Compromise Leads to Tyranny

Seventy-four years ago yesterday, Ludwig von Mises addressed the University Club of New York. He ended his speech with this:

Even in this country which owes to a century of “rugged individualism” the highest standard of living ever attained by any nation, public opinion condemns laissez-faire. In the last fifty years [and in the seventy-four years since], thousands of books have been published to indict capitalism and to advocate radical interventionism, the welfare state, and socialism. The few books which tried to explain adequately the working of the free-market economy were hardly noticed by the public. Their authors remained obscure, while such authors as Veblen, Commons, John Dewey, and Laski were exuberantly praised. It is a well-known fact [still true] that the legitimate stage as well as the Hollywood industry are no less radically critical of free enterprise than are many novels. There are in this country many periodicals which in every issue furiously attack economic freedom. There is hardly any magazine of opinion that would plead for the system that supplied the immense majority of the people with good food and shelter, with cars, refrigerators, radio sets, and other things which the subjects of other countries call luxuries.

The impact of this state of affairs is that practically very little is done to preserve the system of private enterprise. There are only middle-of-the-roaders who think they have been successful when they have delayed for some time an especially ruinous measure. They are always in retreat. They put up today with measures which only ten or twenty years ago they would have considered as undiscussable. They will [and did] in a few years [and several decades] acquiesce in other measures which they today consider as simply out of the question. What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies.

The title of Mises’s speech is “Middle-of-the-Road Policies Lead to Socialism”. But in fact (as Mises knew well) compromise (a better descriptor than middle-of-the-road) leads to tyranny. His student and later colleague, Friedrich A. (von) Hayek, argued at length against inevitability of tyranny through economic micro-management in “Freedom and the Economic System” (1938) and The Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek put it this way in part 16 of Liberalism (1973):

There is, however, yet another reason why freedom of action, especially in the economic field that is so often represented as being of minor importance, is in fact as important as the freedom of the mind. If it is the mind which chooses the ends of human action, their realization depends on the availability of the required means, and any economic control which gives power over the means also gives power over the ends. There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under the control of government, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly, etc. This is the reason why governmental direction of all economic activity, often undertaken in the vain hope of providing more ample means for all purposes, has invariably brought severe restrictions of the ends which the individuals can pursue. It is probably the most significant lesson of the political developments of the twentieth century that control of the material part of life has given government, in what we have learnt to call totalitarian systems, far‑reaching powers over the intellectual life.

Where’s the compromise in that? In the United States, it began in earnest two lifetimes ago, in 1887, with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC was abolished in 1996, but by then (and since) its originally limited regulatory powers were (and have since been) expanded upon through the aggrandizement of the original cabinet-level departments of the federal government, the creation of new cabinet-level departments, the creation of a multitude of “independent” regulatory agencies, and the emulation of federal regulatory power by the States and their subsidiary jurisdictions.

None of that would have happened had the three branches of the federal government not collaborated to expand the powers of the federal government beyond their clear constitutional limits and enabled the various departments and agencies to exercise unconstitutional legislative, executive, and judicial authority. Every bit of that represents compromise — unconstitutionally altering the Constitution or allowing it to be altered — for various personal reasons: feeling good by spending other people’s money, power-lust, getting along by going along, wanting to not seem “mean”, and getting elected or re-elected by assuaging the masses.

Consider Obamacare, for example. A key provision of Obamacare — the camel’s nose, head, and shoulders in the tent of universal health care (a.k.a., socialized medicine) — is the vast expansion of eligibility for Medicaid. In the 30-some States that have opted to participate in the expanded program, persons with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line are eligible, including adults without dependent children.

It would seem that only a Simon Legree or Ebenezer Scrooge would deny Medicaid coverage to those millions who have obtained it by way of Obamacare. Or it would until the following considerations come to mind:

The poverty line is a misleading metric. It’s a relative measure of income, not an absolute one. Most “poor” persons in today’s America are anything but poor in relation the truly poor of the world, and they live far above a subsistence level. The poverty line is nothing but an arbitrary standard that justifies income redistribution.

Other persons, with their own problems, are paying for the government’s generous “gift” to the semi-poor. But who is really in a position to say that the problems of Medicaid recipients are more deserving of subsidization than the problems facing those who defray the subsidy?

