So it’s election season again in the US, and the press is all abuzz over the recent declarations of candidacy. Last time around, I still cared a bit, mostly out of habit I suppose. I liked Romney, who I think is a fundamentally decent man, and I was disappointed to see such a talented, intelligent and enterprising fellow rejected in favor of an inept fool like Obama. So I was interested to that extent.
But Christian reaction had by then so permeated my being that I knew the only difference the election might possibly make is that of a few percentage points in my federal tax rate. Not that those percentages are unimportant, for they are, and the welfare of millions hangs upon them; but thanks to the mind-boggling deficits of the first four Obama years, they are upward bound, for the foreseeable future, almost no matter what. Obama spent so much money that no future administration is going to be able to cut taxes. Obama has eliminated all room for such maneuvers. It’s a genius move, albeit not the move of a genius.
Evil is fundamentally stupid. You can be ingeniously evil, but to be evil in the first place is stupid. E.g., you can devise a brilliant plan to rob a bank, but robbing a bank is an essentially stupid thing to do.
The genius of Obama is in doing stupid evil; that’s the one thing he seems to do really well, despite the impression that with this as with everything else he is apparently backing into it unawares, albeit looking good and streetable in so doing. He *looks* like a pro, see; that’s the thing. He shucks and jives with very few false notes, even though it is clear, if you watch him for half a moment as if you had just met him in the street, that he has no idea what he is doing, no idea what the words he says actually mean. He’s all bluff; all hat, no cattle, as they say in Texas. Clueless. But good at it!
But I digress. The 2012 election did not matter much, I knew. The course was set, other options – even minor changes of heading – had dwindled to wild improbability, and we were headed steeply downward no matter who won.
As the 2014 elections have amply demonstrated.
Nevertheless, I watched with interest. But, not this time. The whole thing is now like an incredibly bad daytime soap opera, so painfully inept even as fantasy that I can’t bear to attend to it. The whole exercise is so patently false, so obviously completely irrelevant, thoroughly dishonest, and most of all stupid, that as with an aggressively bad TV show, you have to wonder how the actors can bring themselves to say their lines. It’s so boring that the boredom of it is excruciating. I’d rather watch paint dry. Literally: this afternoon I watched as a sample of paint dried and changed color (to see if it would look right when it did)(I wasn’t wasting time, see?), and it was more interesting than the election news. The thought of actually sitting down to read something about Hillary, Marco et alia is about as alluring as the prospect of taking sandpaper to my fingertips.
It’s like the half-time show at the Superbowl: ginned up, fake, full of noise, flashes, skin, shouting, hurry, and spastic jerks, signifying … nothing whatsoever.
Boring!
But then, this my visceral boredom and irritation with the political show is interesting in itself. Is it just that I’m getting old and cynical, nothing new under the sun, etc.? Or is there something different at work? Am I not the only one? Are youngsters, too, declining to tune in? Is the whole thing now so completely disconnected from any living reality that it is all cost, no benefit, and ought therefore to be avoided like the plague?
I am sure that there is in my reaction something of the former, of the man who tires of the hurry and noise of quotidian life and as his dotage approaches yearns for the quiet and peace of the countryside, of the truly important businesses of the insects and birds, the trees and flowers, and of course the grandchildren, that do really signify. But too I feel that there is in this reaction something also of the latter – that our public life has got so very false and absurd that it is, not just for me, but for many others, more and more *impossible to watch.*
But if that is the case, then beware, because it means that things are going to change. The networks cannot long survive if we start to tune out. If the politics of the republic are no more alluring, no more interesting, and no more remunerative than a run of the mill reality show, then it will be back to rewrite, pronto. Hollywood needs the issues to seem real, and really decided, in order for people to get really excited about them, or interested.
Politics could indeed get interesting again, if there were any possibility of anything other than a rerun of last season, amped up a notch. What would it be like if reaction were needed as a dramatis persona? Like the guy who, in the middle of filming, smashes into and through the set on his Harley, kicking the whole production up a level or two in the hierarchy of show business self-reference?
