Disaffiliations

     The rising of the tide is slow. He who watches the ocean for only a few minutes would fail to notice it. Only he whose attention persists through several rotations of the Earth has a chance of grasping what’s at work...or of glimpsing the mechanism behind it.

     History, particularly the history of ideas and their applications, is important for that reason. It’s an old saw that “you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” but it is nevertheless true. Old ideas have almost all been tried. Those that succeeded were tried again. Those that succeeded repeatedly, such that we became confident that we could trust them to perform as advertised, became part of the conceptual infrastructure of our society.

     Infrastructure of any sort has a bifurcated character. We need it, but we resent having to tend to it. When it fails us, we repair it with many a grumble. When it’s sound, it tends to vanish from our attention. Thus it is with the ideas on which our society was founded: as we gained confidence in them, we gradually ceased to think about them.

     In the above three paragraphs lies a complete explanation for the gradual disintegration of the United States of America.

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     This morning, the esteemed Dystopic delivers an illuminating piece on the proper response to a Leftist’s attacks on one’s character:

     Treat the Leftist like what he is: a lunatic, a self-absorbed, arrogant asshole with pretensions of intellectual superiority. How do you do this? Mock him. Ridicule him. Use statements like: “Oh, sure, Socialism is great. Why, just yesterday I was thinking about how wonderful the world would be if Stalin had been immortal.” Don’t attack the Leftist’s character — he has none — attack his intelligence instead. He doesn’t have much of that, either, but he will take offense to the notion that you think he is stupid. He cares about that. That will force him on the defensive and expose him for the worthless liar he is.

     Buried in the above is an implicit recognition of the evanescence of memory and the importance of history. Among the Leftist’s most important assets is the short memory of the typical hearer. Our memories are particularly susceptible to the erasure of unpleasant episodes, whether personal or historical. Who cares to remember such things? Such memories are painful. They might actually be dangerous. Doesn’t recalling atrocities and the monsters who perpetrated them open the door to the possibility of repeating them?

     Of course as Santayana has told us, the exact reverse is true. But no Leftist wants his audience to meditate on that truth, nor on its relevance to our contemporary social, economic, and political maladies.

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     Sooner or later, we’ll see bumper stickers and lapel buttons that say:

LET IT BURN

     I’m convinced that it will be quite soon. The sentiment has appeared at an increasing number of sites. It’s frequently expressed through inaction, particularly the decision of so many Americans not to participate in elections, whether local, state, or national. Here are three representative expressions thereof:

     “At this point… what difference does it make?”

     “None” we say to ourselves. The GOP apologists then proceed to go apoplectic, filling the internet with their rage and bile – spamming Hot Air, The National Review Online, The Wall Street Journal and PJ Media with unvarnished rage directed at us unclean traitors. Oh well. We’ve been the front line in the culture wars for decades. They won’t be saying anything the commentators on MSNBC haven’t already shrieked at us – our hides are thick and calloused – from years of Republican snake bites. It’s doubtful we’ll much note this latest abuse.

     Back in the real world, Obama still get’s his entire agenda – no matter who’s running congress or sitting on the Supreme Court. At least with the moonbat wreckers in charge, we have to endure less “failure theater” and insults to our intellect.

     2014 was your last chance to do as you were told Republicans – you instead took it as an opportunity to give the Chamber of Commerce a hand-job. We got the message – and brought the gasoline.

     You are now witnessing the utter collapse of your political party… and your executioner is a blustering reality-show host.

     It would seem that history has a sense of humor.

     [From Dethguild]

     [R]ight there is the rub: we’re not GOING to stop the apocalypse. Politics as usual has gotten us where we are in general; since the useless GOP has already abdicated its treaty responsibility and capitulated on Obama’s humiliating “deal” with Iran, politics as usual is going to get Iran its nuke, too.

     “There’s an apocalypse to stop”? The GOP certainly isn’t going to do it, and the Democrat Socialists seem to be actively for it. Anybody still trying to understand the outrage behind Trump’s current popularity is hereby cordially invited to consider opening his damned eyes at this point, just a little bit.

     [From Mike Hendrix]

     Mr. Trump has actually built a successful business empire by creating products and services that people wanted to buy, not by force, graft and shadowy donations. I might point out that Mr. Trump doesn't really care what the Mushroom Media thinks of him, and is actually capable of breaking wind without consulting 27 polls first. I might point out that Mr. Trump is seen as something new and different in an era of worn-out sequels like 'Clinton On K Street II' and 'Night Of The Living Bush III.' I'm certain that these things are important to some of the Trumpsters, but I feel safe in saying that many of them don't really care about any of this. We've simply recognized reality: The American political process is corrupt to the core. It's nothing but a dog-and-pony show, and we're NOT voting our way out of this. PERIOD (no debate pun intended)....

     The war for liberty in America is over. We lost. All we can do now is accelerate the collapse and prepare to come out fighting on the other side. And in the meantime, if we can enjoy the spectacle of Statist Party D, Statist Party R and the Mushroom Media all losing their tiny little minds over being told that at least one person simply doesn't give a fart in a windstorm what they think, that's pretty awesome. If we'd had more of that attitude over the past few decades, America might have survived.

     In the meantime, let it burn and pass the marshmallows.

     [From Weird And Pissed Off]

     There are others.

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     What distinguishes the “Let It Burn” crowd from others on the Right of the political spectrum? If they have a case – and I would agree that they do – why don’t other, generally freedom-minded Americans flock to their incendiary banner?

     There are a number of reasons. The most widely applicable one is wishful thinking: a stout resistance to the lessons of history, even recent history, because it would destroy all hope. Yet history speaks plainly and implacably on the dynamic that powers all governments: They grow until they are forcibly destroyed, whether by internal or external forces. Santayana stands beneath its banner proclaiming the importance of attending to it. The lesson is generally ignored.

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     “Cato’s Letter” #115, among the seminal documents of the American Founding, contains this passage:

     We know, by infinite examples and experience, that men possessed of power, rather than part with it, will do any thing, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it; and scarce ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry every thing his own way in it; and when he could not, he resigned. I doubt that there is not one exception in the world to this rule; and that Dioclesian, Charles V, and even Sulla, laid down their power out of pique and discontent, and from opposition and disappointment. This seems certain, that the good of the world, or of their people, was not one of their motives either for continuing in power, or for quitting it.

     It is the nature of power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary power, granted at particular times, and upon particular occasions, into an ordinary power, to be used at all times, and when there is no occasion; nor does it ever part willingly with any advantage. From this spirit it is, that occasional commissions have grown sometimes perpetual; that three years have been improved into seven, and one into twenty; and that when the people have done with their magistrates, their magistrates will not have done with the people.

     “Cato’s Letter” #73 adds to this observation:

     Alas! Power encroaches daily upon liberty, with a success too evident; and the balance between them is almost lost. Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind root and branch, makes the world a slaughter-house; and will certainly go on to destroy, till it is either destroyed itself, or, which is most likely, has left nothing else to destroy.

     We are in the terminal stages of such an encroachment. As Ayn Rand once wrote, “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.” Meanwhile, we witness the fattening of every sort of fat cat who has the wit to ally himself with the powerful of his time. He who manages to prosper beyond the officially approved norm without paying obeisance and protection money to power does so only by accident: being fortunate enough to be overlooked.

     If you dispute this, consider Michael Milken.

