They apparently think that if they can find one thing about Trump, tens of millions of people will flee him to vote for a drunken carpet muncher like Hillary Clinton, or an open-borders faggot like Marco Rubio. "His tax returns, David Duke, the KKK!"
They don't understand the ones doing the crapping are the ones attacking Trump. And the more they attack him, the stronger he gets.
They will never, ever understand that.
The simple ones are physics and math (and I know how terribly hard they are). But once you know them, you can use them to shoot a laser off the mirrors the astronauts left there (and that's why we know exactly how far the Moon is from the Earth).
The really hard ones are the social or "soft sciences," which aren't even sciences at all. But whatever "sciences they are - psychology, economics, political science - the purpose is to find the patterns, study them, and use them to improve life. Of course, that not always what happens.
I often tell people if you want to understand the worst in human nature, read the Old Testament. Or even just read Genesis. Better than that, just read the story of the Garden of Eden.
At the end of it there is a statement about a woman's "desire shall be for her husband but he shall rule over her." It doesn't make much sense because it's a mistranslation. It more along the lines of "a woman's desire shall be to rule her husband but he shall rule her."
That's information based on observations, used to find patterns which are then elevated to the status of a rule. Is it a law, that is, a Natural Law? The history of the world informs us it is. Since Pareto's Rule (again, a rule based on observation) is also called the 80/20 Rule, it's not a bad assumption that given the chance, 20% of women want to rule men.
Why? Perhaps the beginning of the story of the Garden of Eden explains that, too, when Eve rebels against God by listening to the serpent (a symbol of anger and envy) tell her she can be like the Gods. And Adam, the moron, listens to her, to his eternal regret.
Of course, everyone with half a brain knows feminism is based on rebellion. Not on "fairness" and "equality," but rebellion.
As I've mentioned before, Carl Jung pointed out women's greatest flaw is thinking she is always right (again, based on Jung's observations of a lifetime). He also suggested women would never be happy until they gave up that belief.
And who thinks they always right? People who think they are Godlike.
In a nutshell at least 20% of women think they are always right, try to rebel against men...and that is what got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
These are observations based on thousands of years of observations, in which the smarter saw patterns, and those patterns became rules, perhaps even laws.
The story of the Garden of Eden also informs us that men's greatest flaw is listening to women. To rebellious women. What the hell? Exactly what kind of morons are we?
My lifetime experience has been an enormous number of women think they are always right but don't even know they think that way. My experience also has been most women are right only by accident (like that old joke about a stopped clock, or a blind pig finding an acorn).
When I was 17 years old, of all things, I had a man tell me the brain had the female part - passive, dependent, emotional. The male part was dominant and rational.
What he said is true - the emotional limbic system (female feels) is underneath the rational neocortex (the male reason part). While men are generally ruled by their reason, most women are ruled by their feels - and they think their feels are always right.
That's why when a few percent of women get completely stupid, the rest of the women, with their childish rebellious nature, follow them straight to hell. And men let them do it.
Women couldn't do anything on their own unless men let them.
For that matter it's men who find the patterns in things, which is why men have discovered/created/invented about 99% of everything in the world. This isn't due to hallucinations about women being "oppressed" but because men and women have different brains (I once told a woman my brain is half laser, half sledgehammer. I don't know if she believed me or not. I got the impressions she thinks she is my intellectual equal).
There really is a battle between the sexes (which is also an observation thousands of years old).
Men are trying to discover/invent/create and many women (and the female-like manginas and white knights) are rebelling against that and trying to destroy it. Out of envy? "If I can't have it neither can you nor anyone else!"
The coming years are going to be very interesting indeed. Think of that old Chinse curse, "May you live in interesting times." That, too, is a law.
I recently encountered a 21-year-woman (actually girl) who got tears in her eyes over Donald Trump, who she thought was basically an anti-women Nazi who was going to force women into being barefoot and pregnant (which originally meant women going barefoot because everything - including their fingers - swelled when they were pregnant. Their shoes didn't fit anymore).
Why is it everyone is a Nazi anyway? The Communists were five times worse.
I refer to such women as having "girl brains" - irrational, ruled by their feels, thinking their feels are always right. It's why women have traditionally not been allowed to vote (after all, remember women voted Hitler into office - all the men voted against him).
I was close to asking this girl who she was going to vote for - a drunken dyke like Hillary Clinton? (I was close to telling her that Bill Clinton apparently has HIV and that Chelsea's real father is Webb Hubbell. She probably would have blown a gasket on her five horsepower girl brains, since girls - and some men - feel actual physical pain from mere words).
I've used this line about "girl brains" more than once. Some women get very upset by this, just the way some get upset when I've asked them to make me a sandwich.
Others are rather amused by it (one told me my "boy brains" were always fishing for compliments, which amused me). Those are the ones who don't mind making me sandwiches, although one consistently made me eggplant sandwiches, which I ate without protest.
A young black man told me a few days that "females got no minds." He was more right than he knew.
Most young women are just all childish heart - all feels, no brains. It's why at least 80% of them shouldn't be allowed to vote.
It'd be a much better world.
It was all pretty funny.
Then Captain Capitalism same to the same conclusion.
This is one of the main reasons - and there are others - why I say both parties have been crapping all over this country for 40 years.
When I was in high school those who graduated could go straight to the steel mill. The starting pay was about $25,000 a year and if they stayed there they could make about $70,000 a year. With a high school diploma. These days, the mill is on the verge of being closed, which means my hometown (which has already lost 20% of its population since I graduated) will be devastated.
When I was 11 years old my father rented a two-story farmhouse with a basement with those big stone walls. Know what the rent was?
$65 a month. That was in 1967. And in that year my father bought a brand-new VW bug for $1600.
That's impossible today, because of inflation. And who causes inflation? The federal government.
My last year and a half in college I rented an apartment for $175 a month, drove a school bus and delivered pizzas. I had a used car (with insurance), my own phone, bought all my food and clothes - and still saved money.
Try that today.
And then the sonsofbitches and court-jester economists lie to us and say that exporting high-paying jobs and importing Chinese trinkets is good for the economy. And that importing criminal morons is a good thing, too.
People with IQs of 100 or less (which is half the country) are supposed to "retrain for higher-paying jobs" (which don't exist for them). No wonder there are adults working at fast-food places (it used to be adults were turned down at such places as being "overqualifed").
No wonder Trump is so popular. People have finally wised up to the fact that neither party is going to do anything for them - except piss on them and tell them it's raining lemonade.
He's called out Bill Clinton as the sexual predator he is (actually a white trash serial rapist who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, too).
Will he call out Hillary Clinton as the drunken carpet-muncher she is? How can the deluded think this warmonger is a liberal?
Will he call out Marco Rubio as the fag he is? And an open borders one at that?
Will he call out the press as the chronic liar it is? (There is a European saying: "He lies like print.")
The outragious he gets, the more the mass of people love him, because he's telling the truth.
Both parties all been crapping all over this country for 40 years, and I want to see both of them destroyed - dead, dead, dead.
This is written by John C. Wright and is from Everyjoe.
When deciding which candidate for the Presidential nomination to support, one should take a step back, look at the larger picture of where we stand in the tragic debacle called history, and take both the long-term strategic goals into account as well as the short-term tactics.
The big picture is a dark one indeed.
America, as the world’s sole superpower, is effectively beyond the strength of any foreign enemy to defeat, or even to wound severely. We cannot be killed, that is the good news.
But we have committed suicide. That is the bad news. We have already swallowed the cold poison, soaked in the tubs, and slashed our wrists. The question is whether enough time remains – even as the warm, fuzzy, comfortable sensation of numbness comes over us and urges us to close our eyes – to rouse ourselves, vomit out the poison killing us, and bind up our wounds to stop the bleeding.
Even the destruction of the Twin Towers, which killed as many Americans as a Civil War battlefield, was due not to the cunning and might of the enemy, but to political correctness that forbade the government officers who allowed the terrorists into our nation to expel or investigate them, for fear of being called racist.
The shootings in San Bernardino likewise were due not to cleverness or strength, but to the politically correct unwillingness of a suspicious neighbor to report the arsenal she saw being gathered.
The case Ahmed the Clockmaker is even more instructive: a Muslim boy brought a mock bomb to a school as a prank, and, after being warned, displayed it to teachers who were required during wartime to treat all terrorist threats as real. He found himself suddenly invited to the White House, and lavished with praise and adoration for achieving the one supreme felicity political correctness holds up as the goal of all life: to be the victim of racism.
What does one conclude from this firestorm of evil and nonsense?
