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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
Since I got another alert on the post, I’m wondering about something else: the odds of factions forming on either side. We tend to portray the left as a monolithic force, but even the Bolsheviks had the Mensheviks to deal with. My thought is that with social justics, intersectionality and similar buzzwords the various left factions would be fighting each other as much as the right. Not that the right wouldn’t have factions.
It’s not really about the merits of competing theory or ideology though, is it? It’s just about who will end up on top and with the power to pick the ideology that prevails and enforce it for some time. That’s one of the things that I believe makes the effort to establish a constitution after the American revolution so momentous – the struggle over the ideology was not violent, even though there were factions and they shifted. It was precise and thorough and agonized and passionate but not violent. Ratification by Pauline Maier is an intriguing telling of the paths followed and compromises made to get one constitution ratified. Ours. That’s why the liberals’ dismissal of its provisions is so disheartening. Our Constitution is not perfect but exemplary in so many ways. I do not like their alternatives.
It’s not about the merits of the ideology, it’s whether or not the disparate groups that form either left or right would stick together long enough to defeat the other side.
For example, as it stands a good chunk of leftist funding/political leadership is still coming from old white guys; if we assume a war situation would have roughly analogous leadership would the Black Panthers/La Raza/whoever still decide to march under the left banner, or would they decide it was time to strike out on their own?
I doubt the black panthers would ever work with La Raza, but I’m sure there would be other opportunistic “enemy of my enemy” combinations – I think it’s happening with the Antifa crowds already funded by the rich white guy(s). So,windy has to have the money. The ultimate winner to be determined after “they” win. Most revolutions are unstable aren’t they ?
What’s an alert, and how was it generated? And what language was it for? Just want to know how Ricochet works. Thanks.
Yes. Though we certainly have factions ourselves, the ones on the Left are worse. They’re starting to eat their own at times. There’s a faction of feminists who hate trans women, a younger faction who hates the ones who don’t like makeup or looking pretty, etc, and black feminists who hate everyone, complaining there weren’t enough black women in the Women’s March. Sometimes I think they wake up every morning and have to check to see who they’re supposed to support that day
Is there an app for it?
Being the inveterate inventor that I am, I’m working on a Woke Alarm Clock that wakes you with a Diatribe For the Day. One less thing to think about, just wake and react. Good conditioning for the little ones. Like a Mickey Mouse clock with a SJW theme.
Little bell thing in the upper right-hand corner of the site. Tells you if someone commented on a post you follow or liked one of your comments or posts.
Ooooh. Got it. Thanks.
What I meant is that the present Democratic coalition is formed of such groups that hold together under the current rules. If there should be a change in the rules, would those groups still continue to coexist, either before or after the war?
An excellent book. Anyone who hasn’t read it should do something to get him/herself suspended from Ricochet long enough to read it.
You are correct that their factions are inherently more hostile to each other than our factions are. Thus they seek to whip their factions into a murderous rage against us in order to hide their internal divisions. Meanwhile they seek to whip our factions against each other.
@rightangles, first I think they check to see who they’re supposed to hate (the most) that day.
Then, as @ctlaw says,