If that opportunity should arise, we must be careful not to take it; must be careful to act from our own conviction of the Right, without partaking of the delectations of the Show, or engaging in its discourse. Nothing could be worse for us than to be co-opted by the Show. No: we must reject it, root and branch. Our tenor, our constant, dreadful threnody, must be this, and only this: Turn back, O Man, forswear thy Foolish Ways – your Whole Show Sucks. Get real, or Go to Hell. Your choice.
In the meantime, let us all attend to the great work of the birds, of the sky, of the winds and of the earth. Let us attend to our children, and their earnest engagement with Reality, and their search for Truth. Let us do the things that are worth doing, that therefore merit life in the first place, and that are worth dying to preserve. And let us be ready to die, rather than forsake them.
Finally, let’s enjoy the spectacle as the scrim of the Show catches fire and begins to Collapse™. Nothing like a nice cozy fire. Hear the crickets?
The Orthosphere 
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This is very well written and insightful. God bless you, sir.
Reblogged this on ReactionaryThought and commented:
“Evil is fundamentally stupid. You can be ingeniously evil, but to be evil in the first place is stupid. E.g., you can devise a brilliant plan to rob a bank, but robbing a bank is an essentially stupid thing to do.”
“the only difference the election might possibly make is that of a few percentage points in my federal tax rate.”
This is what elections are for and have always been.
Elections are not meant to carry out revolutions
Yes. Like I said, by 2012 I had been for several years steeped in Christian reaction, so that’s what I thought.
Our elections can have significant moral consequences. Were McCain or Romney to have gotten in we would today probably be engaged in a ground war in Syria, potentially in Iran and who knows where else.
There I have disagree with Kristor. Romney was not a decent or particularly intelligent man, he was in many ways even worse than Obama.
Romney was not a decent or particularly intelligent man, he was in many ways even worse than Obama.
Ridiculous
I guess you know some things that have been said about him that I had not heard.
Romney did not significantly differ from Obama on social issues. Romney was however, prepared to engage in all sorts of pointless military adventures around the world that would have resulted in tens of thousands dying for nothing (Obama is not doing this). Romney’s statement that Russia is a our “number one geopolitical foe” was stupid. His 47% comment was stupid. He apparent belief that his platform resonated with the American people was stupid. Yeah I know I am supposed to overlook all of this because he had big family or something.
It seems to me that Romney, like most Mormons, is a fundamentally decent man, and he is intelligent enough to have amassed a fortune. Having said that, Mormonism produces a very narrow range of people, and the absurd tenets of Mormonism require Mormons to turn off their critical thinking faculties. His record as governor shows that he is unlikely to have been what we would even broadly consider to be a good president.
His record as governor shows that he is unlikely to have been what we would even broadly consider to be a good president.
Obama is a non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerent. There can be no comparison.
Obama is a non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerent.
Huh?
There can be no comparison.
Romney and Obama are close enough on the essentials save for the fact that Romney would have done a lot more active harm abroad. I think your objection is another case of Mormon tribalism.
Huh?
From Mormon tribalist Barnhardt:
http://www.barnhardt.biz/2015/04/10/what-obama-is-a-non-state-non-uniformed-enemy-belligerent/
From Mormon tribalist Barnhardt:
Cute. I find Ann Barnhardt to be deranged. I generally recommend all Orthosphereans stop reading and listening to her. On this issue, however, I guess she and I are in agreement:
These people honestly believe that Mitt Romney can and will “fix everything”, even though Mitt Romney has actually implemented EVERYTHING people are screaming about Obama attempting, such as RomneyCare (which IS ObamaCare), insurance mandates, contraception mandates, zero-copay abortion on demand, sodomite marriage and assault rifle bans, and has yet to even acknowledge the mathematical impossibility of government spending.
http://www.barnhardt.biz/2014/02/09/the-one-about-maximum-culpability-and-why-gods-wrath-is-certain/
More or less what I said.