The proper conclusion is there are two religions, two cultures, and two Americas in America. One is the real America, lived by real people living their real lives. These Americans believe in individual liberty, the free market, the rule of law and the Word of God.
The other is a sick delusion that is created and maintained by the press, by the academics, by the entertainment industry, and by flocks of hysterical liars. In this America, a patriarchy of white, straight Christian males ruthlessly and by numberless invisible and undetectable evil magic spells oppresses, robs, cheats, rapes, and kills all its helpless and saintly victims.
But, by the twisted logic of modern Leftwing lunacy (a doctrine called intersectionism) everyone is also an oppressor in turn, so that a black Christian is an oppressor of heathens and homosexuals merely by virtue of his Christianity; a homosexual male oppresses women merely by virtue of being male; a white woman oppresses blacks merely by virtue of being white; all hale people oppress all cripples merely by virtue of being non-crippled; all sane people oppress all crazies merely by virtue of being neurotypical; all non-perverts oppress all perverts merely by virtue of being cisnormative.
The religion of the real America is anything within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The religion of delusional America is Political Correctness. The real Americans love America, see it as a shining city on a hill, and as the last best hope for human liberty on the planet. The Delusional Americans see America as the only evil in the world, a pathless forest of monsters and boogermen, and the only threat to the planet.
Ironically, the main engine of the destruction of America selected by the Delusional Americans to do their heinous work is the Federal Government. Whether this is deliberate on their part or merely a side effect of their delusions is an academic point. When you are in a sinking lifeboat, and half the passengers are bailing to save their lives and half are drilling holes in the hull, it does not matter whether they think they are drilling for oil or think they are making holes to let the water run out. The end result is swamping the boat and death by drowning. In this case, the drill being used is the continual growth of the federal government as one constitutional limit after another chaining the Beast is hacksawed away.
One by one by one, the chains on the Beast are parting. The Constitution forbade the laying of direct taxes or capitation: the Sixteenth Amendment broke that chain. Roosevelt, and later, Nixon, took away the chain of the Gold Standard, and allowed the printing of endless IOUs to inflate the currency endlessly. The popular election of senators was another broken chain. The creation of the alphabet soup of agencies, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the basic overthrow of the three-branched system of government in favor of a permanent Mandarin class of unelected bureaucracies snapped more chains, so now nothing was out of reach of the jaws of Caesar. The abdication of the Congress to use the power of the purse to rein in spending, the abdication of the Supreme Court to rein in blatantly unconstitutional power grabs by the Executive branch, the abdication of the Press as a watchdog against corruption and treason in high places, and, indeed, since 9/11 the full-blown aiding and abetting by the press in that corruption and treason, all have set the Beast at liberty to ravage us, and for the public never to hear our cries.
As soon as the Beast is free of all restraint, and the last spark of liberty extinguished, the monster will grow weak and weaker and eventually destroy itself, as all unfree societies sooner or later do. That is the nature of tyranny: all exceptional men must be killed in the first generation, lest they threaten the party in power, and all merely competent men in the second generation, because the party in power is not manned by exceptional, or even competent men.
So the large picture is of a struggle, a culture war, between Reality-based America and Delusional America. The two main weapons of Delusional America are the press and the federal government. To survive, we must elect leaders who will disarm the Beast.
So, in the large picture, to decide which candidate to support for office, one has to decide what is the main problem facing the nation, and who is best suited to fight that problem?
If you think the main problem facing the nation is the federal government, the swaggering and overweight whore of a gluttonous government that consumes lives and taxes with reckless abandon, and, with the bailouts of Wall Street and takeover of General Motors and the Student Loan Industries, not to mention the insolent abandonment of the rule of law in favor of executive decrees, had waded ever deeper into fascism, I suggest you support Ted Cruz. He seems to be a strong supporter of basic Reaganesque principles.
That is not what I believe. I say the main enemy is the Press. Destroy the Press, and the federal government can be driven back into its proper constitutional limitations. With the Press at large acting as the False Prophet for the Beast, it cannot be driven back, because the people are deceived into thinking the Beast will not consume their lives.
The enemy is the Press. The enemy is not the Democrat Party, for they have little power if the Press were not their Praetorian Guard that both defends and elects them. The enemy is not the Jihad, for they would be hunted down and destroyed in a decade, and their known centers destroyed in a day, if the Press were not deceiving the people as to the nature and extent of the threat.
Why is the Press the enemy?
The internet gives you endless opportunities to listen to the Political Correctness mavens in their dens, holes and warrens muttering their thoughts to each other as the gnaw on the bones of their malice. You will hear them again and again talking themselves into hysterics over utterly nonexistent threats. They sound like small children in bed after light’s out trying to convince each other that there is a monster in the closet. They are panicked into screeching spasms about global warming and frothing over Chik-fil-A or college students dressed as Red Indians for Halloween.
But Major Hasan, known to associate with a terrorist cell, guns down disarmed soldiers on a military base, the same children in the dark room yawn and laugh and say this is a non-threat, this is workplace violence, this is an isolated incident, not one example of a typical tactic of attack by Mohammedan Jihad, and his suspicious activities, albeit known to his superiors, were not reported and never acted upon. Three guesses why? For fear of being called racist.
And if you point at this incident, yes indeed, you will be called a racist, and harassed, and sued, and slandered, and libeled, and subject to the attacks of the Social Justice Warriors who have eaten the brains and replaced what few rational people were once on the Left.
The children in the dark bedroom, eagerly trying to scare each other to death with tales of monsters in the closet, ignore the real axe murderer in the hockey mask standing in the hallway
It does not matter that Islam is a religious heresy, and not a race. The accusation of being called racist like a Puritan calling an old woman a witch: it is an accusation needed to confirm the faith of the faithful by identifying an innocent scapegoat as an outside threat.
None of the delusional Americans of Delusional America actually believe that there are any racists worth mentioning left in America: it is merely an article of faith with them, not a matter of fact. Facts to them are as a crucifix to a vampire.
The real Americans want America restored to her lost greatness.
The faithful followers of Political Correctness wants America destroyed.
I know that seems incredible. Why would Hollywood starlets, showered with fame and wealth by America, or politicians, or the moguls in charge of vast media empires, seek to reduce the nation to a bombed-out violence-torn hellhole like, say, Detroit? The answer to that is complex, and beyond the scope of the present column, but the short answer is that they want to give their pride, their lust, their greed, their gluttony, their wrath and their self-righteousness free rein to indulge themselves in vice beyond vice, and to this requires first that spirit of Christ be removed from our souls, logic and reason from our minds, and normal human decency from our hearts. The decency is removed in the name of being non-judgmental, the logic is removed in the name of being multicultural and open-minded and other forms of doublethink, and the spirit is removed in the name of Political Correctness. Out of courtesy to sinners, we now make sin a Constitutional right, and speaking against sin is a hate crime.
But sins are the things that destroy man’s relationship with God, that is, with the source and summit of goodness, truth, beauty and virtue, and so siding with sin against God is inevitably the same as siding with whatever destroys goodness, truth, beauty and virtue. Walk into the any jurisdiction where the Left has had power, from Moscow to Detroit, and you will see ugliness and inhumanity writ large.
It is not easy to convince an entire generation to commit mass suicide, and to obliterate the most wealthy, most free, most sane and most benevolent nation ever to exist in history, and to rush toward the chains and bloodshed, poverty and misery of subhuman Second World socialism.
It required over a century of continual and unopposed effort on behalf of the school system, the newspapers, and most importantly popular books and films. But the effort was unopposed, and the lies won out. We now have the political absurdity of a federal government that operates without passing a budget, the economic absurdity of socialized medical insurance imposed by law upon us, and the logical absurdity of same-sex marriage.
And these things cannot be discussed by plain speaking men in plain language, because America, thanks to our press corps, our public schooling, and our entertainment industry, has been lobotomized.
The best evidence for the lobotomy comes with this very subject of political nominations for president. Each time I have turned on the radio in the last week, each political pundit was discussing one and one issue only: the dispute between Donald Trump and Pope Francis.
As a newspaperman, I knew at once what had actually happened. The press misquoted Trump to the Pope and asked a leading question trying to get His Holiness to say something bad about Trump. Being a Jesuit, the Pope answered in a nuanced and qualified manner, and merely spoke of how, in a general case, Christians are good neighbors, and build bridges rather than only building walls. This, of course, was not referring to any real wall on the Mexican border or anywhere else: it was a pastoral comment about the nature of Christian love. I knew that before I looked up the quote.
The press, grinning and sniveling and whining like Gollum, then misquoted these remarks to Trump, and likewise tried to trick the unwary businessman into some remark of his that could be slanted and misconstrued. Which they then proceeded to do.
