** 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]”.
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.
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.
Good luck America.
RogerG
** Also on my Facebook page.