Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.
In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.
For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.
2016 election results by county.
Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.
Andrew C. McCarthy
The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.
Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.
That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.
All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?
William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.
“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week. If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation. The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.
George Templeton Strong
Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860. Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions. “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1. This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery. Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law. Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Hurray, it’s finally on!
The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996. Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations. One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC. He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”
McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism). Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.
If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness. Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment? The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges. Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything. Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar. The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists. And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.
Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)
The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”. Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers. Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility. But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference? Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law? Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome? In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government. Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.
In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize. They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them. The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.
Segregationists of the old South would be proud. No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed. The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information. It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds. Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders strides to the podium to announce his victory in the New Hampshire Democrat primary, 2/11/2020. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe)
The red/blue assignment on our election maps is wrong. The Democrats should be red, like the Labor Party in Britain. Now, anywhere from 25% to 35% of Democrat voters favor an avowed socialist. With Sanders’s narrow plurality in New Hampshire, to go along with his plurality in Iowa, he is in the hunt to win the nomination if not earn the moniker of “front runner”. In the past, the Dems got away with it through advocacy of slow-motion socialism – espousing socialism with plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability was accomplished by flippant self-identification as a “capitalist” – Warren’s trick. Capitalist or no, the Dems have pressed closer and closer to more and more government control of the economy and much of everything else. Socialism should be defined as “control” of the economy and not limited to “ownership”. Control is achieved with or without ownership.
Elizabeth on the campaign trail, 2019. (photo: Ethan Miller)
Sorry, Elizabeth Warren, you ought not get way with denying your true self. Sanders is more honest than you are.
Last night’s results removed the mask. To be a Democrat, you have just painted yourself one of the many shades of red … along with the espousal of taxpayer-funded abortion from conception to the drive home from the hospital – another kind of red.
The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
Elizabeth Warren is trying to right her sinking ship of a presidential campaign by appealing to the crazy left base of the Democratic Party with more and more outrageous utterances. Last Thursday (Jan. 30), she submitted a question in the impeachment trial by attacking the character of the Chief Justice, the presiding officer in the Senate trial. She basically accused him of being a shill for the president and Republicans. Watch the Chief Justice in a multi-second stare at the senator.
This not the way to “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936) . She would do well to get the book and read it. Under “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People”: #1, “Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.”
Previously, she belittled the office of Secretary of Education by notifying the world that a “trans” child would make the choice if she wins the presidency. What?! Is she showing how far she will go to shamelessly humiliate herself at the altar of woke patronization. At what point is the word “despicable” appropriate in describing a politician?
Laurence Fox and Rachel Boyle in the dust-up on the BBC’s The Question.
How do people make themselves, for want of a better word, stupid? People are normally rational beings (maybe I’m too optimistic), so how do they end up … stupid? One possible answer is that they believe in fictions. Turning an untruth into truth is quite a feat, and the source of much misery when it is pronounced by people with a media bullhorn. One fount of “stupid”with a patina of academic glamour is identity politics and its conferring of “wokeness” on its adherents.
I define “identity politics” as the attempt to assign virtue and vice to people according to immutable qualities such as melanin count and genitalia. A subsidiary precept is the dualism of oppressor/oppressed for which all people must descend, as based on the aforementioned unchangeable personal characteristics – something any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would find familiar. The result is a profusion of baloney. But woe be to those caught in the snares of the woke cadres, as Laurence Fox soon discovered.
Rachel C. Boyle
An example of a dolt on parade was broadcast to the world in the BBC’s Question Time when a supposed “academic”, Rachel Boyle, leveled the banality of “racism” at Laurence Fox for his skepticism about sending all criticism of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, into the “racism” black hole (“black” being no attempt at cultural appropriation).
Take a look.
Boyle has all the academic credentials of wokeness, she being a lecturer and researcher in race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire. The amazing thing about her is the seriousness and self-confidence in her batty denunciations of Fox. She strings together pejorative epithets like a latter-day Muhammed Ali at one of his prefight weighing-ins. Or more accurately, she spouts the nonsense with all the gravity of a lab-coated functionary in the NSDAP Racial Policy Office with calipers measuring the width of noses to peg a person into the official racial hierarchy. Completely absent is any sense of humility. You know, the lack of any self-awareness that she could be wrong.
