Within weeks of the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times launched the campaign against President Elect Donald Trump as a racist autocratic Threat to Democracy, followed by the main stream media. Democratic candidate Joe Biden presented a ho hum globalist foreign policy as redressing President Trump’s threat to foreign democracies, conflated with his anti-capitalist domestic policy.
What does “Democracy” Mean to the Democratic Party?
European populations attracted to communism after the devastation of WW II were encouraged, sometimes with the subtle help of America’s CIA, to choose “social democracy,” i.e., a democratically elected central government that provided a welfare state financed by a market economy, over Soviet communism. America adopted social democracy in the 1960’s not out of desperation but capitalist material abundance.
Today after almost six decades of Great Society welfare over three quarters of all democrats are now “democratic socialists, i.e., they prefer socialism to market capitalism. The young party leaders demand “racial and social justice,” a political Jacobin revolution. Democratic officials have actively supported the demonstrators and rioters in the streets celebrating the Meltdown of Capitalism orchestrated by the Marxist Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA groups demanding a majoritarian “peoples’ democracy” like that of prior communist totalitarian regimes.
How Progressive Democrats Became Zombies
Since the takeover of Cornell University and others at gunpoint, most universities implemented black studied programs that indoctrinated the Charlottesville premise that America was born to slavery and American racist oppression never ended, causing the current income and wealth gap with whites. Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest economists of the past 60 years, who is black and was present at Cornell at the time, has a lifetime of scholarship exposing the fallacy of this premise.
The “Cold War” against Soviet communism lasted from 1945 to 1990. The Communist Party was outlawed in the United States in 1954 with progressive political support out of fear that voters could be too easily seduced by the meretricious promises of socialism – where income equality is achieved by impoverishing all but its leaders – without understanding the inherent totalitarianism that led to communist atrocities under Stalin and Mao, murders and deaths measured in the tens and hundreds of millions. The claim by democratic socialists of western democratic countries with a socialist economy, e.g., Sweden, is a myth.
A century of progressive mis-education explains the zombies’ attack on capitalism. Primary education peddles soft socialism while universities are populated by “effete intellectual snobs,” the label given by VP Spiro Agnew to “national masochists” i.e., intellectuals who would bring national ruin, written a half century ago by the New York Times writer William Safire. American historians have generally been biased against market capitalism. The term “Robber Baron, first used by the New York Times in 1859 to describe Cornelius Vanderbilt, was popularized during the Depression by a disciple of socialist/progressive writer Charles Beard. America’s dark history has been made hopeless to many millenials through the lens of socialist sympathizer Howard Zinn and racist through the lens of the New York Times 2019 revisionist 1619 Project, with the Democratic Party re-writing its’ own racist past. Economists have been the most easily seduced by the attraction of state power, finding “market failures” at both the macro and micro level to justify their intervention. The Austrian economists Schumpeter and Hayek recognized socialism’s masochistic appeal to “intellectuals” who felt that they could run the world better than those chosen to do so.
After the Zombie Apocalypse: the Pigs Rule
Accusations of autocratic behavior by Trump are mostly in response to micro-aggressions of politically incorrect tweets and comments. Coups that overthrow representative democracy from the right generally start with the armed military taking over the media, the bureaucracy, the universities, the unions and all the other sources of political power. The idea that President Donald Trump could direct any of those sources of political power is ridiculous: the deep state has been trying to take him down since he took office. (If the accusations against his AG had any merit, the Democrats would have conducted a real hearing instead of a five hour show trial – a bit long by Stalin’s standards).
Democrats on the other hand are the Party of the deep state. It has been cultivating those sources of political power for a century, and now controls them with the “carrot and stick” method that was so successful for Mexico’s one party PRI for almost a century, suppressing free speech. It’s only a small additional step from social democrat to one-party democratic socialism.