If expanded Medicaid coverage were withdrawn, those now covered would be no worse off than they had been before taxpayers were forced to subsidize them.

Being relatively poor used to be a good reason for a person to work his way up the ladder of success. Perhaps not far up the ladder, but in an upward direction. It meant learning skills — on the job, if necessary — and using those skills to move on to more-demanding and higher-paying jobs. Redistributive measures — Medicaid subsidies, food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, etc. — blunt the incentive to better oneself and, instead, reinforce dependency on government.

I will underscore the last point. The lack of something, if it’s truly important to a person, is an incentive for that person to find a way to afford the something. That’s what my parents’ generation did, even in the depths of the Great Depression, without going on the dole. There’s no reason why later generations can’t do it; it’s merely assumed that they can’t. But lots of people do it. I did it; my children did it; my grandchildren are doing it.

Republicans used to say such things openly and with conviction, before they became afraid of seeming “mean” or losing the perks and powers of office. Principled conservatives should still be thinking and saying such things. When conservatives compromise their principles because they don’t want to seem “mean” or lose perks and powers they are complicit in the country’s march down the road to serfdom — dependency on and obeisance to the central government.

Every advance in the direction of serfdom becomes harder and harder to reverse. The abolition of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is now unthinkable, even though those programs have caused hundreds of millions of Americans to become addicted to government handouts.

And how does government pay for those handouts? In part, it taxes many of the people who receive them. It also pays generous salaries and benefits of the army of drones who administer them. It’s a Ponzi scheme enforced at gunpoint. Despite the seeming benevolence of it all, it’s tyranny. The examples multiply, just as the size, scope, and cost of the federal government (at all levels) multiplies. And the price is liberty.

The best time — usually the only time — to kill a government program is before it starts. That’s why conservatives shouldn’t compromise.

Rabble-Rouser without a Cause

Lee Jussim, an academic social psychologist, styles himself a rabble-rouser. I will credit Jussim with even-handedness. He’s no lefty; see, for example, Claire Lehmann’s “How a Rebellious Social Scientist Uncovered the Truth about Stereotypes” (Quillette, December 4, 2015). But he displays a knee-jerk reaction to what he perceives as authoritarianism. As Lehmann puts it:

Jussim appears to have had an anti-authoritarian streak since day one…. Ferociously independent, Jussim describes having little respect for, or deference to, authority figures. In high school he says he purposely made life miserable for his teachers, and later he would become an anti-war activist.

Which leads me to suspect that Jussim never got over his case of adolescent rebelliousness.* He seems to have an inborn need to lash out at the current regime, regardless of its political flavor. A case in point is Jussim’s muddled analysis of the state of the union. Jussim’s assertions, in block quotes, are followed by my commentary.

In my blog entry here, I highlighted [four] main signals of rising authoritarianism….

All four warning signals are flashing bright red.

The first signal [the less the results of national elections reflect the popular vote, the more the principle of majority selection of representatives is weakened] is an inherently undemocratic characteristic of the Electoral College (lots of people defend the Electoral College on other, nondemocratic grounds but let’s not pretend there is anything democratic about it). Minorities tend to be more radical than majorities, in part, because radicalism is usually delusional (think about everything from Soviet and Nazi propaganda to the modern “alternative facts”) and, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Think concretely. Is it easier to convince one person or 1,000,000 people that the moon landing was faked, that AIDs was a conspiracy to kill blacks, or that Adolf was right all along?

Ok, let’s scale it up. How about 2 versus a million? 10 versus a million?

Etc.

Lenin never actually had the support of more than about 20-25 percent of Russians. Hitler maxed at about 40 percent and his vote total declined before he first adroitly took power democratically then executed his coup from within the halls of power.

Minority rule is a very very dangerous thing…

So a system that empowers minorities to select rulers is at much greater risk of selecting radical rulers.

Jussim implies that majority rule guards against tyranny. How does that square with the enshrinement of the administrative state — which is nearly as tyrannical as it gets — by FDR, a four-time winner of a popular-vote majority, and the expansion of the administrative state by LBJ, another big winner of the popular vote? (FDR was also responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which still rankles leftists — who otherwise view FDR as a god — and libertarians like Jussim.)

