In 2010,
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of
"the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he
described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now
he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.
The primary objective of any people who find
themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic
from its worst conclusions.
Prior to the 2016 election I explained how America had already
“stepped over the threshold of a revolution,” that it was “difficult to imagine
how we might step back, and futile to speculate how it might end.” Regardless
of who won the election, its sentiments’ growing “volume and intensity” would
empower politicians on all sides sure to make us nostalgic for Donald Trump’s
and Hilary Clinton’s moderation. Having begun, this revolution would follow its
own logic.
What follows dissects that logic. It has
unfolded faster than foreseen. Its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity
have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.”
The Democratic Party and the millions it
represents having refused to accept 2016’s results; having used their positions
of power in government and society to prevent the winners from exercising the
powers earned by election; declaring in vehement words and violent deeds the
illegitimacy, morbidity, even criminality, of persons and ideas contrary to
themselves; bet that this “resistance” would so energize their constituencies,
and so depress their opponents’, that subsequent elections would prove 2016 to
have been an anomaly and further confirm their primacy in America. The 2018
Congressional elections are that strategy’s first major test.
Regardless of these elections’ outcome,
however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing
revolutionary spiral. We begin with a primer on such spirals, on the logic of
mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences; move to a general
description of our evolution’s driving logic, describe the 2016 elections as
the revolutionary spiral’s first turn and the “resistance” thereto as the
second. Then we examine how the “resistance” affects the other side, and how
this logic might drive our revolution’s subsequent turns.
The Cycle
and Us
Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth
year of the Peloponnesian War, is a paradigm of revolutionary logic. Thucydides
tells us that the citizens’ divisions had been of the garden-variety economic
kind. Its Assembly had taken an ordinary vote on an ordinary measure. But the
vote’s losers, refusing to accept political defeat, brought criminal charges
against their opponents’ leader. By thus criminalizing differences over public
policy, by using political power to hurt their opponents, they gave the
revolutionary spiral its first turn. The spiral might have stopped when the
accused was acquitted. But, he, instead of letting bygones be bygones,
convinced the assembly to fine those who had brought the charges. After all,
they had to be taught not to do such things again. The assembly approved the
fine. But the second use of political power to hurt opponents gave the
revolutionary spiral its second turn. Had the original wrongdoers paid up, the
problem might have ended right there. Instead, outraged, they gave it the third
push, bursting into the Assembly and murdering him. That ended all private
haven from political strife. Civil war spiraled into mutual destruction, until
the city was well-nigh depopulated.
Thus does Thucydides’ account of how
revolutionary logic manifests itself in personal behavior echo through the
ages—an account that strikes Americans in October, 2018 as all too familiar:
“men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set
the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look
for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day
of danger when their aid may be required.”
The more freely to harm enemies, “words had
to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.”
“Reckless audacity came to be considered the
courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was
held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question,
inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness;
cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme
measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected … even
blood became a weaker tie than party …. The fair proposals of an adversary were
met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a
generous confidence … when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize
it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance
sweeter than an open one…success by treachery won him the palm of superior
intelligence.”
How near we are to all that, and how far from
once-great America!
The American republic’s essence had been
self-restraint toward fellow citizens deemed equals. The Constitution of 1787
had been its paradigm. Under its words and by its laws, Americans had enjoyed
safety and predictability for themselves and their way of life. But
Progressives’ subordination of the Constitution, laws, and institutions to
their own purposes and for their own primacy ended all that. The rest of
America’s increasing realization that only fire can fight fire has followed
naturally.
This is our revolution: Because a majority of
Americans now no longer share basic sympathies and trust, because they no
longer regard each other as worthy of equal consideration, the public and
private practices that once had made our Republic are now beyond reasonable
hope of restoration. Strife can only mount until some new equilibrium among us
arises.
Our Logic
The logic that drives each turn of our
revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to
exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian
necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The
logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If
that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it
short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their
demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth,
to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the
inferior’s humiliation. It is an inherently endless pursuit.
The logic is rooted in disdain, but not so
much of any of the supposed inferiors’ features or habits. If it were, the
deplored could change their status by improving. But the Progressives deplore
the “deplorables” not to improve them, but to feel good about themselves.