One of the ramifications for believing in the unbelievable is the potential for human slaughter. People lose their individuality as they are subsumed into artificially differentiated groups. It’s easy to condemn thousands in a single stroke.
I came across the phenomena of genocidal females – to go along with their more numerous alternatively gendered soul-mates – while reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s second volume of his The Red Wheel. In exile in Switzerland with Lenin were Rosalia Zemlyachka and Yevgenia Bosch, both having key posts in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror from 1917 to 1921.
Rosalia Zemlyachka
Zemlyachka, a Marxist of longstanding, was instrumental with Bela Kun of bringing the Bolshevik butchery to the Crimea in 1920-21. Bosch similarly has blood all over her hands.
Yevgenia Bosch
She became the head of the Ministry of the Interior in the Ukraine when the Bolshevik Red Army seized control of the country. Say “Ministry of the Interior” and you may as well be saying “secret police”, “more blood of the bourgeoisie”, and “Red Terror”. Her body count came to around 400,000-600,000 murdered Cossacks, Jews, and assorted “enemies of the people”.
How can normally decent people become mass killers? It’s highly unlikely without some animating belief system overwhelming all considerations, ideas like those of our would-be totalitarian interlocutor from the woke departments of Edge Hill University, Rachel Boyle. Reducing human beings to categories of goodness and badness as based on biological traits is dangerous business, very dangerous business.
Please read James Pethokoukis’spiece on the AEI website, “Let’s stop pretending that Bernie Sanders wants to duplicate Scandinavia”.
Bernie’s list of freebies – for instance, free college, daycare, and healthcare – are said to be a reflection of his “socialism”. Oh no, not the meany kind (USSR, etc.) he says, but the style of socialism found in – wait for it – Scandinavia. Bernie is stuck in a “socialism” in Scandinavia that was buried by Scandinavians in the 1990’s. He’s trying to resurrect it long after the Scandinavians ran away from it. He’s like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein in his feverish attempts to reanimate the monster.
Bernie’s Lazarus syndrome willfully ignores the fact that Scandinavia isn’t about eating the rich, as is the appetite of those on the Democrat debate stage. The tax bite on the rich is lower in many ways than our own. The operating principle is simple: if you want a government service, you pay for it. As a result, most of the benefits go to the middle class because most of the tax burden is on the middle class.
In other words, Bernie, they have no freebies! So, Bernie, stop selling the snake oil … and cease auditioning for the lead role in the movie remake.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam speaks to gun control activists at a rally in Richmond, Va., July 9, 2019.The French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety in 1793. It was the central governing agency for enforcing the Revolution’s decrees.
The 2018 elections swept into power a revolutionary government in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It’s revolutionary in its leaps away from the customary understanding on highly polarizing issues such as gun rights and abortion. These issues go to the heart of what it means to be a human being and a citizen’s relationship to the state. Like the French Revolution, this will be a revolution from the center, Raleigh being like Paris of 1789.
The Paris mob in 1789.
In 1793, the Reign of Terror, headquartered in Paris, leaped out into the provinces in the Vendée, much of northwestern France, the region around Lyon, etc. The Terror with its revolutionary tribunals, mass executions, and vicious assaults on the Church ignited a popular rvolt against the Revolution’s scheme of radical utopia. Suppression in the provinces took the form of slaughter and bloody class warfare. France experienced the tragedy of its own blue/red divide.
The blue/red divide may be an overused cliché to some extent but it is also very alive in Virginia. The northern urban centers and suburban districts in the shadow of DC – and heavily “blue” – have taken over the state government with the zeal to impose a whole cluster of new gun control measures on the nine-tenths of the state not so inclined. 91 of 95 counties, 13 of 38 independent cities (treated like counties), and 24 towns have already declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries in opposition to what they consider the revolution’s sweeping edicts.
Look at all the Virginia jurisdictions in blue who passed Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions.