Winning this election (fairly or not) provides the Democratic Party the opportunity for one party rule if their agenda faces any serious opposition. They have already discussed many tools at their disposal, e.g., eliminating the Electoral College, further lowering the voting age to 16, packing the Supreme Court (again), mail in ballots, etc. But Barack Obama’s demand at John Lewis’s recent funeral to end the filibuster and announce four new (almost assuredly democratic) senators from the new states of Puerto Rico and the District of “Columbia” (to be renamed of course) in the name of racial and social justice would likely be more than sufficient, maybe even just the threat.
What Good is the U.S. Constitution?
The founding fathers didn’t anticipate political parties, so it isn’t an obstacle to one-party rule. Franklin’s Republic of limited powers was replaced by an all-powerful administrative state rather like Hemingway’s character went bankrupt: “gradually, then suddenly.”
The first necessary condition was to amend the constitution. The end of the Civil War enabled the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments extending voting rights to blacks. The 16th Amendments in 1909 enabling a federal income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1912 provided the funding for President Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the European war and “make the world safe for democracy” the rationale. The direct election of Senators in the 17th Amendment of 1912 limited potential state opposition. All these changes shifted power to the federal government.
Second, the specific enumerated powers of the Constitution have been mooted through Supreme Court political nominations, legal manipulation and intimidation producing “creative” decisions subsequently protected by a convenient legal doctrine of stare desisis, i.e., protection of past progressive Court victories that enable meretricious populist promises. Supreme Court resistance to the New Deal withered in the wake of FDR’s failed attempt to pack the Supreme Court. The subsequent Great Society of the 1960’s, also designed by socialists and implemented by FDR’s protégé President LBJ, substituted federal government funding and decision making not only for states and localities, but for most of civic society and eventually the family.
Four quotes from H.L. Menken of about a century ago sum it up:
- Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
- Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
- Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Kevin Villani
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Kevin Villani was chief economist at Freddie Mac from 1982 to 1985. He has held senior government positions, has been affiliated with nine universities, and served as CFO and director of several companies. He recently published Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue on how politicians and bureaucrats with no skin in the game caused the sub-prime lending bubble and systemic financial system failure.
Mencken had fascist tendencies. He was certainly a Progressive. The lines were drawn in the 1920s as a technological revolution resembling the 1990s made a lot of people rich. The intellectuals far preferred Wilsons’s technocrat ruling class to the “boobocracy” described by Mencken. “The Roaring Twenties” were considered a period of wild excess when, in fact, the only real excess was after Strong died and the market got too leveraged.
the deep state is most certainly real, but I have decided to call it the ‘enduring state’, as the deep part is over. ;)
one of the horde at ace, has conjured this up
https://www.amazon.com/Long-Live-Death-Victory-Spanish-ebook/dp/B08DCHBG45/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=long+live+death&qid=1597003530&sr=8-4
this probably relates to the previous thread better
it makes one wonder, what is the purpose of the state,
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/our-man-in-cambridge-93f
it’s regrettable that professor andrews was a party to this,
mencken was more a foe of the mob and what it brings forth
To gain a terrifying insight into the Democrats’ psychology, try to find a copy of “Gabriel Over The White House.”
It’s apparently been scrubbed from Youtube, apart from a few short clips, but it’s well worth watching. Even the short clips are instructive.
I always look askance at somebody claiming FDR’s court packing plan failed. The goal was not to add justices to the Supreme Court; that was the method. The goal was to gain a more pliant Supreme Court, and since afterwards FDR indeed had that, it seems he obtained his objective.
Now, it is of course possible that the Court spontaneously changed its collective mind about what were essentially the same laws it had struck down once or twice before. It doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible.
I’m also conspiratorially minded enough to think that the “court-packing plan failed” meme is propagated to help maintain the illusion that the Court is above politics, which adds weight to the Court’s reversal on much of the New Deal.
The idea that any human organization can be made immune to self-consideration by simply granting life tenure is both hopelessly naive and insulting to the persons involved. Both ignoring any motivation beyond cupidity and assuming that it would be the overriding motivation for the jurists.
On this, the Founders missed badly. Surely any of them could have made a long list of possible compromises to the the integrity of the courts that didn’t touch on money or position at all. In the end, you can’t legislate personal and intellectual integrity. If anything, life tenure seems to grant license to the worst. Some sort of fixed term would at least insure some turnover.