Then there is this video:
Synopsis: Romney is lacking in integrity and should get the hell out of the way.
By the way my Mormon query was more related to your overall support for Romney and not the Obama quote in particular. So are you a Mormon? Or you a quasi-Mormon or sympathizer a la Charlton?
Romney is a typical big wig politician ruled by expediency, as Barnhardt says. Walking around and knocking things down behind him. Been there done that countless times. This is obvious. Obama is something else, much worse entirely. Seeking to consciously harm the nation without the pretense of loyalty, just as Barnhardt says. Use some of that Scholasticism to see the difference.
–A proud Mormon sympathizer
Seeking to consciously harm the nation without the pretense of loyalty,
So you really think Obama was consciously trying to harm the nation when he pulled US troops out of the Iraqi quagmire? Is Romney loyal to the United States for allowing a foreign leader and his proxies to intervene in a US presidential election? Do you think another war in the Middle East or a confrontation with Russia is a good thing? Or would a war in Syria that Romney vowed to engage in be just another “knocking things down behind him” moment for Mitt? When Romney supported abortion was he just unconsciously harming people?
Use some of that Scholasticism to see the difference.
Sure. Maybe sometime I’ll put the Summa at the bottom of a hat and look for hidden messages.
–A proud Mormon sympathizer
If Romney is supposed to be some kind of example for the Orthosphere than it is time to admit the Orthosphere has failed.
Who cares that much about Romney anyway? He’s not president and he’s never going to be president. Your hobby horses are blinding you to reality that’s front and center.
Let’s talk about the actual president. Obama has purged the military of over 300 senior officers who refused his loyalty oath by not committing to fire on American citizens if ordered to do so. He’s already faced one mutiny against him by the nuclear command in late 2013 when he attempted to assemble and move short range nuclear warheads against long established protocols. The orders were refused by the nuclear command and the warheads sent instead to locations unknown by Obama as a final trump card against him if needed. He’s successfully put down one coup attempt against him when the military tried to extract Chris Stevens from Benghazi against his orders to stand down. The commanding officers ordering the rescue operation were arrested by their XO’s. The military knew Obama was running guns to the Muslim Brotherhood through Benghazi and were going to use Stevens to expose the operations, so Stevens and his detail were killed.
Obama facilitated the movement of chemical weapons to Islamic militants in Syria so he could later try to blame Russia when the weapons were used. He staged a coup in Ukraine to try and goad Russia into a regional war. He’s allowed Russia free reign in the Arctic and eliminated most of the military overflights on our Alaskan border. He ran guns to the Mexican cartels in Fast and Furious knowing that later on he would eliminate the border by executive fiat allowing those same cartel members, latin american paramilitary torture squads, islamic terrorist cells armed by Fast and Furious to walk into the United States. His handlers murdered Tom Clancy, Michael Hastings and Andrew Breitbart before they could finish their joint project documenting the Saudi Sunni money that financed his entire education as a foreign student. He disappeared Loretta Fuddy (perhaps with her cooperation) who was the Hawaii Registrar official responsible for putting together his fake long form birth certificate. The list goes on.
@Andrew E
I guess this is an old thread, but could you provide links for the stuff in your second para? These are not claims familiar to me.
Google Jim Garrow and find the internet radio interviews he gave last year before he was silenced. You’ll have to listen to several to get the whole picture. Decide for yourself whether you believe him. Clearly I do.
You might start here, for instance:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cfp-radio/2014/01/02/jim-garrow-on-the-hagmann-hagmann-report
OK, thanks
I don’t watch t.v. anymore – gave it up several years ago and never looked back lest I turn into a pillar of salt – but every now and again I catch a glimpse of the abject stupidity of the “election coverage” at some public place or the other, as I did last Sunday morning while eating breakfast at McDonalds in Sherman, Tx. Rand Paul was on saying something stupid about immigration or some such (vying for the Hispanic vote, best I recall), but the thing that struck me, which I mentioned to my wife, was the number of people around us who seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say, hanging on his every word, as if the upcoming presidential election makes one bit of difference one way or the other.
