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Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked
This morning I read Anthony Codevilla’s “Our Revolution’s Logic.” Codevilla gave us his breakdown of the Ruling Class vs. the Country Class a couple of years ago, which I thought was spot on so I always look for his essays. This new piece looks at where we’re at, whether we’re experiencing a revolution, and where we go from here. Although depressing, I think his analysis is spot on. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, the path he takes to get there is great grist for the mill of any assessment of the country’s political life and times.
Codevilla takes a hard, historical look at the lifecycle (death spiral?) of revolutions and asserts that we Americans are well along that cycle. The Republic born in 1776 is dead. Along revolution’s yellow brick road, there comes a point where the populations of both sides become so invested in their opposition to the other, so angry and vengeance-hungry over real and perceived damage and insult, that any chance of mutually cooling off and returning to adhering to “laws that are good for us all” gets kicked to the curb and the fight becomes the thing.
This assessment resonates with me. Taking it down to “I am just a simple fighter” level, the best martial arts instructor I ever had spent years teaching me (and my brothers-in-arms) to never lose our composure, even if we were suffering significant damage. “Once you abandon technique, and downshift into ‘brute force and ignorance,’ you’ll never get it back.” It takes a lot of training and a long time to put that lesson into practice. Most are not practiced.
I put the blame for what’s happening squarely on the shoulders of the progressive Left. But righteousness in the conservative cause does not help us right the ship of state.
The rule of law, not only necessary for civil society and civilization but essential to keeping American lives from being short, brutal, and nasty is under attack (or simply disregarded; same thing). We are, I think, seeing this across the board:
At the tactical level, progressive leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Antifa, and student protestors demonstrate a willingness to silence, beat down, or shoot those with whom they disagree.
At the operational level, Blue states and municipalities — and their affiliated law enforcement organizations — and university administrations turn a benign blind eye or tacitly encourage unlawful acts. (On the law enforcement corruption, I hasten to add that for every knucklehead like Broward County’s Scott Israel, there’s an Adam Christianson.) This grotesque confederation ignores federal law when it does not comport with its ideology, and its federal counterparts let their sedition stand.
At the strategic level, the progressive left has infiltrated and assumed the power of the bureaucracies, much of the judicial system, and, of course, the media. The GOP does not fight them tooth and nail in the name of comity and keeping their powder dry. Over time, the plaintive rejoinder from citizens of a conservative bent has become: dry for what?
Codevilla warns — and I concur, to some extent — that should the progressive left regain executive power, they will pursue an agenda meant to ensure that they never lose power again. They will pursue this agenda with no regard for constitutional limitations or constraints. Given what we’ve seen to date, the possible (probable?) parade of horribles may consist of:
- Open borders.
- Continued assaults on free speech.
- Dissolution of the electoral college.
- Redefining the Senate so that the number of seats reflects the respective states’ slice of the population, rather than an allocation of the same number of seats to each of the sovereign states. Just like … uh, the House of Representatives.
- Other outrages aplenty
- Finally, forget gun control. They’ll go full-on gun confiscation, so that our transition (see how trendy and intersectional I am?) from citizens to subjects is complete.
I listed gun confiscation last because it is the one subject on which the progressive left is really willing to share their views. The perfect encapsulation of the progressive mindset is: give up your guns. You want to resist? We’ve got nukes. Yeah, it was a funny. A ha-ha. No way Swalwell is serious, right? Right. In a way. I don’t think the guy would seriously advocate popping a nuke over a US city. I do think this guy would have no problem if the government sent jack-booted thugs house to house to confiscate them, using the NICS background check rolls as probable cause for a search.
I won’t respond in detail to this. Author Larry Correia already did. He analyzed the environment and did some fair dinkum hypothetical numbers running. In his post, he said:
The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was five Special Forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other (and gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?).
I am by no means propounding armed insurrection should the progressives ever get their hands on all the levers of power again, post-Trump. I am analyzing the holes that I assess will be in their analysis when they decide to go all progressive all the way, determined to never let someone they don’t own (like Trump) beat them again. I mean, they’ll own the law enforcement agencies, the military, and the punitive bureaucracies; what need do they have to take pause?
[I need to make an aside, here: This is not a rah-rah pro-Trump statement or post. Codevilla does a good job in his article listing Trump’s failures and shortcomings; I won’t argue with it, though I could offer points in mitigation or extenuation. Instead, this post posits that Trump was an avatar for a wide swath of Americans who saw that the progressive ruling elite/class/establishment (whatever you want to call them) didn’t care about them or their values and they discounted out of hand any input they may have on how the country should be run.]