Hating people for what they are and because it feels good to hate them, is hate
in its unalloyed form.
Hence, in our revolution, as in others, which
side first transgressed civility’s canons matters only historically. In our
revolution, as in others, truth comes to be what serves to increase fellow
partisans’ animus against socio-political opponents, and words to mean neither
more nor less than what serves the speaker at any given time.
As Thucydides pointed out, once people cease
adhering to “those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in
adversity,” partisan solidarity offers the only immediate hope of safety. And
that, in turn, is because “those general laws” are by, of, and for the good of
all. Once people no longer see any good common to all, justice for each becomes
identical with advantage. The only good or justice that prevails is the good or
justice of the stronger. As Plato points out in Book I of The Republic,
far from being a rare phenomenon, this is mankind’s default state.
Hence, among us as well, subjection by force
is replacing conviction by argument. Here too, as contrasting reactions to
events fan antagonisms into consuming flames like a bellows’ blows, victory’s
triumphs and defeat’s agonies’ become the only alternatives
Although understanding our revolution’s logic
tells us nothing about how it will end, keeping it in mind sheds light on what
is happening at any given time.
Our
Revolution
The 2008 financial crisis sparked an
incipient revolution. Previously, Americans dissatisfied with their Progressive
rulers had imagined that voting for Republicans might counter them. But then,
as three-fourths of Americans opposed bailing out big banks with nearly a
trillion dollars, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates joined;
most Republican legislators joined all Democrats; The Wall Street
Journal joined The New York Times, and National
Review joined The Nation; in telling Americans that
doing this was essential, and that their disapproval counted for nothing. And
then, just as high-handedly, all these bipartisan rulers dropped that bailout
scheme, and adopted another—just as unaccountably. They showed “government by
the people, for the people” to be a fable.
This forced the recognition that there exists
a remarkably uniform, bipartisan, Progressive ruling class; that it includes,
most of the bureaucracies of federal and state governments, the judiciary, the
educational establishment, the media, as well as major corporate officials;
that it had separated itself socially, morally, and politically from the rest
of society, whose commanding heights it monopolized; above all that it has
contempt for the rest of America, and that ordinary Americans have no means of
persuading this class of anything, because they don’t count.
As the majority of Americans have become
conscious of the differences between this class and themselves they have sought
ever more passionately to shake it off. That is the ground of our revolution.
Identity
and Power
Our time’s sharp distinction between rulers
and ruled, the ever decreasing interchange and sympathy between them, is rooted
in the disdain for ordinary Americans that the universities have sown since the
Civil War. Ordinary Americans and their rulers are alienated now in ways
unimaginable to the Northerners and Southerners who killed each other a century
and a half ago, but who nodded when Abraham Lincoln noted that they “prayed to
the same God.” Both revered the American founding. Both aspired to the same
family life. Often, opposite sides’ generals were personal friends. And why
not? The schools they attended, the books they read, did not teach them the
others’ inferiority. They were one people. Now, we are no longer one people.
In our time, the most widespread of
differences between rulers and ruled is also the deepest: The ruled go to
church and synagogue. The rulers are militantly irreligious and contemptuous of
those who are not. Progressives since Herbert Croly’s and Woodrow Wilson’s
generation have nursed a superiority complex. They distrust elections because
they think that power should be in expert hands—their own. They believe that
the U.S Constitution gave too much freedom to ordinary Americans and not enough
power to themselves, and that America’s history is one of wrongs. The books
they read pretend to argue scientifically that the rest of Americans are
racist, sexist, maybe fascists, but above all stupid. For them, Americans are
harmful to themselves and to the world, and have no right to self-rule. That is
why our revolution started from a point more advanced in its logic than many
others.
The anti-establishment “wave elections” of
2010 and 2014, in which the Democratic Party lost Congress and control of a
majority of state legislatures, only led America’s Progressive rulers to double
down on their positions of power in the judiciary, the media, corporations,
etc. The Supreme Court struck down a referendum by liberal California
defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The federal Defense of
Marriage Act, which had become law by near-unanimity, was overturned
bureaucratically and judicially. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, on the
books just as firmly, was undone by executive, judicial, bureaucratic, corporate,
and mediatic subordination of religious freedom to anti-discrimination. By the
2016 election, America’s Progressive rulers were demonizing and punishing
persons who define male and female by their birth and personal plumbing. 1984’s
Big Brother had not been so imperious.