It took me less than one minute to find the original quote in its original context online. One. Lousy. Everloving. Minute. And none of the conservative pundits from Sean Hannity to Michael Savage could do the same?
And here is the quote:
Phil Pullella, Reuters: Today, you spoke very eloquently about the problems of immigration. On the other side of the border, there is a very tough electoral battle. One of the candidates for the White House, Republican Donald Trump, in an interview recently said that you are a political man and he even said that you are a pawn, an instrument of the Mexican government for migration politics. Trump said that if he’s elected, he wants to build 2,500 kilometers of wall along the border. He wants to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, separating families, etcetera. I would like to ask you, what do you think of these accusations against you and if a North American Catholic can vote for a person like this?
Pope Francis: Thank God he said I was a politician because Aristotle defined the human person as ‘animal politicus.’ At least I am a human person. As to whether I am a pawn, well, maybe, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to your judgment and that of the people. And then, a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel. As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.
Did you notice the nature of the qualification in that last sentence? The Holy Father is wisely not believing the report of the Reuters reporter as to what Mr. Trump said.
Now, the next question is one of motive. Reading the sentence in context, its meaning is plain. The Pope said nothing about the Southern Border, he spoke of the soul of a man who thinks never of building bridges but always of building walls against his neighbors. It was controversial, to be sure, but not in the petty and mundane way every fool reads the Holy Father’s comment: he is challenging you to embrace the love of Christ, the self-denying, self-abnegating love that gives and gives to the poor and needy, he unwashed and the unworthy.
Why would the Press lie about such a thing, and lie so blatantly, and, in this case, a lie that is easily dispelled by anyone who takes the one lousy everloving minute it takes to look up the original quote? Because, in this day and age, they know the lobotomized consumers of prepackaged infotainment will not take that minute. Even professional reporters did not take that minute. Even professional reporters of Catholic newspapers did not. The cynical liars are as accurate about the wide-mouthed gullibility of the chumps and rubes as is Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man about the rubes in River City.
But, again, this tells us why the Press thought they could get away with it, but not why this is what they wanted to get away with.
That answer is obvious. If you have two foes, you want them to fight each other, not you.
And there are only two potent and dangerous enemies of the Political Correctness religion at large in the world today: Donald Trump and the Holy Father.
Donald Trump is an enemy of the Political Correctness religion because, as a self-made man not indebted to the Donating Class of the Republican Establishment, he has no reason to bow to their idols. He hates the Press and they hate him, and, more to the point, he is largely immune to their slimy tactics of white blackmail, which depends on the weakminded kindheartedness of the victim to allow the professional liars and character assassins to do their work.
Pope Francis is the enemy of Political Correctness because the Catholic Church is the sole standing fortress in the fetid swamp of postmodern, postchristian, postrational nonsense and nonlogic and non-thought still standing firm on the rock of faith and raising high the towers of intellectual clarity, ringing the peal of sanity, speaking the truth in an Empire of Lies. The Church is the Western Civilization. The Church is Christendom. So Pope Francis is the foe of the Press for the opposite reason: he is not self-made but relies entirely on Christ. His debt is infinite but he owes it to Christ who paid an infinite debt for him.
The Press is Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Press.
So of course the Press wants the Pope to fight The Donald. Of course.
What shocked me and continues to shock me is how transparent this trick is, and how obvious it is.
But every pundit I heard, with the sole exception of Catholic talk radio, trusted the press report and took the lying weasels at their word rather than looking up the original sources. Even Catholic websites and newspapers repeated the lies like parrots.
The mesmeric power of the press is disconcerting to say the least, like seeing a scene out of A Wrinkle in Time, where on the street of some dark world ruled by a single evil brain, all the children are bouncing their balls in unison.
So, while I have, as all true conservatives do, very deep reservations about Donald Trump’s lack of strong conservative values, or indeed any conservative values strong or weak, his lack of knowledge in significant areas and so on, my decision is determined by who I think the main enemy is, and who will strike the most powerful blow against that enemy.
The enemy is Political Correctness. The enemy is anyone who calls anyone a racist for any reason. The enemy is anyone who calls anyone a sexist, or a homophobe, or a transphone, or an Islamophobe, or uses any of these other goobledegook blither and jabberwocky to express themselves: for such words are the tongue drippings of a self-imposed lobotomy victim.
The enemy is the Press.
I've always been intrigued by imagination, since it's one of my strong suits. When I was 12 and 13 years old I'd get so lost in a novel I wouldn't hear anyone if they called my name. And if I did hear sometimes I ignored it since I resented the interruption.
Years later I realized that anything that can be imagined is an image of truth. Imagine my surprise when I realize William wrote the same thing hundreds of years ago.
It was J.R.R. Tolkien who made the distinction between what he called "the Primary World" and "Secondary Worlds." The Primary World is the real world in which we all live, and there is only one of it. Secondary Worlds are worlds that writers create. There are an infinite number of them.
If the writer is good enough to create a fully realized world, and readers imaginative enough to suspend their disbelief, they can temporarily become absorbed in that Secondary World, and in a sense, "live" in it. If people can become absorbed enough in a Secondary World, it can be for a while more real than the real world (and as I wrote, I know about that). Such is the power of imagination.
Sometimes Secondary Worlds are good places in which to live, and sometimes they are not. The unhinged Karl Marx created his own private Secondary World. When it was implemented in the Primary World, the result was perhaps the most hellish catastrophe humanity has known. That shows us the power of the (blasphemous) Word made Flesh. Or, as Richard Weaver wrote in his famous book of the same title, Ideas Have Consequences. It also shows us that imagination is not a trivial thing, something to be smiled at and suited only for children.
One of the curious things about the difference between the Primary World and Secondary Worlds is that the first one is inherently imperfect, or to use a religious term, "fallen." Secondary Worlds aren't necessarily fallen, although most are in various degrees. But they are often more ideal than the real world, which is a good thing, because it allows the reader to imagine what a better world might be like.
A libertarian/classical liberal world, for example, is as close to an ideal world as there can be. However, being an ideal world, it doesn't exist totally in the real world. It does exist in bits and pieces in reality. But in many ways it is a Secondary World, one that people are always trying to implement in the Primary World.
How does one learn about worlds of political and economic liberty? By reading writers who try to fully realize those worlds. Alternate universes, if you will. That's one of the things Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard did: they spent their lives imagining fully-realized free worlds, and wrote about them in the hope others would read of them and be convinced of the truth of their positions.
As an aside, I've always amazed that words, or a picture, or an idea, can shoot from person's head into another's - and the receiver understands it! How is this possible?
See that painting? It's John Waterhouse's "Lady of Shallot." You know what she's feeling. Did did that painting do that? How did you do it?
As Richard Feynman so perceptively noted, "...there are new generations born every day...there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."
The difference between the Secondary World of someone like Marx, and those of Mises and Rothbard, is that the latter two had some understanding of human nature and economics, which is why their worlds, made real, would be an infinitely better place than Marx's.
If what is imagined conforms to reality, the effects can be world-changing for the better. Einstein imagined what it would be like to ride a beam of light. His imaginative discovery forever changed the 20th century. Perhaps that saying, "The truth shall set you free" means what it says.
A few hundred years before, Adam Smith imagined what his economic theories would be like in reality. His resulting book, The Wealth of Nations, also changed the world forever. Both Einstein and Smith vividly imagined their worlds, so much so in Smith's case that while walking at night, absorbed in thought, he at least once fell into a ditch.
For some reason which I don't quite understand, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writers tend toward the anarchist/libertarian side. The greatest writers, such as Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad, tilted toward conservatism, although they weren't at all fond of government. The worst writers, like Marx and the Marquis de Sade (who was one of the founders of leftism) are almost exclusively leftist. There is a lesson in that somewhere. We can learn from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism Revisited: "Madness is very often a combination of cold reason and fantasy severed from all reality."
Nearly every libertarian-tilting person I know has been profoundly influenced by the late Robert Heinlein. His The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, about a libertarian society on the moon, is often mentioned by them. I was very much influenced at the age of 13 by A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, which illustrated the importance of the Second Amendment in defending liberty against the tyranny of the State (“The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free”). Others I know were equally affected by Eric Frank Russell's ...And Then There Were None, about a society which had discovered a fool-proof way to defend itself against invaders.
Van Vogt showed me a fully-realized world, and after finishing the novel, I knew the State cannot be trusted, will always try to oppress people, and that people must always be armed to protect their liberty. I clearly saw in my imagination what van Vogt's Secondary World would look like in reality. I was never the same after reading him. Or H.G. Wells. Or Theodore Sturgeon. Or Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Some of these science-fictional Secondary Worlds are very good -- sometimes great places to visit. Peter S. Beagle, understanding this, once made the comment he would go to Middle Earth "like a shot." Visiting such worlds, for some people, makes them understand what the word "gratitude" truly means.
