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September 6 - September 24, 2020
But I asserted and still believe that one-party rule of the USA—blue-state politics from coast to coast—could, once established, last a very long time and might end only with the country itself.
Therefore, not only will 2020 be another “Flight 93 Election,” so will every election, until and unless one of two things happens. Either the left achieves the final victory it has long sought, and the only national elections that matter are Democratic primaries to determine who goes on to defeat—inevitably—a hopelessly outnumbered and ineffectual “opposition.” Or the Republican Party—or some successor—leads a realignment along nationalist-populist lines that forces the left to moderate and accept the legitimacy of red-state/flyover/“deplorable” concerns. Then real politics—voting, ruling and
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We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the nature of an elite to work to augment, entrench, and perpetuate its privilege and power. The questions for the rest of us are: why should we go along, and how can we stop them?
In the real California, six big industries dominate: technology, entertainment, tourism, the ports (Chinese container ships don’t unload themselves), agriculture, and government. California’s image-makers prefer to focus on the first three, with limited nods to agriculture (cult Cabs and artisanal cheese, yes; Salinas Valley lettuce or Fresno County raisins, no) and government. Not, needless to say, the latter’s competence, which is all but nonexistent, but its woker-than-thou “progressivism.”
So you’ve become used to distinguishing “male” from “female” using English pronouns that predate Chaucer? Here comes the California Wokerati—headquartered in Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Westwood, and the Castro, backed by Malibu and Menlo-Atherton money—to cancel you for being Literally Hitler. Such provocations are in part tests to see if you really belong. Those who can adapt, quickly and enthusiastically—who affirm the New Normal without a moment’s hesitation—can stay. Those who can’t or won’t—well, that’s what Idaho is for. California is reserved for the Elect.
The most common employer for native sons and daughters hanging on to California by their fingernails is the government, which pays better, on average, than all but the upper reaches of the private sector (though not nearly well enough to buy a house), offers terrific benefits, and from which you can’t be fired.
The best story I’ve yet heard is a 992-square-foot Old Palo Alto shoebox, purchased in 1970 for $35,000, selling in 2014 for $3 million to a Chinese techie with no plan to come to the States.
As historian and native Californian Victor Davis Hanson lamented of his birthplace and home, “[S]ocieties in decline fixate on impossible postmodern dreams as a way of disguising their inability to address premodern problems.”
In terms of per capita state debt and unfunded liabilities, California’s state government currently ranks, respectively, third and second worst in the nation—not nearly as bad as New Jersey or Illinois, which are about as solvent as the USSR circa 1985, but broke is broke.
In 2017, an estimated fifteen thousand households—in a state whose population is supposed to be forty million—paid 46 percent of all state income tax.
BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone)
have centralized authority in a “fourth branch,” the executive branch’s agencies and bureaucracies. Those institutions, the people in them, and their governing philosophy and methods have come to be known as “the administrative state.” Administrative state rule is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, intended to be rule by “expert consensus.” (We will have much more to say about this phenomenon in the following chapter.)
They can come after you over anything, as often as they want for as long as they want. You can try your luck in the courts, but before you write your lawyer a retainer check, know well that in one-party California, the ruling class sticks together.
“anarcho-tyranny”: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions on the disfavored.
Mexifornia—observed
More sinister is the insistence that you deny reality—for example, affirm that a man is really a woman—or profess things you don’t actually believe: say, that the world will end in twelve years “because of climate change.” As with all cases of religious intolerance, outward conformity is an unsatisfactory defense; the inquisitors must be satisfied that, in your heart, you really believe. Hence insufficient fervor for elite California’s latest enthusiasm is taken as sufficient proof of heresy. There is no political or cultural check on any of this. Millions of Californians may disagree on this
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While California holds 12 percent of the nation’s population, it is home to anywhere between one-third and half of the nation’s welfare recipients. Finding an accurate count is hard, but even if the low estimate is true, it means that welfare recipients are overrepresented in the state by a multiple of almost three.
1994, 60 percent of the electorate—a landslide—voted for a ballot initiative denying welfare to illegal aliens. A federal judge quickly blocked the measure, and that was that.
After a five-time deportee and career criminal shot an innocent San Franciscan in the back and killed her, he was acquitted of all but one minor charge, which was later overturned on appeal. California collectively shrugged. When Donald Trump voiced objection, California’s elites were finally roused to anger—at Trump.
Officially, California will acknowledge no limits to immigration whatsoever. Taking California’s leaders at their word, if a billion people were to arrive in the state tomorrow, they would insist that every single one has a fundamental right to stay—and collect welfare. And shoot innocent women in the back. And have octuplets as a single mom at taxpayer expense.
The essence of California-ism is to care—ostentatiously—about everyone but Californians.
More immigration makes the state bluer—and the bluer it gets, the more pro-immigration, legal and illegal, it gets, culminating in California’s declaring itself a “sanctuary state” with policies that effectively exempt illegal aliens from the laws.
In modern San Francisco’s self-conception, there were the Native Americans who had the land stolen out from under them—then fast-forward to the hippies, the gays, the hipsters, the techies, and the oligarchs. American California isn’t merely gone; it never was.
“many chief executive officers kept their headquarters in New York long after the last rational reason for doing so had vanished… because of the ineffable experience of being a CEO and having lunch five days a week in Manhattan!” Jersey has ocean views but no good restaurants. Tech oligarchs envy Chinese despotism and censorship but don’t want to live there—wouldn’t even if they were in charge.