As you say: Stupid.
The Thinking Housewife had a post recently about the ubiquitous noise and distraction around us as delivered by television. Called The Devouring Screen, it is one of many posts at her site that explores the malevolent effect of TV and other noise sources in public spaces. (Lawrence Auster also delved into this topic at View From the Right.)
Even as we exclude the evil of TV from our homes, we cannot escape it in public, and attempts to do so are met with looks of incredulity and incomprehension.
Btw, if your general lack of interest in the utter farce that is the electoral process ultimately turns to abstension, just remember that among the self-styled ‘really important people’ this means you waive your right to complain about anything, legitimate injustices notwithstanding.
It’s not clear to me yet whether abstension also means one hasn’t the right to endorse righteousness either, but it seems like the logical progression of the idea, I don’t know.
On the contrary, those who do vote put their stamp of approval on the process and ALL its results.
According to Obama, not voting is the equivalent of supporting him.
“According to Obama, not voting is equivalent to supporting him.”
There’s a morsel of truth in that blather, sure:
Which to support – Hussein Obama, et al, or the polluted system which makes such candidacies possible in the first place? Hmmm.
Peter Blood: absolutely!
Perfectly written.
At this point, I hope Hillary Clinton wins (no, I won’t be voting. I’m not in agreement with Nick Land’s ‘Accelerationism’ on moral grounds). This for the simple reason that the Republican Party would be finished at that point. You can only lose so many popular vote elections.
It doesn’t matter if the party dissolves completely, or simply changes its positions in a mass shift to the left (akin to the Conservatives in Britain). Either way its going to leave potentially millions disaffected and shut out of their own political system.
Reaction will experience exponential growth. If someone with as terrible a record and dubious personal history as Hillary Clinton can actually win a presidential election then the sentiment among Conservatives will be “Okay, the country is dead. what now?”
The answer to that question is clear. REACT
This should have been clear after Barack Obama was reelected (I had a sinking feeling when I calculated that he would win on election night), but I think 2016 will be the nail in the coffin as far as mainstream conservatism goes, especially if the GOP nominates somebody with an impeccable “conservative” record. I mean, talk like this seems relatively common to me in mainstream conservative circles, but that might be confirmation bias. Still, if you talk to an ordinary conservative and you say something like “it’s over if Hillary gets elected,” they hasten to agree. Whether that will be channeled into reaction or just general pessimism remains to be seen.
I loved that, Kristor. You have described my own attitude to a T.
The grandchildren, the children, the broad-billed hummingbird nesting on my back porch, the Arizona black rattlesnake I almost stepped on yesterday while watering my potted geraniums, the red tail hawk and roadrunner (the former sitting in a mesquite, the latter directly under him, nosing about amongst the rocky ground-cover, both caught in the same frame of my binoculars from my kitchen window), these are the things that matter to me, even me, a die-hard political animal whose zest for the subject has been squeezed dry, and for all the reasons you cite. God is our fortress: in Him will we trust, not in idiot and mostly heathen kings nor their state apparatus (es?), historically hostile to our God; and aren’t we living it today!?
I’m copying your essay to bring with me when I travel to Memphis tomorrow to visit my aging aunt who took me in when I was 15. I want to share it with her and my cousins. Thank you for speaking for us. (And Alan, she’s a Calvinist!)
Have to say, I disagree with the ubiquitous mindset that American elections make no appreciable difference. To me, it absolutely does make a difference who is appointing folks to the judiciary, and the legion of administrative agencies. There really is a good deal less active evil, a good deal less ruined lives, a good deal less hatred of God during Republican administrations. And I don’t think that’s nothing.