Instead of having to stumble around for years from book to book, idea to idea, wondering what is true and what is not (and not finding it in the vast wasteland of the public schools, including college), all one has to do is read one good novel about a fully-realized world, and the truth of it cannot be denied. Perhaps one might not agree with everything in it, but one will not go away from such books unaffected.
The writer Vernor Vinge, for example, said of L Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach: "Contained ideas I wish could be shouted to the world, ideas that come from the American heritage of freedom and which could bring still greater individual liberty, greater technical progress." I've never seen anyone say this about a college economics text. Or any college textbook.
One of the first things I was told in the first journalism class I took was “Show, don’t tell.” That is the problem with textbooks: they tell, but they don’t show. It’s not a problem with good fiction. It’s because people understand stories…not lectures.
The Greeks had a myth about what the State considered the perfect soldier – an ant.
These ant soldiers were called Myrmidons. They didn't question orders, they didn't think, they just fought and died.
Every portrayal of soldiers I have read in all those dystopian science-fiction novels I've read are just updated versions of that old myth. Portrayals of the military didn't used to be this way.
We can use as an example Robert Heinlein's novel, Starship Troopers, which was made into a movie that, although it has the same name, has little in common with the novel. In fact, it is a degenerated version of the book.
The late Heinlein was strongly libertarian in his writings, although his support of the military has caused some to label him a fascist. They're wrong (when Heinlein was younger he was a flaming liberal). Heinlein was far from a pure libertarian, but he was in no way a fascist (the man had a open marriage, of all things, and his second wife claimed she was a witch. His first one was an alcoholic.).
In his novel he supported a purely voluntary military, easy to get out of, but very hard to stay in. Why? He only wanted the most motivated soldiers. The novel supports the old military virtues of honor, pride, loyalty and patriotism.
In some ways it is a silly book, with depictions of terribly wounded soldiers who aren't supposed to make a sound, but overall, Heinlein's world is one in which I could live. Then there's the movie. It shows the difference between Heinlein's 1950's idealized view of the military, and Paul Verhoeven's mocking, satirical 1990's one. The society in the movie is what I call "soft" fascist – the world is starting to become politicized and militarized. As a result, the military has started to degenerate.
I suspect the more politicized and militarized a society, the more fascist it becomes, and the more its military will degenerate, because of the loss of the true military virtues, which are contrary to fascism. Heinlein's strongly libertarian novel was some 40 years later turned into a fascist movie. Such is the change in the view of artists toward the military, in a short time.
Most artists are, in a way, prophets. They have a sensitivity, and an imagination, that oftentimes allows them to predict the future, not specifically, but in a general way. Science fiction has done a pretty good job. It's usually about 50 years ahead of society - it take that long for science and technology to catch up to imagination.
I think another reason is that most writers, and especially science fiction writers, are somewhat anarchistic. The imagination, the sensitivity, the intelligence and the anarchism together gives them a leg up on everyone else, because they have a pretty clear view of the State and the damage it causes to whatever it gets its tentacles into.
Currently, science fiction's depiction of the military is very disturbing. There are four trends in modern science fiction that all should pay attention to: nanotechnology, designer drugs, genetic engineering. and "artificial intelligence." Especially when the military-industrial complex gets its paws on them, because it will try to use them to produce Myrmidon supersoldiers – killer ants from space.
The first example that comes to my mind is the movie Blade Runner, which was about artificial, genetically engineered superhumans called replicants. The movie, which is very subtle in many ways, suggests the replicants have animal DNA inserted into them. One is part turtle, one raccoon, one wolf, one snake, and one fish, probably shark.
Could such DNA insertions be done? You bet. I do know that unholy mutant that is the marriage of Big Business and the State (what Eisenhower termed "the military-industrial complex") will try, in order to create supersoldiers. You can take that one to the bank.
What comes after Verhoeven's view?
Try the Kurt Russell movie, Soldier, which is an unacknowledged sequel to Blade Runner. Russell plays a soldier who is physically superior to the common man but not nearly as smart (he's barely articulate), unlike the replicants of Blade Runner.
What next? The Borg, a futuristic group of Myrmidons that use genetic engineering, nanotechnology and probably designer drugs. I consider them to be the scariest soldiers ever. (Just wait until exoskeletons for solders are created, which Heinlein predicted and which you can see in the movie, Elysium.)
The Borg comprises humans (and aliens) who are kidnapped and, through nanotechnology and genetic engineering (and I suspect drugs), turned into Borg soldiers. The soldiers are true Myrmidons – they are without fear of anything (including death), without anxiety, without mercy or conscience, indeed without self-consciousness. They follow orders without questions and die without hesitation. They have no honor, no pride, no dignity. They don't even have loyalty or patriotism, because they have no choice in the matter, no more than an ant does.
Any degenerated military in the world would love them. They'll all trying to create them(think of DARPA). And the essence of a degenerated military culture is to treat soldiers as expendable things (G.I means "government issue") – although the upper echelons are always taken care of.
As a personal example, my last year in college a smirking Army officer tried to get us to join, telling the class we would be made officers and "taken care of." The enlisted men, on the hand other, he said, "We don't care what they want." I didn't join.
I also received offers through the mail from every branch. All of them, except the Marines, were interested in certain degrees such as computer science or engineering. Every other degree was listed as "other," except for the Marines, which only wanted to know if I had a degree. And from what I've been able to gather, it is only the Marines that still have some understanding of a true military culture. The other branches, obviously, are starting to degenerate - especially in becoming political.
The Borg also show something rare in fiction, but which always exists in the real world – the welfare/warfare state. Writers in general are very good at portraying warfare. Few understand the other side of that coin is welfare. One never exists, in the long run, without the other.
The Borg are on perfect welfare. They're literally babies in the Borg cube. Every need is taken care of. Unfortunately, to protect that welfare, they are always at war with whatever comes their way. Welfare at home, warfare abroad. It's a law of fascism, no matter what name fascism is called.
The Borg are also always trying to absorb whatever race they encounter. Obviously, they consider themselves so superior to all other races they believe it gives them the right to "civilize" them by force ("Why do you resist us?" asks the Borg Queen. "We're only trying to improve the quality of your lives.") That certainly does sound familiar.
I mentioned about "artificial intelligence," That's an old one is science fiction. People today think of Skynet. Before that, in the '60s, was Hal 9000 of 2001: a Space Odyssey, who murdered about five astronauts.
And Fred Saberhagen used to write about his Berserkers, sentient robots (actually space ships) who wanted to do nothing but wipe out humanity.
Intelligent hunter-killer robots are nothing new in fiction. Now, of course, we're starting to see them in reality.
Good fiction is always a cautionary tale, usually jammed right up the reader's nose. It says, "This is what can happen unless you stop it." Currently it's saying, "A fascist society can be recognized by the attempts of its degenerated military, along with State-supported degenerated Big Business, to use science and technology to create expendable Myrmidon supersoldiers, even if it costs them their humanity.
I've come to the conclusion dueling should be legal. I found this quote: "By ritualizing violence in a punctilious grammar of honor, as it were, duels were supposed to prevent potential chaos. That scourge of public and familial order, the blood feud, could be avoided under the problematic idea that a man's sullied reputation would thereby be restored."
In other words, a little bit of violence prevents a lot. The war is Iraq, for example, is a blood feud. The neocons, who are cowards and chickenhawks, are mostly Jews involved in a blood feud with the Muslim world. Why should that be my problem?
I'd call out every neocon alive: William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith. All would run away, being cowards, and lose the miniscule honor they have.
Wild Bill Hickok, who only fought one duel, used to post a sign in a town, telling certain people to get out of town, or be killed. They all left.
We need such signs today.
This picture, as far as I know, is of a village in Norway. Amazing, isn't? You'd like to live there, wouldn't you? I'd be there like a shot.
I have for decades wondered how exactly you define the free market (bear with me about how it relates to that wonderful picture).
The free market is generally defined as minimal government interference (I dismiss open borders anarchist libertarians as complete and utter fools with zero experience dealing with low-IQ, impulsive, criminally-minded Third World trash, the kind who fill our prisons. These naive supporters are the the kind of anti-American leftists who have elevated their ideologies to the status of religion, to replace the God they no longer believe in. They also belong to the deluded "I Fucking Love Science" crowd, the kind of nuts who think their misunderstandings of "evolution" explains everything).