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     When I wrote Which Art In Hope, I still harbored some hope that the Republic That Was might be restored – that if a sufficient number of Americans simply came to their senses, rose up on their hind legs, and demanded the strict observance of Constitutional and moral constraints on government at all levels, it could be done. Therein I depicted a seemingly successful anarcho-capitalist society. It had absented itself from Earthly tyranny and prospered thereby. Yet it had come face to face, albeit unknowingly, with a lethal threat that pure freedom is insufficient to defeat. The solution required one very special man to sacrifice his life, his love, his home, and everything else that mattered to him. Being a hero of the old style, he did so.

     A completely free society whose members believe unanimously that the coercion of the innocent is morally unacceptable could never impose such a fate on anyone. Being so incapable, it would die to the last man...unless that one gifted individual were to freely give himself as the ransom for the rest.

     I felt the novel to be a sound depiction of an unpleasant but unavoidable truth: that like the State, anarchy is unstable, that it will eventually give way to hegemony, just as hegemony must eventually give way to anarchy. Part of the reason I wrote Freedom’s Scion and Freedom’s Fury, which were no part of my original design, was to bring that truth into even better focus.

     It’s not a proclamation of doom. It’s the recognition that freedom is always temporary, just as is tyranny.

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     Once you’ve accepted the core thesis of the “Let It Burn” community, there are only two overall strategies that make sense: passive self-protection and active revolution. Most Americans who’ve adopted the “Let It Burn” mindset choose the former approach. I’ve moved in that direction myself. A commenter to yesterday’s post gives us an example of the considerations that militate toward it:

     In actuarial terms, I have some 20+ years left. I don't know how many stones will be loosed in that time, or how much of that actuarial time I will really have. I thought maybe the idiocy of Ferguson and then the execution of the NY city cops might kick a few more pebbles in the mix. Add the Tennessee jihadist (a word the MSM will not utter) and one would think the avalanche has started.

     Perhaps it has. We probably won’t recognize an actual “start” to the collapse before it’s well under way. But it’s coming as surely as the rising of the Sun.

     Remember your Santayana.

The Told-You-So Edition

     You can get away with anything as long as you say you’re doing it for somebody else. -- Robert Gore

     It’s always gratifying to be agreed with, even if the substance is something...disagreeable.

     I’ve been screaming – figuratively, of course – about power being the highest – indeed, the only – priority of politicians and aspirants for so long that I can no longer remember when I started. It’s baffled me that something so obvious should have confounded so many for so long. But then, George Washington baffled his contemporaries by refusing the crown of America, and again by declining to accept a third term as president.

     For a while, back then, it seemed to many as if the new Republic had succeeded in creating something new twice over: first, a government founded on popular sovereignty and delegated authority; second, a political class that genuinely agreed on the pernicious nature of power and did not want it for its own sake. But as we Christians have been saying for quite some time, God is not mocked: the dynamic of power would eventually overwhelm the truly public-spirited among the Founders. All it takes is time...and the ascension of the Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson proved that time enough had passed for the dynamic to triumph.

     What brings this to my mind today? So glad you asked:

• The same people who told us 30 years ago that “marriage is just a stupid piece of paper” now insist that it’s a “human right.” -- Kathy Shaidle
• The Battle of Mount Soledad -- Mark Pulliam
• It's always a mistake to expect first principles from the left. In Turkey President Erdogan famously explained that democracy is a train you ride until the stop you want to get to - and then you get off. That's how the left feels about "rights". There are no principles, only accretions of power. -- Mark Steyn
• No cookie will ever satisfy [social-justice warriors]. Our politics will only get uglier, as those who resist this agenda realize that compromise is just another word for appeasement. – Jonah Goldberg
• 90% of the left's attempts at social control are simply attempts to outlaw behaviors they perceived as favored or engaged in by 'traditional" "conservative" "old-school" "white" etc. people. -- Zombie
• The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power. That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues. -- Daniel Greenfield

     Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for these blinding flashes of the obvious. And on we go.

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     In his book For A New Liberty, the late Murray Rothbard noted that regardless of what it seized upon as a “problem” to be “solved,” the Left always proposes the same solution: more government with more power over more areas of human life. Regardless of whether the “solution” involves banning, regulating, taxing, or otherwise decreeing, the ultimate effect is the expansion of the State and its powers, such that what’s done, if it’s allowed, is done by permission. I wasn’t the first to say it – the origin is probably classical – but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when the “problems” are infinitely variable but the “solution” is constant, the proponent wants the solution and nothing else.

     The recent foofaurauw over same-sex marriage, an idea so fatuous that only toddlers and idiots could possibly find an argument for it, provides an example. Kathy Shaidle’s observation above is the key. The point was never “marriage equality;” it’s always been the arrogation of power over marriage by the federal government. Compelling us to accept “married couples” of the same sex, who cannot produce children and routinely violate their “vows of fidelity” in the name of “polyamory,” will of course bring about the destruction of this oldest and most vital of all human institutions – which proves that “marriage equality” is totally beside the point.

     Why would power-mongers want to destroy marriage? It’s simple: the marital bond is private, even more so than the family. It’s massively resistant to intrusions by the State. It’s stood off all attempts to insert law or regulation into it. It’s even survived heavy tax penalties. But it cannot survive being reduced to a laughingstock by federal decree...and thus another bastion of wholly private life will fall.

     Learning to look beyond the present, and beyond the nearest-term consequences as well, is the key to developing a true habit of critical thought.

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     True marriage is intimately linked to the Judeo-Christian moral-ethical tradition, which is itself founded on Natural Law. Christianity in particular is under the power-mongers’ crosshairs, for it constitutes a bastion against arbitrary assertions of authority:

     All genuine progress results from finding new facts. No law can be passed to make an acre yield 300 bushels. God has already established the laws. It is for us to discover them, and to learn the facts by which we can obey them. – Wheeler McMillen

     I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. – Herbert Spencer

     Thus, it’s entirely consistent for the power-mongers to assail those religions, not out of their pretended concern for the tender feelings of atheists, but because alternate sources of moral and ethical guidance are anathema to their aims. Christianity has long been the staunchest of all barriers to the totalitarian program, which is why the great totalitarians have all hated and attempted to destroy it. Even during the era of Throne and Altar, when Church and State were supposedly allied, the Church acted as a brake upon the ambitions of the State and its rulers. The key was and is Christianity’s assertion of the Natural Law: i.e., the laws God has written directly into the natures of His creatures, especially Mankind.

     Natural Law is the First Principle, from which all other reliable principles must derive. It cannot be repealed, amended, or abridged. It simply is. It is self-enforcing, though the penalty for a violation may take years to become visible. Nothing we can imagine could pain a power-luster quite as gravely.

     Natural Law acts itself out most visibly under freedom. Consider the animals of the wild; observe how their natures manifest themselves in every action, at every moment. Thus also with Man: when we are free, we do that which conduces to human flourishing, and to the sort of society best for that purpose. Yes, there are criminals and deviants – free will is like that – but free societies have always succeeded at making them suffer for their sins. Only when the State intrudes, opposing the Natural Law with legislation, do we suffer for sins other than our own.

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     I called this piece the “Told-You-So Edition” because at long last significant commentators and analysts with audiences larger than mine are beginning to get the point, and to say it where others can hear. Perhaps the message isn’t too late. Perhaps it will spread swiftly enough, and resonate with enough Americans, that we can halt our pell-mell rush toward destruction. There can be no certainty; there is only hope.

     But I’ve said that before too, haven’t I?