Circa 930 BC, Israel was confronted with the choice between King Jeroboam and King Rehoboam. There’s no way around it: both were sucky and clearly ungodly figures. At the time, I’m sure that many devout Jews thought it hardly mattered which was king. But ultimately, it did. Jeroboam’s kingdom was an unbroken series of actively evil monarchs. The nation was always hostile to God. Bloody internal coups plagued it until the Assyrians destroyed it forever. There was absolutely no redemptive coda. By contrast, in Rehoboam’s kingdom, a few good monarchs like Hezekiah and Josiah slipped in, and opposition to God was far less militant. The kingdom lasted far longer, and even after it was destroyed, it still found new life under the rock-solid reactionary leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah.
So yes, I did mourn a bit when Romney lost. And I do believe it’s myopic to dismiss all American elections as basically irrelevant.
The US opted for Jeroboam long ago. There have since then been a few good Presidents – Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan – but we are already being invaded by the Assyrians.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather have any of the Republican candidates than Clinton. Things would be significantly better at the margin, and as I said in the OP, that could matter a great deal to millions.
But really it seems to me that any such marginal difference will only slow by a bit our plummet toward the precipice.
Anything might happen, of course. The Warsaw Pact collapsed in only a few days. The same could happen to our liberal establishment. That would make public affairs interesting again.
Whenever we hear of an appalling judicial decision, the judge usually turns out to be a Republican appointee.
Partly, it is because of Republican and conservative infautation with libertarianism, while libertarians never miss a chance to stab the social conservatives in the back.
Whenever we hear of an appalling judicial decision, the judge usually turns out to be a Republican appointee.
Few have ever called me a Republican stooge before, but let me just stooge for them here: This is ridiculous. Yes, prominent Republican appointees often turn their back on the party that appointed them, usually because the GOP is meritocratic in its appointment whereas the Democrats will pick whatever ideologue will pass the Senate smell test of the hopelessly useless Senate Republicans. Still, it is generally the Democrat appointments that get the ball rolling and keep forcing it down every crazier paths. Then Kennedy gets his hands on it (or Roberts, maybe) and comes up with a justification from his mix-and-match-cut-and-paste legal theory of the Constitution for whatever the liberals want, and issues his concurring opinion that might as well be spilled ink because its contorted logic is not going to set any precedent. That is, except when he wants to buck the trend just to keep the rest of us guessing what will come next from his aging hare-brained schemes.
No nathanjevans, Vishmehr is right. some of the worst decisions have come down thanks to- Justices Brennan, Blackmun, O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter all Republican appointees. If George W. Bush got his way, Harriet Miers would be on the court today instead of Samuel Alito. All of these Justices played an important and in most cases a decisive role in foisting some new found “liberty” on the people. There are also examples at the lower court level. The pro partial-birth abortion Judge Richard Posner was appointed by Ronald Reagan. There is also the case of Judge Vaughn Walker, the homosexual judge who overturned Proposition 8. He was an appointee of George HW Bush. I could probably give you numerous other examples if I had the time to research the various appointments. I will say that the Republicans seemed to have finally learned after nearly a half century of disastrous appointments and were able to muster the backbone ti block the appointment of Harriet Miers. All of the justices on the court are liberals but Sam Alito is probably the most “rightist” of the right-liberals.
@ISE:
I clearly acknowledged that, though going all the way back to Justices Brennan and Blackmun is absurd considering the Republican Party of those days and today are two almost entirely different organizations, as all conservatives had to take refuge in the GOP after the failure of Conservative Southern Democrats and the failure of George Wallace’s third party candidacy. The court is also an entirely different creature these days than it was then. Even in the Civil Rights cases, it was hardly ever as universal and, for lack of a better term, activist as it is today. It took a decade to desegregate. It will take a couple of years with this ruling in June to force every state to have same sex mirages.
