The American Body Politic: Is This A Sickness Unto Death?

The sickness of the Left is becoming ever more evident and ever more ominous. What does one say when a mentally ill person kills 6 innocent people, including three 9 year old children, and the leader of the Zhou regime sees this as an occasion to crack “jokes”? And the mainstream Left media refuses to report on the most obvious aspects of the story—and even portrays the murderer as a victim, while the “mentally ill community” storms state legislatures that seek to protect children from sex perverts? And, of course, there is also the Get Trump movement that has made a mockery of the America constitutional order and legal system.

That we are witnessing a sickness of the American soul is clear from statements by prominent Leftist politicians. For example, American Greatness quotes Ayanna Pressley’s (two years ago) remarkably programmatic statement:

For conservatives or reactionaries, revolution remains a last resort. For Marxists, it is always and everywhere the only solution—one to be hastened and encouraged at every turn. “There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives,” said Representative Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) during the summer of 2020. Marxism’s guiding idea is that the whole cultural, economic, and political system, root and branch, must be revolutionized until private property is abolished and inequality eradicated for good.

But we know from experience that, for the Left, unlike the case with normal people, unrest in their lives is a lifelong state of being—it’s what they eat, drink, breathe. How long can normal people tolerate such unrest in their lives? In fact, the actual imposition of unrest by the ruling class on normal people begins to look more and more part of a comprehensive, mad Rube Goldberg political program, as the same author (Spencer Klavan) writes:

Digital technology, which holds out such promise and potential to decentralize power, has in effect often worked to consolidate power among a very few. The upshot is that the republic has begun to look more like a corrupt oligarchy, run by those who may be good at getting wealthy or climbing bureaucratic ladders, but who have little respect for, or even knowledge of, republican ideals. The unprecedented COVID lockdowns imposed in 2020 made it hard to think of ourselves anymore as Madison’s locally governed nation of free men and women with irrevocable, God-given rights. The national lockdown, imposed on the advice of an unelected medical expert (and the highest paid member of a federal administrative perma-state), gave leeway for state and local leaders to invoke “emergency” powers of their own that treated “unalienable rights” as very alien indeed.

The lockdowns, mask mandates, and the tolerance in many locales for 2020’s Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests—which resulted in $2 billion dollars’ worth of property damage, 700 injured law enforcement officers, and as many as 19 deaths—led some to wonder whether their fundamental right to property or even life was simply forfeit when the ruling class deemed it so. It came to seem as if major decisions about Americans’ personal and civic lives were no longer in the hands of Americans themselves.

Klavan raises a fundamental issue of the American political order, which we have also raised from time to time. Whatever the Founding Fathers may have intended, even the non-Left political class—except, perhaps, during election campaigns—have no fundamental convictions concerning the pursuit of human well being and happiness that run beyond the most minimalist and even materialist ambitions—a default libertarianism that pins its hopes for community on the economic impulse of self interest, barely above the level of the beasts:

We tend to assume that citizens of fractious, pluralistic, multiethnic republics cannot hope to share a common vision of higher truth. Instead, we imagine, they must get by on the minimal grounds of working together in mutual (largely economic) self-interest. Leo Strauss called this the “low but solid ground” of modern political philosophy: rather than joining together in shared faith, work, and love, citizens in the modern state seem to be little more than self-centered consumers who share nothing other than space.

Klavan quotes a political philosopher whose ideas I’ve discussed previously at considerable length, who criticizes this state of affairs as ultimately unsustainable:

It seems to have worked up to a point—but only up to a point, and its limitations as a political system have become more apparent as our own republic appears to degenerate. That is why “classical liberalism” has come under fire from critics, like political philosopher Patrick Deneen, who see within it seeds of our present spiritual emptiness, isolation, cultural uniformity, and loss of freedom.

This is certainly not the vision of the Founding Fathers (drawn from the Ancients, especially Aristotle), but it is who we are now—at least to a great extent and for purposes of the public square of political discourse—as Americans. The Way We Live Now. Klavan, calling to mind the thought of American statesment—we don’t seem to have those anymore—calls for a recovery of what they held as the ideal: a common sense of “friendship” among Americans. Not a mere sense of “unrest”.

Klavan goes on to discuss ways of recovering that sense of mutual “friendship”. Ultimately, however, he is forced to recognize a dilemma. Friendship is not achievable without shared beliefs and convictions, which would overcome “unrest”:

I have stressed throughout this book [How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises] that all the good and noble things we want to fight for cannot exist unless God does. And there will be no “saving the republic,” no “escaping the cycle of regimes,” without God. The reason we all feel so anxious to save the world is because we don’t trust that He is there to do that job. And so we take upon ourselves world-saving responsibilities for which we are quite laughably unequipped. But it will be He who determines whether our republic stands or falls, and whether this nation tomorrow goes the way that all nations must one day go. And if it does, then only He will endure and only our investment in Him will have turned out not to have been in vain.

Because the West, which is God’s, does not depend on the survival of America. The truth, which is His, has endured the rising and falling of many nations, the coming and going of the cities …

Which brings us to Matthew Boose’s more phenomenological article today:

Groomed to Kill

The massacre in Nashville is not the fault of conservatives, it is the bitter fruit of a madness that has poisoned an entire generation.