There is the remedy of impeachment. I believe the last Federal Judge impeached ended up in Congress.
We see in the 9th Circuit that embarrassment over being routinely overturned by the Supreme Court isn’t a deterrent.
Did the Founders expect the Constitution to last this long? Is there any accessible analysis of things they may have said/written on the topic?
The fact is that federalism, and anything but brute power outcome-is-all-that-matters-process-be-damned, just don’t speak to the majority of people anymore.
If the Dems really do take control next year and really try to cement their power as they have in CA, etc, there still could be a window for an Article 5 convention, but one doubts there is the courage to do so, and the chance will pass just as it did after the one-person-one-vote abomination. Plus the odds it would result in decent reforms are practically nil anyway, alas.
Brian, If I’m recalling this correctly, wasn’t it Franklin who told a questioner that the constitution’s framers had given us “A republic if you can keep it.” or words to that effect. Conditional I would say on maintaining virtue as a public value. My virtue detector is reading way low.
Death6
I mean something more in-depth than either that Franklin crack, or the Adams quote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”…
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”-Thomas Jefferson, from this letter:
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tree-liberty-quotation
Note that the letter is from 1787, so not about the French Revolution.
Yep, I almost included that one too.
Just wondering if any of them wrote a proper treatment, thinking about when and how people should consider doing what they themselves did.
I feel like we are in the condition of the Pilgrimage of Grace, where people know the establishment is taking a wrecking ball to their culture and way of life, but have too much respect for the theoretical basis of that establishment, and fear of what it would mean to reject it, to actually do anything.
The vampires are waving the constitution in our faces as they assault us, and we just sit here thinking, well, that piece of paper is supposed to protect us from vampires, so everything must be ok…
It would be hardly an exaggeration to describe English history as a succession of wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_England
Many of which could be called civil in nature. If you start with the Bishop’s war in 1639 and end with the execution of Simon Fraser in 1747, the most recent extended for more than 100 years. These would have been recent history for the founders, quite a few of which could trace the emigration of their families to one or another of them.
The Jefferson quote cites a period of 100 years, I would be surprised if many were much more optimistic. Considering the interval between the adoption and the Civil War, they would have been right.
This is the argument for the “Living Constitution”. So flexible as to be changeable at the whim of judges or legislators. The only real countervailing argument is that it has served us well for more than 200 years by trying to keep as close as possible to a literal interpretation. We have a deliberately cumbersome and slow process for making changes that has failed often enough to give a prudent person pause.
On English history, I just finished reading Jesse Norman’s biography of Burke.
Next I will read his book on Adam Smith.
I have just finished reading a series of well researched historical novels about the Industrial Revolution by a fellow who taught Economic History for years.
The series begins with this one and goes 12 books.
I had no idea until reading a book about “The Glorious Revolution” (the name catches in the throat for a Catholic, unfortunately, since it’s hard to feel “glorious” about overt bigotry, and the destruction of England’s historical culture) how much of the debates around the American Founding, and the Bill of Rights especially, are directly related to the issues that were at stake in 1688…
That period gets completely overlooked, which is odd, since it’s so relevant to America. People love to read about the Tudors, for the soap opera stuff, and the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution, but that in-between time gets ignored…
It’s not as if the period before 1619 could be described as placid. The Founders had plenty of recent bad precedents to use. In 1787 Jefferson was in Paris and must have been aware of the rumblings. He was very bloody minded as long as he was far from the blood.
It is also worth noting that the rebellion of the 13 colonies was affected by domestic British politics of the time – at a later enquiry, General Howe (a member of the Whig party and friend of pro-independence campaigners such as John Wilkes and Charles James Fox) explained to a Committee of Enquiry that there were “political reasons” why he refused to follow up at Brandywine to destroy the Continental Army. (By the time Cornwallis replaced him as commander, Howe had declined victory repeatedly — whether at Manhattan, Brandywine, White Plaines, or Valley Forge.)
