Rush Limbaugh yesterday let out the “S” word: secession (see below).
Over the past few years, I have been ruminating on the topic of secession, and worried that we are essentially two different peoples heading toward it. The differences are so profound that for one to rule the public square, the other is suppressed. Our politics have become a matter of conquest as we have become so deeply divided. It’s natural for the conquered to seek separation.
How different are we? Metropolitan areas are enthralled by a relatively recent nanny-state zealotry. Everywhere else, tradition and self-reliance has a stronger grip on imaginations. It’s the difference between pleasure-seeking materialists and your local church, if you want avatars to encapsulate the two sides.
Mayor Muriel Bowser looks out over a Black Lives Matter sign that was painted on a street, during nationwide protests in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 5, 2020. (Khalid Naji-Allah Executive Office of the Mayor/Handout via REUTERS)
We see it more and more, and all around us. During the Trump presidency, Democrat/Lefty strongholds engaged in John C. Calhoun-style nullification of federal immigration law, which Calhoun was an 1830’s harbinger over a federal tariff.
Now, it’s the traditionalists’ turn. Licentious electoral systems in blue states, and metropolitan cores in red-leaning states, have imposed an executive branch with lefty evangelical zeal on the vast stretches outside the blue dots and the coasts. In 1860, George Templeton Strong put it succinctly when he said, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
The simple fact is that the urban cores and urban-core dominated states has adopted an aggressive leftism in recent years. They have moved extreme left while the rest of the country has remained more true to our founding beliefs and traditions. This could be a secession sparked by a militant collectivism in like manner as the adoption of a grand theory in defense of race-based chattel slavery in the South in the middle of the 19th century would incite the first go-around. In opposition, the abolitionists were the inheritors of an emancipation that is traced back through Christianity to classical times.
Modern urban bohemiansBlue collar Americans
I am worried. The fundamentals are present for a repeat. Indeed, if wiser heads don’t stop the leftward lurch, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
South Floridians stood in long lines Sunday during the last day of early voting in Miami, Oct. 31, 2020. (photo: Alan Diaz/AP)
The direct answer to the question is “no”, but it’s what we’re stuck with. All the other governance choices are even more dangerously spurious. Autocracy, aristocracy, and oligarchy take the powers of a mob and put them in the hands of one or a few egos. Still, to admit that a broad franchise is the only remaining sensible option is a far cry from it filling the role of the holy grail. Our world is flawed and so are the people in it. All we can say with certainty after an election is that one candidate was first past the post, that one person got more of the little pieces of paper than the others. Any attempt to tease out of the result something more significant is a recourse to divination. You know, like trying to uncover the will of the gods from haruspicy (inspection of animal entrails) or ornithomancy (interpretation of bird actions).
This man in Rhumsiki, Cameroon, attempts to tell the future by interpreting the changes in position of various objects as caused by a freshwater crab through the practice of nggàm. Does he have better accuracy than our pollsters?
It looks like Biden is our president for the next four years. What does it mean? It’s simple: Biden got more of the little pieces of paper than the other guy. That’s it! It was just as true in 2016 as it is today.
The possible reasons for an electoral outcome are as numerous as the number of hair follicles on a silverback ape. Back in 2016, Trump got more of the slips in key states than Hillary, but was it mostly because a sufficient bulk of voters in those places didn’t like Hillary or was it due to love for the orange man? Was it an outrage vote against suffocating political correctness? Was it a rebellion of the middle of the income spectrum without college degrees? Was it a cry from flyover country? Was it an uprising against halfwit elites awash in money, influence, social status, and discreditable educations from Ivy League schools? Was it because the other side was simply caught off guard? Can’t say, but that won’t stop the crystal ball gazers at Fox News and the leftist cabal at MSNBC/CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC/WaPo/NYT/Newsweek/Time /Slate/Politico. There’s no shortage of seers (pundits, talking heads) when dollars-for-mouth is dangled before some with past or present clout. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace speaks to John McCain 2008 campaign strategist Steve Schmidt.
2020 offered some intriguing results. Biden pulled out a squeaker. But how? Let’s start with a few things that are objectively true. First, we are in the midst of a virus-panic. The hysteria contorted nearly everything from livelihoods to educating the young to Thanksgiving to elections to romance. How can anyone get a date while marring the face with the look of a bank robber? It’s hard to even get started with a stranger when eyes meet but the rest is a mystery. As for the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas are to be relegated to computer screens. Ugh!
Back to elections, they were deformed by throwing caution to the wind, just what Democrats have been trying to achieve for decades. For them, many deep blue jurisdictions functioning as one-party states tossed ballots to every addressee on the voter rolls. Please, if you will, compare that to going to the old tried-and-true voting booth. The ballot is accounted from poll worker to voter to the secrecy of the booth to the observed placement of the ballot in the box in front of the poll worker. Surely, chicanery is still possible but it becomes viral in massive vote-by-mail schemes when ballots are thrown about like supermarket ads into mail boxes or on the ground next to them. The only real stopgap for integrity is the Boy Scout oath. Ugh!
