Relocate the DC swamp dwellers

 

 

Chip Bok cartoon via Townhall 

Roger Kimball published a fairly long column over the weekend, “Abandon the Swamp” at American Greatness.  Here are two paragraphs summarizing Mr Kimball’s solution to the ongoing progressives vs conservatives crisis:

The focus should be on eclipsing Washington, D.C. as the seat of government. It has long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city. It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it somewhere that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.

The more I think about our situation, the more I believe the only hope for the republic is to downgrade the place of Washington in our public life. The business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. That is not what the people, who pay for it, want. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.

“The greedy puppet show.”  Fits right in with Sundance’s scenario that all of the DC political construct is a “Potemkin Village”, maintained to provide us plebes with the “Illusion of Choice.”  Read Mr Kimball's column here.

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At the crossroads: Utopia or Dystopia?

 

In a very long meditation at American Greatness, Roger Kimball puts the decline of the West today into a vivid historical context.  And the extract below ties it all into the “Great Reset” a/k/a the New World Order – the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) stated objective.

. . . When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power. “Of all tyrannies,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own  good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Mr Kimball concludes:

All of which is to say that modern technology has upped the ante on hubris. Our amazing technological prowess seduces many people into thinking we are or, with just a bit more tinkering, might become “as gods.” The first step in that process is to believe that one is exempt from normal moral limits: that “if it can be done, it may be done”—i.e., the capacity to do something brings with it the moral sanction to do it. It is a foolish thought, a dangerous thought. But it is a thought with which we will all find ourselves having to contend as we continue to surprise ourselves with our strange cleverness. It is part of the crossroads at which the West finds itself today.

It’s a very long read, but worth a look.

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Just out today: Against the New World Order

 

Book release Via Instapundit:

Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order  [Hardcover – October 18, 2022];  ed. Michael Walsh

Contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, the late Angelo M. Codevilla, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, and David Goldman.

Take that, Klaus Schwab.  Our household is ordering it on Kindle.  You can take a look at Mr Walsh's Introduction online at Amazon here.

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Socialism's seductive appeal

 

Roger Kimball has good history and philosophical lessons for us at American Greatness. He concludes:

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.

Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking, as [philosopher David] Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle. The governments that support the welfare state, Stove points out,

are elected by universal adult franchise; but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters—in some countries, approaching a quarter—either is employed by government or is dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme. In these circumstances it is merely childish to expect the welfare state to be reduced, at least while there is universal suffrage. A government that did away with free education, for example, or socialised medicine, simply could not be re-elected. Indeed it would be lucky to see out its term of office.

Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous “Essay on Population,” that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.”

“The apparently narrow principle of self-interest,” mind you.

Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”

Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.

It’s the same lessons that gave America its first Thanksgiving;  when collective socialism failed, the settlers learned that freedom, incentive, and private property harnessed self-interest to the greater good.

Read Mr. Kimball’s entire essay here.

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Weapons of Mass Deception and The Verdict

 

The verdict: guilty on all three counts.  How was Derek Chauvin going to get anything resembling a fair trial?  Michelle Malkin had some commentary and here are her closing paragraphs:

Judge Peter Cahill, however, shrugged off the threats and ruled that the jury doesn't need to be shut off from media and social media exposure until closing arguments begin next Monday. Never mind the barricades and barbed wire outside the fortified courthouse. Never mind the half-billion dollars in damage already done by George Floyd's vigilantes. Never mind the blaring, front-page stories about shopkeepers preparing for bloody chaos if the jury doesn't rule the "right" way.

Instead, Cahill nonchalantly advised the jury to simply avoid the news during the trial. Sure, just ignore the acrid smell of anarcho-tyranny permeating the air. Take no notice of wall-to-wall coverage of Gannon's resignation Monday afternoon after he pushed back against the media. Pay no attention to the journalists raging at police officials calling out rioters. Tune out the black-clad militants screaming "All Cops Are Bastards" and "No Justice, No Peace." Pretend away the pretrial publicity and nightly news jeremiads from racial demagogues Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump painting Chauvin as an evildoer on par with Ted Bundy or Adolf Hitler.

With the media acting as relentless co-prosecutors and character executioners, the well of fair and impartial jurors who can weigh evidence without fear of retribution has been irreversibly poisoned. Like Minneapolis, Brooklyn Center, Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Ferguson, and so many other cities before them, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to an impartial jury, fair trial and due process have all gone up in choking flames. This is what the twilight of a once great and free country looks and smells like.

Her full column is here.  Another column on this topic by Roger Kimball appeared at The Spectator here.

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