Note the commonality with Klavan’s article. Those who aspire to be our rulers, who to a great extent already are because the normal populace lack the convictions to mount an effective resistance, seek a shock army of perpetual “unrest”:

the Democratic Party is hellbent on feeding the malignant narcissism of the “trans community,” in which they see a reliable, perpetually aggrieved voter base and a tool with which to terrorize society.

Boose is issuing a call to arms:

In a truly astonishing statement, Biden’s dimwitted lesbian press secretary gave a fulsome defense of the massacre, saying the “trans community is under attack right now.” 

If it wasn’t already clear, the shooter in Nashville was a Janissary, a demented footsoldier of an evil, totalitarian ideology that wishes to remake the world in its demonic image. 

There is little daylight between the Wahhabist extremism of the shooter and the blasphemous maundering of Joe Biden, a “devout Catholic” who presumes to speak for the Almighty when he says that so-called transgenders are “made in the image of God.” 

Biden ... 

He is a leader in an unhinged cult that uses pseudoscience to maim children. 

Resistance, as Klavan saw, is impossible with belief in God, because hatred of God is increasingly at the core of who we are as Americans. If you don’t believe me, just look at the flags at our embassies, look at who is excommunicated from public life

Like all totalitarian cults, the trans cult preys upon the youth, and drives a wedge between parents and their children. 

It demands unyielding obedience and affirmation of its false creed, which burns with sulfurous hatred of Christians and the faith that was once the beating heart of the West. 

Society is paying the price for having tiptoed around these hectoring tyrants over the past seven or eight years. 

Well, but the institutions of that “society” that were charged with safeguarding the beating heart of the West long ago gave up that role—not a mere seven or eight years ago.

It is beyond the power of society to satisfy them, as their grievance is with God, not man. 

What they really want is to change their nature, and to make society accept their god-like self-image. 

Yes, the same point that Tucker Carlson made a few days ago.

Should we be surprised that people who think this way are turning violent? Especially now, that they have been whipped into a frenzy with apocalyptic rhetoric from the likes of Biden about their “rights?” 

But let’s finish up with the Get Trump movement, because it plays into this sickness of our body politic. Indeed, Alex Mercouris argues that what we are seeing may in fact signal a sickness that is similar to the pre-revolutionary stage of Russian history (it’s an easy 18 minute listen).

Now, the guys at The Duran are mostly discussing the pneumo-pathological state of the American Left, its utterly lack of contact with the reality of America today. That’s understandable, but it must be stated that this sickness is shared by much of the establishment GOP—they were complicit in getting us to this point. Certainly the likes of Turtle McConnell—who, when he’s not in rehab is insisting that Ukraine is more important to America than Americans—and Bluto Barr share a deep responsibility. Turtle and Bluto conspired to enable the installation of the Zhou regime, presumably because they regarded Trump as an enemy of the state—an enemy of the DC establishment that rules the American Empire. Now Bluto pretends to be shocked at the current turn of events, as if he held no responsibility.

With that in mind, and with the Left’s goal of perpetual “unrest” in our lives, listen to Mercouris discussing the utter nihilism of the American political class, who neither care for men nor fear God. They reflect the public life of the country. Here are the last 3 -1/2 minutes:

14:28

The key thing to understand ... even if you accept that it's 5D chess [what's going on in the Get Trump movement], it is utterly nihilistic 5D chess because it is not addressing America's actual problems. It's making them worse. It's torching the political system in order to achieve some complicated strategy which is ultimately about keeping yourself in power. You're going to blow up the legal system, in order to get Biden across the line. Or you're going to blow up the legal system and the constitutional system to prevent people talking about de-dollarization. Or you're going to blow up the legal system to give yourself the space to wage World War Three. How is any of that to the benefit of the United States?

A political class that thinks in that way is no longer fit for purpose, because it's only thinking for itself. It is no longer thinking of the interests of the greater country that it leads. Now, there have been many examples in history where that sort of thing happened. Remember our History series about the fall of the Russian Empire. One of the things we discussed was the constant intriguing that was taking place in St. Petersburg, in the court, as people were trying to undermine the government because they thought they could take over the government themselves. They weren't looking at the bigger picture of a revolution that was brewing all around them. Well, that is exactly what this is. It is a political class that is so fixated on its internal political games that it is losing the larger plot of what is happening to the country it leads--to the United States. And, of course, if it succeeds--if this thing [Get Trump] actually works then all it will actually do is it will undermine the United States even further and lead it into an even deeper crisis.

From every point of view this is disastrous. And polarizing. There have been periods in American history when people have felt enormously angry and passionate about political issues--Prohibition, Civil Rights,--but the political class, the people who cared about politics in America always, in the end, felt a greater responsibility for America. You'd think the class the United States has today, if they're thinking that way, if they're even rationalizing what they're doing in that kind of way, are no longer fit to lead the country that they are leading. 18:00

We know how things worked out in 1917. We'll see how this unfolds.