And how is a 46-percent popular-vote minority (Trump’s share of the popular-vote total) the same as the type of radical minority from which Lenin and Hitler sprang? We should feel safer with Clinton — a statist in the tradition of FDR — who won only 48 percent of the popular vote?

What about other presidents who won the electoral vote with less than 50 percent of the total popular vote, many of them with smaller shares than Trump’s: John Quincy Adams (1824), James K. Polk (1844), James Buchanan (1856), Abraham Lincoln (1860), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), James Garfield (1880), Grover Cleveland (1884, 1892), Benjamin Harrison (1888), Woodrow Wilson (1912, 1916 — bingo!), Harry Truman (1948), John F. Kennedy (1960), Richard Nixon (1968), Bill Clinton (1992, 1996), and G.W. Bush (2000). The rule that the winner of the electoral vote wins the presidency has been in place for a long time, and it has produced all of those “minority” presidents. Why? Because with the rule in place, candidates aim to win the electoral vote, not the popular vote. Trump is far from the first successful candidate to do so, and he’ll be far from the last.

So the first signal has been flashing red, on and off, for almost 200 years. It’s a rather unreliable signal, especially given the tyranny instituted by FDR and LBJ — who won huge popular-vote majorities. Or maybe John Quincy Adams was a stealth Hitler. No, it was Woodrow Wilson. Jussim is right, just 100 years late.

The second signal [if and when policies and practices threatening our fundamental rights – speech, religion, association, press – are even proposed, those rights are threatened] is flashing hard and fast. The stay of the Muslim ban was issued, in part, because the ban appears to violate separation of church and state, and in part because it violated academic freedom of state universities (this is part of what gave the states standing to argue for a stay of the ban in court).

Only someone who’s ignorant of constitutional law — as Jussim seems to be — would say that the temporary immigration order was constitutionally stayed for either of the reasons cited. Those are merely judicial pretexts for barring a president from exercising a constitutional function. The Constitution protects Americans’ freedom of religion, despite leftists’ efforts to curtail it; the Constitution doesn’t protect non-Americans because they happen to practice a certain religion. The Constitution protects freedom of speech, including the freedom of academics (like Jussim) to spout nonsense; the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right of non-American academics to enter the United States.

In addition to the State Department Purge, President Trump has routinely advocated for torture, which is illegal (also flashing the third signal). His administration has also routinely attempted to silence, intimidate, or derogate members of the government and the press.

The State Department purge? Trump simply went against mindless tradition and accepted the resignations of senior political appointees who were undoubtedly anti-Trump. Sanity ruled, for once, in the treatment of the State Department.

Has Trump, as president, authorized torture? Or didn’t he back down from his earlier statements? I believe it’s the latter. (Though I have nothing against torture if the use of it protects Americans.)

Nor has Trump actually attempted to silence the press. He and Bannon have correctly characterized the press (or most of it) as tools of the Democrat Party and left-wing causes generally. Or are they not allowed to say such things because they’ve been accused of harboring fascistic ambitions by people who are afraid that Trump will — justifiably — dismantle much of the left-wing edifice that stands on the necks of American taxpayers? In any event, I’ve seen no evidence that the press has been silenced. Quite the contrary, in fact. Hour after hour, day after day, the media are dominated by anti-Trump ~~reporting~~ propaganda.

The third signal [if and when the federal government advocates not changing laws, but violating laws, the rule of law is threatened] flashed hard when the Trump administration instructed the immigration arms of the executive branch to ignore the court rulings.

The link leads to something else entirely. As far as I know, the court rulings have been honored by the Trump administration.

The fourth signal [rising popularity, membership, and political action among hate groups and neo-fascist movements] is flashing because of the rising tide of harassment of Muslims, minorities, and Jews.

There’s a lot of fake hate-thought and hate-crime out there (small sample here). But none of the real stuff is the doing of Trump, who — unlike Hitler — doesn’t hate non-Aryans or homosexuals. Anyway, there’s simply nothing like a mass movement of the kind that helped to push Hitler into power. It didn’t happen here. Or maybe it did, when Barack Obama became president and black thugs were given free reign to burn, loot, and kill.

