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America’s Greatest Threat is Still There
Memorial Day always makes me stop and think about how unlikely it is that The United States even exists. All the risks that had to be taken, all the sacrifices that had to be made, all the little things that had to turn out just so. It’s incredible that America came into being, and still exists. And then I think about how, if just a few things had gone wrong, none of this ever would have happened. And how easy it would be for us to destroy all that was built by all those remarkable people and remarkable events over the past few centuries.
With the strength of our economy and our military, no foreign power can realistically threaten America. To paraphrase Lincoln, if this country is to die, the cause of death will be suicide. So when I see our “government of, by and for the people” start to view the people of this great country as an impediment to their goals, I get very concerned. Such as when I wrote this, nearly two and a half years ago:
I view much of modern politics as a power struggle between two groups: 1) Classical liberals who value individual liberty and a restrained government of laws not of men, and 2) Statists, who believe that an active government can be a good way to buffer the flaws of individuals to better move us toward a Utopian vision of peace and equality. The problem here is that Statists gravitate toward government (understandably), including the administrative state, regulatory agencies, and other “career government” jobs. This leads to a situation touched on by @EJHill’s recent post, “There’s no such thing as checks and balances.” When one political party attempts to increase the size, power, and influence of government, and the other party wishes to decrease the size, power, and influence of government, then the government is unlikely to remain an uninterested bystander when elections come around. Checks and balances between the different branches of government become less relevant when they all have the same goal. It’s no longer a government of, by, and for the people. It’s the government versus the people. This has been tried before; with consistent, predictable results.
If Russia had played a role in our last presidential election, that would have been concerning. First of all, it would mean Putin, one of the most powerful men in the world, is a fool. Why would he want Trump as President when he could have Clinton? Second, that is something close to an act of war (except when Obama does it to Israel). Third, it’s a security concern in other areas.
But this is scarier – our own government is trying to control our elections. The FBI (and other government agencies) attempting to influence our elections is absolutely terrifying. Not unexpected, but terrifying. Republicans don’t just need to run against their opponent – they also have to run against the media, the educational establishment, and popular culture. OK, that makes it tougher. Now, they have to run against the very government they hope to work in someday. Meaning that if they somehow manage to win, they will be working with lots of people who are very open about the fact that they don’t want them there.
I’m not sure this is fixable. Classical liberals tend to avoid government, and thus are unlikely to seek a career in the administrative state or some other role in government. Thus, the government naturally will tend, over time, to become populated nearly exclusively with Statists, who will nearly unanimously favor Democrats. Government is, by definition, the seat of power. Do we really expect these people to decline to use their power to control the path of government? Remember that they view government as a tool to improve the greater good – they have only our best interests in mind. If you were on the side of the angels, and you had the power of government, would you not use it to help more people if possible?
None of this is unexpected, and as far as I can see, none of it is correctable.
So who did what at the FBI? The FISA court? Some other government agency I’ve never heard of? I don’t know, and I doubt we’ll ever find out the details.
But this is terrifying. Someone, please tell me I’m overreacting.
When President Obama, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the Democrat party attempted to use the FBI and other government agencies (staffed by unelected government workers) to control the outcome of a presidential election, I found that to be an existential threat to America. At that time, I doubted that the investigations into the matter would yield much fruit. Because, obviously, those investigations are being performed largely by those same unelected government workers, who have a stake in the outcome of elections. What motivation do they have to reduce their own influence, and thus reduce their own ability to do what they view as good for society?
It’s been nearly two and a half years since I wrote the above passage. I don’t think anything has changed. Or perhaps it has and I’m being overly cynical?
What do you think? Is this threat to our country as serious as I’m making it out to be? And do you think there’s a chance this trend can be reversed?
Published in General
Put me down with those who think our best hope of a reversal lies in a religious reawakening. I’m thinking specifically a revival of Christianity. Consider a few points:
I’m just sketching here. The point is, we need to think beyond political and economic terms if we want to win this fight.
Speaking of hyperinflation, look at the US debt and consider this:
That’s without China’s attack on the USD’s status as a reserve currency. With it. . .
I see this a lot – we don’t watch the news at home, but get social media feeds, etc. Some family members’ perceptions about what’s happening and what we should do are vastly different from mine. Which is OK, there’s no friction around it, I try to stay away from any deep political conversations.
But their perceptions are different. Which means everyone’s views of facts are distorted, limited, in some way, and we should be aware of that from our side, too.
