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Shun the Crowd, Embrace the Remnant
This has been a disheartening political season, to say the least. We entered the 2016 presidential cycle with the strongest group of nominees in memory. Today, we mutter last rites over our hopes for a robust debate, as a heckler in a red hat spits profanities at the corpse.
In what was the best chance to elect a conservative in our lifetimes, the current Republican frontrunner is a populist blowhard with a liberal history, authoritarian tendencies, and rotten character. His contempt for the Constitution is surpassed only by his trail of failed businesses and busted cons.
Outside of a Hail Mary touchdown of a Cruz nomination or a brokered convention, it appears fans of virtue and limited government will be wandering the wilderness for some time. A plurality of Republicans have now abandoned the ideals of a Republic while a large majority of Democrats abandoned them decades ago. As conservatives talk of third parties and protest votes, they should also plan for their likely fate as America’s Remnant.
The concept of a Remnant was first seen in the Old Testament. When the prophet Isaiah was charged with speaking uncomfortable truths to an unwelcoming public, the Lord promised he wouldn’t change the minds of the majority. Instead, Isaiah’s blunt words were intended for a faithful minority from whom restoration would ultimately emerge.
Eighty years ago, Albert Jay Nock applied this term to the conservative minority of his day:
Apparently, then, if the Lord’s word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion about that, — the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it…
The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak minded and weak willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous…
If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah’s own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; “there is but a very small remnant,” he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character — too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses…
Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that capacity he not only had the Roman mass man under observation, but he had him on his hands 24 hours a day for 18 years. What he did not know about him was not worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost every page of the little book of jottings which he scribbled offhand from day to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.
One of those jottings serves as a reminder to all of us in our latter-day Remnant:
As Donald and Bernie and Hillary shout to the masses, the conservative minority needs to speak truth to power, not worrying about the crowds grabbing selfies at political rallies. Popular opinion changes quickly, as we saw with the Iraq War, and even more dramatically with George H.W. Bush’s 89 percent approval rating 18 months before he lost reelection.
As we persuade with facts and ideas, keep in mind that a classical liberal remnant created the American Revolution while the masses created the French Revolution. This election cycle hasn’t been kind to fans of limited government, but we can charge on as happy warriors with the goal of ultimately restoring this nation to true greatness.
Published in General
That’s what I read. I wish I could tell you where, but I can’t remember as I’ve been all over the Internet this week.
But it makes sense given that McCain was in the gang.
The following is meant with love:
There is plenty of time later to be a remnant. We’ve talked for what seems like forever about winnowing the field. It’s pretty winnowed now.
There are still some battles to be fought before its over. At this point, what more do you have to lose?
It is dispiriting that when the going got tough, the conservative movement went into the fetal position before crawling off into exile.
If we lose, we can still go into exile.
It’s little wonder that a large part of the Republican coalition looks on us with contempt. When everything was on the line, we turned tail without giving it all we could.
Don’t confuse faith with desperation. Trump supporters know the GOP establishment will screw us. It’s what they do. Ditto the Democrats. And who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing.
More likely to govern from the right than Romney and McCain, yes absolutely. Like I said, read the positions he’s staked out.
I can see Trump’s past positions as reason for him not being your candidate, and he’s never been my candidate, but this derangement syndrome is unfathomable.
The Emperor Caligula once appointed his favorite horse to the Roman Senate. McCain is proof the people of Arizona cannot afford an entire horse.
I think pride of place should go to Lindsey Grahmnesty more than McCain for Rubio’s befuddlement with the Gang of Eight.
But his current positions do not come from principles of any kind, besides whatever he thinks might sell in the moment.
Trump’s reflexive positions are standard Manhattan, far to the left of most of America. And when he “stakes out” a position, such as on immigration visas, he flips on that position without hesitation, in the name of “flexibility.”
Obama is an incompetent socialist. Trump is, in his way, potentially far more dangerous. None of us know what he really believes, because it is apparent that he does not hold any beliefs (except in himself) particular strongly.
Anyone who has flipped political parties every 5.8 years is not someone you can predictably say would govern with any principles save for aggrandizing power and expediency. Neither of these is a constitutionalist approach.
I am not deranged. I am looking at this with the rational eye of a businessman who would never do even an arms-length transaction with someone with Trump’s record of screwing people. And we want him to run the country?
iWe, You are absolutely right.
In a 2-party system I subscribe to the old Buckley stratagem, “choose the most electable conservative,” which is why I voted for Rubio when I had the chance earlier this month. As for Rubio’s Gang of 8 mistake, there’s one reason that it did not stop me from voting for him as President. I believed Rubio when he said that he believed in the Constitution and would honor Congress on immigration policy, and would not, under any circumstance, issue a lawless executive order to make immigration policy as Obama did. Rubio as President would be preferable to Rubio as Senator if immigration policy is the question. The bottom line is, I’m just looking for someone who will return us to some sort of Constitutional order and respect the separation of powers. Cruz fits that bill nicely. Trump does not. So until I’m forced to make a choice between The Con Artist and The Convict, I’m going to pray that we get to a contested convention and Cruz prevails.