The United States was founded on the belief in the government protecting "life, liberty and property." That belief pretty much came from John Locke, although most of it came from Christianity, on which the West was founded (look up Jonathan Mayhew sometime, who was referred to in his time as a "transcendent genius" and who came up with the concept of "no taxation without representation"), and who wrote that no one had to obey a government that disobeyed Natural Law.
Let's take suburbs. Are they free market? No. The government, a long time ago, set up the laws to encourage middle-class suburbs. That's not "free market," but so what? The government was supporting the people.
Most people rather enjoy living in quiet, peaceful suburbs, ones with good public schools (and public schools, obviously, are not free market).
I have met "homeless" people who preferred to be hoboes (look up what that really means) and who've told me they lived their lives as they did because they were free of everything (although, to be accurate, there is a fine line between eccentricity and mental illness).
But not everyone wants to live in suburbs and some people despise them. They'd rather live in that village in the picture.
The government at one time encouraged the middle class, which is the backbone of the United States. The "poor" are quite often parasite trash who think they are supposed to be supported by everyone, and the uberweathy "one percent" are also parasites, whose wealth comes from laws which take from everyone to give to them.
The only "class" that matters are the middle class.
Why do we not have villages like this in the U.S.? (Forget the fjords, because they're not the point. The hills do matter, though.) The government has never encouraged such beautiful little villages.
Something that has stuck me for decades is what you could call "Nordic Socialism" (it wouldn't work in the U.S., not with all those low-IQ, criminal Africans, Muslims, Mexican and other South Americans).
This "socialism" only works in high-IQ, high-trust societies which are small, homogeneous and populated by high-IQ whites. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland.
Iceland has a little over 300,000 people and is populated by people like me. I've lived in cities with more people than live in Iceland! And yet it is an advanced society.
Why is Haiti not like Iceland? All of Africa? The entire Arab Muslim world? We know the reason, although some try to deny it (think of Jared Diamond's deluded Guns, Germs and Steel).
The picture is of a village in a high-IQ, high-trust community, and all of us know perfectly well everyone there is a high-IQ white. Africans, Muslims and Mexicans could not build such a village and couldn't maintain it, either.
The more Third Worlders we let into U.S. the less free market we're going to have, the more government oppression (what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny") and the more communities such as the one above will cease to exist, replaced by East St. Louis and Detroit (while whites retreat to mountains, to look down on the criminal masses below).
Whites always take to the hills, while the genetically inferior mob the valleys (think Elyisum, in which whites move to space stations and leave the Earth to the Third Worlders).
I hope to God that village does not take in Third Worlders. It would cease to exist.
It's clear the "free market" of people moving where they want does not work. It's been a castrophe of rape, murder, muggings and other crimes.
For the matter the "free market" of trade (which is actually managed trade) does not work, either. "Capitalists" traded with the Nazis during World War II, they traded with the Communist Soviet Union, and they traded with Communist China, sending our wealth and knowledge to them, arming them against us. "Capitalists" put profit above all else, just like the Ferengi.
I don't believe in autarky (which is a country being self-sufficient) because we can't grow our own bananas except in greenhouses (this is known as "absolute advantage"). But it a good thing to be self-sufficient in energy. We should be self-sufficient in all that we can. That's just common sense, which is something many "economists" do not have.
Heaven on Earth, turned to Hell...though the mass immigration of those who do not believe in political and economic liberty. Of those who do not believe in America.
This article is from the Right Stuff and written by Chesterton's Ghost.
The libertarian movement is in a state of crisis. If we are to survive as a serious movement, if we are to continue to have any relevance, we must begin to advocate what Sean Gabb calls “grown-up libertarianism.” I prefer Rothbard and Rockwell’s term “paleolibertarianism.” What is a paleolibertarian?
A paleolibertarian is someone who believes in the rights to life, liberty, and property, but who is also mindful of the kind of environment required for libertarian philosophy to be fully realised. This environment is a homogenous society where the degree of time preference is low, and self-restraint high.
A paleolibertarian, like Burke, believes in both liberty and in order. The two are not mutually exclusive, but instead depend upon each other.
A paleolibertarian recognises that just as conservatism is parasitical on the concept of private property and a small state, libertarianism is something unique to Western Civilisation, and moreover libertarianism cannot survive in a moral vacuum.
A paleolibertarian is not ignorant of the fact that the libertarian philosophy grew out of, and is parasitic upon, Thomistic Natural Law on the one hand, and the English Common Law on the other.
A paleolibertarian recognises that libertarianism only makes sense within the confines of Western Civilisation, and particularly so within the Anglosphere. In other cultures, codes of decency which we take for granted simply do not exist. Why else would the German State have begun a poster campaign in January of this year to keep sexual abuse, rape, and public defecation to manageable levels?
A paleolibertarian believes in the nation, and not the modernist idea of the “propositional nation”, but the proper definition of the nation, being a people who are come together based on ties of blood, shared history, and soil.
A paleolibertarian recognises that a policy of Open Borders is one of national suicide.
A paleolibertarian further recognises that in England, the homeland of libertarianism, this spells trouble for the cause of liberty.
And yet the prospects for liberty are rather worse than just that. For, as I said in my opening sentence, the libertarian movement itself is in trouble. It is tragic that now, when the need for a serious libertarian movement has never been greater, the movement should be in such a state.
The libertarian movement is no longer primarily libertarian, but is instead a consortium of cultural leftists and big business-corporate interests. Instead of simply libertarians, most libertarians, including myself, though as a reaction to this, are now hyphenated libertarians.
While it is obvious that if libertarianism is to flourish, there must be high levels of personal responsibility, respect for private authorities, strong intermediary institutions between the citizen and the state, you would not hear this from the modal libertarian. It would be nice if all libertarians recognised this need for what we might call “private government” or “self-government”, rather than endorsing hedonism and cultural suicide, but alas, it is unlikely.
Perhaps a more optimistic view of these libertarians may be that it is the best we can expect from them. In other words, it is surely better for them to be cultural leftist libertarians than full-blown statists. It might further be argued that cultural leftist libertarians are, “transitioning”, so to speak. In other words, they may grow up in the future.
Yet I do not think that they will grow up. As Rothbard said, the libertarian philosophy attracts weirdos, outcasts, and oddballs. People who want to practice an obscene lifestyle of some kind quite like the "live and let live" and "respect no authority" version of libertarianism. Once a cultural leftist, always a cultural leftist; it's only their political views that change. Yet, of course, their cultural leftism isn’t confined to producing only cultural errors; the egalitarian who believes in multiculturalism almost always believes in democracy, too.
The ultra-leftist so-called “Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism”, which seems to have taken root in at least one think tank in the United Kingdom, for instance, is certainly not a “gateway drug” to grown-up libertarianism. Those who are Bleeding Hearts are usually confirmed Bleeding Hearts. Left-libertarians are of the Left before they become libertarians and therefore being of the Left is a stronger part of their identity than being libertarian.
In addition to the egalitarians, the libertarian movement also contains a surfeit of corporatists, and of course the two are not mutually exclusive; most corporatists are keen to profess their love of all things LGBTQQIAAP and all things multicultural. However, the corporatists tend to be found in the well-funded libertarian think tanks. The libertarian movement is quick to denounce other movements for their special interest and lobbyist group funding, while being paid handsomely by Koch Industries, Inc. In the United Kingdom, funding is also an interesting issue, with one think tank having taken a large sum of money from Blair’s New Labour on at least one occasion. The same think tank may well be funded by, and if not funded by at least associated with, a thoroughly corporatist-statist outfit which lists among its services “Public Administration Reform, Public Financial Management, Infrastructure Development, and Justice, Security, & Peacebuilding.”
In return for corporate and state funding, whether direct or indirect, these organisations argue for tax cuts for the rich, mass immigration, and drug legalisation, and very little else of fundamental importance. They also have a tendency to needlessly revisit old arguments such as that of socialism versus capitalism, and while doing it imply that the existing order is indeed free market capitalism.
It might be argued that, by pointing out these deficiencies, I am engaging in infighting. I would like to see less infighting, but it really does tend to only be people like myself who want less infighting. The Leftist and the corporatists are quick to call any criticism of their own arguments "unproductive infighting", but if an argument is wrong then it is wrong. Infighting is the result of often irreconcilable differences. The "Libertarian Movement" is starting to be revealed for what it is: non-existent. Instead, we have numerous factions who all either dislike or misunderstand each other and whose definitions of the word "libertarian" are all radically different.
If we continue as we are for much longer, then the result will be that nobody will use term “libertarian” any more.
The various splinter groupings of libertarianism are so numerous as to lose count and lose interest in keeping up with them. The left-libertarians, the geolibertarians, the environmentalist libertarians, the black anarchists, the mutualists, the agorists, the national anarchists, the feminist anarchists, the libertarian-leaning white nationalists, etc. etc. etc.