I agree with this. I try to test myself to see if I am on the correct side, especially in the really big things like the intelligence community and FBI investigations of the Trump campaign and administration. One way to do this is to see when the Leftists news sources are forced into reporting things as I have taken them to be fact. The recent release of all the testimony before the House Intelligence Committee is an example. When will we hear from Barack Obama regarding the current story of the January 5, 2017 White House meeting and Susan Rice’s January 20, 2017 memo about that meeting? If nothing like what is being described ever happened one would think he would be out correcting the record.
This is to link my comments above to the topic of the OP.
The bigger government becomes, the more of a drag on the economy it is. When the government is the only official economy, such as in the USSR and the pre-Deng PRC, the result is poverty. When there is a real economy, the parasitic drag can be overcome, but at an increasing cost.
The CCP thinks it has a way out of this. It jump started its economy by stealing intellectual property while using a mercantilistic state to carve out manufacturing monopolies in critical products.
Like Germany under the NDSAP, it’s ramping up its military and planning to take direct or indirect control of enough other peoples’ resources before the bill comes due.
Like Germany, the CCP projects an ethnic suprecmacist world view, at least for propaganda purposes (I’m not sure if the CCP leadership actually believes this as a doctrine the way dedicated Nazis did.)
Unlike the Third Reich, China really did have an old culture (largely destroyed by Chairman Mao, but persistent in some ways and highly useful as a source for propaganda memes) and some of its actions (the conquest of Tibet, for example) are modern assertions of Imperial rule over various territories.
Like the NDSAP with ethnic Germans outside the borders of Germany, the CCP views Chinese people abroad as one of many justifications for expanding its state’s reach.
Like the NDSAP, the CCP does not consider itself to be bound by the norms of what the anglosphere considers to be the standards of civilized behavior for nations. Indeed, the NDSAP then, and the CCP now (and the jihadis, but that’s another can of worms) view or viewed those standards as existing primarily for the convenience of the PTB in keeping their power and status. Including the artificial distinctions between war and peace, diplomacy and war, commerce and war, banking and war, and finance and war. As befits its greater experience as a nation, China is more systematic about this than Germany was.
There are many overlaps in attitudes and interests between the CCP, the denizens of the administrative state and transnationl progressives in the West, and transnational corporations.
A weak US military cannot oppose the military aspect of Chinese plans. But neither can a US military captured by the administrative state and hamstrung by the SJW agenda. Nor can a US military based on an economy collapsing due to debt (a big chunk of which is in the hands of the CCP) and hyperinflation.
If the US dollar is massively inflated and China controls the resources the US needs to maintain its sovereignty, China won’t need a hot war between China and the US. China is showing its willingness to crush Hong Kong and to absorb the harm this does to the Chinese economy. Would China hold its hand from, say, an EMP strike on the US at a time that suits the CCP?
Those comments summarize CCP very well. Our current shutdown gives a taste of what happens when government becomes a larger share of the economy. Americans should not accept it. Joe Biden and the Democrats are tied closely to the Chinese Communist Party and their behavior shows it. They will try to deny it but Americans should go by what they have done not what they say in this election year campaign.
Yes. A chance? A slim chance? Fat chance?
The EUrinal is coppering its bets:
So are the Saudis, for whom China is now a major customer. The KSA is hoping that it can price the golden eggs cheap enough that China won’t want to eat the goose.
Israel is forging ties with China. Who here thinks that the next Democrat administration, or the one after that, will be a reliable supplier of critical military consumables for Israel?
Not all of them. Some of them are ashamed of what they think are the great evils of this country (up to the point of hating it), and see themselves as agents of change to transform the US into Socialist Euro-land.
Leak to whom? The media were known to be wiretapped and on the wrongs side anyway. Congressional Republicans? They had a full slate of things to investigate and mutter about already. And if they wound up publicly exposed as on the wrong side, well we always knew there was something about the guy, but wow, a racist!
It is all about the pension. 98% of federal civil service are bland, risk averse seat warmers torturing their contractors and writing torturously long but vacant emails with vague but suspect objectives and diverse virtuous sounding epithets where the strategy part should have gone. The pensions for long service are generous and as secure as any on the planet. Getting fired for cause is pretty much the only threat against the pension. Some actually do good work while getting to that pension, I’ve met some excellent government servants. But the pension is the thing. And if they manage to make it to their retirement date without getting fired it is almost impossible to make that pension go away.
And to get fired for being a racist? Can’t go home again, and all your calls are blocked.
Ummm. 1972 was a whole different world, technologically. The NSA worked a lot harder to get a lot less.
Compared to the PRC Han, the Nazis were half-hearted compensators for inferiority complexes racists. They are the Middle Kingdom. The world is measured by their conformance to Chinese culture and traditions, on a dipole measure with China at the high end and barbarian/not China at all at the low end. The world consists of supplicants to China and China.