The Ultimate Manifesto, Part 3: The Omnipotent Executive

     Have you ever read about the curious case of Worcester v. Georgia, Gentle Reader? Virtually no one has, yet it’s among the truly seminal Supreme Court cases of the early Republic. It concerned a Christian missionary, Samuel Worcester, who had moved onto a Cherokee reservation in Georgia, and had started a newspaper there. Georgia had a state law that required non-Amerinds who wished ingress to an Amerind reservation were required first to purchase a license to do so from the state. Worcester was convicted under that law and imprisoned. The case above, for which Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the decision, established that the relationship of the Amerind tribes with the U.S. is a nation-to-nation relationship. Therefore, no state could make laws that impinge upon any Amerind tribe.

     President Andrew Jackson was unhappy with the decision. He refused to assist in the enforcement of the decision against Georgian resistance, even though by implication it asserted a federal prerogative, which would seem to mandate federal enforcement. The apocryphal saying “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” derives from that decision. (There is no record of Jackson’s ever making the neatly phrased statement attributed to him, though he was of approximately that opinion.) Georgia eventually freed Worcester, but only after he had struck a deal with the state to leave Georgia permanently, which he honored.

     It was the first significant case of the Executive refusing to accept the authority of the Judiciary. It underscored the Judiciary’s lack of an executive arm of its own, the reason for Alexander Hamilton’s characterization of the Judiciary as “the least dangerous branch” of the federal government:

     Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

     Today, Hamilton’s assumption that the power of the purse would be sufficient for Congress to ensure that the Executive would not defy it seems a bit naive.

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     I’ve written on other occasions about the difference between law de jure and law de facto. In essence, the law as it genuinely affects the lives of Americans is that subset of the de jure laws – i.e., the laws passed by Congress or the state or local legislature – which is effectively enforced: the law de facto. Why, after all, would anyone care overly much about unenforced laws?

     (In point of fact, there is a reason to concern oneself about an unenforced law: it’s available to be used against those the political elite dislikes. Consider that before arbitrarily dismissing unenforced laws such as Andrew Cuomo’s “SAFE Act.” However, in practice only those laws that are actively enforced are pertinent to the private citizen...at least, as long as he keeps his head down..)

     The Executive branch of the federal government comprises the presidency, all the Cabinet departments, and the entire federal bureaucracy: the “alphabet agencies,” to which Congress routinely delegates quasi-legislative power. The Cabinet, of course, includes the Departments of Justice and Treasury, which have overt enforcement arms: the FBI and the Secret Service. As Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces, the president also wields American military power, which would constitute a truly fearsome enforcement agency were it to be used within America’s borders.

     (Numerous bureaucracies have been arming their field personnel. Full auto weapons. Armor-piercing ammo. Mustn’t forget that.)

     Congress has its Sergeant-at-Arms. The Supreme Court and lesser federal courts have their bailiffs.

     Given all the above, who decides what the laws of the United States, de facto, really are?

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     Worcester v. Georgia reminds us that the loose-cannon ways of the Obama Administration, while extreme, are not without precedent. Indeed, Lincoln’s assumption of dictatorial powers during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s peremptory imprisonment of various peace activists after the U.S. entered World War I, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s freewheeling “New Deal” capers should constitute a dramatic reminder that when the Executive decides to defy and ignore the Legislative and Judicial branches, it can do so with impunity. The other branches cannot effectively discipline a lawless Executive, at least while its myrmidons remain loyal and obedient to it.

     Consider the recent Supreme Court decision striking down EPA overreach under its specious interpretation of its powers under the Clean Air Act. The White House announced immediately that it was going forward with its environmental regulatory program – a program which threatens to raise the price of electrical power by a factor of three – even so. What can the Court do about it? For that matter, what could the Court have done, had it decided King v. Burwell differently, were the White House to instruct the IRS to continue granting ObamaCare subsidies to persons who enrolled through the federal exchange in defiance of the ruling?

     The Obama Administration is exceptional only in its brazenness, its “you can’t stop me” attitude toward Congress and the judiciary. The core problem has been with us since the ratification of the Constitution. Indeed, it might be insoluble: there will always be a single commander for any enforcement agency, and the men with the guns will be inherently disposed to do as he says, other voices notwithstanding.

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     I think I’ve come to the end of the “Ultimate Manifesto” series. Hard thought indicates that “the system” as we understand it possesses inherent dependencies that can and have failed us. Specifically, it depends upon the willingness of the three branches of the federal government to respect their Constitutional bounds. When that respect dissipates, as it appears to have done, the remaining remedies lie solely in the hands of the citizenry. One of those remedies, the electoral process, has proved insufficient. The other involves a great amount of blood and destruction.

     What, then, must we do?

“Shut The Barn Door, Sadie! The Horse Is Gone!”

     You might find this hard to believe. As one who has worked with – indeed, alongside – far too many government functionaries, I don’t:

     It’s often been a theme here that the State is evil...and it is. (Whether it’s a “necessary evil” is still up for discussion.) But wait: There’s more!

The State Is INCOMPETENT.

     And I will tell you why.

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     “Senescence begins when growth ends.” – “Lansing’s Law”

     “Institutions have their own dynamic, and the dynamic of governments is to grow.” – David Friedman

     Government Systems, acting in accordance with the laws of growth, Tend to Expand and Encroach. In encroaching upon their own citizens, they produce Tyranny, and encroaching upon other Government Systems, they engage in Warfare. -- John Gall, Systemantics

     A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. -- Herbert Spencer, "Over-Legislation"

     Apologies for the barrage of quotations, Gentle Reader, but this is a subject upon which much has already been said, and not just by your humble commentator. The problem is putting it together properly, a trial with which anyone who has ever coped with that Satanic torment called customer-assembled furniture will already be familiar.

     Any human institution will strive to grow. Indeed, any living thing, whether it’s an individual or a colony organism, will strive to grow, for growth is the sole alternative to death. But growth always comes at a price. The price of growth isn’t always paid by the thing that’s growing.

     An institution grows by expanding its sphere of activity, which inevitably involves acquiring personnel and assets. In a competitive ecology, that implies the consumption of other organisms. However, it also implies at least a partial diversion of the personnel and efforts dedicated to the institution’s previous sphere of action.

     Every institution has an optimum size. That size is determined by its goals and the context within which it pursues them. But an institution that pursues goals that are unrelated to one another, or worse, which interfere with one another in some way, will carry overheads of personnel and internal protocols that engender costs and inefficiencies that two institutions pursuing those goals separately would not experience. Thus, when an institution reaches its optimum size, it faces a choice:

1. Grow beyond that optimum size, whether by acquiring new goals or by expanding beyond its original context, and thus become inefficient;
2. Begin to die.

     There are no other possibilities.

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     All other things being equal, over time an inefficient institution will be required to face more efficient competitors. This will compel one of the following responses:

• Decline;
• Fractionation;
• Warfare.

     The first of these is obviously undesirable. The second is plausible only for institutions that are capable of surviving the process. The third, while it might not involve flying lead and spurting blood, necessitates further loss of efficiency and must eventuate in recourse to one of the other two.

     This is as true for governments as for private companies and associations.

     A government, of course, is an institution which has arrogated the privilege of coercing individuals and institutions that lie within its “jurisdiction.” Therefore, it’s capable of suppressing competition. (Indeed, competition between governments is normally called warfare; competition between governments within a “jurisdiction” claimed by more than one of them is civil warfare.) Thus, a government need not be balked by any limit upon its growth other than the purely physical.