Check out this scenario: party activist is alerted to the date of the mailing, is assigned a voter registrar list to visit addresses, helps persons answering the door to fill it out, assists them in getting a replacement if they threw the thing out with the supermarket ads, helps those delinquents in filling it out, and reaps the ballots from any leftovers, and all the while getting paid for it. Some of this is illegal, but how can you prove it? It all happened before anyone was alerted and ends up in the vote count. And then it’s off to the microphones after the things have been counted to admit the presence of fraud but claim it’s inconsequential. The reliance on the moral integrity of political activists is a sorry basis for an election system.
Secondly, all the pieces of paper are treated equal by the counters, as they should be. But are they in reality? Do they truly reflect an equal mental comportment for voting? Some people don’t care. Some people don’t care enough to devote the mental energy to be informed, or even vote if left to themselves. An election might be reduced to the success either side experiences in galvanizing the non-informed and uncaring. Under these auspices, an election is a race to collect pieces of paper from both sides’ dunces.
Where’s the buy-in on the part of voter? I don’t think it’s asking too much of the citizen to sacrifice a portion of their lunch hour to fulfill their chief civic responsibility. It says much about you if you’ll only do your duty if the ballot is delivered to you, someone helps you fill it out, get it to the registrar, or worse, bribes you into voting with holidays, free rides, and free lunches. Still, that vote from a blank slate has the same weight as the one from a person who understands that a ban on fracking will destroy their livelihoods and children’s future while doing nothing to mitigate “climate change”.
Democrats are the main instigators of a loosey-goosey election system. COVID gave them the prime opportunity to saddle us with choices of their multitudinous uncaring and ill-informed.
True, both sides have ample minions in the dunce category, but ample doesn’t mean equal. The Democrats seem to incorporate a bumper crop of dolts who are all-too-willing to believe in bunkum. The absurdities aren’t limited to the person who can’t break away from The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Profound inanities proliferate from Democrat head honchos on down. The vagina-head protests at the time of Trump’s inauguration – a good sample of the D base – were populated with people who are now ecstatic about the head grifter of a family of grifters with a creepy personal history ascending to power. Pelosi, Biden, and the rest of the big cheeses are alright with sovietizing healthcare, as if bankrupting the nation will make it all better. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning no matter how you shake it. The destruction of the livelihoods of millions will come at no change in Climate Change since the two biggest CO2 polluters don’t hone their policies to the wishes of the Sierra Club and are too ecstatic about leaving the stone age. The Dem’s bastardization of the confirmation process is now legendary after they tried to conduct a lynch party on Kavanaugh on the basis of nothing more than the baseless and raw accusation of single person, a person without evidence and littered with contradictions. The Senate hearing room and the mob in the street – the Democrat base in full view – were enflamed with the slander. Speaking of dunces, who else but a dunce could believe this bunk? The rabid D base could.
Women’s March, Washington, DC, Jan. 21, 2017.
And I haven’t mentioned the bilge that came to be known as “collusion” and an impeachment that was solely based on a singular phone call in the president’s exercise of foreign policy. A request for assistance in an American investigation on the grifting habits of the Biden family was turned into coup against the 2016 election. The manner in which the conversation made its way to the wolves in the Dem leadership in Congress speaks volumes. As it turns out, the “whistleblower” was an Obama leftover partisan hack in the bowels of the NSA. From there, the salivating wolves running Congress ran wild with impeachment at a time when a dangerous virus was insinuating itself into the country.
Collusion like impeachment was pure hooey, as Mueller had to reluctantly conclude. The only proven collusion turned out to be an unwitting (or witting) kind between Hillary/DNC and a partisan zealot and a sometime Russian intelligence operative, which ended up in the form of a smear known as the “dossier”, and then to the wolf pack. Who could believe this stuff? Dunces could, especially if clouded by untrammeled hatred and a lust for power. This disreputable cast of characters made up the “loyal opposition” in 2020. Biden was only a surfer riding the wave.
Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, July 2019. (CSPAN)
Interestingly, Trump’s earlier request to the Ukrainian president unexpectedly gained additional legs in the week before this November election. By then, though, it was too little, too late. The scandal known as “early voting” – a month or earlier – became standard and the Dems exploited it to the hilt. The non-voting tendencies of their demographic base could be corrected by the mailed ballot and ballot harvesting. They already had millions in the bank before the good news about the vaccine, the recovering economy, and Tony Bobulinski’s revelations of Biden and his family’s time-honored tradition of peddling influence to become millionaires and maybe next door neighbors to the Obamas with a Martha’s Vineyard estate of their own. The party of big government is self-interested in it becoming bigger because it will make millionaires of them all. Grifting is a profession for this clan.
Joe Biden (middle), his son Hunter and his sister Valerie Biden Owens in 2016. Recent attacks on the former vice president pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son during the Obama administration. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)
The picture of the 2020 election is more complicated than the elevation of an incontinent grifter to the presidency. The Republican down ballot did slightly better than the top of the ticket. The Republicans are in a stronger position to flood the zone with proposals to restore integrity to our elections. Voter ID, putting an end to early voting, reducing the prevalence of mail-in voting, establishing stronger federal standards in federal elections, and instituting criminal penalties for public officials who violate those official norms are some ideas that should make their way into bills. Let the Democrats play their “suppressing the vote” gambit. These measures poll well. Republicans, get on with it and make some hay.