All of these have one thing in common: their overriding loyalty is not to "liberty", but to the other thing in their name. The economically leftist-libertarians are more concerned with the rights of labour and the well-being of the poor. The geolibertarians are more concerned with imposing a land value tax on the population. The environmentalist libertarians are more concerned about saving the planet. The black anarchists and the white nationalists put racial particularities before the universalities of natural rights. The agorists are anti-market. The feminists are feminists.
But there already exists a better funded, better recognised, longer established anti-liberty and anti-property movement, funded by either big business interests or by Marxist interests, that corresponds with all or most of the loyalties of the above "libertarians." The State and its agents would probably like to impose a land value tax on us. They also like the class warfare that results from employer versus employee conflict. They also like to impose environmentalist restrictions on us. And they like to create needless conflict by pitting men against women through the maintenance of an extraordinarily powerful feminist movement.
My prediction, then, is this: that most, if not all, so-called libertarians will drift back to the movements which more clearly represent their own group identity.
To take an example of this, look at the pathetic campaign of Rand Paul for the GOP nomination. He failed for two reasons. First, he became part of the establishment. Second, and more fatally, he attempted to appeal to the Black Lives Matter-type voter that is more naturally attracted to Bernie Sanders. These people are not libertarian or conservative by inclination.
Ron Paul was fantastically successful because he listened to Lew Rockwell and went after the white middle-class traditionalist vote, which is a significant part of the American electorate and which, more importantly, are inclined to libertarianism. In politics, even the libertarian candidate has to take identity politics into account. Libertarianism has only ever been successful politically when it has appealed directly to the Anglo-Saxon, i.e. the descendants of the founders of the Tory, Whig, and liberal traditions.
Ron Paul was basically paleolibertarian in that he was uncompromising in his libertarianism, but didn't try to appeal to cultural leftists and corporatists by putting any special emphasis on drugs or tax cuts for the wealthy. Ron Paul's libertarianism was about restoring the old American liberty, not creating a special modern kind of liberty, a Brave New World, as it were. Rand Paul could have built on the Ron Paul movement, but he chose not to. Whether he will be seen as instrumental to the slow decline in libertarianism that will now result, or whether he will be seen as a symptom of it, I do not know. But since the world's political movements are parasitic on those of the United States, it seems that this slow decline will be mirrored the world over.
The nub of my argument is not at all pessimistic. What I am saying is that we have, in the libertarian movement, experienced an artificial boom of interest, so to speak. The feminists, neo-Marxists, neoconservatives and others who have sought, some of them sincerely and others less so, to use libertarianism for their own ends will ultimately give in and return to their natural movements, i.e. the movements that represent their primary loyalties. Feminists, Marxists, Black Anarchists, Environmentalists, etc. are not natural libertarians and as such they will never grow up. Instead, they will only run away screaming once they realise what libertarianism is, and what it is not.
And then that leaves those of us who believe in libertarianism, and recognise all of its implications. It leaves, in other words, the paleolibertarians. The result will be that we shall have our word back—whether we want it back will be another matter entirely. We will then have to decide where to go from there. But in the meantime, to differentiate ourselves from those who are not serious about liberty, but only about themselves, the word “paleolibertarian” will have to do.
I go further. For the time being, while the mainstream libertarian movement whines about Donald Trump being a “fascist” for raising the most important issue of our day—immigration—the paleolibertarian must dissociate from these people and instead forge a working relationship with those of a paleoconservative or nationalist bent. For those libertarian purists out there, this will be nothing short of treason. But to quote the evil John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do, sir?”
This painting is Gerrit Dou's "Astronomer by Candlelight." When I first saw it decades ago I thought, "This is a perfect example of what today people call a geek." It's an insulting term, of course, but the best way to stop that is appropriate the word for yourself.
This is a guy who is an introvert, who is imaginative and intellectual, who is curious and creative. Look at that expression on his face. This is a discoverer, an explorer, an inventor, a teacher.
I can guarantee you he is a loner, bored by the midwits around him, probably didn't like school, and is an autodidact.
These men have been around since the creation of the human race.
In Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," which is sort of the first English novel written, there is a character known as the Clerk (really, scholar). He is the one who would "gladly learn and gladly teach." He's satisfied with a bed with a bookshelf at the head of it.
The Miller, who is simple-minded merchant interested only in money, does not of course understand the Clerk at all. The Clerk understands the Miller pretty well. No surprise there.
I've read various theories about how geeks "evolved." I smile at all of them.
But I do know what geeks have done is amazing. The Isaac Newtons, the Adam Smiths, the Albert Einsteins, the Stephen Hawkings.
Where would we be without geeks? Ten thousand years in the past? That wouldn't surprise me at all.
The strangest of the geeks (comic book culture, programmers) have recently been under assault by the most fanatic of feminists/Social Justice Warriors/white knight manginas.
What gives? These women don't want to be in this culture anyway. Do they instead just want to destroy it, the way leftists (and feminism is leftist) want to destroy everything?
These guys overwhelmingly aren't even popular with women, not when they go to conventions dressed as Boba Fett.
This is an example of that bizarre feminist tendency to want to invade and destroy male spaces.
The only way to handle this is to never back down and never apologize.
Not surprisingly, Lew's site isn't all that popular anymore. I wonder why?
I've written about Hubris/Nemesis a lot. I still remember clearly Bush's nearly insane, arrogant, deluded attack on Iraq - a country we supported and armed in its war with Iran. Then suddenly a third-rate tinhorn dictator like Saddam Hussein (when Iraq had an economy about the size of North Carolina) is going to attack the United States with nuclear weapons? What the hell kind of nut could believe that?
Of course, I and many other people predicted what would happen, including the mess of problems we have today. But then, I'm not blinded by stupidity and hubris.
This article is a bit dated but still very useful. It is from the Patiotist (I've had this on my hard drive for years but is apparently no longer available online).
Contrary to my student [and the vast majority of his peers - and of two generations of academics who eliminated both many of the dead-white-men from the curriculum and most of the live ones who would teach the dead ones properly, eliminations required to secure pedagogic prominence for various non-whites and non-Christians,] some unmentionable racist-sexist dead-white-man was correct in asserting that to remain ignorant of what transpired before you were born is to remain forever a child.
Thanks especially to the liberalizing educrats and their legal system creations, the intellectually lazy, tantrum-tossing, short-attention-span, Western Christian Civilization denigrating children of diverse hues, religions, and sexual preferences are now in charge. If you think MTV is the extent of the problem, spend time with the National Review according to Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg.
As we are about to step once more, big guns blazing, into the cesspool of post-British imperialism that is not merely Iraq but the whole of the Middle East, we should learn from the ancients anything they can teach us about such adventuring, particularly in that region. Herodotus has been labeled both the Father of History and the Father of Lies. Considering contemporary historiography, both what is published today as scholarship and what is generally pontificated in classes to gullible and/or apathetic students, those contradictory titles make even more sense than they did in Antiquity. Herodotus, of course, was not a historian in our sense, which discipline derives specifically from the work of Thukydides. Rather, Herodotus’s work is what its title means most literally in ancient Greek: inquiries, investigations, studies, or researches.
The Histories is a complex, digression-filled narrative examination of the wars against the Greeks waged by the Persian Empire: a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-religious behemoth that had swallowed the whole of the ancient Near East and could not rest until it ruled, either as one of its satrapies or through a puppet tyrant, the whole of the world seen by ancient Persians as potentially harmful to Persian power and wealth. If that reminds you of Pharaonic Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, the Macedonian Empire, Rome, the Arabic Empire, The Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Aztec Empire, the British Empire, the USSR, the Third Reich, Marxist China, and, increasingly, post-1860 Washington DC, then you ain’t brain dead.
Herodotus was a combination of investigative journalist, antiquarian, geographer, anthropologist, ethnologist, folklorist, and moralist. His work originally was presented orally, as were the ancient epics. The massive scope of The Histories is held together by the theme: the hybris [excessive pride or arrogance] that leads to overreaching [including ignoring good advice] and brutality, which guarantee nemesis [destruction, especially that which is retributive justice.]
Surely Herodotus’s Greek audiences would have considered the repulses of Persian onslaughts as morally good for the whole world and not simply because it was the freedom of various independent Greek city-states that was at stake. The Persian Empire exemplified hybris like no nation the Greeks of the Fifth Century B.C. had known and feared.
Before proceeding with a discussion of a few lessons from The Histories applicable to us, I need to emphasize that to ancient Greeks, hybris was not something exact for which each man was guilty. As men are inevitably unequal in abilities, intellectual and physical, that which is hybris for one man may be justified, even expected or demanded, of another man. What is hybris in you or me may be almost a requirement for another.