Second, the oligarchs want to distance themselves from all that is held by elite and world opinion to be bad about America: racism, sexism, Bible-thumping, guns, and so on. Third, they wish to evoke California not as an American state but as an idea: the Golden State, the California Dream, paradise, the future.
Disgruntled Californians at least have an escape hatch, somewhere else to go. Indeed, so many people are leaving California that the state is likely, for the first time in its history, to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 census—even with the continued influx of illegal immigrants. Though it’s fair to ask whether other states should want any fleeing Californians, given that they have the nasty habit of pushing, in their new homes, the very policies that spurred them to flee their old one.
Moreover, the ancient philosophers and historians whom the founders consulted for guidance either assert that inequality of rank is part of nature or else argue that, as a practical matter, some form of legally enforced conventional (as opposed to natural) inequality will always prevail in real-world politics.
“universalist,” “propositionist,” and even “neoconservative.” “Propositionism”
As every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted, there can be no room for complaint. As to those philosophical gentlemen, those citizens of the world as they call themselves, I do not wish to see any of them in our public councils. I would not trust them. The men who can shake off their attachments to their own country can never love any other. These attachments are the wholesome prejudices which uphold all governments.
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.
stability in any society requires a measure of commonality in customs, habits, and opinions.
Still, to select immigrants according to their “attachment to the principles of the Constitution of the United States” is so eminently sensible—so beneficial to domestic harmony and the continued thriving of republican government—that one wonders why we don’t screen today’s newcomers for those exact same sentiments!
For the founders, the purpose of civic nationalism was not to erase or replace ties of kinship and commonality but to create and augment them. Their goal was to meld together a population not necessarily descended from the same ancestors or professing exactly the same religion and to ensure that they all spoke the same language, were attached to the same principles of government, practiced their faiths freely and without sectarian strife, and were or would become similar in manners and customs. If the precise circumstances Jay described in Federalist No. 2 were never strictly true, the goal of
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Hence arguing that we ditch civic nationalism is tantamount to saying, “Let’s dispense with our identity in order to strengthen our identity.”
even if most of us weren’t of widely mixed stock—recall that there are still real nations peopled by those old ethnicities. They won’t accept us. To an Italian, an Italian American is an American, not an Italian. And so on across the board. We cannot but be who we are: Americans.
Specifically, it is alleged that the turn to reason as a basis for legitimacy, authority, and order undermined men’s faith in every other source of guidance and eventually led to the present’s rootlessness and hedonism, since in the final analysis reason is fit for calculating means but not for evaluating ends.
There can be no question that liberalism—at least in its overtly leftist recent iteration—has done enormous damage to the country generally, and to tradition and religion specifically.
The Declaration itself cites God no fewer than four times: by name, as Creator, as judge, and as Divine Providence. Among the leaders of the Revolution were hundreds of ministers, preachers, and clergy, none of whom saw any contradiction between their faith and their support of the founding principles. In virtually every founding-era document—from the Declaration to the preambles of the state constitutions, from public speeches to private letters—one finds solemn praise for both the truth and necessity of religion.
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
In truth, leaving aside outliers such as Franklin and Jefferson—whose deism is hard to deny—the vast majority of the founders, along with the overwhelming majority of the American population at the time of the Revolution (and decades, if not centuries, thereafter), were orthodox believers who saw no contradiction between their faith and the principles of the Revolution or of their new government.
To the founding generation, it seemed reasonable that the God who revealed the Decalogue, preached the Sermon on the Mount, and created the natural world also endowed that world with natural moral principles that accord with His law. The alternative—moral commands with no basis in nature or that contradict nature—seemed to them irrational and implausible.
Furthermore, the founders saw no inherent contradiction between reason and tradition or between reason and religion (at least not at the level of daily life). Abraham Lincoln defined conservatism as “adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried,” a sentiment with which the founders would have fully agreed. Traditions become established not because they don’t work or run counter to reality and human nature, but precisely because they do work, or at least don’t undermine or contradict human nature.
Political legitimacy has two foundations: justice and longevity. Obviously, a revolutionary regime cannot, in the beginning, rely on the latter. A claim to the former is its only option.
A claim to legitimacy based on justice must have a standard of justice to which to appeal. The
or it is consciously crafted to reflect nature, natural justice, a standard that man does not will or create.
The three criteria for political stability and long-term happiness within a society are justice, concord, and legitimacy. “Might makes right” undermines all three: it hastens the demise of any regime based thereon and makes life more turbulent, violent, and unpleasant while such a regime lasts.
Thumbs down on might makes right
a claim that good and bad, better and worse, good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice exist by nature, are knowable by man, and not only do not contradict the divinely established moral order but accord with it, indeed are part of it.
In short, there must be a standard knowable to reason that exists outside of or transcends considerations of “tradition” or “one’s own.” This
How does the equally commonsense observation that an idiot, dissipated, sixth-generation “aristocrat” is not naturally superior to, and cannot by right rule without consent, a talented and virtuous farmhand inevitably lead to “Harrison Bergeron”?
Senator (and Vice President, Secretary of State, and many other offices besides) John C. Calhoun—called the central theoretical assertion of the Declaration of Independence “the most dangerous of all political error” and a “self-evident lie.”