With Republican successes down ballot, what is the “voice” of the people? Some voters believe this, some believe that, and some are just morons. The last category might be more numerous because it includes the folks who believe in things that aren’t true. Progressivism and socialism are plagued with things that aren’t true. These two related worldviews have a head start in the fantasy department. How many voters are firmly entrenched in them? My guess is that there are many. So, the “voice” of the people is a cacophony with a healthy dollop of the farcical.
Wayne County (Detroit) poll worker covers the windows after poll watchers were evicted on November 3, 2020.
Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election boards to segregate late-arriving ballots. The order is important to be sure, but there are two kinds of possible corruption in this virus paranoia-stoked election: misbehavior in the processing of the ballots and the abuse in the production of them. Alito’s order deals with the former.
Right now, we are in the processing phase and, rightly, much attention is focused on the much rumored, historical, and serious irregularities in Democrat one-party fiefdoms. Yet, let’s not forget the altered system that produced the ballots, delivered them, set the conditions for which they were marked, and played footsie with the deadlines for their arrival for processing. It’s the production side of the equation wherein lies the greatest difficulty to prove widespread criminal abuse, beyond what has been dismissed as just anecdote, but which naturally draws into question the legitimacy of elections. The biggest threat to our democracy (actually, citizen republic) is the Democrats’ long-held desire to conduct monkey business with the franchise.
The setup before the ballots get to the counters makes it possible for all the other suspicious activity in processing them. That setup was due to COVID, which was the expedient to turn our elections into a Third World affair. The virus has been exploited to mutilate our way of life. The COVID panic was used to repeal the First Amendment – unless you’re going to march in the streets for a neo-Marxist revolution, erase our history, loot, pillage, and burn – construct authoritarian regimes in the states, and dismantle livelihoods. The COVID scare was used to destroy the education of our children, social life, and our self-concept as we move about disguised in masks. Children will grow up knowing people only from the cheek bones up. Now the ginned-up madness has tainted the foundational element of a citizen republic, the vote. Among those other things, COVID became the pretext to construct a Rube Goldberg election system; one mostly designed by Democrats to cook up Democrat victories.
Election challengers watch poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit, Nov. 3, 2020.
Are elections in the COVID and post-COVID era to be limited to rubber stamping Left/Democrat proclivities? The collectivism gang distorted our established ways while Republicans tried to put a break on Democrat designs with ballot integrity measures, to no avail in the era of the COVID panic-as-excuse. The Democrat dream of expanding the franchise to include the living and the dead, the non-citizen and citizen, the uninterested and grossly ill- or non-informed, and the ineligible and eligible was made real.
In many states, particularly blue ones, ballots were sent hither and yon by mail using voter rolls dirtied with many who cannot legally vote and those who would not if left alone. Where did the ballots go? They went to an address to then be marked by God-knows-who. A kind of cattle roundup in the form of ballot harvesting was authorized by the usual suspects to milk every last vote out of the uninterested, ill- or non-informed, living or dead, and ineligible and eligible.
Ballot harvesting.
What was happening behind the closed doors of those addresses? Who and how were the ballots filled out? I don’t know, you don’t know, they don’t know, which now elicits healthy suspicions that the entire process is a sham.
Then deadlines became meaningless, all in order to keep the ballot boxes open so they could be later stuffed to produce the Democrats’ preferred result. Another healthy suspicion. This jerry-rigged system encourages such misgivings. Is this what is meant by the risible chant “count very vote”? Pardon me, after this contrived and mockery of a system, for having my doubts about the results. Reagan said it best, “Trust but verify”. He said it in reference to the Soviet general secretary; many of us are saying it to the people of a party with many similar beliefs.
If Trump loses, nonetheless, Trump will have pulled the makeshift bandage off a fetid wound. He brought out of the interstices all the harmful bacteria that are present in the open wound of our modern politics and system of government. Thanks to a dossier, Mueller, and a coup that was disguised as impeachment, we now know of the existence of the dark influence of a new, pernicious, and burgeoning social class: an American nomenklatura. Sometimes referred to as the deep state, it’s an interweaved and integrated social class of government-associated non-profits and government workers, both appointed from the world of DC and ensconced in the civil service.
The nomenklatura
They have allies in the culture in the Democratic Party, Big Media, corporate boardrooms, the uber-rich, people with haute couture pedigrees and pseudo-prestigious degrees from our campuses-turned-indoctrination centers. It’s a vile socio-political ecosystem that Trump has exposed by his presence and persona.
Out of this milieu came the 2020 election. Biden is the quintessential creature of it. He might ride into office on a river of this socio-political slime. These next four years might be very interesting ones.
Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump bang on the glass and chant slogans outside the room where absentee ballots for the 2020 general election are being counted at TCF Center on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)
If Biden wins, he will earn the rap “Your Fraudulency”. The virus has given us more than 200,000 dead. It’s now the go-to excuse for conducting an election that appears to be eerily reminiscent of those in a post-Soviet republic. Massive mail-in voting is, on its face, highly dubious. The blanketing of many urban-dominated states (overwhelmingly blue) with mail-in ballots is an invitation to fraud in states with a history of it. Accounts are trickling in of the dead voting and out-of-staters and non-citizens mysteriously showing up in the vote count. Poll watchers were evicted from the counting (see below), something stipulated in law, ostensibly due to COVID-induced paranoia about “overcrowding”.
And the post-election vote counts in these deep blue, historically corrupt Democrat one-party jurisdictions all blows one way: to the D’s. As they say in politico-speak, the “optics” aren’t good, and neither is the legitimacy. Will Biden be declared the winner by a rankly partisan media, and truly accepted by the public, in an election with as many credibility holes as a block of Swiss cheese?
What’s next for the aggrieved? Frankly, options are few. Potentially illegal votes will disappear like a rain drop in a pool. Segregating them will be impossible once they are counted. The wrangling over the 2000 election brought to light the realization that a do-over isn’t likely because the courts are as reluctant to get involved as a child is in eating his spinach.
Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, November 24, 2000. (Photo by RHONA WISE / AFP)
The Constitution stipulates the process for choosing the president and leaves management of the election process to the states. If the state turns a blind eye to chicanery, there’s little recourse, especially if the process is as opaque as Trump initially wanted his wall to be.
Court challenges might have legs if the shenanigens clearly violate other Constitutional provisions, as in 2000 when the Gore team violated equal protection in trying to cherry-pick selected Florida counties for recounts. A case could be made here, but it’ll have to overcome extreme judicial hesitancy.
The state legislature could be called into session to block the caper in a legal action, but it will be late to the party and, as of this writing, there seems to be little life at the state capitol. No doubt, the Constitution establishes the state legislature as the election nanny. Still, it would be too little, too late.
Sadly, election fraud has proven to be the the most unenforced crime on the books. There are no finger prints and the smoking gun is so dispersed as to be unrecognizable, and the jury-rigged system of throwing ballots hither and yon in the mail invites suspicions. In response, the public may be limited to the Constitutional right of association. The election lacks legitimacy, so show up at Your Fraudulency’s inaugural in droves and express your disapproval.
Wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, Vice President Joe Biden visits a mall in Las Vegas with senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto. (AP Photo)
Don’t worry about being accused of mimicking the 2016 vagina-heads. They had no case. They just didn’t like the result. This one has the pungent stink of fraud all over it.
We are stuck in a rut. We are mired in a blockheaded assumption that there are few if any continuities in human experience. We are tacitly and openly told that we can make ourselves anew according to each passing era’s intellectual, cultural, and technological superficialities. After all, individuals, we are told, are blank slates to be inscribed with whatever lies about in a person’s social environment and/or can be pushed into the mind by media and the diktats of the schools. Therein lies the heart of progressivism, and its monstrous crusades to make people conform to fleeting fads of thought. The way is made wide open to endlessly fiddle with people and their personal arrangements, as in the silly-but-menacing Green New Deal.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 14: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hold a news conference to introduce legislation to transform public housing as part of their Green New Deal proposal outside the U.S. Capitol November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. The liberal legislators invited affordable housing advocates and climate change activists to join them for the announcement. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As a high school American History teacher, an entire chapter in the textbook was devoted to the “living Constitution”. It’s the idea that condones the boundless busybody government so beloved by progressives and their intellectual cousins, the socialists. However, it’s a complete refutation of the common thread throughout time of the thing that resides in all of us: human nature. This generic quality is the primary and permanent thing in the wirings of Aristotle to Adams to your Sunday morning sermon. Today is a constant war against the sage wisdom of our cultural legacy.
Norma McCorvey (right) – the “Roe” in Roe v. Wade – and lawyer Gloria Allred in 1989. The SCOTUS decision in 1973 was classic “living Constitution”. (File Photo / The Associated Press))
The confrontation plays out in our elections. Elections are the means to an end for our progressive brethren. Instead of elections being a neutral process to gauge the voice of the people, they are seen by today’s progressives as something to be manipulated to achieve the desired end, and then they drag the rest of us into their ends-justifies-the-means hell. Herein lies their predisposition to cheat by flaunting and surreptitiously breaking the rules. The 2020 election elucidates this lesson, and many, many more. Here’s a few others.
First, as it seems now, the Republicans will never win a close election. The predilection of progressives to win at all costs leads to legal and illegal abuse of the vote. Massive mail-in voting is scandalous, period. The progressive resistance to the simplest measures to protect ballot integrity is shameful in the extreme. The system is tailor-made for cheating.
The amount of cheating is hard to determine at this point. But we do know what happens when the protections of a police force are pulled back. Look no further than Minneapolis, Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ, Portland’s mean streets, New York City, Chicago, Kenosha, nearly anywhere a large concentration of people reside. What gets rewarded with no fear of consequence gets repeated. Ditto for election fraud when guarantees for election integrity are replaced by the equivalent of the Boy Scout oath as the sole stop for malevolence that lies in some hearts.