The best presentation of that may be found in The Iliad. Patroklus is at least on the verge of hybris [from his desire to overreach to do good] in wearing Akhilleus’s armor and attempting to stand in for the greatest hero; he is guilty of hybris in failing to adhere strictly to Akhilleus’s directions. And the rightful wages of sin is death. Akhilleus is not guilty of hybris at any time, even though he refuses to humble himself before the older, richer king of men Agamemnon: who is wrong and thus in harming his men is himself guilty of hybris to serve his vanity and his grip on power.
That is not a denial of absolute right and wrong; it is a realistic understanding of the nature of man. We know it instinctively and judge according to it when neither our hybris nor modern prejudice gets in the way. For example, we know it would be hybris for a 200-pound man to strut and boast that he can play left tackle against any defensive end in the NFL. We know that his demanding to do so is ludicrous at best and that defeat for his team is all but assured if he gets his way. We also recognize the hybris of the head coach who flaunts his position and its authority, who pounds his chest and chimes his experience as both player and coach, as he rejects the good advice of the offensive line coach and the other lineman to keep the wannabe tackle on the bench.
Folks galore guilty of the worst intellectual and/or moral hybris are now running our schools, governments, publication enterprises, and churches. The pressing need for warnings concerning men of war and hybris is readily apparent today. Consider David Horowitz’s blog attack on The American Conservative and through that magazine on the whole of the surviving American Old Right, which, following particularly the wisdom of George Washington, knows that if Romans could not maintain a true Republic while creating an Empire [which necessarily promoted a type of multiculturalism that led directly to both loss of freedoms for Roman citizens and moral degradation,] then neither can Americans.
Horowitz, just as he would have written of leftists who disagreed with Marxist approaches when he was a New Left Marxist, writes of the need to ‘re-evaluate’ the conservative status of those who do not support neo-conservative imperial warmongering:
“I’m talking about a fundamental alienation from the realities of this country in favor of one theory or another, which leads to a dissociation from the primary obligation which is to defend your community. If you are willing to attack your own country when it has been attacked by foreign adversaries, you are no longer a critic but an adversary yourself.”
First, to warn your country about the poisonous fruits of its policies is no more to attack it than it is for the physician to attack his patient by telling him he must kick heroin or die. And only a child or someone in denial, and/or up to his hairline in decadence, would believe so. Second, to Horowitz [who ignores the facts that the monster Hussein did not attack America and that Al Qaeda has little support among pro-Saddam Iraqis,] the Old Right warning about foreign entanglements equals, at least when Israel is involved, Leftist denunciations of these United States as a racist, sexist, homophobic oppressor. Our communities are being ravaged culturally, morally, and politically by: illegal immigrants; non-assimilating legal immigrants; anti-white and/or anti-Christian special interest groups; centralized-government-worshiping bureaucrats and the excessive taxation required to fund them and their programs; and Leftist professors, journalists, and lawyers. In response, David Horowitz, who threatens the anti-Semite charge about as freely as Amiri Baraka slings the racist charge, calls for another neo-con purge of paleoconservatives. The issue is, depending on the individual neo-con [who like the leftist tends to ooze contempt for fly-over country and the many local traditions, folkways, and especially allegiances that manage to survive among the white Gentile rubes,] either one of essentially mindless acceptance of foreign adventuring [unless Bill Clinton is President and wants such military use for ‘liberal’ goals] or one of aggressive pursuit of Israeli hawk positions: Uncle Sam’s Empire must spill the blood of Americans and spend several billion dollars to rid Israel of its enemies so the socialist Jewish state may thrive as a Jewish nation whose existence proves the worth of multicultural democracy and free enterprise.
As strange as the claim may sound initially, the extreme of neoconservatism is not Horowitz’s desire to purge from the Beltway/NYC inner sanctum of ‘respectable’ Martin-Luther-King-loving, multicultural ‘conservatism’ the Old Right ‘heretics’ who doubt the wisdom of imperial warring against Iraq. Norman Podhoretz [the Godfather of the neocon view of American Empire significantly of, for, and by Jewish interests who is particularly adept at denouncing paleoconservatives as anti-Semites] actually calls for World War to be waged against most of the Islamic Middle East.
In such a political, social climate, wisdom from Antiquity is sorely needed. Kroesus, king of Lydia, conquered the ‘Asiatic Greeks:’ Greek city-states in Asia Minor [the western coast of what is today Turkey.] When he learned that the Persians had conquered the closely related Medes [who had led the resistance of Iranian tribes to the routine incursions of the expansionist Semitic Assyrians and Babylonians] and appeared set to attempt their own expansion, Kroesus decided he was the man to swat the Persians right back into the backwater of the Aryan tribes [Iran.]
Of course, success in such a venture would pave the way for Kroesus, already steeped in imperial blood, to move eastward and perhaps rule an empire larger than any ever held by Assyrians or Babylonians.
Being a cautious, perhaps even pious, ruler, Kroesus consulted oracles concerning his plans. He was told that if he attacked the Persians, a great empire would be destroyed. Perhaps because the same answer instructed him to make alliance with the most powerful Greek city-states, perhaps because he was willing to hear only what he desired, Kroesus interpreted the oracle to mean that he would destroy Persia. Ignoring the unambiguous warning of a Lydian named Sandanis, Kroesus pressed on, and his hybris destroyed the Lydian Empire. The Persian Emperor Cyrus, puffed with his successes against Lydia and Babylon, then took hybris to a level beyond that of Kroesus. He set his sights on ruling the land of the Massagetae: east of the Caspian Sea and thus a necessary step toward reaching beyond the known world.
As Cyrus’s men built bridges to cross into the territory ruled by widowed Queen Tomyris, she sent the Persian emperor a note advising him to return to his home to rule his own people and manage to suffer the sight of her ruling her own people. The queen’s note underscores the covetousness, for power to deny others self-rule more than for material wealth, that trusses all empire building, even those empires that truly expand in order to do good: such as free slaves or save the union or force equal rights for women or end religious or ethnic persecution or guarantee rights for the poor or terminate child sacrifice or make the world safe for democracy. Emperors are inevitably guilty of what the prophet Nathan condemns in King David, himself a small-time empire builder whose hands, though constantly folded in repentant prayer, were so bloody that Yahweh rejected him as builder of the Temple.
Not only was the Persian army defeated by the nomadic Massagetae, but Cyrus lost his life. Tomyris placed his head in a bag filled with human blood, giving the great emperor his fill of the thing for which he lusted. Of course, considering that Cyrus allowed certain Jews in Babylonian captivity to return to Jerusalem a year after he conquered lower Mesopotamia, our intrepid neocons could brush this all away by asserting that Herodotus was just another anti-Semite who hated any friend of the Jews. It would be far from the first time they revealed their ignorance and reflexive smearing designed to silence opposition.
The only police who I believe should be armed are those who walk a beat. And when is the last time you saw that? They used to do it in the past.
Actually, those who walk a beat should receive extra pay, and if people want to give them free stuff, like meals, that is fine with me. The police should support the citizens, and the citizens should support the police. There should be mutual respect, and maybe then the police should be what they're supposed to be - peace officers, not "police."
Crime in the U.S. is not that high, contrary to the media and politicians, neither of whom I believe about anything.
The original gun control laws were meant to apply to blacks only, These days, blacks have a death rate by firearm over 39 times of whites - a little over 17 per capita. The white death rate by firearm is .32 per capita (in Holland it's .33 per capita, which means whites in the U.S. have a lower death rate than peaceful Holland).
For that matter, the homicide rate in 2011 was the lowest on record since 1960.
What crimes would go down if all the citizens were armed? Oh, I dunno. How about everything? Murder, rape, burglary, assaults, battery...you name it, I think it would go down.
There is nothing in the Constitution about having police. There is the Second Amendment, though, which guarantees the right of the citizens to be armed. Although many people don't seem to know it these days, the Constitution does not guarantee your rights - it enumerates your natural rights from Nature, or God.
There is definitely nothing in the Constitution about the police being militarized - armored vehicle, machine guns, the whole bit.
Of course, when the police have these things criminals are going to target them so they can get those advanced weapons. Shades of Robocop!
Some (say liberals, all of whom are emotionally four years old) will claim if everyone was armed, there would be shoot-outs on the street. These are the same children who claimed that when concealed carry was passed in many states, there would be the same public shoot-outs.
It didn't happen, and in fact crime went down.
How can liberals be so wrong all the time? I am reminded of what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited: "Leftists don't merely misunderstand human nature. They don't understand it at all."
