There
is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our
conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with
family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and
associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back
and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of
any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the
background like an unchained wild beast:
What has happened—what is happening—to the
geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture?
Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about
everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic
Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is
not?
Millions
of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most
of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push
for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by
illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our
educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.
Each
year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted
automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and
professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our
society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness
which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart,
creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise
can repair.
The
progressives loudly tout their support for “equality” and what they term
“liberation from arbitrary restraints.” They tell us that they are working
against historic “racism and sexism.” But, in actuality, their program turns
real liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in
unrequited passions and desires, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a
pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K.
Chesterton, the definition of actual lunacy.
In
his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929),
Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?’’ He
responds, in part:
“First
and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the
yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and
if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
“The
lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return….
The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much… But the man
who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it
was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of
reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [bolding added]
The
social justice fanatics who demonstrate in the streets, who appear nightly on
our news channels broadcasting the ideological virus they call news, who parade
before a House or Senate committee (or serve on that
committee!), and who indoctrinate gullible and intellectually-abused students
in supposed centers of higher education, are, to use Chesterton’s parable,
lunatics. They are “already outside the world of reason,” and their
unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to
create anything of real and lasting value.
They
partake of a virulent cultural post-Marxism that, despite slogans of “defeating
racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy,’’ and establishing equality,
is ultimately unachievable. Its advocates are, measured by the historical
reality of two millennia of Christian civilization and by the laws of nature,
insane.
They
sloganize about “the fruits of democracy” and “equal rights,” where in some
future utopia “racism” and “sexism’’ will finally be banished….but where, in
fact, the very contrary will exist, where democracy will have become a
totalitarian dystopia a thousand times worse and more oppressive than anything
George Orwell envisioned in his phantasmagoric novel Nineteen Eighty Four.
This
element, this force in our country, which now numbers many millions of
votaries, works feverishly and tirelessly to achieve its objectives. And, as we
have seen, especially since the presidential election of 2016, it will do
anything, use any tactic, including defamation, lawsuits, censorship, even
violence to achieve its ends, to turn back what it perceives even in the
slightest to be “counter-revolutionary.”
The
question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in
republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared
understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it
entering its agonizing death throes?
One
can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history
since the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the
results of that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.
Increasingly,
we live in a country that has become de facto little
more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but
a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with
radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically
differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing
views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever
means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of
equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one
oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own
making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make
Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.
At
the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language.
Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and
frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality,
democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by
those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives
(“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer
effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this
nation.
It
is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable”
conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry,
Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican
types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist
conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the
Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the
establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle
America, for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who
still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see the rest of
us as mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this,
you see, is now “American democracy.”
We
are not supposed to question this arrangement; we are not supposed to get off
the “reservation” assigned to us. That, you see, was the way the “new
oligarchy” would work. But in 2016, in exasperation, we did question it, and we
did so because instinctively we knew that the unelected managerial class—a
cosmopolitan and globalist elite—was far more loyal to its own class and more
concerned about conserving its power and authority. It did not give a damn
about us, despite the endless stream of campaign promises we hear every
election season.
We
understood that the chances of success were minimal, and even if we were
successful—electorally highly unlikely—the establishment and Inside-the-Beltway
elites would ground to dust or coopt any opposition, including even Donald
Trump.
But
the unlikely did occur, and the elites—the media, the entertainment industry,
almost the entirety of academia, the progressivist Democrat Left, and also
those supposed defenders of our interests, “conservatism inc.”—responded with
unleashed and unrestrained anger, contempt and condescension. Those elites feel
threatened by the “natives’’—threatened by those of us on the giant fly-over
plantation between the million dollar mansions surrounded by walls in Silicon
Valley and the paneled million dollar board rooms on Wall Street where the
international globalists gather to plot the future of the world.
No
matter that Donald Trump filled much of his administration with establishment
figures and GOP standbys (especially in foreign policy). The fact of his
election had signaled that the mask of the administrative state, its very
authority had been seriously challenged. And what followed was what can only be
described as a torrent of lies, fabrications, assaults on our character,
attempts to suppress our guaranteed rights of speech and expression, shaming
us, and efforts to destroy our livelihoods or get us fired from our jobs or
dismissed from our schools.