Furthermore, my main point is that the traitor Republican justices are what puts the Democrat ideologue justices over the top. The reason the Republican justices get so much press is because they’re the one “moderate” that President Bush appointed for meritocratic reasons (at least purportedly) that tips the balance against sanity (or, as they put it, for social justice or whatever). If it was just Republicans doing the appointment (albeit, that’s unrealistic), the situation would be better. Consider, of the 5 Republican appointees on the court, 3 have been almost unwavering in ruling with the bulk of the conservative base on key issues. Roberts only major bad decision (that I can think of, anyway) was Obamacare, so let’s give him half a point. That’s not even including the decent judges, all of whom are more well qualified to sit on the High Court than the scoundrels and ideologues the Democrats have to offer.
Not to mention, Conservatives learned their lesson with Sandra Day O’Connor and Kennedy, which is why Harriet Myers (it didn’t help that her resume wasn’t exactly stellar either) never made it to the court.
Also, none of this to say that the Republican Party is a laudable organization or of great use. It might be irrelevant as it’s quite possible an even moderately conservative Republican will never again be elected President. Also, I’m a divine right monarchist: I clearly want little to do with any party that calls themselves the “Republicans.” However, it’s just blatantly false to assert that it’s Republican appointees driving the perpetual revolution: The Democrat appointees are driving it, and a few Judases from the GOP are giving them the keys in the few places they don’t already have them.
I clearly acknowledged that, though going all the way back to Justices Brennan and Blackmun is absurd considering the Republican Party of those days and today are two almost entirely different organizations,
I’ll grant for Brennan that could be the case, though Brennan was of course nominated by Eisenhower a President who many conservatives still see as presiding over the “golden age” of America. In the case of Blackmun, however, the Republican party of today was already more or less established at the time of his nomination. It was Nixon who was able to attract urban Catholics and Southern Whites to the Republican party, along with placating the Rockefeller types, as well moving heaven and earth for Israel (see US aid and intervention in the Yom Kippur war). That more or less sums up the modern GOP no?
The court is still activist, though it has slightly tilted , as Vishmehr pointed out, in a libertarian-right-liberal direction. That is not a good thing for traditionalists like us. The scope of the federal government’s power under the commerce clause has been somewhat drawn back from its high water mark. under the New Deal, though of course this development does not placate libertarians. The scope of “individual liberty” has been broadened to include all kinds of new rights. The relatively recent holdings in Citizen’s United and in Hobby Lobby enshrine and protect the rights of corporations Only in our polity are corporations considered “persons” while unborn children are not. The Rehnquist and Roberts courts will be remembered as being moderately right-liberal.
Anyway, its all academic. The traditionalist take away is that our system is irredeemable.
Again, it’s not just the judiciary, but also all the administrative agencies. You can’t forget about those. And as for the judges, you ought to try looking at it from the flip side. Yes, several “appalling judicial decisions” are written by our guys. Conversely, how many non-appalling decisions have been written by the Democrats? Basically none. I don’t know about you, but I’m glad the court stood up against gun control in 2008 and 2010. Had Kerry won in 2004, those decisions would have gone the other way.
Yes, several “appalling judicial decisions” are written by our guys. Conversely, how many non-appalling decisions have been written by the Democrats? Basically none.
Justice White, Kennedy’s appointee to the Supreme Court wrote a dissent in Roe v.Wade. As I said the whole Supreme Court is rotten because it applies a rotten ideology (liberalism). It makes no difference to limit the scope of government or implement some kind of procedural change when the ruling ideology is liberalism.
Republicans simply don’t believe in their candidates enough to get them appointed. Democrats will fight to the death for theirs; Republicans cave at the least opposition. When Bork got shot down, the GOP should have nominated someone 10 times more conservative, and even more so if that got shot down. In short, the GOP lacks coj*nes. Funny how the GOP always portrays the Dems as appeasers in foreign policy, when the GOP is infinitely worse about it on domestic issues.