How far will comrade Ralph Northam go to impose the revolution’s decrees? Maybe somewhat stunned by the opposition Northam said on Dec. 11, “If we have constitutional laws on the books and law enforcement officers are not enforcing those laws on the books then there are going to be some consequences but I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.”
Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring in May 2019.
Virginia’s commissar Attorney General, Mark Herring, leveled an even more direct threat to the opposition districts when he declared on Dec. 20 that “they [the gun-control laws] will be enforced, and they will be followed”. Attention then shifted to the Virginia National Guard as the newly minted Army of the Revolution. Maj. Gen. Timothy P. Williams, the Adjutant General of Virginia, issued an equivocal response when questioned about the use of his troops to put down the widespread rebellion. How could he be otherwise? Nothing has happened as of yet.
Will the Army, though, allow themselves to be used as the enforcers of highly detested laws? The Army of the Revolution would be put in an awkward position when the local sheriff, DA, or jury refuses to arrest, try, or convict a parent for allowing their 17-year-old daughter access to a gun to defend herself against a couple meth-heads. Massive and passive resistance may render the revolutionaries’ dream of a gun-free utopia mute. Or will it? If history is any guide, secular political utopias have the nasty habit of becoming coercive, very coercive.
Mass shootings of anti-Revolution rebels at Nantes in 1793 in a sketch from the time.
The blue/red divide is nothing new. And it seems that our modern revolutions always have a “blue” cast in their attempt to overturn a deeply-rooted and traditional ethos. Welcome to Virginia’s historical rhyming with late 18th-century France. Will it be as traumatic? I hope not.
Neil Peart of Rush, July 2010 (Paul Warner/WireImage)Neil Peart posed at his drum kit in the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio on 17th December 1977. (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns)
Neil Peart, master drummer for Rush, died of brain cancer earlier this week. May he rest in peace and God’s comfort for his family, friends, and devoted fans.
He was my age, born in 1952. He was 14 days my junior. In many ways, in his early lyrics, he reflected the fascinations of young and preternaturally rebellious teenage boys, alone and bookish and enthralled by individualism. To no surprise, to many teenage boys who were precociously literate in a facile sense, the writings of Ayn Rand would captivate them. Her libertarianism made an impression on them, and maybe myself to a degree during my coming-of-age years. After all, traditions and the standards that derive from traditions can seem like unnecessary and damaging social barnacles to a young and undeveloped mind.
Ayn Rand
It’s easy to drift into atheism or any of the iconoclastic faiths, finding the only one you knew the best, the one you grew up with, as flawed.
Then maturity sets in. Life’s experiences marinate your thoughts and a person might come to realize what G.K. Chesterton noticed a century before when he saw such minds “in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea” (from his book “Orthodoxy”). Traditions and traditional faith, and their moral and social norms, may have a sounder basis than a young and energetic mind can grasp. Peart came to understand this fact when he seemed to reject Randianism and even pure libertarianism when he said in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview:
“So as you go through past, your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.”
In many ways, Neil Peart represents a world and a time that I could easily recognize. It was a time of the breezy rejection of the old and the juvenile understanding that nothing exists beyond the self.
The kids from “Stranger Things”.
Such a mindset may make the individual a god, but at least it doesn’t wallow in the Sanders/Warren socialism, the collectivism of same, and the similarly self-identified cliques who are united by nothing more than the victimhood of their self-proclaimed oppression. If Randianism or libertarianism gets a young person to rebuff the nonsense, something good may come of it.
Below are the lyrics and live performance of their song “Anthem”, taken from an Ayn Rand novella, “Anthem”. You’ll need the lyrics to get the point.
Anthem
Know your place in life is where you want to be
Don’t let them tell you that you owe it all to me
Keep on looking forward, no use in looking ’round
Hold your head above the crowd and they won’t bring you down
Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought
Live for yourself
There’s no one else more worth living for
Begging hands and bleeding hearts
Will only cry out for more
Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought
Well, I know they’ve always told you
Selfishness was wrong
Yet it was for me, not you
I came to write this song
Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought, wrought, wrought
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: N PEART / A LIFESON / G LEE