And,
of course, there was the Russia Hoax, involving the Hilary Clinton campaign,
the Democratic National Committee, the Mueller Commission, a compliant media,
and the FBI and other intelligence services, and totally false claims that
somehow the Russians “had interfered” in our elections. In fact, the “Russia
Hoax” was completely political; the Russians were not involved, save for a few
double-agents who were actually working for American/FBI interests. It was a
massive, unparalleled effort not just to bring down the president, but more
significantly, to discredit any opposition to the Deep State establishment’s
control.
There
are then, palpably, two Americas. They still use the same language, but they
are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. Almost weekly
words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension, and those “devil terms”
have become the modern equivalents of linguistic hydrogen bombs deployed by the
progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried has
called a “post-Marxist” praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of
cultural Marxism towards a new and imposed template.
No
dissent from this template is permitted in our society. If it demands you call
black, white; then you must comply, or suffer the consequences. If your eyes
tell you one thing, but the collective media and elites tell you something
else, “who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes”?
For
“conservatism inc.” this state of affairs poses critical problems: the
“movement” is more or less moribund, like a Persian eunuch at court, of little
danger to the harem and of doubtful usefulness otherwise. Its stale ideas are
not attractive to Millennials and offer no practical solutions to the
challenges at hand. Indeed, in too many cases “establishment conservatives” and
their Republican cohorts in Congress only serve to normalize each progressivist
victory. Creative ideas from the Right only come nowadays from what is termed
“the disauthorized Right,” from the nationalist Right (especially in Europe),
and the populist and Old Right (here in the United States).
Some
“movement conservatives” have recognized this. And there has been recent talk
about the “conservative movement” somehow harnessing the newly unleashed
nationalism and populism—witness the recent efforts of Zionist scholar Yoram
Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism,
2018) to incorporate these tendencies into the conservative mainstream. A
national conference on “nationalist conservatism” was held in Washington on July 14-16. But such
attempts are essentially efforts by a “phony right” (as
Paul Gottfried terms it) to once again derail real opposition to
the Progressivist project and maintain control over disparate elements (and
also deflect criticism of Israel, always a bugaboo for the Neoconservatives).
Such
efforts will ultimately fail, just as the creation of a new American
nationalism will flounder, as well. Unlike most European nations which possess
an organic history and common heritage, the United States has traveled too far
down the road of unbridgeable division for a rooted nationalism to be successful.
The disparities and extreme differences are far too great.
It
is time to look elsewhere for solutions.
America in 2019 faces three
possibilities for its future:
(1) Either there must be some large
mass conversion of one side or the other (a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?),
probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression,
disaster; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of
large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including
possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although
increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution
of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war,
followed by a harsh dictatorship. Disorder always abhors a vacuum, and that
vacuum will be filled one way or another.
Given the
present state of this nation, are there any other realistic possibilities?
After all, despite the pious pining of the Neoconservative publicists that
America is the world’s “exceptional” nation, the new Utopia, God did not grant
us national eternity, did not guarantee our future. And our leaders and many of
our citizens have done their damnedest to undo and undermine all those original
hopes and promises.
The
modern American madness, the lunacy—and that is certainly what it is—increases
exponentially, it seems, on a daily basis. There are so many examples of it, it
is so rampant in our society, that our surprise and outrage have become inured:
imagine something incredibly and impossibly awful and crazy…and, lo, it
actually will happen in our insane society.
There
are only a very few things, a few statements by Abraham Lincoln that I can
agree with. One of them is this (1858): “A house divided against itself cannot
stand.”
The time has come; the
moment has arrived for us to discuss not only what is wrong with the country,
but how we actually might resolve the issues that confront us. And just perhaps
the answer is not a new and
necessarily-controlled or imposed faux-nationalism, but some sort
of national separation, hopefully peaceful, that might be the least
disagreeable course. The other options, all of them, bring violence, civil war,
and probably dictatorship. And that is something we must hope to avoid.