     But as stated above, and has been confirmed by innumerable historical examples, growth beyond an institution’s optimum size inevitably engenders inefficiency...and the further from its optimum size a government grows, the more inefficient it becomes.

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     The problem is compounded by the sort of person who works in government, whether as an elected official, an appointee, or a hireling. As I’ve written on several previous occasions, such persons are not primarily interested in providing anything you or I would deem a “public service.” Some service-minded sorts will aspire to such positions, but the institutional dynamic of government makes it improbable that they will remain in them for long, nor will they rise in authority. Note how quasi-authoritarian institutions such as unions exert a “slow down, you’re working too fast” efficiency-damping influence upon their members. The State, a fully authoritarian institution, takes that to its logical conclusion: persons who challenge the anti-service ethics and behavior of their co-workers are forced out, if not subjected to punishment for “whistleblowing.” I submit that we’ve seen quite enough demonstrations of that phenomenon within the tenure of the current administration.

     Thus, with no counterbalances and no viable competition that cannot be suppressed by the force at the behest of the State, the State grows without limit: first beyond whatever might be its proper sphere; then through ever increasing levels of inefficiency; finally to complete incompetence. Any task it nominally undertakes is virtually guaranteed never to be accomplished. Indeed, in many cases its “progress” is retrograde: conditions move in the direction opposite to the one it purports to seek.

     Robert Conquest’s Third Law is thus established as the supreme operating rule of the State.

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     Given all the above, which is easily within the mental scope of anyone capable of reading this essay, we should not expect competence from government at any level. Indeed, we must not. Nor is the problem specifically characterological. The laws and dynamics that militate toward this outcome are only intensified by the accession to power of persons of bad character. At this stage in our devolution, you could populate the 88,000 governments of these United States entirely with living saints, and it would make virtually no difference. Hence the title of this piece.

     There is no cure but the hoof-and-mouth disease cure. There is no palliative but effective separation of oneself from the State. The Katherine Archuletas of Washington are the dominant lifeforms therein. It could be no other way, for the State is their ecological niche, wherein they are optimally positioned to survive and flourish. We cannot eliminate them without eliminating their habitat.

     Think it over.

The Burning Of Baltimore: A Coda

     I’m fairly sure my Gentle Readers are all thoroughly sick of the Baltimore atrocities by now...but I want to take this opportunity to make you all much, much sicker:

     House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer defended Baltimore city officials’ reaction to the riots erupting in the city by asking for more federal tax dollars.

     The Daily Caller asked Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, if the city’s leadership had failed, since the West Baltimore area was still being rebuilt from the 1968 riots. Hoyer replied, “We have to invest in making sure that we have proper infrastructure and proper housing so that we have neighborhoods that are safe and that we have safe conditions in which to live.”

     “But I wouldn’t call it a failure, certainly, of Baltimore,” he added. “But we’re going to have to as a country invest if we’re going to have the kinds of communities we want.”

     A Democrat has responded to a question about the failure of Baltimore’s “leadership” – merciful God, how I hate the notion that political officials are our “leaders!” – by calling for more tax dollars paid into the Treasury by Americans from other cities and states to be expended on “infrastructure.”

     What an incredible surprise.

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     It’s been said many times (now and then by me) that when a politician, or a political interest group, proposes the same “solution” to every “problem” that comes down the turnpike, you can bet your last dollar that the “solution,” not the “problem,” is what the politician or group really cares about.

     Add to that the observable, terrifying rate of failure of political “solutions” to proposed “problems.” Quoth H. L. Mencken on “the sex problem,” by which he was referring to the pervasiveness of prostitutes (and customers for them) in cities of significant size:

     There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn’t know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man, who hasn’t a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn’t offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn’t believe and hasn’t stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Havelock Ellis. His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.

     Every political “solution” requires three things:

1. Laws,
2. Hands,
3. Funds.

     When the “solution” fails to eliminate or substantially reduce the “problem,” what follows?

1. Legislators virtually never repeal the applicable law; that would be an admission of error.
2. Those who “work” for the agency charged with the “solution” have livelihoods to protect, and will fight tooth and nail to retain them – even to enlarge them.
3. The money not spent on government employees is spent on material and outside “experts,” who acquire an interest in the perpetuation of the “solution” at least as strong as that of the government employees!

     Sociologists call this an “Iron Triangle,” which defends its politically created turf with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs. This is the prime example of the importance of individual motivation and its priority over notions of “civic virtue:” To those with a personal stake in the “solution,” its perpetuation outranks the “problem” in importance.

     Theorists will theorize, moralists will moralize, and political strategists will politically strategize until the Moon should fall from the sky. None of them will ever change that central fact about government and government programs. It is the key to why all political systems, including anarchism, are inherently unstable.

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     Race riots aren’t new. We’ve had fifty years to get accustomed to them. They invariably feature Negro mobs running rampant through urban districts, smashing and looting. There’s always a triggering event, of course, but the trigger is seldom of enduring importance. What matters is the facility racialist mouthpieces have developed at inciting anger among American Negroes, who have been remorselessly propagandized about how they’re “oppressed.” Raise that pitch high enough and they’ll riot.

     I’m about to say something that’s likely to offend a great many persons, so those with excessively tender sensibilities or generally weak constitutions should leave the website at this point.

     Have we cleared the room adequately? Good, ‘cause here I go:

When was the last riot by American Caucasians?

     It doesn’t matter whether the disparity is a consequence of intellectual deficiency, emotional susceptibility, or simple lust to loot and destroy. Negroes riot; Caucasians don’t. More, they’ll riot regardless of the merits of the triggering event. All they require is “just cause,” and yes, those are “sneer quotes.”

     John Derbyshire touched off a huge controversy with his column “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” Yet not one of his critics could refute his assertions. What those assertions amount to is that concentrations of American Negroes constitute a hazard to the life and property of non-Negroes.

     I submit that we have had enough demonstrations of this proposition to grant it our confidence.

     Negro racialists know their audience. They know how easily it can be whipped into a furor. They know how little can be done to restrain a black mob bent upon looting and destruction, if the authorities are unwilling to use force to the necessary degree and in the necessary amount. They know that at least for the present, the response of “authorities” to such riots is far more likely to be conciliatory – Steny Hoyer’s approach – than punitive. Last and most significant, they know how to profit personally from the sequelae.

     There will be more such riots, in more cities, over ever more trivial occurrences.

     Draw the moral.

Creeping Totalitarianism Part 2: Present And Future

“Romney didn’t win, did he?” – The Dishonorable Harry Reid

     Yesterday’s emission was one of many that started from the David French article about Wisconsin’s persecution of conservative activists. The DextroSphere is generally up in arms over it; grass-roots conservative activists were the targets, so grass-roots conservatives everywhere sense the dimensions of the threat.

     The big guns are lining up as well. Hearken to Rush Limbaugh on the subject:

     I mean, it's incredible. They could literally set out to destroy you, and the only thing standing in the way of it is the honor system. If you have a corrupt prosecutor (which this story has), and if you have a corrupt judge, (which this story has), and if you have a police department that is also corrupt (this happened in Milwaukee, mostly), then you can pull this off.

     There's even a quote from a couple police officers who were forced to participate these midnight raids on innocent people who had not done a thing other than support Scott Walker. That's all they had done, and cop car after cop car, cop after cop, SWAT teams, you name it, show up with battering rams to break into these people's homes! They're kicked out of their homes at midnight, at one o'clock in the morning. They're not allowed to take anything; they're not told why.

