No, there has not been anything like this in American history.
In 2020, the tiny leadership group of one of the two great political parties arranged, virtually overnight, the nomination of a person who had been a figure of fun in Washington for most of his long career, was now failing in the primaries, and was known to be senile.
This candidate prevailed in an election held in the midst of chaos engineered by an equally small group of bureaucrats who had enhanced their power by spreading panic about a disease that some of them had helped create.
After three years of demonstrating his incapacity, the elected president began providing evidence of senility that was obvious even to senile people. The same tiny group of leaders, responding to the demands of a few large donors, forced the president to abdicate his power. With lightning speed, the leaders then installed a new candidate for president, a person long famous for her unpleasantness and incompetence.
You’d do that if you loved power. In any society, people who love power will want to increase it.
This is the kind of thing the Roman imperial families used to do. This is the kind of thing the Bolsheviks used to do. The difference, of course, is that the Democratic Party oligarchs have lots and lots of money to enforce their will. Some of the billionaires’ wealth was earned fairly in the capitalist system. Some of it — the fabulous wealth of the Clintons and Obamas comes to mind — came as a reward for political “engagement.” Either way, it is used to purchase surrender. Like the Bolshevik system, the power politics of America now operates on a program of total obedience and conformity.
I’m referring not merely to the fact that the vast Democratic Party can be turned on a dime at the behest of a few decayed grandees such as Nancy Pelosi and Charles (“Chuck”) Schumer. I’m referring also to the absurd scenes, worthy of any Bolshevik or National Socialist pronouncement (white is black, black is white, no matter what you see we are actually abounding in peace and plenty), in which spokesmen for the party roundly deny that there is anything physically or mentally wrong with the president, that he is still “creating” millions of jobs, that the border is secure, that inflation has been reduced by the trillions of dollars his government has borrowed, and so forth. People are expected to believe this stuff.
I’m referring as well to the regime’s insistence that the most marginal of its positions be embraced by everyone who wants to partake of its power. Not just liberty to change one’s sex, but a mandate for little children to change their sex without let or hindrance from their parents. Not just the availability of government health insurance, but (as advocated by the new presidential nominee) the abolition of private health insurance. Not just home rule for the District of Columbia, but statehood for the District of Columbia (the 24th most populous city in America, one-twenty-fifth the size of Rhode Island). Not just financial aid to students who need it, but abolition of debts for students who did not need it. Not the absence of discrimination in higher education, but the necessity of discrimination. Not just funding for the war in Ukraine, but the admission of Ukraine to NATO.
With lightning speed, the leaders then installed a new candidate for president, a person long famous for her unpleasantness and incompetence.
I could go on. All these positions are marginal; whether they are right or wrong, almost no one is in favor of them. But they are holy writ for the ruling party — by which I do not mean the Democratic Party, USA, but its leadership and its well placed, well heeled backers in business, the bureaucracy, the academy, and the media. Many such positions became holy writ with the same speed that Biden was anointed and then ousted. Drag queens were no longer guys who were free to do their thing (as they certainly ought to be). Overnight, they became an obligatory part of government functions.
Is there a logic hidden in this chaos? Several kinds of logic, I believe.
I’m not in favor of government health insurance, at all, but there’s a big difference between providing it and forcing everybody to take it. Why would you do that? You’d do that if you loved power. In any society, people who love power will want to increase it. If your exertion of power doesn’t accomplish its ostensible purpose — as in the case of the draconian covid regulations — you have the opportunity to choose whether you love your noble purpose more than you love power. People who choose power over purpose are likely to hang in there and fight for it, and this often makes them more likely to win whatever quantity they want of it.
Another “logic,” if you want to put it that way, is the logic of totality. Orwell saw it; every venerable conservative or libertarian thinker saw it. If your desire is to hold onto power, revel in power, base all your hopes and dreams on power, you cannot permit any vestige of opposition to remain. This is why virtually all conservatives and libertarians have been banished from universities. The test is not whether they know physics or Indo-European philology; the test is whether they are willing to conform to the “compact majority.”
That’s Ibsen’s phrase, and I like it; but it doesn’t quite work. The circle of choicemakers among modern liberals has visibly contracted, as it does in any oligarchy. It’s hard to hang onto wealth; it’s just as hard to hang onto power. The weakness of the compact nonmajority becomes visible when you notice the leaders’ anxiety to keep every plausible support group in line. The Arab Americans of Dearborn suddenly become crucial to placate. African American women are perhaps one-twentieth of the electorate, and many of them live in noncompetitive districts and states. But suppose that this time, one-tenth of them decline to vote! Something must be done!
Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them.
You can say the same about every other interest group, discovered or created or merely imagined. To inspire them all with loyalty to the regime is clearly impossible, but (again, a certain “logic”) the prospect of a narrow margin of defeat or victory can provoke extreme efforts to maintain that all-important grasp on power. The fact that people in many of the target groups have steadily lost enthusiasm just makes the effort more important, and more extreme, because it reveals the regime’s fragility.
Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them. As the Biden regime meddles with foreign powers, which it constantly and aggressively does, I can’t take refuge in the idea that “they’re just popping off again.” They are following the logic of power, the logic of the small yet potent foreign policy establishment (the people who would love to have Hillary Clinton back), the logic of the “intelligence community” that is always grasping and always wrong, except about its uncanny ability to keep itself in power.
This is gloomy enough. And the voting record of the American people does not inspire me with automatic confidence. They voted for the puppet Biden. The allegedly best and brightest of them have voted 19 times for Nancy Pelosi. It is possible, however, that the electoral chaos of 2024 will lead even some supporters of the regime to wonder what the hell is going on here.