According to this article from 2013 (interesting read, btw), the recruitment of Rubio was a group effort.
If this is true, Rubio would have had tremendous leverage in way this bill was rolled out.
Marco Rubio is a liar and betrayed his constituents. That is why he lost.
I’ve said many times that the game the GOP is playing is politics.
Politics.
Not let’s preen over the principles we ignore when convenient while we betray the wackobirds who voted for us.
I simply do not see how anyone can reasonably lecture anyone else about the steely principles of conservatism after the administration of George W. Bush.
Not that that ever stops anyone.
Gop, you deserve your fate. You worked hard to earn it. You will not be missed by most people, or history, any more than the Whigs or their steely principles are missed.
Buy-bye.
Proof that the ersatz “Gang of 7” needed Rubio more than he needed them. Rubio failed to recognize this and in so doing betrayed the very folks who got him elected.
Bringing about this result.
Couldn’t say it better.
I can’t believe how anti business conservatives can be. In business your word is your bond. Trump has given his word on his “deal” with the electorate. I’ve listed above his conservative positions he has given his word to. If your word is meaningless, then all future negotiations are futile. Trump knows that. He wrote a book on that. Unless you can read the future, you’re speculating. His failed businesses are creative destruction. All businesses have failed elements. He wouldn’t be trying if there weren’t.
He hasn’t closed the deal yet, so his word is malleable.
I am as pro-business as they come. I am the CEO of companies, and I report to thousands of shareholders who have entrusted me with their hard-earned funds. I know what it means to be a fiduciary.
I have been a “handshake” businessman for my entire life. Trump is NOT an honorable businessman. His cram-downs on contractors are famous: he signed deals, then when it came time to pay, offered pennies on the dollar. He consistently did the same to his investors.
Look at his actual record: Trump’s “word” is worthless, and always has been.
Yes. This is precisely the problem.
He says many things. He changes his mind all the time.
Using past history to predict the future is not speculation: it is extrapolation. And it is the best we have.
Casinos are not creative destruction, ever. They are a tax on the stupid. Do you not see that not all businesses are equal? It is not as if Trump ran a factory or a services company. Casinos are parasites.
Have you seen the comparative stock quotes? Trump consistently performed much worse than his competitors.
Very good Jon, and thank you because I am genuinely having trouble some days, discerning whether I’m nuts or they’re nuts…
I think one difference is how much time you spend in tee vee land, from whence the orange menace sprang. From inside the boxed world the guy looks like Donald j trump, businessman from New York flying around on private jet with supermodels rallying thousands to a great and noble cause. But one step outside the box, absent the manipulated visual assault and groveling pundits and reporters, one is more likely to contemplate actual data and perceive the reality of the con artistry vs. the legend. To me he’s casino Donny, or a televangelist, or a craven conspiracy peddler hawking bunker food and gold bars. Both versions are unacceptable to me, and one is truly terrifying. It took exactly one viewing of a complete 90 min. Trump “rally” for me. It wasn’t just dumbed down, it was baby talk and gibberish – questionable whether English was the messenger’s first language. And wild applause…for what? Trade wars and street justice and barely concealed xenophobia? And other vague innuendo to stick it to The Man? Ay yi yi!
Count me among the remnant wandering around outside the box with my nose in a book, where at least we don’t have to deal with endless walk-in bathtub and viagra commercials. I half expect Donny to start branding his own get-up-and-go pills and Corinthian leather bobby clubs with built in mex detectors. (Just imagine a James Lileks segue for one of those sponsors.)
This is water under the proverbial bridge, so it’s probably not worth my commenting, but – according to the anti-Rubio faction, his One Great Sin was membership in the Gang of Eight, a sin for which he has been offering contrition, though apparently not enough to assuage his critics. Trump, on the other hand, has no record of being a conservative – and every evidence of being a blue-state liberal, no record of keeping his promises, no history of living a conservative, moral life and, correspondingly, a consistent history of changing his positions and breaking his “word.” There is absolutely no evidence that he is worthy of anyone’s trust. And yet some Ricochetti persist in claiming that he can now be trusted to govern as a conservative and that he will behave differently than his previous behavior suggests will be the case. Should a Trump administration actually come to pass (and I seriously doubt his ability to beat the unindicted felon in November), I predict there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth – and countless recriminations – after the Great Orange Leader has ascended to his throne and begun his reign by reneging on every “promise” his supporters thought he had made to them.
Lately I’ve tinkering with the notion of the Trump Wall.
We’re talking about the southern border with Mexico, which is about 2,000 miles long. The Great Wall of China is about 3,100 miles long.
It just seems impossible to build this Trump Wall.
Ironically, what kept us safe from invasion, intruders, and enemies until World War II were the mountains and oceans and rivers that surround us. These things no longer work with planes and drones and rockets. And our spaciousness, in terms of creating a walled-off fortified castle-state, is now our weakness.
We need to do something–Venezuela is on the verge of collapse, and when Brazil collapsed economically in the 1980s, we saw a major influx of immigrants, legal and illegal.
But I can’t imagine how we can wall ourselves off. We have millions of miles of coastal areas where people can come ashore if they want to. And there millions of fields where planes can take off and land.