     They're not allowed to explain to anybody that this has happened besides the neighborhood which can see it. Years after the fact, mothers are reporting their young kids that were at home when this happened are still traumatized. People are reporting today that they get scared and traumatized and panicked when they see a uniformed police officer just walking a beat. They hightail it away.

     It is the fear that I think a lot of innocent people experience when law enforcement is pursuing them. I know. I've been there. I know a number of things. Law enforcement's never doubted, other than the civil rights community. The media doesn't doubt them. Law enforcement can leak anything they want about anybody, and the media writes it, and it becomes fact. Even average, ordinary Americans say, "Why would the cops lie? Why?" I mean, they take it on faith.

     However, there has still been no notice taken of this atrocity by the Main Stream Media. Worse, the Democrats have rallied to defend such practices:

     One of Texas’s acute corruption problems is the fact that the Travis County district attorney’s office, which prosecutes corruption cases, is absurdly, comically corrupt—by which I do not mean the “Hey can you get my dopey kid into UT law?” level of corruption that is commonplace in Texas, but Boss Hogg levels of corruption. You wouldn’t know it from the typically witless and servile reporting of the Austin American-Statesman, but the drunk-driving conviction of Travis County district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is the least of that office’s problems—much more significant is the fact that is she recorded on camera threatening legal retaliation against the police who booked her. She is as explicit as can be about this: “You’re going to be in jail,” she said.

     The same prosecutor is trying to put former governor Rick Perry in jail for having vetoed funding for her office. Why did he veto the funding? Because the corruption prosecutor is grossly corrupt and a convicted criminal to boot. She went to jail, for pity’s sake.

     The Texas state house understandably has passed a bill that will curtail the Travis County district attorney’s special role in prosecuting ethics and corruption cases against elected and appointed officials. Instead, those cases will be investigated by the Texas Rangers. (Old punishment: jail. New punishment: Ranger roundhouse kick! Okay, not really, but that would be kind of awesome.) Naturally, Texas Democrats have sought to block that reform. And a handful of Republicans have, to their discredit, joined them, which is inexplicable.

     Please read the entire article; it’s brief (which Kevin Williamson seldom is) and piercing (which he always is). But don’t stop with being outraged. Do something Democrats and other leftists seldom do: think about second-order effects.

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     You cannot have social stability where there is privilege for the rulers and subordination for the ruled. That’s a Society of Status (Isabel Paterson, The God of The Machine), in which the “Emmanuel Goldstein dynamic” will operate until it collapses:

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

[George Orwell, 1984]

     When the High’s brazenness about their special status leads to the outright dismissal of the laws they claim to have passed “for the general good,” while they simultaneously exercise the full weight of their powers to oppress and silence their critics, the conditions for their overthrow have been established. The sequel is likely to be extremely unpleasant:

     [America is] becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it’s not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

     Today in America, we have a liberal president refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

     Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

     That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind....

     What is the end game, liberals? Do you expect these people you despise to just take it? Do you think they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, I guess we better comply?” Do you even know any real Americans? Do you think you’ll somehow be able to force them into obedience – for what is government power but force – after someone finally says “Enough?”

     Kurt Schlichter and I are asking the same question.

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     The Party in 1984 strove to cement itself into permanent power by exerting that power to the utmost. The conditions to which the proles (“the Low”) were subjected were so crushing that they couldn’t even conceive of rebelling. The Outer Party (“the Middle”) was kept almost as poor materially as the proles, was regimented to the hilt, and was watched continuously for the merest hint of deviation. The few Outer Party members who dared to deviate were remade psychologically, in a fashion that would break them of the will to resist. The Inner Party (“the High”) was composed entirely of fanatic loyalists willing to do anything whatsoever to retain their hegemony. Thus the Party attempted to solve the age-old problem of political stability.

     1984 is fiction, of course. But at least one element of it has crept into American reality:

     [C]onservatives already do outbreed the left — which is why the left is so determined to maintain its iron hold on education, K-through-12-through-infinity. If they can’t (or won’t) breed more lefties, they know how to make them.

     That’s why homeschooling frightens them so much. That’s why they fight so hard against their own strongest constituents in the effort to prevent school choice and teacher accountability.

     Twelve years of endless harangues about “social justice” and the like will leave a mark on a child that’s near to indelible. It lacks the intensity and focus of O’Brien and Room 101, but it compensates with duration. Many parents find themselves helpless against it.

     Winston Smith wrote that “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” A few moments later he added, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” The proles of our place and time are utterly dependent on the State. The State is their father: protector and provider both. they will never even imagine that their protector / provider is really their owner, to be overthrown if they are to advance. There is no hope in them.

     We are the Outer Party. Not in material matters – even a “poor” American lives a life of riches undreamed by emperors of old – but in the view of the political elite. They don’t have the technology to watch us continuously, though with their drones, license plate readers, and the proliferation of “smart” appliances” they’re advancing on it. They haven’t yet disarmed us, though they’re working on that as well.

     The political class, regardless of Democrat or Republican affiliation, is our Inner Party. It uses its tools to subjugate where it can, and to propagandize where it cannot. With the recent, unabashed resort to political prosecutions to destroy its opponents, its consciousness of itself has become complete. Do not doubt that it will go on as it has begun, and to ever greater intensity.

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     Somewhere in the future lies a point of no return, at which all prospect of deliberately ejecting the political class will have vanished. Somewhere nearer to the present lies a point at which the possibility of doing so non-violently will have been extinguished. The Spoonerites waited too long, and were forced to flee. Unless there’s a planetoid wandering through that I haven’t heard about, we won’t have that option.

     It’s not enough to complain to one another. It’s not enough to vote. It’s not enough to support this or that promising-looking candidate. We’ve tried all that.

     What, then, must we do?

Creeping Totalitarianism Report

     This disturbing article from David French demonstrates factual reporting as it was once practiced:

     “They came with a battering ram.”

Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking.

She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.

She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door.

“I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.

“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”

She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.

“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.

The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”

Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

     Disturbing? Indeed, terrifying. But why?

     Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.

     That’s why.

     To the best of my knowledge, the Gestapo-like raids above, all of which targeted conservative activists in Wisconsin, have not been reported by any major media organ. There’s been no mention of them in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Philadelphia Enquirer. Why?

     I’m afraid you already know why.

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     The raids above were conceived by Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm, a highly partisan Democrat whose wife is a shop steward in a Wisconsin teachers’ union. They were judicially approved by Judge Barbara Kluka, another Democrat. And of course, they were carried out by unionized Wisconsin police.

     The motivation could not be clearer. Democrats only believe in free speech for Democrats. They’re particularly disturbed by the ascendancy of conservative Republican governor Scott Walker. That Walker has rationalized the state’s budget, turning a habitual deficit into an annual surplus, and his actions to reduce the bargaining privileges of Wisconsin’s municipal and state unions, have enraged Wisconsin Democrats beyond all description.

     God help the conservative who dares to challenge the power of Wisconsin unions.

     Will district attorney Chisholm face any legal penalties for his utterly unfounded “John Doe” investigations and the terrorization of Wisconsin conservatives by use of police power? Will Judge Kluka face any penalties for facilitating those SWAT-style raids? What about the happily cooperative Wisconsin police? For that matter, now that National Review has publicized the affair, will the Main Stream Media take an interest in this blatant use of political power to suppress the free speech and organizing rights of Americans?

     Don’t bet the rent money on it.

