If the potential economic disaster of a Democrat regime doesn’t concern you, consider the implications for free speech.
As Mark Steyn comments, don’t be surprised to see an effort to establish “human rights” commissions, a la Canada.
7 thoughts on “The Coming Thugocracy”
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If the potential economic disaster of a Democrat regime doesn’t concern you
Doesn’t concern who? When Obama loses, particularly if he loses McGovern style, you can laugh the whole thing off as a scare tale.
Granted, there are some reasons to be dissatisfied with McCain. He’s not really a conservative and hardly a Republican either. He’s not reliable, not a source of confidence like Palin is. But the Politburo dealt itself an impossible hand before it even played the Obama card. Both Clinton and Obama are unelectable, moreover Obama is by far the weaker candidate.
>Doesn’t concern who? When Obama loses, particularly if he loses McGovern style, you can laugh the whole thing off as a scare tale.
Unfortunately, Obama seems to be ahead in the polls and the elctoral college. We can all argue that he has not sealed the deal — well he has not. BUT this was going to be a tough year for the GOP anyway. McCain was probably the only Republican who could have pulled it off. But he is just up against too much — Iraq, dissatisfaction with Bush, the general level of discontent, and now the subprime meltdown. Throw in how deep in the tank for Obama most of the media is and I cannot see McCain pulling it off, let alone on a Nixon–McGovern level.
Ever read Orson Scott Card’s “Empire,” Mr. Simberg? Fascinating little book. Its premise can be boiled down to a single sentence. That is, “In the U.S., lawfare will be followed by open warfare, as surely as night follows day.” When we as Americans (society I mean, not you and I personally) can’t agree to disagree anymore, *that* is the exact moment when we get to re-prove Lincoln’s notion – “If destcution be out lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Lurk a bit in the correct – and by no means fringe! – blogs and websites from either side of the aisle, and you see the same sort of language that you’d see in the 1850s or 1760s. Prof. Reynolds calls it “the mainstreaming of survivalism,” but it looks an awful lot to me like when the colonists started stockpiling food and weapons at Concord, or the earliest days of the Nebraska and Kansas Territories.
Anthony, we can all take heart in at least one thing: there’s only one poll that matters, and it’s not for another three weeks. All the prior polls need to be taken with a grain of salt. Most people I know deliberately lie to pollsters, just on general principles. We do this simply to confound the things, and have been doing so for decades. Ever since the press decided it’d be a great idea to try manipulating public opinion by presenting such polls as “news,” in fact.
Ever read Orson Scott Card’s “Empire,” Mr. Simberg?
Mr. Card is fond of setting up very contrived ethical dilemmas. I wouldn’t use his works as examples in this case. They have value, but as morality plays not realistic depictions of the near future world and its problems.
There are examples of real world republics and democracies that have died from within. The three examples I think most relevant are the democracy of Athens, the Republic of Rome, and the Third French Republic. All three had conflict between the wealthy and the rest, war and peace, between change and preservation.
In the 1850s and 1760s, there were insurmountable differences that drove those words. What is the analogue to that in the modern age?
The three examples I think most relevant are the democracy of Athens, the Republic of Rome, and the Third French Republic
Mmm, if we’re going to be all apocalyptic and all, I suggest the better analogy is to the collapse of the western Roman Empire between 250 and 450 AD. A centripetal tendency that forced society into two groups — the supremely wealthy, connected at court, predecessors of medieval princes, and the grindingly poor, bound to the land, predecessors of medieval peasants. Arguably stemming from the increased tendency to look to the Emperor to solve all problems, with a resulting atrophication of local initiative and finance, a steadily increasing tax burden, and a steadily increasing trend of subsisting on the largesse of the Emperor and not on your own labor. A trend to punitive and moralizing cultural myths, a standard of public behavior so unrealistic that it encouraged cynicism and hypocrisy, and the suffocation of small-scale, local enterprise.
Sound at all familiar? Maybe.
In the 1850s and 1760s, there were insurmountable differences that drove those words. What is the analogue to that in the modern age?
Now that is an interesting question, and I think the answer is, in all three cases, demographics. Anyone who wants to explain the explosion of the Civil War has got to first explain why slavery did not provoke one in the 1790s. Ditto the Revolution — why did it not happen in the 1750s?
My answer is demographics. The composition of the United States change substantially, because of immigration, in both the 1750s and 1760s, and in the 1820s-1840s. These huge movements of people changed the nature of American society, and brought difficult new pressures to bear on the institutions that had kept the peace, pressures they could not bear. Collapse and the erection of new structures followed.
Could something like that be happening today? Maybe. We have had a great big immigration wave over the past 20 years. Not as big, no — but then we hardly expect a new civil war.
But…consider the possibility that one reason the compromises between North and South broke down in the 1850s is because the North swelled with new immigrants, who did not share the common Revolutionary experience with the South, and because the South felt increasingly fearful of that strange, alien and powerful new North.
Do you get the feeling that a certain substantial chunk of Americans feel today that, similarly, they are losing control of the social mythology? That new demographic groups are becoming influential, even controlling, and that the new ideology is alien and repugnant? Could be.
Postscript: consider that the new standard bearer is a guy with strong “world” immigrant connections, barely American in some sense, and whose ignorance of American history is surprisingly substantial in someone who aspires to the Presidency. Our previous candidates have normally rung the full changes of American patriotism and exceptionalism, even to the point of being nauseating — but Obama significant does not. As others have said, he seems indifferent to America qua America, considering it not a noble and ancient tradition to extend, but rather a convenient base on which to erect some entirely new tradition.
And consider also the fear and hatred this provokes in those who oppose him, the sense of loss, as if the America he helps shape will be “American” in name only, a New Coke of a country.
> Arguably stemming from the increased tendency to look to the Emperor to solve all problems, with a resulting atrophication of local initiative and finance, a steadily increasing tax burden, and a steadily increasing trend of subsisting on the largesse of the Emperor and not on your own labor.
One interesting difference is that American poor don’t pay federal taxes. They pay a portion for their subsidized retirement, but that’s it.