing.
And ultimately–perhaps ironically–it was semi-barbarous men like Doniphon who made civilization in the Old West possible. Unfortunately, the Stoddards of the US forgot the lessons of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the shades of Valance are gathering at the gates.
A more interesting plot might have had Stoddard surreptitiously poisoning Liberty Valance; he worked in a restaurant after all. With Liberty gone, Stoddard’s law practice thrives and he achieves success back east, but he lives with the knowledge that he killed Liberty Valence. Maybe the John Wayne character could have been portrayed as knowing about the killing, but choosing not to denounce Stoddard because he realized Valence had to be disposed of. And he still loses the girl!
The Man Who Poisoned Liberty Valance–hm, I dunno. Would have brought Stoddard down a peg, sneakily killing Valance rather than confronting his own death by facing Valance with an iron in the street. And Doniphon would then be a peripheral rather than a central figure in the plot, having done nothing of great consequence. Doubt the Duke would have liked that.
At any rate, the film’s practically perfect as is. Not sure a better western has been made.
We don’t need (imaginary) movie hero’s like Doniphon to illustrate your well made point. I maintain we have to look no farther than the men whom we sent into battle in WWII. The tales of what they did when in contact with the enemy are tremendously impactful to read. They indeed left their “virtues” at the door, did whatever was necessary, and returned home.
That they returned and rejoined society as sons, husbands, fathers—and yes, CivNats, is impressive. They picked up those temporarily discarded virtues and conducted themselves in an impressive manner as expected in a decent and well ordered society of that time.
If you are strong enough to cut down the laws, then you are the law and you can do whatever you want to do to achieve your goals.
“All power comes from the barrel of a gun.”–some Oriental.
Z-man’s essay reminds me of this quote from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons:
You beat me to it, but I must say I’m with Thomas More on the matter.
At least for now: as long as we’re gaining adherents, mob rule is not in our interest.
I disagree with the assertion that the only alternative to obsessive adherence to the current rules is mob rule. This is a false dichotomy conservatives have been fond of using since they discovered Thomas More. These polar opposites are of no use because no one lives at either end, not even the radicals. We always exist in the realm of exception. What matters, the only thing that matters, is who shall overcome whom in deciding the exceptions. It is either those who value the spirit of the law or those who reject it. The letter of the law is never and can never be an issue in the fight with radicalism.
Yep. Conservative in Congress or in various groups have plenty of tools to fight back that doesn’t involve anything radical. They could simply employ the same lawfare as the Left. There are plenty of conservative lawyers and even a few judges out there.
But, of course, they don’t. Even Trump won’t do anything like that if he was elected. However, something tells me that Vance – if Trump would let him – would. I think that this rising elite – Vance and King Cobra come to mind – are far more comfortable playing the same game as the Left. Just a guess.
“Vance and King Cobra come to mind – are far more comfortable playing the same game as the Left. Just a guess.”
Perhaps more of a “hope” than a guess. My hope as well.
Yes this is at the heart of Carl Schmitt’s argument – his critique of liberalism in this regard applies equally to conservatism in its present warped form. “Liberalism” without any opposition is tantamount to mob rule anyway, as we have seen from St George and covid forward.
But Robert Bolt used dichotomic imagery to suggest that you can no more be a little radical than a little pregnant.
And here’s the thing: once we win, we’re going to need new laws, and we’d be pressed to come up with something better than what America already has.
The problem is institutional capture, not the institutions.
Sure, but how did the institutions become “captured”. They once were a bastion of support for the “old” America. For example, Harvard had a Jewish admissions quota.
Simply cleaning house won’t stop the problem of rat infestation, you’ve got to plug the holes or they’ll return.
Cleaning house – recapturing the system from below would go a long way and it hasn’t even been tried.
Harvard is increasingly rendering itself irrelevant exactly because of racial quotas – the important battle is in primary schools. A group of five-six determined parents ready to dedicate three months work, could coup most local school boards in America.
And the law is like a net. You can’t make one without holes.
America has a plethora of bad laws, and neither the constitution nor the institutions was any impediment to them – because they rest on false assumptions about man and government.
The good thing about America is that bad laws can be repealed without chopping people’s heads off.
Less than a century after America’s laws really came into effect, 600,000 people fatally had bullets put in them. That’s not decapitation, but close. How many have been murdered by blacks since? I imagine the number is far, far higher.
But Washington is William Roper in the play, he’s the guy that cut down the law to get to the devil.
This I tend to doubt—well, not the head chopping aspect, but the repeal of laws. As long as those who can fog a mirror are allowed to vote simply because they exist, then we are screwed. Even if we succeed at repeal, those who put those laws into effect will still remain to “fight another day” as they say.
Because I reside in battle ground AZ, my views are a bit jaded by the current election process. The Dem/Leftists are hell bent to turn the State hard Blue. There are almost no commercials to be seen, *but* political ad’s—radio, TV, internet—does not matter.
OK, so what’s the problem? Well, simply that these ad’s are completely and utterly false in their affirmations—both Rep and Dem. Now, I’m a practical guy and assume the people putting money into those ad’s know what they are paying for and their return on the dollar for such blithering idiocy!
Now if people are swayed through such nonsense, then really democracy has no future with such people making up the deciding portion of the populace. In short, we are too stupid to vote on such matters of self governance.
We need not to repeal bad voters, not bad laws. 😉
…We need to repeal bad voters, not bad laws…”. Woops
And gems like this from Mr Z are why I come here. He has me thinking about Aristotle (1) and Carl Schmitt (2), and here on the West Coast it isn’t even breakfast time yet.
(1) “The city (polis) comes into being for mere life, but exists for the good life.”
(2) “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
Yes, but in More’s example the devil followed the law, expertly and to a tee. As they often say, in hell there is nothing but procedure, and it is meticulously followed.
Robert Bolt, who wrote that screenplay, was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1968. He was also a member of the Committee of 100. He was married four times. Yet people constantly quote his words as being those of Sir Thomas More.
What a catch. I knew there was a reason I absolutely detest that stupid scene.
It’s a paradox that the more laws and regulations a society has to write, the more lawless it becomes in practice.
“If it’s not explicitly against the codified law, it is there fore legal” ignores the unspoken social norms and customs that underpin a society and a civilization.
The “just go back to ‘muh Constitution” boomers surely must be starting to see this? Young people definitely do.
I’ve no printable solutions. “Diversity is our strength!” definitely undercuts the idea of a unified cultural and social norm though.
You hold the gun
And I hold the wound
And we stand looking in each other’s eyes
Both think we know what’s right
Both know we know what’s wrong
We tell ourselves so many, many, many lies
We’re not pawns in any game
Not tools of bigger men
There’s only one who can really move us all
It all looks fine to the naked eye
But it don’t really happen that way at all
— The Who, “Naked Eye” (1971)
Now imagine this is Townsend saying this to a little boy.