From the Opium Wars to the Ascent of Mao was just a cyclical historical burp, like all other periods of barbarian incursion. China fell out of harmony and harmony has been or is in the process of being restored, depending on how much one acquiesces to the CCP as a legitimate expression of China.
The Church used to think the Universe revolved around the Earth. The Han know it and the rest of the Earth revolve around the Middle Kingdom.
I had Chinese roommates in college, and my late Tai Chi teacher was born in China before WWII. Further affiant sayeth naught.
Not in any way related, but a funny story.
When my brother went to work for the State Department, as part of the onboarding process they got tours through some of the various intelligence agencies. At CIA they told him about the time the counter-intel people were doing an audit of all the antennas on the roof of the headquarters building, and found that there were a few dozen more than there were supposed to be.
This caused considerable concern. Turned out that some of the installers, when replacing old antennas with new ones, were just disconnecting the cabling on the obsolete ones but leaving the antenna in place.
I have worked for a Taiwanese and a naturalized emigre from the PRC elite academic class at different times, and was able to observe them in the same room on occasion. The chemistry was hilarious. These were meetings but they were always at opposite ends of the room and the body language was contemptuous each for the other even as they were straining to be gracious and polite for the room. Making the rounds, when they inevitably fell into each others orbit the conversation was perfectly superficial and correct and the graciousness so strained that quantum singularities sprang up in the room. I kept wondering if a cage would drop from the ceiling so they could fight the cage match right then and there. Two predators looking to decide the alpha, where the alpha will be the one who deflects the conflict. Very Chinese.
It was much more fun to watch that opera than it was to pay attention to the latest business updates.
Both saw China as something bigger than life, if currently under sadly constrained circumstances, both had pretensions of elitehood, yet both were naturalized American citizens expertly working American markets despite coming to the language in late adolescence.
Americans have no concept of ethnocentrism to describe this world where the winner is always the one who is most Chinese according to standards going back millennia. On the plus side, the Chinese have no more idea who they just smacked in the face than Tojo did in 1941.
Trump is the perfect leader for the next four years. Let slow Joe rest peacefully.
Remember that the equipment on top of State headquarters draws a lot of attention up and down Embassy Row. There will have been hours of conversation and analysis on every configuration change up there, in many, many languages.
I was doing something in the publications office down the street when the guy upstairs came down and introduced himself. He was signals intelligence and he just wanted to warn the neighbors that they were leaking like a sieve electronically. When they found out it was publications they were very pleased, since the data leaking was public and the din helped obfuscate their own efforts to the other side.
Good post, Doc. I do want to comment on one part:
I agree that this is a major political divide, and that politics is often formulated in this way. By libertarians, actually.
There is a third option, which is traditional conservatism. I’ve been moving toward this position for years, and have generally continued to use the term “classical liberal” to describe myself. It’s still on my Ricochet bio, but maybe I need to take it off.
Traditional conservatives think that government is necessary because of the flaws of individuals, but want government power constrained under law because the individuals who wield government power are also flawed. They do not think that Utopia is possible, absent Divine intervention.
I generally find that classical liberals share a Utopian vision of peace and equality.
I do suspect that the meaning of the term “classical liberal” has changed over the years. In your view, does it involve promotion or enforcement of traditional morality? Or would that be Statist?
There was some back and forth about Michelle Malkin and the Unz Report on another thread. John Derbyshire writes for Unz. Derb was bounced from NR as a “white supremacist.” (I can see how some would say that. What’s true is that he weights ethnicity much more heavily as a component of national identity and solidarity than is now acceptable. He’s worth paying attention to on China though, and the article this analysis is from is thought provoking.
My Tai Chi teacher was, among other things, a fancier of high quality antique chops and knew a lot about the stones they were carved from. Some of his friends were also collectors. He showed me one of his prize pieces, and told me a story about how one of his friends went on a trip to China, and got taken. The friend had spent a lot of money on a piece that looked similar but was a forgery. My teacher thought it was hysterical.
My acupuncturist’s ex is from a high ranking CCP family. I’ve heard some very interesting stories in the offfice.
I get lots of YouTube ads about Joe Biden and the CCP, and if that is the main theme for this fall I may not put up a Trump sign in my yard, after all. I’d rather see more emphasis on your 2nd sentence, the one I put in bold.