To be sure, nearly all Presidential administrations have overstepped their legal and Constitutional bounds at some point. The Founders did not create a system of balance of powers and checks and balances to prevent attempts at overreach — they created it to prevent the success of such attempts. However, I do not recall so many attempts at overreach in the earliest days of any Presidential administration since I started attending to politics (around 1969).

The overreach seems to be in Jussim’s fevered imaginings about a fascist takeover of the country.

The question is: Can a system hold against a determined attempt to undermine it? Tyrants such as Hitler, Putin, and Chavez all initially came to power quite legally, and then subverted their respective systems to install authoritarian autocracies. “Following the law” is no guarantee against tyranny.

The “determined attempt” is another figment of Jussim’s fevered imagination. Tyrants like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ also came to power quite legally. But they were “all right” because they favored “compassionate” big government. (Well, not the segregationist Wilson or the FDR of the internment camps.)

All of which raises some deeply troubling social, psychological, and political questions. Why do people support autocracies? What, psychologically, is necessary for democracy to flourish? Why do democracies fail?

American democracy has pretty much failed because successive presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Courts have violated the Constitution. It’s been going on since the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Fascism is already here — but it’s not Trump’s fascism, so Jussim can’t see it.

Democracy, even American democracy, is not invulnerable, and will almost certainly not last forever. That, however, does not mean anyone needs to quietly acquiesce to its demise.

If Jussim means by “American democracy” the rule of law according to the principles of the Constitution, he’s postmaturely correct. It’s already dead. And it will take more than the election of a Trump to revive it.
__________
* I don’t denigrate persons who rebel against incompetent or tyrannical authority. I’ve done it as an adult. I twice succeeded in having incompetent bosses fired. A third effort failed, but knowing that it might, I used it to set myself up for a financially rewarding exit.

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Independence Day 2016: The Way Ahead

Prudence…will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.… [A]nd such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history…is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Declaration of Independence
(In Congress. July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration
of the thirteen united States of America)

* * *

It is fitting, in this summer of discontent, to be faced with a choice between the spiritual descendants of P.T. Barnum and Lady Macbeth. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison are spinning in their graves, at high velocity.

The candidacies of Trump and Clinton are symptoms of the looming demise of liberty in the United States. There hasn’t been a candidate since Ronald Reagan who actually understood and believed that Americans would be freer and therefore more prosperous if the central government were contained within the four corners of the Constitution. (And even Reagan had a soft spot in his heart for Social Security.) Nevertheless, it is appalling but unsurprising that liberty’s end is in sight just 27 years after Reagan left office.

What went wrong? And how did it go wrong so quickly? Think back to 1928, when Americans were more prosperous than ever and the GOP had swept to its third consecutive lopsided victory in a presidential race. All it took to snatch disaster from the jaws of delirium was a stock-market crash in 1929 (fueled by the Fed) that turned into a recession that turned into a depression (also because of the Fed). The depression became the Great Depression, and it lasted until the eve of World War II, because of the activist policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which suppressed recovery instead of encouraging it. There was even a recession (1937-38) within the depression, and the national unemployment rate was still 15 percent in 1940. It took the biggest war effort in the history of the United States to bring the unemployment rate back to its pre-depression level.

From that relatively brief but deeply dismal era sprang a new religion: faith in the central government to bring peace and prosperity to the land. Most Americans of the era — like most human beings of every era — did not and could not see that government is the problem, not the solution. Victory in World War II, which required central planning and a commandeered economy, helped to expunge the bitter taste of the Great Depression. And coming as it did on the heels of the Great Depression, reinforced the desperate belief — shared by too many Americans — that salvation is to be found in big government.

The beneficial workings of the invisible hand of competitive cooperation are just too subtle for most people to grasp. The promise of a quick fix by confident-sounding politicians is too alluring. FDR became a savior-figure because he talked a good game and was an inspiring war leader, though he succumbed to pro-Soviet advice.

With war’s end, the one-worlders and social engineers swooped on a people still jittery about the Great Depression and fearful of foreign totalitarianism. (The native-born variety was widely accepted because of FDR’s mythic status.) Schools and universities became training grounds for the acolytes of socialism and amoral internationalism.

Warren Henry is right when he says that

progressivism is…broadly accepted by the American public, inculcated through generations of progressive dominance of education and the media (whether that media is journalism or entertainment). Certainly Democrats embrace it. Now the political success of Donald J. Trump has opened the eyes of the Right to the fact that Republicans largely accept it….

