Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Hope and the Deep State
I post reviews of every book I read here, but this post is about a novel I read fifteen years ago, Hope, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith, which, although I considered it a thriller bordering on fantasy when I read it in 2002, I now consider prophetic and highly relevant to events now playing out in the United States.
Alexander Hope, a wealthy businessman with no political experience, motivated by what he perceives as the inexorable decline of the U.S. into a land where individual liberty and initiative are smothered by an inexorably growing state, manages, defying all of the pundits and politicians, through a series of highly improbable events, to end up elected president of the U.S., riding a popular wave of enthusiasm he generates in large rallies where he tells crowds things they’ve never heard before from the lips of politicians of the Locust and Quisling branches of the unified party of the ruling class, or from their mellifluous mouthpieces in the mainstream media. Crowds find themselves saying, “Wait—that makes sense!”, and the day after the election finds America with a president unlike any in its history.
Hope arrives in Washington with no political allies: members of both purported parties see him as an interloper and potential destroyer of their comfortable and lucrative racket. The minions of the bureaucracy and the “Beltway bandits” who feed at the federal trough are in a state of abject panic: here is a president who understands that about 95% of what they’re being paid for is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government. Never before has there been such a threat to the welfare/warfare/surveillance/nanny/spy empire, and this “deep state” reacts and begins to draw its plans against this elected interloper.
For many years I’ve kept a personal blog. Nothing too big or grand. There I discuss mostly politics and history. From time to time I get e-mails from parents asking for reading lists. What books will best impart an understanding of freedom? Like many parents, they’re unsatisfied with the low-thinking busywork their children get assigned. They’re even less satisfied with the flagrantly statist and collectivist slant of their course material.