Protesters gather in front of a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, A police precinct in Minnesota went up in flames late on May 28. (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)
Second, stop early voting and tighten the qualifications for mail-in voting. Even in a pandemic, we must return to in-person balloting on a set day. Any mail-in ballots can only be allowed within a predetermined window of no more than 5 days before the election and certainly not after. Early voting means that a voter acts before all the information before the election has been presented. The Democrats were harvesting some ballots before the public got an inner glimpse into the seamy world of the Biden family. Some people may have voted for a man who might face impeachment and criminal prosecution.
Third, ad hominem and failure to articulate a policy rationale can be serious problems in a chief executive. Have I accurately described a significant part of the Trump persona? The approach may appeal to a fixed slice of the electorate but has little capacity to reach out beyond that cocoon. Results are definitely important but weren’t sufficient to overcome a wildly permissive election system and a portion of the public who couldn’t take the absence of a generous spirit. Much of this was baked into cake by Trump. It was euphemistically referred to as being Trumpy.
Being Trumpy for four years meant that he failed at expanding his base to compensate for the rabid opposition. Results were enough for some among the hesitant but an energized Left with its mobs, fellow travelers, and money – and there was much of that from the Left’s growing billionaire class – and those of the center-right who were put off by his manners made a solid mass of irreconcilables and an uphill climb. The virus was another one of those things that fell into a preexisting vortex. Trump is a two-edged sword of combativeness against the swamp and crudity. The persona has a niche audience.
Fourth, the Republican Party is now a working-class party. Nationalism, patriotism, economic growth, and opposition to the “woke” thought police are now the party’s watchwords. Our elites from the boardroom to the faculty lounge are lost, but it’s no great loss since they are numerically insignificant and already held in such great disrepute. The party must assiduously plow those demographic fields that knows no specific ethnic, race, or gender attribute.
Trump supporters at a campaign even in Fort Dodge, Iowa, November 12, 2015. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Fifth, the great divide in our politics is no longer liberal/conservative. The catalyst for what divides us is culture. We are two different peoples irreconcilably separated by fundamental beliefs and ways of life. More accurately, liberal/conservative has been supplanted by tradition/avant-garde. The geographic complexion of the dichotomy is rural/urban or city/countryside, an age-old split.
Traditional notions of family and faith are more readily and publicly defended outside the metropolis, boardroom, and faculty lounge. The traditions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, grace, and fidelity have an appeal beyond the frivolous categories of race, ethnicity, or gender. Therein lies tradition’s appeal to certain demographic segments nationwide, but the bastion is in the countryside.
This last lesson on our current state of affairs is fraught with the most danger. Culture defines us. Assaults on it and its related livelihoods will elicit strong reactions. Many nations, including ours, have been through this before. It isn’t pretty, and frequently bloody.
As long as the city continues the movement to separate itself from the rest of the country – and, indeed, it’s the city with its avant-garde reflex that is the engine of the separation – the country will be on the cusp of a fight, both physical and rhetorical. Be prepared for dark times despite the empty calls for unity, empathy, and accommodation in the election’s aftermath. The reality on the ground and the machinations in our institutions won’t match the speechifying words. Are we truly irreconcilable? We’ll soon see.
USA. Erie. 3th November. Inside the Courthouse opening mailed votes.
“Beyond the margin of fraud” is a cliché but one more true today than ever. Let me be perfectly frank in saying that, in order to limit the “margin”, not every vote should count nor should every potential voter vote. It’s stupendously ridiculous to claim otherwise.
I am one with Andrew C. McCarthy on this in his piece on National Review online. The Supreme Court muddied the waters in a recent 4-4 vote in allowing the Pennsylvania Court to rewrite its election laws but SCOTUS ordered any affected ballots to be held in abeyance till a final determination. This election won’t stop in SCOTUS. Think of the whole range of state and federal courts that’ll have a say on this monstrous flub of an election before we can put “finis” on it. Even then, the final vote will have the lingering smell of a septic tank.
How did we get here? And no, you can’t blame the virus. We can lay fault with the fact that we have forgotten the sole purpose of elections: to register the voice of the people. But how do we know that the tally reflects the “voice”? We don’t, and that’s because of the Democratic Party harangues to “count every vote” while they engage in a full frontal assault on ballot integrity.
The virus has a role . . . as an excuse, a pretext for Castro-style plebiscites. Mail-in voting has always been scandalous since it destroys the secret ballot and no-one knows what happens behind the closed doors of an address. Now we’ve put the gambit on meth. Obstacles in attempts to match signatures, screams of horror against voter ID, and the demand to count everything no matter how mangled underscore the Democrats’ fixation on the need to pile up the pieces of paper as their route to power. At the end of the day, though, did we have an election or merely a greasy slide to power?
Where’s the “voice”? Is it the “voice” of the profoundly uninterested and ignorant? Is it the “voice” of ballot harvesters? Is it the “voice” of the ineligible? No doubt, invalid votes cancel valid ones. So, we have an election that will satisfy few and has a stink rising from it.