The 2016 election’s primaries were all about
the American people’s search for means of de-throning increasingly insufferable
rulers. Even on the Democratic side, many bridled at their self-serving
unaccountability. But since the Democrats are the party of government, it was
clear that protection from and vengeance against the existing power structure
would have to come from the nominal opposition party. Yet the Republicans were
very much part of the problem. That is why 2016’s real struggle took place
within the Republican primaries, the most enduringly significant fact
of which is that Jeb Bush, the candidate most closely identified with the
Progressive ruling class, spent some $150 million and secured only three
convention delegates. Americans in general, and Republicans in particular,
were looking for the polar opposite.
Donald Trump was out of central
casting—seemingly a caricature of what the ruling class said about its
opponents. But the words he spoke were less significant than that he spoke with
angry contempt for the ruling class. That—and the crowded field that never
allowed a head-to-head choice—is what got him the chance to be the alternative
to the ruling class. And that is what got him elected President of the United States.
Those who voted for Trump believing or hoping
that he would do a, b, or c, were fewer than those who were sure that he
offered the only possibility of ending, or at least pausing, the power of an
increasingly harmful, intolerant, disdainful, socio-political identity. In 2016
one set of identities revolted against another. That was the revolution’s first
turn.
“The
Resistance”
The ruling class’s “resistance” to the 2016
election’s outcome was the second turn. Its vehemence, unanimity, coordination,
endurance,and non-consideration of fallback options—the rapidity with which our
revolution’s logic has unfolded—have surprised and dismayed even those of us
who realized that America had abandoned its republican past.
The “resistance” subsequent to the election
surprises, in part, because only as it has unfolded have we learned of its
scope prior to the election. All too simply: the U.S government’s
upper echelons merged politically with the campaign of the Democratic Party’s
establishment wing, and with the media. They aimed to secure the establishment
candidates’ victory and then to nullify the lost election’s results by
resisting the winners’ exercise of legitimate powers, treating them as if they
were illegitimate. The measure of the resistance’s proximate success or failure
would come in the 2018 elections.
Partisan “dirty tricks” are unremarkable. But
when networks within government and those who occupy society’s commanding
heights play them against persons trying to unseat them, they constitute cold
civil war against the voters, even coups d’etat. What can possibly answer such
acts? And then what?
These people, including longstanding
officials of the FBI and CIA, are related to one another intellectually,
morally, professionally, socially, financially, politically, maritally, and
extramaritally. Their activities to stop the anti-establishment candidate, and
president—in this case, Trump—have spanned the public and private realms, and
involved contacts in Britain and Australia. They enjoy The Washington
Post’s, The New York Times’, the Associated Press’s, CBS’,
NBC’s, ABC’s, and CNN’s unquestioning megaphone effect to the rest of the
media.
The Democratic Party’ opposition “research,”
for which the wife of a senior FBI official was partly responsible, was cross-validated
by the FBI and became the substance of a counterintelligence warrant for
surveilling the Trump campaign. After Trump’s victory, the intelligence
agencies’ summits continued their political and socially partisan alliance as
“resistance” against the elected President. Even before inauguration, the Times and
the Post published what the highest intelligence officials
said were the agencies’ conclusion (no evidence, just conclusions) based on
highly classified information, that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal
the election.
When the surveillance and the investigation
turned up nothing, intelligence and Justice Department officials played
peek-a-boo with snatches of classified information behind transparently bogus
claims of national security, and tried to catch him in perjury traps and other
“procedural violations.” With the Media’s help, they created headlines and
hampered Trump from governing. Two years later, the agencies continue to fight
Congress’s demand that the classified bases for the allegations be made public.
