THE RIGHT'S COLLAPSING MORAL FOUNDATION

      Neocon blowhard Victor Davis Hanson, who is an example of what passes for a deep intellect in Postmodern America, penned another troubling article this week. Titled The Anti-Democratic Democratic Left, Hanson's article is ostensibly about abuses of the Legal Establishment committed by the Democrats. As of typical of most of Hanson's writings, it is mostly simply a laundry-list of crimes committed by the Junta heavily punctuated with declamations about how 'Things have never been this bad!' and 'Never before in history has this happened!' and 'OMG things were so much better under Bush!' etc. 

      It seems to escaped Hanson's notice that most of the unprecedented Lawfare and abuses of the system have been committed by the Republican-controlled House, which has exceeded every Congress in history in impeachments, censures, removals, expulsions, inquisitorial hearings, forced resignations, and the like, but we digress.

     

     The problem with Hanson's article is not that his complaints are factually incorrect. The problem is with the presuppositions and inferences liberally salted throughout it. This a fairly typical technique that he uses in most of his writings: he states facts, but in such a way that it leads to dangerous conclusions. For example, the header and conclusion of his piece reads, "the defense of those destroying democracy is that they are doing it to prevent others from doing what they would do, should they have been on the receiving end of exactly what they are now doing."

     While it is true that despots typically do live in fear of retribution, the idea implied here is retribution is the goal of the postmodern Conservative movement. It is not a traditionally Conservative position. Our Founding Fathers, for example, weren't interested in owning the Royalists and making it payback time for the Tories; their goal was to free the American Colonies from tyranny and establishment a Government of Laws which would ensure that such tyranny never happened again. If we had a real Conservative Movement, that would be the goal of removing the Democrats: to re-establish a Rule of Law and institute reforms to keep such abuses from returning.

    In contrast, the 21st Century's version of 'Conservatism' is simply to replace the Liberals while leaving the apparatus of abuses intact, and dishing it out upon their former overlords. In a previous post, we analyzed the degraded thinking and low morality involved in such a position, but it may not hurt to repeat a wise observation from a Dead White Male again here:

   "They have given the world the classical expression of the slave's ideal: the ideal, I mean, by which the crushed and cringing servitor would like to live if only he were strong and free. The power to get or do the things that he wants to do or get is every man's desire; but sheer Power---hard, empty, hectoring Power---is the daydream of the downtrodden. To such, the real meaning of Liberty is veiled; they neither understand nor want that equal fellowship of mutual consideration, courtesy, and self-respect which among themselves the free-born take for granted. What the slave longs for is to be, still more to feel himself to be, the kind of man that he thinks that his master is."

   That is the dynamic driving far too many minds in the Postmodern Right, and it explains in large measure the complete lack of concrete substance to their whole political orientation. Since Hanson mentioned the January 6th Protest, let's look at a widely-circulated photo of that day of notorious Red Pill 'influencer' and provocateur Anthime Gionet, a.k.a, Baked Alaska, who was stirring up trouble at the event:

    Here we see him with his feet propped up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, chatting on her phone while one of his toadies is taking selfies in the background for social media. A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. It was a foolish thing to do and publicity stunt and yes, the Junta over-reacted on Gionet like everyone else; but what we would like to observe is what it symbolized in Gionet's thinking. He wanted to be in Pelosi's shoes, 'to be the kind of man that he thinks that his Master  is.' 

    While I certainly don't condone the January 6th inquisition, the last thing that America needs is 4-8 more years of some new group launching assizes against its own perceived enemies---which easily could include anybody reading this article. The actions of the US House since the rather anemic Red Tsunami of 2022 shows us exactly the direction which they intend to take: very little about restoring democracy as the likes of Hanson and Gionet assert and a lot to do with putting the lash in somebody else's hands to use as freely as he likes. 

   Simply replacing the Junta isn't going to solve anything if we are unwilling to replace them with anything better. It underscores the unspoken issue again that there is no political solution, it is at root a collective spiritual and moral problem---and that our problems are fundamentally of our own making. Shifting responsibility for our collective failures as a society onto a political movement will accomplish nothing in the end, but only potentially delay the inevitable descent into tyranny.