Republicans have occasionally succeeded in slowing the rate at which America has become more progressive. President Reagan was able to cut income tax rates and increase defense spending, but accepted tax increases to kick the can on entitlements and could not convince a Democratic Congress to reduce spending generally. Subsequent administrations generally have been worse. A Republican Congress pressured Bill Clinton into keeping his promise on welfare reform after two vetoes. He did so during a period when the end of the Cold War and the revenues from the tech bubble allowed Washington to balance budgets on the Pentagon’s back. Unsurprisingly, welfare reform has eroded in the ensuing decades.

Accordingly, the big picture remains largely unchanged. Entitlements are not reformed, let alone privatized. To the contrary, Medicare was expanded during a GOP administration, if less so than it would have been under a Democratic regime…. Programs are almost never eliminated, let alone departments.

The Right also loses most cultural battles, excepting abortion and gun rights. Notably, the inroads on abortion may be due as much to the invention and deployment of the sonogram as the steadfastness of the pro-life movement. Otherwise, political and cultural progressivism has been successful in their march through the institutions, including education, religion, and the family.

Curricula increasingly conform to the progressive fashions of the moment, producing generations of precious snowflakes unequipped even to engage in the critical thinking public schools claim to prioritize over an understanding of the ages of wisdom that made us a free and prosperous people. Church membership and attendance continues their long-term decline. A country that seriously debated school prayer 30 years ago now debates whether Christians must be forced to serve same-sex weddings.

Marriage rates continue their long-term decline. Divorce rates have declined from the highs reached during the generation following the sexual revolution, but has generally increased over the course of the century during which progressivism has taken hold (despite the declining marriage rate). Those advocating reform of the nation’s various no-fault divorce laws are few and generally considered fringe.

There’s more, but disregard Henry’s reification of America when he should write “most Americans”:

Meanwhile, America has voted for decade after decade of tax-and-spend, borrow-and-spend, or some hybrid of the two. If the white working class is now discontented with the government’s failure to redress their grievances, this is in no small part due to the ingrained American expectation that government will do so, based on the observation that government typically hungers to increase government dependency (not that the white working class would use these terms).…

In sum, while it is correct to note that elites are not doing their jobs well, it is more difficult to conclude that elites have not been responding to the political demands of the American public as much as they have driven them.…

The presidential nominees our two major parties have chosen are largely viewed as awful. But Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer two slightly different versions of the same delusion: that progressivism works, if only the elites were not so stupid. This delusion is what most Americans currently want to believe.

Sad but disastrously true. Dependency on government has become deeply ingrained in the psyche of most Americans. As Timothy Taylor points out,

[g]overnment in the United States, especially at the federal level, has become more about transfer payments and less about provision of goods and services.…

[There has been an] overall upward rise [of transfer payments] in the last half-century from 5% of GDP back in the 1960s to about 15% of GDP in the last few years….

The political economy of such a shift is simple enough: programs that send money to lots of people tend to be popular. But I would hypothesize that this ongoing shift not only reflects voter preferences, but also affect how Americans tend to perceive the main purposes of the federal government. Many Americans have become more inclined to think of federal budget policy not in terms of goods or services or investments that it might perform, but in terms of programs that send out checks.

What lies ahead? Not everyone is addicted to government. There are millions of Americans who want less of it — a lot less — rather than more of it. Here, with some revisions and an addition, are options I spelled out three years ago:

1. Business as usual — This will lead to more and more government control of our lives and livelihoods, that is, to less and less freedom and prosperity (except for our technocratic masters, of course).

2. Rear-guard action — This option is exemplified by the refusal of some States to expand Medicaid and to establish insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. This bit of foot-dragging doesn’t cure the underlying problem, which is accretion of illegitimate power by the central government. Further, it can be undone by fickle voters and fickle legislatures, as they succumb to the siren-call of “free” federal funds.