The intelligence agencies’ “resistance” has
also meant that the executive aides whose jobs require security
clearances—nearly all do—are hostage to these agencies’ agendas. Even as Trump
was being inaugurated, CIA withdrew the clearance from the official he had
appointed to oversee African affairs at the National Security Council. The
reason? The young man had criticized the Agency. Trump’s accession to the
agencies’ assertion of the power to decide with whom he may or may not speak of
the nation’s secrets radically decreased the number and quality of appointees.
Trump’s similar deference to the Agencies’ classification and selective leaking
of politically sensitive materials has also helped “the resistance.”
The bipartisan ruling class inside and
outside the government have made the “resistance” a “full court press.”
Non-governmental parts of the ruling class
are full partners in the “resistance,” often in partnership with government,
from which they draw money directly or via special treatment, with the support,
of course, of the media. Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center,
the NAACP, and countless other such groups have helped restrict the 2016
election’s effects by an unending stream of lawsuits and “reports,” amplified
by the press, that have intensified attacks on the politically incorrect.
Silicon Valley’s corporate giants played a
large and growing part. Since well before the 2016 election, suppressing
dissent has been at the very top of Progressives’ agenda. Suppression of
dissent is what Political Correctness is all about. The First Amendment and
dedication to freedom of speech’s deep roots in American life have limited its
grip and blunted the ruling class’s efforts to penalize whatever they choose to
call “hate speech.” E.g., one Blake Lemoine, a senior engineers at Google,
discussed with colleagues censoring anything favorable to Tennessee’s
Republican senatorial candidate, Marsha Blackburn because said they, she is a
terrorist. Such talk in such places is as good evidence as any of how broad and
deep is the assault on Americans’ freedom of speech.
Every executive order, every law, every
utterance, occasions obstruction, and obloquy in the strongest terms. Reductio
ad Hitlerum is commonplace. Since the beginning of the Trump
administration, some federal district court judge somewhere has either stayed
or outright declared every action of his and his subordinates unconstitutional,
dictated remedies, and passed that off as the rule of law. Thus do such judges
exercise the powers of the president and Congress. At a minimum, fighting such
obstruction through the appellate courts (panel and then en banc) and then to
the Supreme Court takes months or years.
And since the Supreme Court has been the Left
agendas’ chief legitimizer, holding on to it by any and all means has been a
priority.
Pons
asinorum
The revolutionary import of the ruling class’
abandonment of moral and legal restraint in its effort to reverse election
results cannot be exaggerated. Sensing themselves entitled to power, imagining
themselves identical with legitimacy, “those general laws to which all alike
can look for salvation in adversity“—here the US Constitution and ordinary
civility—are small stuff to them.
Their ruling class’s behavior regarding Judge
Brett Kavanaugh’ nomination to the Supreme Court has been a further, epochal
step in this regard.
No one doubted that the ruling class would
“Bork” Kavanaugh. But the 1986 attacks on Judge Bork had caricatured his ideas,
not slandered the man. The 1991 charges against Clarence Thomas, though untrue,
had involved an accuser who actually had contact with him and hence might
possibly have been true. But it was virtually impossible for the accusations
against Kavanaugh to be true. Their patently insincere manner and substance
advertised their purely slanderous nature.
Those who made them did so knowing that all
alleged witnesses denied knowledge of the event. The the accuser’s closest
friend denied ever hearing of the incident, or of Kavanaugh, which denial the
accuser blew off by a gratuitous reference to the friend’s “health problems.”
To avoid liability for perjury, she repeatedly claimed not to remember any
checkable facts whatever. But at least once, she slipped up. Asked “Have you
ever given tips or advice to somebody who was looking to take a polygraph
test?” she replied: “Never,” despite an eye witness to the contrary. Yet,
Republicans did not dismiss the affair as a hoax.
The anti-Kavanaugh campaign’s power and
significance lies precisely in the ruling class’s perpetration of an
in-your-face hoax. Making someone pretend that your patent lie is true may be
the most humiliating of assertions of power. The ruling class, knowing the
Republicans, dared them publicly to dismantle the fraud: to show the accuser is
an emotionally troubled person, a Democratic Party activist who has worked
for Corcept
Therapeutics, manufacturer of an abortion drug, who engaged in
slander and possibly perjury. In some measure, it looks like Democrats won the
bet. The Republicans absorbed tirades and mobs, while protesting
generically about “politics,” even as Democratic activists were intimidating
them physically at airports, in elevators, chasing them out of restaurants, and
disrupting their private lives.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh endured vilification
and taunts for inability to prove his innocence, even questions about when he
lost his virginity, as if these were legitimate, without giving a judge’s
lessons in law. After he protested the squalid injustice being done to him,
following predictable charges of intemperance, his apologetic op-ed in
the Wall Street Journal kissed his tormentors’ hands.
