It’s increasingly clear that one-party polities are corrupt, badly managed and serve the interests only of those at the top and their courtiers. I think that if Biden and Harris win, the entire country will devolve to a kingdom of  state and regional duchies composed of  often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs. They will rule by fiat (often inconsistently and illogically) as they have been in dealing with COVID-19. Because they can, the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.

In a lengthy essay, Michael Anton details why he thinks the leftist dream (which, in essence is a feudal form of tyranny) is within reach if Trump loses.  I urge you all to read in its entirety this thoughtful article at your leisure. At best, I can only highlight some of the many salient points he makes.

1. Since the 1960s policies and practices have enriched the ruling class and “erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties” as they degraded our culture and dishonored our heritage.

2. At present the office of the presidency is seriously weaker than the unitary executive described in the Constitution intended as an entrenched bureaucracy undermines, flouts and disobeys the president at every turn if he dares to advance policies “unpopular with the deep state.”

3.  The benign phrase “public-private partnership” is no less than “the use of state power to serve private interests” and the relationship is one in which the senior partner is always big business.

4.  Congress, he argues “is a joke.” Our government is run by “The cogs and lickspittles in the bureaucracy, led by a small elite in corporations, above all in Big Tech and finance, will determine all important policies, foreign and domestic.”

5. The COVID lockdowns and mandates engineered by governors and mayors without laws to permit them based on “expert” lies continue even as we know the virus is definitely not the plague we were told it would be.

He argues that should Trump lose we can expect increasingly anti-democratic governance “committed to social engineering and grievance politics” and a continued undermining of virtue and promotion of vice.

Anton talks about the undermining of the right to self-defense and the outrageous prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, who in Kenosha did just that against three attackers whose marauding had been encouraged by the Wisconsin governor’s and local mayor’s refusal to enforce the laws to maintain order. 

Attorney Lin Wood, who successfully sued on behalf of Richard Jewell and Nick Sandmann and who this week volunteered to represent  Kyle  Rittenhouse (the hero of Kenosha) for defamation says we are facing a revolution and need to prepare ourselves for the fight. 

Lin Wood @LLinWood
(1) Republicans are talking “policy differences” while focusing on upcoming election. They are not taking the current situation serious or they are just plain stupid. They need to face truth that our country is under attack.
(2) The former President, Barack Obama, is calling for sustained protests. The leader of the resistance movement, Hillary Clinton, is saying that we should not accept the results of the next election.
(3) The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is describing our President, @realDonaldTrump, as an enemy of the state. Many radical members of Congress are openly calling for the overthrow of our government.
(4) 1 1 1 = Revolution.
#FightBack
5:55 AM · Aug 29, 2020

The Duchy of Newsom as the Template of the New Order

No better example of what Anton describes as our future can I find than the sad state of California under the governorship of Gavin Newsom. I’ve written elsewhere of the Green New Deal disaster he helped birth and which now plunges much of his state into darkness and misery. 

Victor David Hanson has written extensively on what has brought his home state so rich in natural resources to its knees. Here’s but one of his latest reports. It begins (and then extensively documents):  “Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness…”

At the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. notes that California politicians obsess about things like “climate change” they are powerless to do anything about while ignoring serious problems they could do something about if only they had the skills and will to govern. In that one-party state there is simply no accountability for failure of vision and execution:

Unfortunately, the people running the state, including Joe Biden’s prospective veep, have been mostly meme-chasing, pose-striking calculators. Their only career plan: nurse their standing with Hollywood green activists, trial lawyers and public-sector unions. In a one-party state, there is no serious clash of policy prescriptions. That’s how Kamala Harris could reach middle age with a giant vacancy in her résumé where one would normally find some connection to policy ideas.

If the state is to dig out of its deepening hole, it will need something else. It will need, you know, ideas. In fact, only a revolution of ideas can save it from the path it’s on. And the first idea is easy to see. The state will have to wake up from the sheer ludicrousness of devoting so much of its politics to a problem its politics can’t fix at the expense to those it can.

So why do the citizens of blue hells not rebel? That is the question -- Anton and Hanson and Jenkins, like so many of us, know they must.

My online friend “The Infamous Ignatz” sees it in psychological terms:

I don't think the people living in urban blue hells want to live in hell, but irrationality on a mass scale is made up of millions of little individual irrationalities collectivized.

An irrational person has a very, very difficult time choosing the rational option because it involves so many self-negating decisions, not least of which is stopping the magical thinking and the blaming of others for the problem.

That's why I equate irrational society with personality disorders. It's not that people in urban hellscapes aren't miserable, they just don't see any way out. For those outside looking in, American cities' electoral habits fit Einstein's apocryphal definition of insanity better than anything I can think of.

What makes it even more incurable and persistent is the very people the voters think they are hiring as their therapists not only come themselves from the ranks of the disordered but they have very powerful incentives making sure the patient never gets well. 

Maybe that’s part of it. I do think that the movement in the direction of feudal, tyrannical governance is being aided by the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from places where this kind of government is the norm. It gained force when civics education was dropped in schools in favor of less significant subjects, and the hollowing out of our higher education institutions, including law schools, which since the 1960s have increasingly become there-oughta-be-a-law schools which encourage future judges and law clerks to imagine themselves as legislators and executives. Nor can we forget the role being played by the tech giants, who are using IT as a weapon for social control and the destruction of privacy. In any event, November will have us in the fight of our lives. Be prepared.