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Welcome to New California, where services less than half as good cost more than twice as much; where half of what you pay for in taxes you’d be a fool to use and the other half is either worthless or a guided missile targeted right at your nose; where infrastructure and quality of life crash through the Valley floor while crime soars; where your daily commute time quadruples along with the price of gas; where “middle-class” homes cost $800 per square foot; where—if you’re dumb enough to stay—you live far worse than your parents and pay multiples for the “privilege.”
The median home price in California is now just north of $600,000—well more than twice the national average and the highest in the Lower Forty-Eight by far.
This task—securing rights—is the core function of government. It entails above all securing people’s physical safety against foreign attack and domestic crime. At the most basic level, a government that does this effectively is legitimate, a real government. One that cannot is a government in name only—a failed, or fake, state.
But James Madison himself—the “Father of the Constitution”—warned that mere “parchment barriers” would not be enough to secure Americans’ liberties over the long term. Real, living men—jealous of their freedom, prudent and spirited enough to maintain it—would have to do the hard work. The system bequeathed to us by our founders requires maintenance.
Because the truths on which America was founded are universal, America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—“the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but also “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” If the universal truth of human equality means that every nation in the world deserves liberty, each will still have to achieve it on its own.
The final, serious objection to equality is the claim that it somehow requires or encourages open borders, or at least leaves one intellectually defenseless against arguments in favor of open borders. This is wrong. As we shall see, the founders’ political philosophy is not only entirely compatible with immigration restriction; it in some sense requires it. For to maintain a citizenry “dedicated to the proposition,” one cannot willy-nilly import anyone from anywhere: one must screen for those likely to be or to become themselves “dedicated to the proposition.”
The equal natural rights of all men do not demand or imply world government or open borders. On the contrary, a social compact without limits is impossible, a self-contradiction. A compact that applies indiscriminately to all is not a compact.
anyone. It is a perhaps sad but nonetheless intractable truth that not all peoples in all times and places are ready or able to assume the responsibilities of liberty or to secure their equal natural rights through republican government.
Political legitimacy has two foundations: justice and longevity.
A claim to legitimacy based on justice must have a standard of justice to which to appeal.
Is not the similarity between slavery and mass immigration obvious? (Note to the hysterical that I said “similarity” and not “identicalness.”) They both serve the same fundamental purpose: to provide cheap labor to squeeze working-class citizens and enrich a few. The fact that slaves are not free and immigrants are is, to be sure, a gigantic difference—for immigrant and slave alike. But what about the third man, William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man”—the man whose wages are undercut or whose job is entirely lost?
Administrative state rule is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional.
But Progressivism’s most enduring legacy is the damage it wrought on the functioning of our political institutions and on elite understanding of politics. Casualties include federalism, the separation of powers, limited government, and enumerated powers.
The leading founders were well aware that “all men are created equal” is fundamentally incompatible with slavery.
Let’s call it “soft bribery.” A businessman donates to a politician’s campaigns over the years and makes clear to said pol that when his time in government is up, he will be taken care of—provided he works for the businessman’s interests while on the inside. This arrangement is so common that its terms never have to be hinted at, much less stated. It’s just understood that this is how our system works. Monied interests know what they must do to “get things done” while aspiring pols know that “government service” is the surest path to wealth for those who can’t hack it in tech or finance.
Nor is it only politicians who benefit from these practices. Recent revelations would seem to indicate that no institution in American life is free of pay-to-play corruption—everyone in a position of power or influence is on the take in one form or another. The Sierra Club, for example, dropped its long-held stance that mass immigration is a threat to the environment in exchange for $200 million from a woke billionaire.
Student spying would be bad enough, but when teachers do it the results can be devastating. In the first half of 2020 alone, six professors at American universities—including the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department—were arrested either for passing American defense and technology secrets to China or illegally taking money from the Chinese government or both.
Look at what we’ve learned just during Trump’s presidency. Our intelligence agencies—forbidden by law to spy on Americans—not only did exactly that, but spied not just on ordinary citizens, which would have been bad enough, not even just on incoming officials in a new administration, which is even worse, but on a major party presidential candidate in the middle of a presidential race. And did so at the direction and with the full knowledge of the incumbent president and his most senior cabinet officials and aides. The FBI—supposedly the sterling example of American rectitude—contrived a phony
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I am sorry, and even a bit trepidatious, to have to say this, but the most storied and powerful agencies in our government—the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the entire “intelligence community”—are, all of them, corrupt.
Remember how Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer taunted President Trump for challenging the spies who nominally work for him? “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Let that sink in for a moment. Here we have one of the most powerful men in the United States, a pillar of the ruling class, a titan within our government, openly bragging that our most powerful, secretive, and unaccountable agencies mete out private vengeance—including against elected presidents—to serve their institutional interests.
In the founders’ conception—indeed, in the view of virtually every political thinker and practicing statesman who ever lived—the core purpose of government is to promote the common good, traditionally understood as policies that benefit the whole citizenry. We now have almost the exact opposite: a government and elite institutions that either deny there is a common good or insist that it is identical with their own narrow sectarian interests.
What has Conservatism Inc. successfully conserved, what leftist advance has it prevented, over the last thirty years?
The foundational purpose of the Narrative is to obscure who the ruling class really are and to misdirect potential resentment and class hatred in other directions.
The crafters of the Narrative are not unaware, however, that to large portions of the American population, this part of the message rings hollow. Top slots in modern America may theoretically be open to all, but somehow most of them keep ending up in the hands of the same types of people—basically the sons and daughters of the current ruling class, plus a few well-chosen and obedient outsiders plucked from poverty and obscurity to demonstrate the rulers’ “fairness,” “openness,” and “commitment to diversity.”
In fact, not only does the media never stop amplifying hate hoaxes and never apologize when the hoaxes are inevitably revealed to have been phony, they refuse even to admit hate hoaxes are a phenomenon worthy of coverage.
Examples include “We must fight them there to avoid fighting them here” to justify the American military’s unending conflicts and presence in some forty countries. Another perennial is “Trade barriers are immoral and will crash the economy, while free trade is indispensable and benefits all,” even as free trade contributes to the decimation of manufacturing, destroys communities, hollows out the middle class, stomps down wages, fuels the opioid crisis, and causes mortality rates to spike.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s
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The ruling class, then, are not so much exceptional as above-average and conformist. The former quality is what gets them into college; the latter is what college exists to make them. Yet however banal and unimpressive, members of this class run everything important in modern America.