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     I’ve written before about the evils attendant to prosecutorial discretion and sovereign immunity.

     The combination of grand jury biddability and prosecutorial discretion has given rise to an assembly-line character in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors tend to be as ambitious for advancement as anyone else in "public service," and in their case the road to higher positions is paved with copious convictions, whether or not those convicted deserve their fates. Inasmuch as the luxuriance of criminal law has created a state of affairs in which every one of us, whether wittingly or not, is "guilty" of something, an aggressive prosecutor can "rack 'em up" by pursuing a simple strategy:

1. Look around for "suspicious" behavior -- i.e., behavior on the part of a private citizen that can be made to appear suspicious;
2. Ruthlessly probe every element of the "suspect's" life, using the effectively infinite resources of the State, until enough "suspicious" behavior has been amassed;
3. Assemble a huge list of charges to place before a grand jury;
4. Present the case in such a fashion as to promote the more plausible accusations and obscure the less plausible ones, thus securing a grab-bag indictment;
5. Offer the indicted person a plea bargain that will spare him centuries in prison and complete pauperization at the bargain price of a few years and/or a few thousand dollars.

     There is no brake to this strategy. Excessive law plus complete prosecutorial discretion plus a competent prosecutor's ability to lead a grand jury by the nose combine to put even a simon-pure citizen at the mercy of the criminal justice system. And what a system it is! Had it been consciously designed to put the maximum number of persons in prison regardless of guilt or innocence, it could not have been done better.

     Those evils are on vivid display in David French’s article. Yet it would be foolish to expect any correction to them. The State never willingly surrenders power. It only takes; it does not give. And when persons whose ideology tells them that:

• Their politics makes them morally superior to those who disagree; and:
• The ends justify the means; and:
• They will face no penalties for whatever they do;

     ...have the opportunity to wield State power for their political benefit, no Earthly force is sufficient to restrain them.

     I’ve ranted about this more than once:

     Prosecutorial discretion, when coupled to sovereign immunity -- doctrines absolutely anathema to the Anglo-American legal tradition -- make it possible for statists to conceal evil motives behind a cloak of righteousness. No one can come out against "law enforcement" without exposing himself to pillory as an "anarchist." Worse, when the evil motives are revealed and the pressure is removed from the statists' targets, no remedy is applied and no restitution is offered to the victims.

A long time ago, in commenting on a similar case that occurred in Florida, the legendary Russell Baker wrote that "When the government says it is going to get you, it is going to get you." It appears that nothing has changed since then, except for the identities and political orientations of the prosecutors and their targets.

     Need I say more?

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     A number of the bloggers who entered the fray around the time I did have gone silent or near to it. Consider Mike Hendrix and Emperor Misha, two old favorites of the DextroSphere. Several others have gotten by mostly on reposts.

     I miss their regular emissions, but I can understand the trend. We’re tired. We’re getting old. And we’ve been repeating ourselves rather a lot.

     That’s what happens when outrage follows outrage with neither redress nor remorse. We’re still angry, but we’re beginning to feel that there’s little point to continuing on. And we dislike to think we’re huddled in an otherwise empty room, with no one listening to us but one another.

     The American people appear to have been enervated to the point of surrender. The Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayevsky’s screenplay for Network captured my sense of it perfectly:

     I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

     We know things are bad — worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

     Is it really this way? Are we unwilling to rear up on our hind legs and roar defiance into our oppressors’ faces?

     Do you want your freedom back? Do you want to feel reasonably safe from “your” government? Voting every two or four years ain’t gonna do it, people. It will take actual resistance to the tyrants by persons brave enough to do so – and staunch support of those brave ones, political, legal, financial, and moral, by the rest of us.

     I know, I know: Who bells the cat? It’s the old question, the one we use to paralyze ourselves. It’s more effective than ever. The State in our time can target individuals with frightening accuracy, and can bring overwhelming power to bear against them, as David French has told us. The Redcoats didn’t even have rifled barrels on their muskets.

     Is there a Patrick Henry in the house?

     Never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m just an old man who claims to remember what it was like to be free. We didn’t even have color TVs back then, so how good could it have been, really?

     All rise for Flag salute. Here are your internal passport, your work permit, and your ration card. Now sit down and pay attention to the political officer. He’s here to serve!

The Agony And The Irony

     No, this won’t be about Michelangelo, and anyway, I’m no Irving Stone.

     I’ve been working, fitfully, on Statesman, the fifth segment of my Realm Of Essences series, and having one hell of a hard time with it. The hard time arises from the nearly continuous stream of real-world events about which I write these op-eds. Those events, of course, center on the current political environment, which is driven by a figure whose ideology, character, personality are the diametric opposites (to put it mildly) of those of my major protagonist, Stephen Graham Sumner, the Onteora County lawyer who rises by an improbable concatenation of events to become president of the United States.

     Lord Acton told us that “Power tends to corrupt.” Indeed, I’ve never doubted that corruption will always be found mated to some degree of power. But it’s always seemed to me that the engine of that correlation belongs a bit further back than Lord Acton put it: Power attracts the already corrupt and the easily corruptible. That such men should aspire to power is natural; that they should exploit it for their own venal ends follows as the night follows the day.

     In Sumner I’ve created a political figure who seeks power to redress the injustices of prior generations of politicians. He wants it not because he lusts after it, but because it’s the only way to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” according to the dictates of the Constitution of the United States. He’s as passionate about justice as my other Realm Of Essences protagonists, but in a sharp contrast with the others, he’s entered the political arena to pursue it.

     If we omit consideration of the current crop of declared candidates, that’s not something we could say about any candidate for the presidency since Calvin Coolidge, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan. (As for the current crop, let’s just say I have my doubts.)

     So I’m about to promote as a hero-figure a president-protagonist who deviates from the established pattern so starkly that there’s no one to model him on. Power will not corrupt him. It will change him; doubt it not. Nevertheless, his focus will remain squarely on doing justice and reviving the Constitutional order.

     And while I’m doing that, I have to keep writing about current events, the terrible political / economic / social mess the country is in, and the Pretender in the White House, whose behavior is that of a man who resents this country, possibly even hates it, and is working to see it brought low.

     The irony defeats my powers of description.

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     I believe that things can somehow be turned around – that with the right aggregation of decent people exerting the right kind and degree of effort, we can return this country to its Constitutional basis. Indeed, I don’t merely believe it; I’m certain of it. What I’m far from certain about is what measures would suffice to do it. With each successive degradation, peaceful means seem less applicable, and a violent revolution seems less avertible.

     The political process has been effectively privatized. The two major parties control it so completely – with which federal law actually helps them – that in an election for a federal position, no third-party candidate has a chance against them. With rare exceptions, federal office holders are effectively immune from legal rebuke. (We’ll see if Senator Menendez proves an exception; so far, Lois Lerner has not.) The most common assessment of our prospects for the near future is bleak. That assessment is probably correct.

     So how can I make Statesman plausible? Is it doomed to be a political fantasy – something we might wish would happen, but that never really could? Or is there still a crumb of hope that a Stephen Graham Sumner could rise from among us “ordinary” Americans, could gain sufficient backing to mount a credible candidacy, and could not only win the presidency but could bring enough like-minded candidates into Congress to give him a real chance to achieve his aims?