I do not say that “American elections make no appreciable difference”. My point is that elections are not meant to decide fundamental questions, such as status of slavery, unborn or whether the country should be communist. Elections are peacefully contested and the losers more or less gracefully accept their losses since they know that their loss is not going to be catastophic to their cause.
Except that the Democrats do not “gracefully accept their losses.” They have a record of contesting the results and “recounting” the votes until their guy wins (the most prominent example I can think of being the selection of Al Franken to the Senate after the apparatchiks “recounted” the votes half-a-dozen times, excluding more and more ballots for spurious reasons, until Franken won—then they stopped recounting).
This goes back to the observation that the Democrats are driving towards the cliff at 80 mph, while the Republicans want the car to stay within the speed limit. There are two truths in this analogy: one is that while both the Democrats and Republicans will lead us to disaster, the Republicans will get us there more slowly; the other is that the Democrats are lawless and will use any means to achieve their goals (e.g., Harry Reid’s recent admission of lying about Romney not paying taxes, retorting with “he lost, didn’t he?”).
At this point, I don’t know which is worse: the imminent collapse and destruction as led by the Democrats, or the gradual collapse and destruction as led by the Republicans. Death by immolation or death by a thousand cuts? Either way, you’re dead. However, we don’t know what lies on the other side. A slow collapse, as we have seen for the past few decades, is livable in its own way, but what if Plato is right again and after our failed experiment in democracy (killed, in part, by the liberation of women and the imposition of the income tax), we get dictatorship? What are the chances of it being benign? How long will it last? What kind of chaos will ensue during the transitions into, and out of, that dictatorship? I fear that the misery these changes will inaugurate will outweigh the misery of our current lamentable state.
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I believe that there is too much deprecation of our constitutional order as devised by the Founding Fathers. Nathanjevans calls himself a divine right monarchist. But, is that a better form of government? The only divine right monarch is Christ who will someday come to claim his kingdom. All human pretenders to that title are as polluted by original sin as judges and congressmen. A constitutional monarchy at least provides a brake on executive privilege. Our political system is disfunctional due to the libertine and statist nature of the social elite and their welfare and warfare constituency. John Adams understood the nature and future of our constitutional order in his famous observation to someone, ” Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other (sort of people).” Ain’t it the truth.
The founding fathers themselves were rebellious, antinomian, and libertine degenerates. The more you look into the history of the revolution, the more it becomes clear how blatantly unchristian our struggle for independence was. A good place to start is Fisher’s “The True History of the American Revolution,” which can be read at the Internet Archive.
I suppose it is hypothetically possible for our Constitution to produce a mostly godly governance, but the framers sure did their best to make that impossible. As I said on the other thread, the document’s primary theme is the absolute Sovereignty of autonomous Man. This is implied in its magisterial opening of “We The People,” and made explicit in Article V, which says that a supermajority of the citizenry can declare absolutely anything to be legal. At the same time, the First Amendment and the Oath clause in Article VI angrily demanded that God and His law butt out of our national government forever.
Divine right monarchy is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t always get a Josiah or a Hezekiah as your king. On the other hand, we can be assured that we’ll never get a Josiah in a democracy.
“Democracy makes it impossible for the statesman to do his duty. A statesman of the greatest goodwill becomes, in a democracy, the slave of his supporters; he either satisfies their personal appetites or they destroy his backing. The statesman lives under the tyranny and permanent threat of the electoral agent.”
– Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Perhaps you don’t know about the concerted efforts of the prayerful John Jay to heal the growing divide between the colonies and Great Britain. He did not come aboard the dissenting train lightly.
To cast all our Founders as degenerates is to betray a bit of ignorance, IMO.