Thank you Democrats for ruining a once good thing. In your zeal for power, you’ll only have made your opponents apoplectic. This election will have produced two types of winners: the kind who won in spite of the fraud and those who won with it. For those who rode the current of pungent malfeasance to office, they could be rightly referred to as “your fraudulency”, with no more validity than that.
Will half the country accept a corrupted tally? I kind of doubt it. The Democrats are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Here’s an interesting question: What happens when elections lose their integrity? Elections have often been referred to as peaceful revolutions. The peaceful part is only possible if they are popularly accepted as credible. If the process lacks credibility, forget about the “peaceful” kind. Opposition will be left with no recourse but the violent other type.
The Democrats are playing with fire and an end to civility.
Empty envelopes of opened vote-by-mail ballots. (Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images)
** Note: This was written on the day of the Nov. 3 election.
On the eve of the American Revolution, the cantankerous John Adams wrote, “The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty [sic].” Adams’s faith in virtue as the corrective for our personal failings and weaknesses was as sorely tested in his time as it is in ours. He warned his fellow countrymen of excursions into wistful utopianism like the kind that was engorging revolutionary France. He wrote that a proper political order was “an attempt to place Government upon the only Philosophy which can support it, the real constitution of human nature, not upon any wild Visions of its perfectibility [sic]”.
John Adams, 1788
Combine the two comments and you have a dire warning on the current state of affairs in our country. Virtue is in rapid decline alongside an unacknowledged acceptance of the utopianism of human perfectibility.
Giving momentum to these troubling trends is the ingestion of raw majoritarianism by one of the two great political parties, the Democratic Party. I cringe when I hear Pelosi, Schumer, the Squad, and any of the other notable lights who grab a microphone to announce their fealty to “protect our democracy”. Reporters and the public let it slip without comment. What do they mean by “democracy”? For them, it’s raw majoritarianism. Everything for them boils down to 50%+1 of the little pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin.
Democrats today can only see human betterment being achieved under the auspices of an expansive state. Irony of all ironies, Antifa – or Anti-fascists – are pro-fascist in their basic assumptions. They and their kissing cousins in the base and leadership of the Democratic Party would find little disagreement with Mussolini’s famous and pithy dictum, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” – if they only knew, which they don’t.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, 1930.
Under cover of “civil rights” and their rank notions of equality – meaning equality of outcome – nothing will be allowed to escape the purview of the state. For them, gun ownership is highly suspect and placed under heightened state supervision. Bible-based Christianity and its adherents will be policed for their beliefs and practices. A form of mob intimidation will be unleashed on anyone not courting the ruling party’s line with the connivance of Big Tech and Big Media. The central planning of environmentalism will cover all economic and social activity, governing where we live and how we live. The state will entice more young people into extending their stay in educational mediocrity with “free” college – meaning the national debt and the taxpayer will be larded with the bill. Medicare for All, or whatever they end up calling it, will turn an industry into a branch of the federal government. The remaining rump of the healthcare private sector, if one is allowed to survive, will atrophy into nothingness and single-payer. The financial angle for the bread and circuses will be hiked tax rates and new tax schemes that reflect the poisonous gruel of identity politics. Those targeted with propping up the bloated edifice with ever-larger extractions from their earnings will gradually, if not immediately, flee for safer environs. Welcome to “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” . . . and burgeoning Swiss and Barbados bank accounts.
The Democrats’ zeal for state-sponsored utopia will push the country into a way of life increasingly mediated by politics. The more the state does, the more is decided by politics. And politics, as it is deeply embedded in the Democrats’ brain stem, is a cacophony of avaricious interests and officially-endorsed grievance groups. Politics becomes the jockeying for the biggest slice of the federal budget among the Party’s litany of constituent groups. There is no market for much of anything, only orchestrated pressure campaigns, a growing army of influence peddlers, and crafty wheeling and dealing in the murky world of the revolving door of lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats. Disappearing from the public square is personal volition in the provision and consumption of goods and services as more and more of life is opaquely triaged through DC politics.
All the Democrats need is the sanction of 50%+1 of those pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin. After the initial electoral success, they’ll move to permanently warp our Constitutional order to the benefit of their urban political machines which will give them a lock on power for decades. A toothless Supreme Court after court packing, the permanent addition of 4 new Democrat senators, the impotence of the Congressional minority after the euthanization of the filibuster, and the neutering of the Electoral College by extra-Constitutional means does the trick without having to deal with those “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” between the coasts and outside the cities. The question is, can this be done before any blowback in the next midterms? My guess: maybe not all, but much permanent damage will have been accomplished.
So, suburban moms don’t like Trump and in so doing may tilt the electorate into choosing the release into the henhouse of the wolves of socialism and perpetual metropolitan rule. I suppose this is what you get when raw majoritarianism is the arbiter of all matters public and private.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as, from left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – The Squad – listen during a news conference last year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Public discourse in the public square is dead and sensible deliberation in our institutions is gone. Increasingly our thoughts and speech are hyperbolic. Dramatic audio-visuals in the form of net-connected material such as podcasts and the full range of social media have replaced quiet contemplation and scholarship. Since the schools are mostly absent at the switch, people have little to rely on to mediate what they’re seeing and hearing. And when a extremist ideology comes to dominate one of our major parties, we have all the makings for a catastrophic rift.