Apologizing for something of which one should be proud is an establishment
Republican hallmark.
The anti-Kavanaugh campaign did not keep him
off the Supreme Court because, it seems, Republican Senators Jeff
Flake and Susan Collins, who had reasons and constituencies for voting no,
supported him partly out of revulsion for the smear campaign. Very rare!
Kavanaugh’s confirmation was better than
defeat. But it was not a perfect victory for the White House or for the
Republicans. The “resistance” succeeded in showing: if we can do this to this
man on this basis, we can wreck anybody, as may be convenient to us. It showed
Americans what today’s Progressive movement means for those it dislikes: “If
they can do this to him, they could do it to me.” The campaign has been part
and parcel of the resistance’s ever growing violence against the rest of
America. This has changed America. Like lost virginity, it cannot be undone.
The anti-Kavanaugh campaign is but the latest
of the ruling class’s nationwide incitements to intimidation, inconvenience,
and even violence against persons who stand in its way. Violent “protests”
against candidate Trump’s appearance in several cities nearly forced their cancellation
and led the media to blame ….Trump. Conservative speakers on campuses routinely
expect “protests” in which people get hurt. “Protesters” at public figures’
homes mean to show that “the people” will not allow “enemies of the people” to
live normal lives. House majority whip Steve Scalise and his baseball team were
fired upon by someone energized to do just that. This sort of
thing—“demonstrators” attacking the rulers’ opponents—is standard in places
like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Iran.
In 1919, a member of the Russian Duma had
asked: “Comrade, is this just?” Lenin famously answered: “Just? For what
class?” Forty years later, in similar circumstances, Fidel Castro delivered the
dime store version: “Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution,
nothing.” In 2018 our ruling class, in unison, set out to destroy all but the
biological life of a political adversary. It substituted vehement assertion for
truth, cast aside argument, foreclosed questions, celebrated its own deed and
vowed to persist in it. Asked whether what they were doing was right, Senators
Booker and Hirono answered directly—the others did so indirectly—that this
was the right way to proceed with a person whose jurisprudence was so
objectionable. Whether they know whose footsteps they are following matters
little.
What matters a lot is that our ruling class
does not deal and will never again deal with their opponents as fellow
citizens. Theirs was a quintessentially revolutionary act, after which there is
no stepping back.
The “resistance” worked. You may have won the
last election, said the ruling class. But we’re still in charge. Indeed, they
are. And they might stay that way. But human nature ensures that people reply,
and repay. Establishment Republicans were driven to admit that their kind could
no longer buy the Left’s comity. Hence the Wall Street Journal’s
editorial announcing “We’re all deplorables now.” That is the only sense in
which the “resistance” may rue the Kavanaugh saga. That is revolution’s logic.
Rage,
Reciprocated
By dropping all pretense of ruling for the
common good; by presuming that they embody the law (Laws-R-Us); by instituting
various kinds of boycotts (Institutions-R-Us); by using the strongest, most
motivating language toward opponents; by inciting all manner of violence; by
death-gripping their privileges; by using their positions’ powers in government
and social institutions at or beyond their extreme edge; the people who occupy
the government’s and society’s institutions continue to remove whatever
deference the institutions (by the authority of which they rule) had inspired.
They increasingly stand before their opponents, naked. By daring their
opponents to capture these positions in any way possible, and to use them in
the same way, they threw down a gantlet that is now being picked up.
In short, the “resistance” has begun to
radicalize middle America. It redoubled millions of Americans’ sense of siege,
their fear of unbridled rule by unaccountable powers, of being accused of “hate
speech,” of normal life made impossible by Progressive socio-political demands.
It confirmed the sense that Donald Trump and such as he, whatever their faults,
are all that stands between themselves and having an alien way of life imposed
upon them.