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     Shadow Of A Sword evoked a fair number of emails that expressed hopes like those above. Yet the majority of my correspondents were equally candid about the low likelihood of a Sumner-like Constitutional movement. Though few were explicit about it, the consensus seemed to be that too many people have too much invested in the status quo, and therefore that any movement to alter it significantly would be defeated by popular assent. Jonah Goldberg’s conclusions in Liberal Fascism were essentially the same.

     Is our only hope something like Hope? If so, pray that a likely planetoid passes by...and that we’ll be ready to exploit it when it does.

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     The above sounds gloomy because it is – because I am. Leader figures seldom rise above the context from which they emerge. In our time, movements are more likely to be about some fashion trend or fad in popular culture than about liberty and justice. The exceptions are targeted and tamed or eliminated with high reliability. A real-life Katniss Everdeen would be assassinated before she could become the emblem of freedom Suzanne Collins’s wonderful books allowed her to be. A real-life Kevin Conway wouldn’t be permitted to exist, much less to operate a heavily armed private security force.

     John Derbyshire thinks we’re doomed. He could be right...but I can’t accept it. Perhaps I will someday, if I live long enough, but it would put a permanent end to my fictional efforts, so I’m holding out for now. I have to pay for my animals, my leisure reading, my new barn, my preferred anti-agita remedy,and the C.S.O.’s shoe fetish somehow, don’t y’know.

     Have a nice day.

Even Sadder Puppies: An Insider Cops To The Scam

     Larry Correia, the author of the popular Monster Hunter series, is the quintessence of the “outsider” to the science fiction / fantasy world. The “insiders” detest him for his politics and his love of firearms. Thus, when he first strove to become involved in the semi-organized world of SF/F fandom by attending its annual Worldcon, at which the field’s highly prized Hugo Awards are announced, the “insiders” subjected him to an unexpected degree of insult and contempt. He’s written about it more than once.

     I’ve never attended a Worldcon and don’t intend to attend one. Indeed, I’d have no truck with it if it were held across the street and a courier were dispatched to my doorstep with a limo and an engraved invitation. Hey, that’s just me:

• Lovely But Unlovable Ladies
• Keeping The Hate Alive
• As They Go Marching
• On Feminism, Power, And Groups, Yet Again
• Politically Insoluble
• Adventures In Joinerism

     ...group-averse and incurably skittish about crowds. But Correia’s laudable reaction – the original Sad Puppies campaign to open the Hugo nominations to a wider and more inclusive field of writers – was the exact opposite. As you’ve read here and probably elsewhere, this year it reaped a staggering degree of success.

     I allowed myself a dollop of Schadenfreude over the butthurt reactions of the trumped-Ace “social justice warriors” who had cliquefied the Hugo process to exclude those whose politics diverge from theirs. That was yesterday’s indulgence. Today’s subject is of more substance.

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     An “insider’s insider,” George R. R. Martin, author of the wildly successful fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire, has taken it upon himself to promulgate a sort of Gospel Of The Insiders. Correia, who despite not having spearheaded “Sad Puppies 3” remains closely identified with the concept, answered him at length.

     In point of fact, the controversy can be boiled down to one paragraph – and not a particularly long one:

     If the rules of Hugo nomination and balloting permitted the “social justice warriors” to do what they did – colloquially, “slate voting” – with considerable success for some years, then the very same rules permit what the Sad Puppies campaign has done with equal success. Therefore, the ire of the “social justice warriors” is merely over having been beaten with their own tactics. That makes them sore losers and nothing else.

     What’s particularly striking about this affair is how the insiders who’ve proclaimed for half of forever that the Hugos are “for all of fandom” have decided to issue a modification to their stance. Here’s George R. R. Martin’s formulation:

     Who owns the Hugo Awards?

     You know, looking back, I am probably partly to blame for some of the misconceptions that seem to exist on this point. For years now I have been urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards, and saying things like “this is your award” and “this award belongs to the fans, the readers.” I felt, and still feel, that wider participation would be a good thing. Thousands of fans vote for the Hugos most years, but until recently only hundreds ever bothered to nominate.

     Still my “it is your award” urgings were not entirely accurate.

     Truth is, the Hugo Awards belong to worldcon. The World Science Fiction Convention.

     What is Martin saying in the above? That the explicit rules governing Hugo nominations and balloting, which have been as they are for many years, really aren’t the rules at all? That rather than just paying the fee for a supporting membership, he who wishes to nominate or vote for certain books for the Hugo must actually attend the convention, wherever it might be situated that year? Or is he trying to say something else?

     Ponder that for a moment.

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The aim of the High is to remain where they are. -- George Orwell

     Insiders are inherently hostile toward outsiders. (They’re often hostile toward one another as well, as within a sufficiently large clique there will usually be one or more sub-cliques maneuvering for control over the larger group.) To have “made it inside” is to have achieved a desired status, a distinction from others who haven’t managed it. The value of such a distinction is inversely proportional to the number of people who share it. To extend Orwell’s insight modestly, not only do the High want above all things to remain where they are; they also want to prevent the expansion of their ranks...and with an almost equal fervor.

     When the insiders find the rules working counter to that aim, they seek to change the rules – or to insist on a new interpretation contrary to the one that was used against their interests. Sometimes they succeed. But when their machinations are illuminated for all to see, the value of their insider-ship is diminished even more than it would otherwise have been.

     By protesting, entirely because they’ve been thwarted, that the Sad Puppies campaign somehow abused the simple, clear Hugo nomination process, the “social justice warriors” have done a large disservice to those writers who’ve been awarded Hugos in the most recent years: the very writers their own machinations raised to glory.

     The “social justice warriors” are faced with a terrible dichotomy: either the Sad Puppies campaign was entirely licit as the rules stand, in which case their outrage is over having been outplayed at their own game, or the campaign was a low, dirty tactic, in which case it was just as low and dirty when they employed it, and taints the Hugos awarded to their favored ones.

     George R. R. Martin, whose books I’ve enjoyed heretofore, has taken the second of those positions, in direct contradiction of both the clearly worded rules and his own previous pronouncements on the subject.

     That is what insiders do.

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     A number of parallels, not all of them accurate, have been drawn between the Hugo controversy and the “GamerGate” flap. The details of the latter are somewhat different from those of the former, in that no awards and (with the exception of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate) no organized campaigns were involved. The common element is the desire of the “social justice warriors” to exclude persons they dislike for their politics or their particular tastes from being considered as holders of respectable opinions. In the former case the battlefield is the Hugo process; in the latter, it’s the “gamers’ press,” which has been targeted for conquest (with a fair degree of success to date) by the “social justice warriors.”

     The core parallel is insider-hood: who controls the levers of power in the relevant domain.

     Like all leftists, the “social justice warriors” seek power: first and foremost, over who may say what, and where, and to whom, and on what subjects. They have a particular affinity for the expressive trades: the educational system, the news media, and above all the entertainment media. These are the shapers of public opinion. Power inheres in groups, institutions, and the control thereof. The rest should follow without need for further explication.

     In those areas where they’ve established themselves as the insiders, the “social justice warriors” will fight viciously to prevent any dilution of their control. In those areas where they’re still struggling for hegemony, they’ll use every imaginable tactic to achieve their aim...and will ignore any protests of foul play once they’re in the power seats.

     That’s the process, and the end toward which they will forever strive:
     To be the only respectable writers.
     To be the only “legitimate” educators.
     To command the heights of the entertainment world.
     To rule on who may speak with authority, and about what.
     And they will destroy whoever and whatever stands in their way.

     Be on your guard.