See below.
Cultural antecedents are at the root. These antecedents differ by geography. Tradition has a higher survival rate outside the big cities, corporate boardrooms, big media centers, and the classroom. Inside those nuclei, it’s a worldview wedded to hedonistic collectivism. It’s not that metropolitan elites, and those who aspire to be, are hedonists. Their life pattern is typically traditional in marriage and family formation; but it’s what’s in their heads that makes all the difference: hedonistic collectivism. They near-homogenously vote that way. Meaning, they vote left.
The Democratic Party has become the epicenter of this urban belief system. As such, the Party has moved radically left and is essentially an urban phenomena. The belief system is baked in the cake of urban politics, and, by the way, is disseminated to the kids everywhere, but particularly to those in the inter-connected, cell phone world of exurbia-to-core. What we have is an isolated Party that has moved so far left that an uber-liberal like Pelosi is now mainstream. This is not a Party conducive to Truman or JFK any longer.
The Republican Party is essentially where it was since Calvin Coolidge, with only slight deviations. This is expected of a Party more compatible with our philosophical legacy. Key is the understanding of fixed standards going back to the ancient nexus of Jerusalem-Athens.
Therefore, the current political battle lines are Jerusalem-Athens vs. hedonistic collectivism. In Constitution-speak, it’s the real Constitution vs. a “living” one. In the hands of the Left, the rule of law becomes the rule of men but sold as the rule of law.
So, the rift isn’t due to a movement of both parties from each other. It’s a product of the big shift of the Democratic Party to the left, which means a fuller embrace of hedonistic collectivism. Combined with their political throw weight in densely packed urban areas, they can, if they marshal their critical masses, outvote everywhere else. Thus, their worldview has the potential to be imposed throughout the land. 2020 offers their best chance ever.
Is the rest of the country ready for the central planning of The Green New Deal (even if modified), centralized and massive gun registration and confiscation, invasions into the pulpit to force alignment with the left’s ethos, carte-blanche to abortion, toothless law enforcement, promiscuous nationwide lockdowns, forced acceptance of transgenderism in all manner of social interaction, the ongoing seeding of leftist ideology in the schools, and the radical restructuring of our Constitutional order to permanently empower the cities and their political machines? I don’t know, but we might be getting ready to have a taste.
My guess is that the rest of the country won’t sit idly by. They won’t wait for the next Congressional bi-elections to right the ship. Anyway, Congress has allowed itself to be turned into a glorified debating society as executive powers have filled the void. Obama proved that you don’t need legislation when you’ve got your phone and pen. An urban-dominated federal government will have tradition-minded areas up against a wall with no escape. The only recourse for those traditionally minded will be extensive civil disobedience and resistance – sadly, some of it will be armed. When you back a person into a corner, things go badly and quickly.
As a teacher in the public schools, I’ve seen this many times. Buckle up for a wild ride. It won’t matter if a new Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress appear to modify their rough edges and compromise. You have to remember that it’s a compromise from the position of the radical left, democrat-socialists in power. In the end, the system still moves left, just at a slightly slower pace – especially after they rigged the system of government through court-packing, defanging the minority after the loss of the filibuster, made the Electoral College an irrelevancy, and cowed the Supreme Court with vicious attacks.
Sanctuary cities point the way in showing that a resistance can thumb their noses at a clear federal authority and get away with it. Likewise, traditionally-minded areas could just as easily follow the same script. Only in this case, these people are more likely to believe in the private ownership of firearms and the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment as a hedge against tyrannical government.
I’m not endorsing this possible outcome. I’m forecasting it. I hope, I hope that I’m wrong.
The outcome of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tx., 1993. Our current flashpoints for violence will occur with groups already sensitive to federal government impositions.
In case you haven’t seen it, here is the clip of the woman who was tasered and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s football game.
A couple of immediate observations are in order. (1) Is outdoor mask wearing under the condition of social distancing efficacious? I have very good reason to doubt it. If irrelevant, the rule is madness and its enforcement to the extent of tasering and cuffing is dastardly. (2) The mild reaction of bystanders is deeply disturbing. The mindless compliance with probable stupidity and meekness while viewing the manhandling of a person is astounding. Something deep has happened to us, our leaders and us. Troubling, very troubling.
Across the country, we are experiencing despotism from state executives on down – the federal component being more restrained. Mostly, these encounters occur in “blue” jurisdictions even though the municipality might be in a “red” state. This says volumes about a common political DNA between progressive (Left-leaning) governments and the smothering of popular common sense. We are into the 9th month of the pandemic and many nations and would-be despots in our country are threatening to reimpose their totalitarian edicts as if they have learned nothing since January.
Either science has stood still or our rulers are blockheads. My money is on the latter.
Lockdowns, or versions of them, are much talked about, despite the ineffectiveness of the first go-around as evidenced by the resurgence of the virus in various locales. Universal mask-wearing is commanded, even outdoors, in spite of the absence of evidence of the bug’s spread in the open air in dispersed situations. Incidentally, the fear spread to the almost 7,000-ft. Logan Pass trail in Glacier National Park (Aug. 2020). The sight of people masking-up is shocking to me to this day for what is says about us as a people.