Conservatives are outnumbered by the people who hate them. Hate them. The media’s profligate messaging has ensured that people generally kinda/sorta on the left look at Conservatives as mean, evil, nasty, people. Yada yada.
But, in light of the Correia quote above (and the link, which I recommend), let’s break it down geographically.
For the most part, our wannabe, clueless overlords are packed cheek-by-jowl in urban areas. Whatever happens in the event of a full-on progressive putsch to rid themselves of that pesky Constitution and normal Americans’ input, it ain’t going to be pretty.
Like Correia, I won’t go into detail. But the smug, smarmy, self-satisfied authoritarians who are sure normal Americans — particularly those adamant that their rights spring from their Creator, not the government — would be amenable to having our rights steamrolled would be in for a rude awakening.
Hey, knuckleheads: stop sowing the wind.
Well, that’s my cheery first 2019 post.
Have a great year. Live well. Love hard. Enjoy the ride.
Published in General
I concur. However, I do have a nagging doubt that if I just tune out and live local, I’m going to get ambushed on down the road.
Term limits versus earned expertise. I used to be against term limits, after all, when, like Putin, you’re termed out, you still have the connections and can run things from the back office. But now I figure that no one deserves to be in there anyway. Paul Ryan has become my poster boy for accruing expertise in a particular aspect of government work. And he was chosen for an abortive run for vice president, and then faded away, never having accomplished anything.
Unfortunately, term limits would only strengthen the hand of the non-elected deep-staters who occupy the back offices.
Cleaning up the Swamp? Make states appoint their own senators.
In that context, I think of the speech by Stephen Rea in V for Vendetta. (Starts about a minute in.) It could go wrong so easily.
What always got me was how V was portrayed as a right-wing thing. When I watched it, I thought it was all left wing. Looking at Britain now, I think I was right.
If I’m not mistaken, it was written in the 80s with Thatcher and Reagan in mind as the John Hurt party.
I try to be level-headed, and I’m beginning to think taking off the rose-colored glasses and facing the realities is the only way to go. You’ve just confirmed my fears. Darn it.
And look how history turned out. They were rather the good guys.
The Second Coming was a poem written by WB Yeats at the end of WWI. Although it’s called Modernist Poetry it’s really a warning about the anarchy of Modernism. The Modernist must destroy history in order to shape, and bring forward the new Socialist Man. It is the culmination of the French Revolution. As the peasants found out when they resisted the planning commissions in Paris and were treated, and slaughtered like cattle.
The individual man must become the collective man, there is no room for individual conscience, only the myth of collective conscience. The irony is that when the collectivist removes Christian values they try to remove God from His throne. They want to leave the throne standing so they can sit upon it. When men become gods conscience becomes whim, and reason comes from a fist.
The Second Coming uses Christian imagery of the Apocalypse, it’s not Modernist. The Modernist uses apocalyptic means to achieve their vision. It’s a vision that has no sacraments, it can only repeat it’s apocalyptic actions.
In my limited experience with the human race(especially compared to Boss Mongo’s), I am constantly asking myself “What veneer?”
@susanquinn I think that is the healthiest way to go but few will thank you for stipulating reality when it obstructs their ideology. If you are secure in, say, the 5 most important principles that guide your life – civic and otherwise- you won’t be afraid. It’s pretty liberating.
At this point, the restoration of our Republic depends on the Left agreeing to adhere to the rule of law rather than weaponizing the law against its political opposition. This would entail, at a minimum, the prosecution of Hillary Clinton for crimes against the country and the office entrusted to her (intentional mishandling of classified information and selling influence). Bill should go to jail for his sexual crimes (rape and pedophilia).
That Dinesh D’Souza has done time for a much less egregious crime which was unprecedented in the level of prosecutorial pursuit and punishment delivered shows just how unbalanced the “justice” system has become.
The likelihood of the Clintons walking away free of punishment does not bode well. The Left pockets another “win” and the country gets that much closer to violence Codevilla predicts.
Great post, Boss. I didn’t think you could add anything to Codevilla’s piece, but you did. Thanks.
I guess that goes to show, the left doesn’t know who it really is itself. They see the badness, but don’t see that it is their own oppressive tactics that they blame their enemies for.