3. Geographic sorting — The tendency of “Blue” States to become “bluer” and “Red” States to become “redder” suggests that Americans are sorting themselves along ideological lines. As with rear-guard action, however, this tendency — natural and laudable as it is — doesn’t cure the underlying problem: the accretion of illegitimate power by the central government. Lives and livelihoods in every State, “Red” as well as “Blue,” are controlled by the edicts of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the central government. There is little room for State and local discretion. Moreover, much of the population shift toward “Red” must be understood as opportunistic (e.g., warmer climates, right-to-work laws) and not as an endorsement of “Red” politics.

4. Civil disobedience — Certainly called for, but see options 5, 6, and 7.

5. Underground society and economy — Think EPA-DOL-FBI-IRS-NSA, etc., etc., and then dismiss this as a serious option for most Americans.

6. The Benedict Option, about which Bruce Frohnen writes:

[Rod] Dreher has been writing a good deal, of late, about what he calls the Benedict Option, by which he means a tactical withdrawal by people of faith from the mainstream culture into religious communities where they will seek to nurture and strengthen the faithful for reemergence and reengagement at a later date….

The problem with this view is that it underestimates the hostility of the new, non-Christian society [e.g., this and this]….

Leaders of this [new, non-Christian] society will not leave Christians alone if we simply surrender the public square to them. And they will deny they are persecuting anyone for simply applying the law to revoke tax exemptions, force the hiring of nonbelievers, and even jail those who fail to abide by laws they consider eminently reasonable, fair, and just.

7. A negotiated partition of the country — An unlikely option (discussed in this post and in some of the posted linked to therein) because, as discussed in option 6, “Blue” will not countenance the loss of control over millions of lives and livelihoods.

8. Secession — This is legal and desirable — as long as the New Republic of free states is truly free — but (a) it is likely to be met with force and therefore (b) unlikely to attract a critical mass of States.

9. Coup — Suggested several years ago by Thomas Sowell:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Glenn Reynolds, who is decidedly anti-coup, writes

that the American Constitution, along with traditional American political culture in general, tends to operate against those characteristics, and to make the American polity more resistant to a coup than most. It is also notable, however, that some changes in the Constitution and in political culture may tend to reduce that resistance….

The civics-book statement of American government is that Congress passes laws that must be signed by the president (or passed over a veto), and that those laws must be upheld by thejudiciary to have effect. In practice, today’s government operates on a much more fluid basis, with administrative agencies issuing regulations that have the force of law – or, all too often, “guidance” that nominally lacks the force of law but that in practice constitutes a command – which are then enforced via agency proceedings.…

[I]t seems likely that to the extent that civilians, law enforcement, and others become used to obeying bureaucratic diktats that lack a clear basis in civics-book-style democratic process, the more likely they are to go along with other diktats emanating from related sources. This tendency to go along with instructions without challenging their pedigree would seem to make a coup more likely to succeed, just as a tendency to question possibly unlawful or unconstitutional requirements would tend to make one less likely to do so. A culture whose basis is “the law is what the bureaucrats say it is, at least unless a court says different,” is in a different place than one whose starting impulse is “it’s a free country.”…

[P]ersistent calls for a government-controlled “Internet kill switch”49 – justified, ostensibly, by the needs of cyberdefense or anti-terrorism – could undercut that advantage [of a decentralized Internet]. If whoever controlled the government could shut down the Internet, or, more insidiously, filter its content to favor the plotters’ message and squelch opposition while presenting at least a superficial appearance of normality, then things might actually be worse than they were in [Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey’s Seven Days in May, which imagined an attempted coup by a Curtis LeMay-like general].…

[T]he most significant barrier to a coup d’etat over American history has probably stemmed simply from the fact that such behavior is regarded as un-American. Coups are for banana republics; in America we don’t do that sort of thing. This is an enormously valuable sentiment, so long as the gap between “in America” and “banana republics” is kept sufficiently broad. But it is in this area, alas, that I fear we are in the worst shape. When it comes to ideological resistance to coups d’etat, there are two distinct groups whose opinions matter: The military, and civilians. Both are problematic….

[T]here are some troubling trends in civilian/military relations that suggest that we should be more worried about this subject in the future than we have been in the past…

Among these concerns are:

A “societal malaise,” with most Americans thinking that the country was on “the wrong track.”

A “deep pessimism about politicians and government after years of broken promises,” leading to an “environment of apathy” among voters that scholars regard as a precursor to a coup.