The voters who, over four election cycles,
stripped the Democratic Party of the U.S. Presidency, left it in the minority
in both Houses of Congress, without Governors in two-thirds of the States, and
in the minority in two-thirds of the state legislatures did so not out of love
for the Republican Party. They were being insulted and made to feel strangers
in their own country, and wanted that to stop. But elections did not stop the
ruling class’s assaults on their supposed inferiors. Instead, the “resistance”
increased pressures on them. Political correctness is more virulent than ever,
speech is more restricted than ever. Being on the wrong side of the right
people is more dangerous than ever.
2016’s voters expected that their elected
President and Congress would protect them, acting on their behalf with
unrestrained power. But Congressional Republicans mostly joined Democrats, and
Trump complained while mostly complying. Knowing that some good judges are
being appointed raises hopes but does nothing now to protect Americans from what
a host of hostile officials of government, corporations, education, in
league with what the media are doing to whomever steps out of line.
While it is by no means clear how these
voters will respond in 2018 and 20, surely, the “resistance” sharpened in them
the revolutionary logic that dictates repaying outrages with compound interest,
and revived the question that drove the 2016 election: what does it take to
counter all this? Countering the ruling class as it has evolved through the
resistance is the third turn of our revolution’s spiral.
Trump?
If Trump isn’t what it takes, what is? The
very question shows that Trump is neither more nor less than what serves his
constituencies’ desires for protection and payback.
President Trump has found it easier to
proclaim victories over middle America’s enemies than to achieve them. Often,
he has simply protested the bipartisan ruling class’s continued rule while
acquiescing in it, as he did on March 23, 2018 when signing the $1.3 trillion
omnibus bill that continued financing every Progressive group, and increased
funding for all of the ruling class’s priorities; and as he did on September
17, 2017 when he signed the Joint Congressional Resolution that urged all U.S
agencies to combat “hate speech”—and defined it in such a way as to accuse his
supporters of it. On national TV, he confessed that wise men in Washington had
convinced him that his (and his voters’) desire to withdraw from the Afghan war
had been wrong. Having finally decided to declassify documents many of which
the intelligence agencies had given to the Washington Post, he
apparently let them convince him that doing so would harm national security.
While complaining of the Democrats’ slander of Judge Kavanaugh, he led
Republicans in refraining from asking the questions and bringing out the facts
about the accuser that distinguish legitimate complaints from slander.
Trump’s rousing speeches feed the body
politic as empty calories feed the human body. Bluster followed by surrender
has political legs both short and shaky. Trump’s tone has lifted his
constituencies’ expectations. But tone does not give substance to public
opinion, poses but a flimsy barrier to the ruling class’s concerted power, and
does not begin to satisfy constituencies threatened by the ruling class machine
that came of age in the anti-Kavanaugh campaign.
At any rate, what happens in our revolution’s
third turn depends less on what Trump will do than on what millions of people
on all sides will do.
Elections
and Aftermaths
Who will accept losing the next elections?
Odds are that neither the Left nor, now, the Right will accept it. What forms
may such rejections take? We do not speculate on elections’ outcomes, depending
as they do often on factors extraneous to the main issues. Rather, we consider
how each side might react to the possible outcomes.
Were the Democrats to regain a majority in
the House of Representatives in 2018, there is no doubt that they would
redouble the “resistance,” and that a substantial portion of the Senate’s Republican
majority would be friendly to it. That would leave the 2016 electorate’s
defense to Trump—who would be forced to fully deploy Presidential powers in
that task or to abdicate it to whomever would campaign credibly to fully
exercise those powers after the 2020 election. Such leadership having become
necessary—by Trump or whomever—it would carry with it the conservative side of
both Houses into sociopolitical stasis for the next two years. Whether Trump
were the candidate or not, the 2020 elections would bid for a historic national
clarification, and make the 2016 ones appear to have been for low stakes.