Homosexuality, Lycanthropy, And Free Will

Almost exactly two years ago, the redoubtable Erick Erickson wrote about the political controversy over same-sex marriage as follows:

Let me make it clear for you — you will be required to care. Gay rights advocates on the steady march toward and past gay marriage will make you care. They will not give you room to sit on the fence....

The left will allow no fence sitting. You may not believe me. You may think me hyperbolic. But the history of the world shows this. Events ultimately come to a head. They boil to their essence. And at that point you must choose.

Matters have most definitely come to a head:

ABC-57 reporter Alyssa Marino’s editor sends her on a half-hour drive southwest of their South Bend studio, to the small town of Walkerton (Pop. ~2,300). According to Alyssa’s own account on Twitter, she “just walked into their shop [Memories Pizza] and asked how they feel” about Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Owner Crystal O’Connor says she’s in favor of it, noting that while anyone can eat in her family restaurant, if the business were asked to cater a gay wedding, they would not do it. It conflicts with their biblical beliefs. Alyssa’s tweet mentions that the O’Connors have “never been asked to cater a same-sex wedding.”

What we have here is — as we called in journalism school jargon — “no story.” Nothing happened. Nothing was about to happen....

Memories Pizza didn’t blast out a news release. They didn’t contact the media, nor make a stink on Twitter or Facebook. They didn’t even post a sign in the window rejecting gay-wedding catering jobs. They merely answered questions from a novice reporter who strolled into their restaurant one day – who was sent on a mission by an irresponsible news organization.

Next: ABC-57 anchor Brian Dorman leads the evening newscast dramatically with this:

Only on ABC-57 News tonight. We went into small towns looking for reaction to the Religious Freedom Act. We found one business, just 20 miles away from a welcoming South Bend…with a very different view.

Notice that his city of South Bend is “welcoming,” but that small-town business is not. It’s very different. That’s why ABC-57 “went into small towns,” as if embarking on a safari to aboriginal lands.

Not only did ABC-57 News create that story ex nihilo (out of nothing), but the next day, the station’s Rosie Woods reported on the social-media backlash against the Christian pizza shop owners.

“Our Facebook page has been blowing up with comments after we aired that story last night,” said Woods. At this point, even my old Leftist journalism professors would be grinding their teeth and rending their garments.

You see, not only did ABC-57 manufacture the story with an ambush interview, it then doubled-down by making the reaction to the story into another story to give the sense of momentum, as if it were growing at its own impetus. Yet, everything about it is a fabrication.

Memories Pizza didn’t “publicly vow to reject gay weddings” as HuffPo says it. The O’Connors were just, quite literally, minding their own business.

Today, Memories Pizza is closed. The owners have been showered with abuse. And it might not reopen:

All right, then! You sodomitic fascists and your allies in the media have asked for it, and now you’re going to get it -- good and hard.

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In considering homosexuals, we must distinguish between the marginally rational ones and the werewolves.

Mind you, it is not and can never be rational to prefer to have sex with a member of one’s own sex. At its most defensible – i.e., not very – it’s a matter of preference...of tastes. Of tastes there is nothing written, as the Talmud says in mildly humorous self-contradiction. (The Jews would know; no other religious tradition has written nearly as much.) But at its worst, homosexuality bears a strong resemblance to the compulsion to infect others that’s characteristic of lycanthropy.

The werewolf, once transformed into his beastly other self, cannot control himself. He must bite others. The virus in his system compels it. The werewolf is merely a vehicle for the procreation and proliferation of the virus. He has no other role in this world...well, except to populate endless reams of urban fantasy novels, but that’s a subject for another tirade.

Consider this highly compressed but brilliant summary of the applicable political dynamic:

1. It's a free country, X should not be illegal.
2. The Constitution prohibits X from being made illegal.
3. If the Constitution protects a right to X, how can it be immoral? Anyone who disagrees is a bigot.
4. If X is a Constitutional right, how can we deny it to the poor? Taxpayer money must be given to people to get X.
5. The Constitution requires that taxpayer money be given to people to get X.
6. People who refuse to participate in X are criminals.
7. People who publicly disagree with X are criminals.

Except for skipping the part about public financing for same-sex weddings, homosexual activists have followed that design with near-perfect fidelity. But wait: there’s more!

Ask a hundred homosexuals whether their sexual preference is a conscious choice. If you get even one to say yes, you’ll have done better than I did, and I’ve known well more than a hundred. They all protest quite vigorously that they were “born that way.” Now for the follow-up question: “Do you wish you had been born heterosexual?”

That’s where the backing and filling starts. You see, to answer that question with an uncompromised, unqualified “Hell, no!” is to commit homosexual treason. The activists among them trumpet deafeningly and endlessly that “gay is good.” Deviate from that entry in their prayer book and you’ve made common cause with...them: the imagined legions of “Christianists” whom they claim want to round them up, stand them against a wall, and shoot them dead. It’s almost as bad a crime as coming out against abortion. (Never mind that you cannot impregnate a member of your sex.)

The contradiction between the “born that way” and “Hell, no!” responses couldn’t be clearer. But I advise you not to try to delve into it with a homosexual. Let’s just say that the subsequent conversation wouldn’t be polite.

It’s the virus at work. I mean that entirely metaphorically, friends; homosexuality is almost certainly not the result of a viral infection. It’s a matter of conscious choice.

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Even should we stipulate that the homosexual inclination is inborn, which I do only for the sake of argument, it does not follow that homosexual behavior is compulsory. Man has free will, the most important aspect of which is the ability to choose not to act.

Even if the taste is inborn, acting on it is a choice.

Some homosexuals have succeeded in refraining from sodomitic sex, altering their orientations, and have gone on to marry in the conventional fashion and produce families. The activists hate those folks with a red passion. They’d destroy them if they thought they could get away with it, as their “defection” fatally undermines the activists’ case.

If the act itself is a matter of choice, so is every behavior peripheral to the act. So is political activism about the act’s legality. And so is the activists’ mad campaign to destroy the institution of marriage, than which there is no institution more important to the formation and maintenance of a free and prosperous society.

But in today’s social context, it verges on seppuku to dissent from the homosexualist gospel. Crusades against the defenders of the traditional understanding of marriage are even more commonplace than death threats. Ask Brendan Eich how that can work out.

If homosexualists’ viciousness toward those who disagree with them is a consequence of their affliction, it strengthens the rarely made case for having them committed and forcibly treated to correct it, by prolonged, painful aversion therapy a la mode Clockwork Orange if all else fails. The more destruction they wreak, the more Americans will begin to wonder whether that might be the only way to peace.

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I’m eyelashes deep in the completion of a story whose theme is that God does not make junk. Those of you who read my fiction might be shocked by it; it’s quite definitely out of my usual patterns. It’s the result of a challenge from another writer, who dictated the critical motifs and who’s smugly confident that I can’t pull it off. I find it difficult to resist a challenge of that sort, in part out of my pride in my skills, and in part because I haven’t lost one yet.

Those who feel the inclination toward homosexuality are no more junk than you or I. Their trial may be beyond what the rest of us must endure; not being inclined that way, I wouldn’t know. But they are no less required to face their trials and surmount them than anyone else. To “reverse the flowchart” and attempt to force others to endorse their perversion, and to surround it with defenses so formidable that none may even disagree with any aspect of it, is vile beyond comparison...almost beyond contemplation.

The backlash is already accumulating. It won’t be long before the peasants go for their pitchforks. I doubt the werewolves will enjoy what happens next. Their butt buddies in the media won’t like it much either.