It is also worth noting that the rebellion of the 13 colonies was affected by domestic British politics of the time – at a later enquiry, General Howe (a member of the Whig party and friend of pro-independence campaigners such as John Wilkes and Charles James Fox) explained to a Committee of Enquiry that there were “political reasons” why he refused to follow up at Brandywine to destroy the Continental Army.
In other words, Howe was a more successful version of the Civil War Union General George B. McClellan, who somehow managed to fail to take Richmond despite what should have been overwhelming force and later failed to destroy Lee’s army despite having a copy of the Confederate Army’s plan of battle.
What good is the U.S. Constitution?
I remember a long time ago Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club wrote something to effect that the right was always going around trying to stop the left from burning down a house we shared.
I recall wondering what would happen when the right decided the house was so damaged that it was no longer worth saving.
I think we’re finding out now. I note most importantly of all that the Republican electorate defected en masse to Donald Trump, despite being told over and over again by our GOP betters that he was unsuitable.
I suspect Trump has at the very least noticed something is wrong, and has started in practice treating that old timey document just like the left treats it- as an obstacle to success.
I note his four recent executive orders, which I’m sure everyone reading this has heard about. I don’t allege Trump is ignoring the Constitution, but when the Supreme Court casually rewrites it on command from the left then I certainly see no reason for Trump to pretend otherwise, even if Senator Ben Sasse gets upset.
I further note that Trump let the left burn the cities it controlled with effective impunity, and then declined to give them money to rebuild. I can’t imagine any prior Republican doing the same, and I recall Bush 41 certainly did not. I suspect the left’s plan was for Trump to send in the National Guard to keep leftist-run cities from burning, then attack him as a murderer when rioters ended up getting shot while attacking Guard troops, followed up with attacks on Trump as a dictator from high-ranking Deep State military officers. End game, the Geee Ohhh Peee would have finally obtained cover to abandon Trump, and they could have impeached him again and removed him from office.
But Trump didn’t play along, which I think is popular with his supporters. If the left literally wants to burn down their own houses, let them- and then let them camp in the ruins. To be blunt, I’m tired of paying for Democrat incompetence- and more to the topic at hand, I’m tired of being lectured that a document I know they despise and seek to destroy forces me to do it.
The Constitution should restrain everyone, or it will eventually restrain no one. If it has degenerated into nothing more than a set of shackles set upon the political right, then it is time for it to go.
“If it has degenerated into nothing more than a set of shackles set upon the political right, then it is time for it to go.”
Or an excuse for politicians of the “right” to tell their alleged constituents why they can’t actually do anything on their behalf.
It’s hard for me to see the cities crumble and burn – I have children in Cleveland and Chicago, and I’m concerned about them.
I’m also a scant 30 minutes from Charlotte. We’ve had some protests in Rock Hill, but nothing in the way of violence.
But, the point of letting the cities burn and descend into the chaos of lawlessness, yeah. I’m on board with people getting what they have yearned for – and getting it, good and hard. Maybe after they have to PAY for what they allowed to happen, they will get the point.
extending voting rights to blacks
No. It guaranteed voting rights to blacks and former slaves. The Constitution never restricted voting rights – to anyone. The various amendments “giving” the right to vote to blacks and women really just imposed a national solution for a situation that already obtained in many places.
MCS Says:
It would be hardly an exaggeration to describe
Englishall of history as a succession of wars.FIFY
The main defect of the Constitution is that We The People fail to comprehend that we are the ones responsible for maintaining the Republic in good health.
The People are responsible to maintain the division of the enumerated powers, to monitor and discipline the judges as well as the executives and the legislators, etc etc etc.
Instead, We The People assumed that the Constitution was able to function on the equivalent of an autopilot. This is the problem. We The People are lazy and stupid and degenerate and now we’re screwed. We are getting everything we voted for, in spades, and then some, good and hard, until it ki11s us.
James: We the People didn’t destroy the historical form of the government by the one person one vote abomination. The Supreme Court did that by fiat. Everything flows inevitably from there.