Like a lot of things he says, Trump’s solution just doesn’t seem practical.
Yeah, the wall—assuming it worked—would only stop part.
He’s got a pretty comprehensive plan here, most of it revolves around enforcing existing law, and pausing immigration to put Americans back to work.
I actually like that idea.
Ooh. I could have so much fun with comprehensive plan here. I could copy into a document rename it “A Good Immigration Plan?”, send to some of the #NeverTrump associates and ask what they think, that is, do they think it’s a good plan? Then ask them a mis-direct question such as “Do you think Hillary developed this plan herself or someone else did? Oh, I am so loving this idea; I may actually do it. Wait. I think someone else … <smiling>
Yes. I am going to do it, the next time someone tries to convince me to vote for Clint0n, but probably not on Ricochet.
Forgive me for saying so, but I sat staring and marveling at this paragraph, contemplating all the myriad ways in which it went wrong.
First, the millions of miles of coastline shrink vastly if you only imagine them as they would be displayed on a map, not as a Mandelbrot Set. Second, a good way to wall ourselves off would be to build a wall. Third, we should get a handle on who is landing on our fields, for multiple reasons. Fourth, I note that the US government and the US military both exist, and since this is a problem that necessarily requires government action, both should be used to motivate foreign governments to stop their citizens from inviting themselves into the United States.
I suppose that last doesn’t directly reference your paragraph, but often missed in these sort of questions is that one reason the government and armed forces exist- theoretically, anyway- is to prevent foreigners from simply moving in and displacing the people already present.
It seems the US government has forgotten this.
Hence, Trump.
It probably did sound stupid to well-informed people, of which I am not one on this subject. :)
I am fan of NCIS, and based on that show, the job of keeping the wrong people out of the country seems undoable to me. You can fly under the radar, come into a harbor with a little tiny submarine, swim to shore like the SEALs do, . . .
The ways to enter the country illegally seem limited only by the writers’ imagination.
The terrain along the southern border–and I have never been there–is mountainous, isn’t it? Has it only been the expense that has kept the individual states from doing this in the past? If I were the governor of Arizona looking at hospital and school bills for the immigrants coming over the border without our permission, I would have built a wall by now and sent the bill to Washington.
I live on Cape Cod, and there’s a very active Coast Guard unit here because of illegal drugs that come in by water. They do an amazing job, but they can’t catch them all. Which made me wonder if the wall was actually buildable.
I’m not an engineer, so perhaps it is possible.
I’m pretty much with that other Old Testament prophet of the conservative movement Whittaker Chambers who saw himself as addressing the most remnanty of remnants:
From “Odyssey Of A Friend: Letters To William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961.”
His doomy tones often came across as despairing though he had quite a sense of humor – “This ho-ho sort of guy,” as National Review publisher William Rusher put it. And he never lost the sense of acting as if the appearance of impending loss were wrong; that is, actual hope is in the face of what might seem hopeless.
I’ve tried to devise the most succinct case against Trump I can, and this is what I came up with: “He is a man of low character who has betrayed everyone who has ever trusted him; he has little knowledge of and less respect for the constitutional order; he is an authoritarian who admired the monsters who carried out the massacre in Tienanmen Square; he claims he will bring in the very best people, yet his campaign is staffed with thugs and imbeciles.”
I’d like to see an explanation of why these things do not matter.
They do matter. But in politics it almost always comes down to the lesser of two evils. Let’s see who winds up on the other side.
I never thought I’d find myself looking at Joe Biden as America’s political savior.
What have we come to?
Yes, but in delivering that slap down, the country got eight years of Clinton. GHWB may have deserved it, but the rest of us didn’t. Would that we weren’t about to repeat that same mistake.
I first encountered Nock and the idea of The Remnant in one of Bill Whittle’s magnificent essays. I think it was “You Are Not Alone” (which I’d love to be able to link, but, sadly, has disappeared with the rest of ejectejecteject.com). The idea of an indestructible, diamond-hard core of humanity, that would carry the torch of Civilization through Dark Times, had an immediate and compelling appeal to me, and still animates my perspective on the state we’re in — even as I caution myself about the passive resignation it can potentially lead one to. Jonah Goldberg’s May 2009 National Review piece on Nock critically examined that tendency and its consequences, noting that “For all his clarity and passion, [Nock] professed no interest whatsoever in trying to persuade anybody.”
This is indeed a trap we can lure ourselves into. Even as I feel that sense of resignation to a world gone mad, and a strong temptation to retreat into a private life, I’m wary of surrender to a seductive self-deception. Per Feynman, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” For all Bill’s admiration of Nock, I don’t think he has surrender in mind either. Be it building parallel institutions here (a “what” in need of a “how”), and/or working toward a way out to a new frontier, we must do more than shelter-in-place and endure.
Wonderful! — Thank you!
Bill mentioned not too long ago the possibility of his essays being tidied up and republished at some point. I certainly hope we’ll see that. Meanwhile, I’m grateful we have stashes like that one (along with the print edition of Silent America) to fall back on. His is some enduring, timeless, exhilarating work.