Terrifying is the key word here, and I for one do not — did not — think you were overreacting at all; I keep using the same words over and over again, perhaps I have to admit to the limitations of my vocabulary, but the same ones keep coming back, such as lunacy and sheer insanity, both of which I have used quite often in the last few weeks to describe the bizarre conduct of Judge Sullivan in the Gen. Flynn case, and those same words apply equally to that Rogues’ Gallery of thugs which fomented all the nuttiness of the last three years, starting out with the one whose photo you highlighted, Saint James himself. And, while I certainly agree with @percival that things are looking up as the evidence is coming in and with @bobthompson that a lot of things have changed in the past 2 1/2 years in a very positive way, I, like so many others it seems, keep asking, as I have asked in more than one post here, where are the indictments? I am counseled to be more patient and, as a “recovering” lawyer of many years’ actual, courtroom practice, I know full well that things take what seems at times like forever to get the wheels of Justice finally moving, but it seems to me that this is like molasses in January and I actually find myself looking forward to the hours of 4-5 pm our time on Fridays in the hopes that there will be the usual Friday night news dump, when the denizens of the Swamp decide to let us underlings know what is going on up there in “our” capital city. I see things like McCabe getting a pass, only to be told that they are saving the “big” charges on him for later. How much later? I see things like lawyers in Justice and the FBI altering official documents, and then “losing” them, only to have a Federal Judge, the execrable Sullivan again, give it a pass saying “things get lost”! I see these things with the full knowledge, not something I read in a book, of what would happen to me or any number of plain, old lawyers who try to (actually!) play “by the book” if a Federal Judge ever found out that I had altered a single document in a record before his or her Court. I see things like Comey bragging about how “he sent” the sleazy Peter Sztrok and another agent to spring a perjury trap on Gen. Flynn and then getting adoring applause and laughter by a Manhattan audience, and I ask myself whether these people could possibly be living in my America? Overreacting? No!
My point exactly.
I know that there are some things happening. But if no one goes to jail over such an egregious set of crimes as this, I don’t think that going through the motions of an investigation matters one way or the other.
This was BIG. The punishments must fit the crimes.
Or else this becomes the new normal. And American democracy ceases to exist.
We kicked out the Nixon Administration for doing far less.
But the press hated Nixon, and loves Obama.
I just figured out how to get this taken seriously.
Have Trump do the exact same thing to Biden. Openly.
Absolutely brilliant idea. Perfect.
Dr. Bastiat, I got so carried away with my rant (sadly, an occupational hazard) I completely forgot one of the main reasons I wanted to be sure to send a comment your way, aside from the fact that your posts, both current and past, were excellent, was to recommend a book of which I was reminded when I read your list of miracles above. The book is “Almost A Miracle- The American Victory in the War of Independence” by John Ferling, published in 2007. It is quite lengthy and massively researched with multitudinous footnotes. Your words reminded me of that book and how desperately important it is for all of us to be constantly aware of the many miracles it took to get us here, and, as we have painfully learned in the last three years, how many more it will take to continue the repairs necessitated by so many decades of neglect and Marxist rot.
Thanks again for your great post, and for the interesting conversation it engendered. Jim.
Or … October Surprise? This time with perp walks!
Jim –
Sounds like a great book – I’ll be sure to check it out!
And you’re right. There were a lot of miracles along the way. We would be wise to bear that in mind.
Thanks for your kind words!
These two points are important, but they are blunted by another point. The PRC emigre I worked with was unparalleled at studying the client and learning anything and everything that she could use to develop that relationship and anticipate the slightest concern. I have seen pure sales people up close, and what she did left them all in the dust in its tireless pursuit of even the most trivial advantage. Not that it was sinister or slimy, at least as far as I know, just very thorough in digging out every idiosyncrasy that might lead to an advantage. Our breakfast meetings were often populated by her latest findings.
From that I envision a nation where the primary predictor of success is the ability to study, and predict the needs of, ones superior in consistent and superlative fashion. Pathological servility. Think a cadre of brown nosers ratcheted up to nuclear levels of performance. They have five times the people so, I stipulate, five times the 140+ IQ population. All of that intelligence directed like an arrow to making the next guy up the chain happy. All the way up to Xi.
That is too simplistic, of course. Every society has a wide variety of types. But when I meditate on all that brainpower I see it grinding on pathological servility under Xi. And remember Europe’s royal courts back in the day and all the rest. Thank you, Xi, for serving as the perfect sink for an otherwise daunting advantage.
I like the Derb although I don’t share his views on race, his voice still serves as an important corrective for the blind spots created by the principled egalitarian approach to ethnicity and race bating. You mean diversity doesn’t equal strength? Just division and rancor? Who knew?
Sounds Great!. Hope you are right!
Children are
gifts from the property of society, not their familiesentrusted to us by God. They belong to Him and we need to make Him proud that we are teaching them to walk in His ways.