A strong belief in the effectiveness and honor of the military, as contrasted to civilian government.

The employment of military forces in non-military missions, from humanitarian aid to drug interdiction to teaching in schools and operating crucial infrastructure.

The consolidation of power within the military – with Congressional approval – into a small number of hands….

A reduction in the percentage of the officer corps from places outside the major service academies.…

A general insulation of the military from civilian life…. “Military bases, complete with schools, churches, stores, child care centers, and recreational areas, became never-to-be-left islands of tranquility removed from the chaotic crime-ridden environment outside the gates…. Thus, a physically isolated and intellectually alienated officer corps was paired with an enlisted force likewise distanced from the society it was supposed to serve [quoting from an essay by Charles J. Dunlap, “The Origins Of The American Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters, Winter, 1992-93, at 2]….

[D]istrust in the civilian government and bureaucracy is very high. A 2016 Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center poll found that more than 6 in 10 Americans have “only slight confidence – or none at all” that the federal government can successfully address the problems facing the nation. And, as the AP noted, this lack of confidence transcends partisan politics: “Perhaps most vexing for the dozen or so candidates vying to succeed President Barack Obama, the poll indicates widespread skepticism about the government’s ability to solve problems, with no significant difference in the outlook between Republicans and Democrats.”

As a troubling companion to this finding, the YouGov poll on military coups…also found a troubling disconnect between confidence in civilian government and confidence in the military: “Some 71% said military officers put the interests of the country ahead of their own interests, while just 12% thought the same about members of Congress.” While such a sharp contrast in views about civilian government and the military is not itself an indicator of a forthcoming coup, it is certainly bad news. Also troubling are polls finding that a minority of voters believes that the United States government enjoys the consent of the governed.63 This degree of disconnection and disaffection, coupled with much higher prestige on the part of the military, bodes ill.

Or well, if you believe that a coup is the only possible salvation from despotism.

Military personnel (careerists, in particular) are disciplined, have direct access to the tools of power, and many of them are trained in clandestine operations. Therefore, a cadre of properly motivated careerists might possess the wherewithal necessary to seize power. But a plot to undertake a coup is easily betrayed. (Among other things, significant numbers of high-ranking officers are shills for the regulatory-welfare state.) And a coup, if successful, might deliver us from a relatively benign despotism into a decidedly malign despotism.

But unless there is a negotiated partition of the country — perhaps in response to a serious secession movement — a coup is probably the only hope for the restoration of liberty under a government that is true to the Constitution.

The alternative is a continuation of America’s descent into despotism, which — as many Americans already know — is no longer the “soft” despotism foreseen by Tocqueville.

* * *

Related posts (in addition to those linked to throughout this one):
The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience
A Declaration of Independence
A Declaration of Civil Disobedience
The States and the Constitution
And many more here

Two-Percent Tyranny

In case you hadn’t noticed, marriage — long the cornerstone of civil society — is being redefined out of existence by the gay lobby. I say redefined out of existence because marriage becomes meaningless when any odd coupling is recognized in law as marriage.

In case you hadn’t noticed, bicycle lanes are choking the streets of “progressive” cities — Austin being a case in point with which I’m too familiar. The bicyclists for whose benefit those lanes have been marked are notable for their arrogant behavior (e.g., deliberately hogging traffic lanes and forcing lines of motor vehicles to crawl behind them).

The recognition of gay “marriage” and the encouragement of bicycling are “liberal” causes, of course. And as is usual with “liberals,” the causes are promoted with religious fervor, regardless of the consequences. Both causes have led to the manufacture of “rights” by public officials. To put it another way, the “rights” in question aren’t rights that arise from voluntarily evolved social norms. (To anticipate a “liberal” objection to voluntarily evolved social norms, slavery isn’t one — it’s a state-sponsored practice.)

In sum, the gay “marriage” and bicycling movements are instances of tyranny on behalf of two-percent minorities. It just happens that about two percent of Americans are homosexual, and about two percent of commuting is done by bicycle in most “bicycle friendly cities.” (The nationwide share is a paltry 0.6 percent.)

It’s “our” government at work, in its usual wrong-headed way.

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Life in Austin (1)
Life in Austin (2)
Life in Austin (3)
Driving and Politics (1)
Driving and Politics (2)

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