The bobbies in England for many years didn't carry guns. That was because England was very peaceful. Now they do carry guns, because England isn't so peaceful anymore. And England now has very strict gun-control laws. And what has happened? Crime has sky-rocketed since the ban.
Liberals don't care if you live or die. They want to ban all guns, and if crime shoots straight up, they don't care. That makes them evil people.
The best definition of a liberal I have ever heard is "A liberal is someone who'd rather see a woman raped and strangled with her own pantyhose then defend herself with a firearm."
I have lived in states where there is open carry. The first time I saw it was when a young woman, in her early 20s, came into a restaurant with a semi-automatic on her hip. No one looked at her or said a word.
That state had a very low crime rate.
Will it ever come to the day when the police are disarmed and the citizens armed? The movement for citizens being armed grows every day.
And if they police continue to be stupid, murder citizens and become more and more militarized, the day will come a lot of them have to find other jobs. Sooner or late, the populace will get tired of abusive and oppressive police.
The city had to pay out ten million dollars after this case of mistaken identity by a corrupt and evil "police officer."
Leftists - who hate you - ultimately want to disarm and kill you.
I've known since I was 12 I was introverted, although it wasn't called "introverted" then. I don't remember it being called anything except for teachers commenting on my report cards, "Bobby is so smart but doesn't use his talents!" because I was a smart introvert and bored by school, so I wandered off into my imagination (which was disparaged as "daydreaming").
The bureaucratic intellectual proles who run our schools have never known what to do with smart, introverted, daydreaming kids. They have always been the square pegs in round holes.
Years later I read some definitions of introverts and I thought, yes, that's me.
Introverted doesn't mean shy. I'm not shy. It means not gaining energy from crowds and instead recharging yourself from being alone. Crowds exhaust us. If I'm in a mall too long I can't stand it and have to leave (or else sit in the food court and get a snack!).
And introverted does mean daydreaming, becoming lost in your imagination.
Donald Trump is an extrovert (and since he's a smart one I'll bet you he has smart, introverted advisors). Personally I think Clint Eastwood is an introvert.
Certain introverts are imaginative and creative. It's clear Adam Smith was an introvert. He used to wander around at night puzzling out economic problems in his head though the use of his imagination. (He also used to fall in ditches since he was absorbed in his imagination).
Albert Einstein? Introvert.
Bill Gates? Introvert.
Elon Musk? Introvert.
Stephen Hawking? Introvert.
There are a lot more extroverts in society than introverts. Too bad for us, since schools are set up for extroverts (introverts understand extroverts a lot better than extroverts understand introverts).
In fact, extroverts are consistently trying to turn introverts into extroverts since they are clueless about us. I find that very odd, since the best of introverts have given so much to the world. I'll bet every smart, imaginative introvert out there has horror stories about what clueless extroverts have tried to do to them.
I suspect - no, I know - that rich introverts use their money to get away from the dumbest of extroverts. I know I would.
Is there any good at all to stupid extroverts? If there is, I don't know what it is.
Hundreds of years ago militaries used to divide soldiers into four categories. The worst was "stupid and busy" (a dumb extrovert) and it was best to kick them out of militaries because they got people killed (those to be given the highest command was "smart and lazy").
The other two categories were "stupid and lazy" and "smart and busy," which covers almost everyone in the world.
The worst problems I've ever had with people are those who are stupid and busy - dumb extroverts. As far as I'm concerned they're a horror to avoided. Not just by me but the entire world.
Ultimately I think imagination is not about trying to predict the future but create it, because once you imagine something then you can create it. For good or for bad.
I recently read a book, The Pentagon's Brain, by Annie Jacobsen, which is about DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Whenever the U.S. ends up in a war, and you for the first time see bizarre weapons, such as drones that assassinate people, those weapons (in fact all of them) came out of DARPA.
DARPA has scooped up all the super-duper smart, imaginative scholars, who spent all their time dreaming up these weapons.
Is this good or bad? Both, actually, because it allows us to keep far ahead of our enemies.
But this is what happens when smart, imaginative introverts, with their ability to concentrate on problems, and their creativity, can do.
Again, for good and bad.
"...what many people ascribe to introversion really belongs in the intellect/imagination domain. Intellect/imagination represents a drive for cognitive engagement of inner mental experience, and encompasses a wide range of related (but partially separate) traits, including intellectual engagement, intellectual curiosity, intellectual depth, ingenuity, reflection, introspection, imagination, emotional richness, artistic engagement, and aesthetic interests." - Scientific American
Trump was inevitable. The "elites" never saw it coming and still don't understand it. Instead, they think the Great Unwashed in Flyover Land have the problem. They hate us.
This was written by Charles Murray and is from the American Enterprise Institute.
If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.
In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.
Historically, one of the most widely acknowledged aspects of American exceptionalism was our lack of class consciousness. Even Marx and Engels recognized it. This was egalitarianism American style. Yes, America had rich people and poor people, but that didn’t mean that the rich were better than anyone else.
Successful Americans stubbornly refused to accept the mantle of an upper class, typically presenting themselves to their fellow countrymen as regular guys. And they usually were, in the sense that most of them had grown up in modest circumstances, or even in poverty, and carried the habits and standards of their youths into their successful later lives.
America also retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities. Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960 census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.
In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees. They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000 and $203,000, respectively.
And the conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.
Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.
For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.
While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.
Work and marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and this held true for the white working class into the 1960s. Almost all of the adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were married.
“In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income.”
Then things started to change. For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not as continuous.)
These are stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go with large numbers of unattached males.
In these communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.
Consider how these trends have affected life in working-class communities for everyone, including those who are still playing by the old rules. They find themselves working and raising their families in neighborhoods where the old civic culture is gone—neighborhoods that are no longer friendly or pleasant or even safe.
These major changes in American class structure were taking place alongside another sea change: large-scale ideological defection from the principles of liberty and individualism, two of the pillars of the American creed. This came about in large measure because of the civil rights and feminist movements, both of which began as classic invocations of the creed, rightly demanding that America make good on its ideals for blacks and women.
But the success of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed. Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.
By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working class.
White working-class males were the archetypal “Reagan Democrats” in the early 1980s and are often described as the core of support for Mr. Trump. But the grievances of this group are often misunderstood. It is a mistake to suggest that they are lashing out irrationally against people who don’t look like themselves. There are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism, as I myself have discovered on Twitter and Facebook after writing critically about Mr. Trump.
But the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the working class. The economists can supply caveats and refinements to that statement, but the bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.
During the same half-century, American corporations exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968 and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.
“The central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”
During the same half-century, the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working-class jobs. Apart from agriculture, many of those jobs involve the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.
Economists still argue about the net effect of these events on the American job market. But for someone living in a town where the big company has shut the factory and moved the jobs to China, or for a roofer who has watched a contractor hire illegal immigrants because they are cheaper, anger and frustration are rational.
Add to this the fact that white working-class men are looked down upon by the elites and get little validation in their own communities for being good providers, fathers and spouses—and that life in their communities is falling apart. To top it off, the party they have voted for in recent decades, the Republicans, hasn’t done a damn thing to help them. Who wouldn’t be angry?
There is nothing conservative about how they want to fix things. They want a now indifferent government to act on their behalf, big time. If Bernie Sanders were passionate about immigration, the rest of his ideology would have a lot more in common with Trumpism than conservatism does.
As a political matter, it is not a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t share the traditional American meanings of liberty and individualism. Neither does Mr. Trump. Neither, any longer, do many in the white working class. They have joined the other defectors from the American creed.
Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.
And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. They may advocate social democracy, but they are also unhappy about policies that treat Americans as members of groups and staunch in their support of freedom of speech, individual moral responsibility and the kind of egalitarianism that Tocqueville was talking about. They still exist in large numbers, though mostly in the political closet.
But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. And just as support for the American creed has shrunk, so has its correspondence to daily life. Our vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that touch almost anything we want to do, individualism is routinely ignored in favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class. Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.
Our national identity is not altogether lost. Americans still have a vivid, distinctive national character in the eyes of the world. Historically, America has done a far better job than any other country of socializing people of many different ethnicities into displaying our national character. We will still be identifiably American for some time to come.
There’s irony in that. Much of the passion of Trumpism is directed against the threat to America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants. But the immigrants I actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious. Keeping our national character seems to be the least of our problems.
Still, even that character is ultimately rooted in the American creed. When faith in that secular religion is held only by fragments of the American people, we will soon be just another nation—a very powerful one, a very rich one, still called the United States of America. But we will have detached ourselves from the bedrock that has made us unique in the history of the world.