Schools are shuttered in many districts – and the mass of 4th graders remaining 4th graders into their 5th-grade year – without any evidence after 9 months of the bug’s spread among children and to adults. Astounding.
Whoever said it was spot-on (and it probably wasn’t Einstein): “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Repeating ineffective earlier actions may reflect the quixotic and paralyzing belief in no-risk. Combined with progressivism’s despotism streak, we have a population willing to stand by as a person displays more common sense than the people who are tasering and cuffing her. Astounding, absolutely astounding.
BOSTON, MA – OCTOBER 01: New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a rally calling on Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to reject Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court on October 1, 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
The thought plagues me. Are the American people so unwitting that they are willing to let into power a cultural entity so inimical to human flourishing? Is this “wisdom”, as in the “wisdom of the American people”? The congery is nothing but a patronizing and trite slapstick mouthed by grasping aspirants of power and worth about as much.
Democracy, after all, is just a game of voting and counting them up. As in a game of baseball (when the coaches and players aren’t kneeling), there are runs (votes) and a total score. The outcome is a matter of math, not “wisdom”. The result only becomes “wisdom” if it validates the presence of a benign culture from which sprang the result. But as a pundit from long ago would say, this ain’t your grandmother’s culture.
Antifa demonstrators in Portland in 2019.
Something happened along the way. This is not a culture infused any longer with the beatitudes, the Genesis and Exodus stories, The Passion Play, the recognition of human failing in the presence of original sin, and the founders. Instead, the vacuum is filled with state-love and its cult of the “expert”, smothering group identities, obsessive hand-wringing over innumerable inequalities, and a rejection of personal accountability and self-reliance.
In other words, we have a mess. The mess has been foisted on us by our “betters”, all of whom are networked by a common social experience, an experience much at odds with realities for the bulk of the population. Many had middle class, suburban upbringings – the only mundane aspect of their backgrounds – and attended elite universities. Church might have had some relevance in their early years but it’s hardly detectable now. The corporate boardroom isn’t that much different from the faculty lounge in resumé and belief.
Church attendance in the broader society is way down, and we are starting to see Bibles burnt in the public square and the desecration of churches and statues of saints. The fundamental premises of these actions are increasingly found in the Democratic Party. Christianity will only have a role if it serves the Party’s post-truth doctrines. Daily, you can watch Nancy Pelosi mangle the Bible’s persistent refrain for PERSONAL involvement in the lives of the needy into a command for a near-socialistic nanny state. That way, she and the rest of us can wash our hands of them by turning them over to civil service-protected, unionized public employees. It’s shameful.
Portland protesters burn Bibles, 2020.
The rise of socialism is key to the Party’s corruption. They protest – Elizabeth Warren, “I am a capitalist” – but the charge is unavoidable. If not now, when can we call them socialists? When does their claim to be capitalists give way to the reality of their socialism? Is it a difference of opinion over the choice of the verbs “own” and “control” between “power” and “property” in the definition, as in “government power to own/control property”? At a certain point, it’s difference without a difference. They propose such an immense expansion of government controls in The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and increased taxes (they say on the “rich”) that a deed becomes a meaningless piece of paper.
This is where we are heading if today’s Socialist Revolutionary Party, aka Democratic Party, is rewarded with victory in November. For many of you, it’s what you will vote for, knowingly and unknowingly, and what you’ll get. Your exclamations about Trump’s language and behavior can’t hide the fact of Bernie/AOC’s platform as scripture for policy-making. Some hate Trump so much that they are willing to sacrifice your children’s future. Elites won’t be affected because they will be still guaranteed legacy admissions into Harvard, not your kids.
The decline in you and your children’s fortunes is a certainty since socialism doesn’t work. A foul-mouthed executive can still function successfully, but socialism can’t, even if it is headed by Mother Teresa. Turning loose the rewards of unproductivity while increasing the penalties for productivity is not a prescription for national well-being.
The polls are troubling enough to keep me awake at night, particularly one about majorities of both parties favoring a “radical restructuring of the American economy”. I know, I know, the phrasing is so broad that it entices people to check it. Regardless, a thinking person would have to ask, who will do the restructuring? We don’t have a “structured” economy. Ours is one of spontaneous associations, also called freedom, also called a free market.
Central planning in LA. Mayor Garcetti and the city council endorsed a classic example of central planning in their drive to 100% green energy by 2045. Central planning is notorious for setting targets like those set by Gosplan in the USSR.
“Structured” economies have central planning, i.e., someone to structure them – like Gosplan in the USSR. Therein lies the rub: no small group of people can manage an economy, and it will have to be small since large groups undermine “planning”. It’s through planning that things are “structured”. The result is a Havana society of the largest open-air museum of classic 50’s automobiles and crumbling apartment buildings.
So, go ahead, hate Trump for his indelicate language and tweets and vote the socialist wolves into the American hen house. You’ll set back your children’s prospects for decades.