I spent 30 years walking the hills and trails around San Francisco Bay. That beautiful, woke, ‘sustainable’ city by the Bay. And one of the least self-sufficient edifices ever erected by man. With none of its utility sources or logistics tail inside the city, and its infrastructure spread across hundreds of miles of open land. I’d give it three days.
(Five years ago, someone might have run a proof of concept op. Would sure be interesting to know who and why…)
It’s not just that they are dependent on the surrounding territory. When they run short of food, water and power, they’ll find out the coalition isn’t as solid as they think. The rich, white liberals will still have that stuff and other people won’t, and it’ll turn into Gotham from The Dark Knight Rises.
When the topic of a civil war is brought up, the liberals always laugh and say the same thing: How do we think we’d win against the US Military with all its weaponry. Do they not realize whose side the military would be ON? It would be that predominantly red map posted above including most of our military plus the armed citizens of Texas et al against a bunch of protein-starved anti-gun vegan beta males in Birkenstocks. Not that I hope it happens, because I don’t.
Two problems:
I said most of our military for that reason. But anyway it wasn’t serious, even though I’d like to see it.
I had read the Codevilla article when it first appeared, before the November election. Due to @bossmongo ‘s link, I went back for a reread, and this stood out:
It’s interesting that it’s on just such points that Trump has dug in his heels 12 months later – shutdown vs. budget acquiescence, draw downs in Syria and Afghanistan, ridiculing the newly elected ‘woke’ Dems. Is Trump reading Codevilla? I’d guess not, but his own political senses and whatever data he is getting told him the same thing: those who elected him want more. (I don’t want to divert this into yet another Trump back and forth, but he’s an inescapable part of the revolutionary spiral that is Codevilla’s thesis.)
The Codevilla essay should be read in conjunction with the Tucker Carlson 15-minute monologue from earlier this week, the one that so many NR writers have criticized.
If you want to know why mainstream conservatism became so politically sterile and why it was unable to to respond adequately to the revolution that began in 2008, all you have to do is read Smith, Shapiro, French and their colleagues.
Then you’ll know why the Tea Party failed, why Trump was elected and why a soft confederacy is, for Codevilla, the best possible solution to our Cold Civil War.
The Left gets New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles…we get the rest.
Haha! And just to be nice, throw in Baltimore and Detroit and Stockton, CA and any other cities they drove into bankruptcy.
What Codevilla’s analysis missed is the Iraq War, which demoralized conservatives for 5 long years before the coup de grace of the financial meltdown and the bailouts.
He also does not mention two other little “flies in the ointment” for the loose confederacy he hopes can arise from our coming division:
1. Policeman of the World
2. Our unsustainable National Debt
How the confederacy handles them will make the disposition of Fort Sumter seem like child’s play in comparison.
Remember, they are intimately intertwined: we can’t have our debt without being policeman.
As I have been telling you folks, you can’t have small government and the Empire.
Could you refine this argument for me? I do not equate “world’s policemen” with Empire. I simply don’t see it. It seems military interventions either meet the two requirements for justification — 1) moral cause AND 2) American self-interest — or they don’t. But, that’s not the same as colonizing the nations in which the conflicts occur and administering their governments. I rather wish we had colonized Iraq than squandered our investment of lives and treasure there, although, I probably agree with you that the endeavor was doomed from the start and was a foolish decision.
But, I think what you’re saying is the existence of a dominant military force such as ours is a temptation too far for any person or party due to our fallen human condition and will ultimately end in abuse of such power. Is that right?
I can agree with the previous. I just don’t see an alternative, as I don’t ever want our country to be subject to some other country’s dominant military power. Chalk it up to the tragic human condition.
That’s pretty much where I am.
I think you can say the same thing about to United States Dollar being the reserve currency too. It makes me ill when I think all of the stuff through, but better us than them. It truly is a weapon and it gets abused at home and abroad.
JMO.
Doesn’t this describe the Antifah and Occupy protesters? Yes, they would beat their drums all night and ravage their own women until the Army surrenders. What an image.
How hard would it be to deport all of Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago to California? (Just kidding, of course.)
That is such a good idea.
California is going to have epic fiscal problems at some point.
Isn’t that something akin to what Trump ran on? Take the country, take the oil, (and I would add, run the place, rule it ruthlessly) and save money and tens of thousands of lives.
I actually think colonizing Afghanistan would have worked well, but what do I know?