Were the Republicans to maintain nominal
control of Congress, the Democrats would have a chance to rethink “resistance,”
and open the door for some kind of moderate settlement. But it is difficult to
imagine the ruling class reversing a course that has been set by how its
character has evolved over a century, renouncing its pretensions and
privileges, and treating the “deplorables” as fellow citizens. Likely,
its pressures on the “deplorables” would continue, as would the Republicans’
failure to deal with them. Such a Republican “victory” would make it likelier
that Trump would be the 2020 candidate. This would add its own level of
uncertainty to the outcome.
Were the Democrats to win the presidency in
2020, even Republican Congressional majorities—made up as they are of
substantial “soft” elements—would be no barrier to an agenda about which no
speculation is necessary. The revolution would flow along classic,
predictable lines.
The consequences would depend on the extent
to which the conservative side of American life rejected that presidency’s and
its agenda’s legitimacy—and on how the ruling class would abide “resistance” to
itself. What would a fully re-empowered ruling class that had tasted the
possibility of dis-empowerment do to preclude anything like that ever happening
again? How would it use the massive power that defines it and by which it
defines itself? How would it marshal corporate power? How would it use the
educational system? To what levels of demonization and repressionwould it
descend? What license would it give to its affiliates to do what, to whom?
Trump had reacted to the post 2016
“resistance”—mainly by Tweets. Were the Left returned to power after 2020, it
would not tweet about resistance—it would crush it, officially and by inciting
unofficial violence. How would the crush-ees react? At what points would
clashes occur? With how much violence? Sooner or later, somebody is going to get
killed. Then what?
Were the Republicans to win in 2020 led by
Trump or by whomever, the revolution’s logic would flow along lines parallel
but different, opening the possibility of ending up in something other than
war. There would be no doubts about brooking delays or major modifications to
the conservatives’ agenda. The difference would lie in that agenda’s character
and on the consequent possibility of a peace. A potential peace might be
obtained based on the sorting out of populations and defusing conflict between
them by means of loosening relations between the states such that these become
looser than existed prior to the Civil War.
Prior to Progressivism, the American
political tradition had not been about imposing any way of life on anyone. The
earliest of our great religious-political controversies was settled in 1636
when Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Rhode
Island. The Mormons, rejected elsewhere, made the desert bloom in Utah. Getting
along by agreeing on the agreeable, agreeing to disagree on the rest, and the
subsequent sorting out of people into compatible groups, is what kept the peace
among a diverse people. The Civil War loomed because Southerners unreasonably
insisted on expanding their “peculiar institution” since they feared—all too
reasonably—that a preponderance of free states would force them to give it up.
In 1861, Lincoln tried to avoid the war by pledging on the North’s behalf not
to transgress on the South. But by then, neither side believed in
self-restraint any more.
Nor does any side in our time truly believe
in and practice self-restraint. For the Progressive side, it is anathema in
principle as well as in practice. The conservatives, among whom the zealot’s
taste for taking the speck out of the neighbor’s eye is not widespread, revere
self-restraint in principle, but are learning to transgress against it in
practice.
Were a conservative to win the 2020
presidential election, dealing with the Progressives’ renewed resistance would
be his administration’s most pressing problem. But had the Left’s resistance
failed utterly during the previous four years, it may be possible to convince
it to switch from its present offensive mode to a defensive one. Were this to
be the happy case, the conservative side of American life, operating from a
dominant position, might be able to obtain agreement to some form of true
federalism.
Unattainable, and gone forever, is the whole
American Republic that had existed for some 200 years after 1776. The people
and the habits of heart and mind that had made it possible are no longer a
majority. Progressives made America a different nation by rejecting those habits
and those traditions. As of today, they would use all their powers to prevent
others from living in the manner of the Republic. But, perhaps, after their
offensive resistance’s failure, they might be reconciled to govern themselves
as they wish in states where they command a majority, while not interfering
with other Americans governing themselves in their way in the states where they
are a majority.
Practical issues aplenty would have to be
settled—e.g. the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and voting. For
some, laws are already on the books (18 USC I/29/611) . Others, involving the
judiciary’s reach, can be dealt with within the Constitution (Art III sec, 2).
Foreign policy is an especially challenging area for any loose federation.
While there is no way to know the things that
will happen, we know all too well why they will happen.
Between the
acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
—William
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I
Angelo Codevilla is a Senior Fellow of the
Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston
University.