While I will agree that not all the Founders were degenerates, I have come to have a very hard time sympathizing with their cause. Not just because of the form of government they produced and the abject falsehood of the Declaration of Independence, but their grievances were illegitimate in the first place. They were founded as colonies of the British Crown, and they acted like it was some horrible injustice when the British made them pay an incredibly small amount of taxes (especially compared to what the average Englishman was paying at the time) to pay off a war that was waged almost entirely for their benefit. Not to mention, George Washington is actually the person responsible for getting the British involved in the first place.
The Founders might not have been all bad, and some of them might have been motivated by what they saw as Christian principle, I believe they couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s notable that Thomas Paine, who it is believed greatly contributed to the clamor for the actual break with “Biblical” arguments in Common Sense, later wound up apologizing for the most radical elements of the French Revolution. The bloody and unjust treatment of many even passive loyalists belies the notion that the American Revolution was somehow fundamentally better than the French. They were both bloody and rejected what had been almost undeniable Christian Truth up until that point.
From a Traditionalist standpoint, there simply was no good reason for the USA to break with Britain. Even to the extent we were culturally distinct, we still shared the same patrimony. There was certainly not grave enough tyranny to justify resistance, let alone independence as a republican state, that is if there was any tyranny at all.
The assertion that Christ is the only legitimate divine right monarch is contradicted by the fact that clearly David and Solomon ruled by divine right, and they too were (rather obviously) contaminated by original sin. The idea that Christendom languished in darkness about the fact that virtually all of it had a borderline blasphemous form of government until John Locke came along is absurd on its face.
A divine right monarch is by inference an absolute monarch. I believe that Lord Acton was right in stating that power tends to corrupt and absolute power will corrupt absolutely. Among us this shows itself in the attitude and decisions of many federal judges. The government of the Byzantine Empire seems to have been based on this principle and it virtually guarantees wild swings in public policy as the Byzantines often experienced. I think that in general most countries would be best served by a constitutional monarchy. There was a chance for this in Spain in 1975. Francisco Franco was the de facto King of Spain and chose Juan Carlos de Bourbon as his sucessor. It seems Juan realized that his personal total rule would never be acceptable in our time in Europe and the Cortes came to have real legislative authority. The experiment was killed however when Juan gave away his executive authority. So, it seems that we will never know if constitutional monarchy would be vindicated within Western Civilization in these times. Juan and now his son are just gilded hood ornaments on the limousine of state as the other European monarchs are.
By the way, Christendom did not languish in darkness because government is only one part of the many parts of a nation. If Our Lord appointed an angel as ruler for each nation we would have perfect permanent government as James Madison observed in the Federalist Papers. But he chooses?/allows? men both good and bad to steer the ship of state. Soli Deo Gloria.
A divine right monarch is by inference an absolute monarch.
Not necessarily. I believe that all government derives its authority from divine right (really, the Bible can’t be much more explicit about the fact God gives governments their authority), and Monarchy is the best form of government for a variety of reasons. One chief reason, though, is that it does symbolize that authority flows down from God to others. The idea that authority flows up from the people is antithetical to the Scriptures.
I believe that Lord Acton was right in stating that power tends to corrupt and absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
Except this clearly isn’t so. Power tending to corrupt is one thing, especially in a society that is not properly ordered, but the idea that an absolute monarch would, of necessity, be corrupt is simply wrong.
Among us this shows itself in the attitude and decisions of many federal judges.
Let me get this straight: The insanity of a republican court system that has been utterly divorced from Christianity and recognizing Christ as Lord demonstrates that an anointed Christian Monarch would be corrupt? You might want to rethink your reasoning here.
The government of the Byzantine Empire seems to have been based on this principle and it virtually guarantees wild swings in public policy as the Byzantines often experienced.
Not as wild and as uniformly evil as the shifts in public policy in every modern Western republican state.
The experiment was killed however when Juan gave away his executive authority.
The most important powers the monarch possesses are what would generally be termed “judicial.” It is their duty to protect the law as it was passed onto them by their ancestors. Somebody else could execute it or modify its application without touching the absolutely central duty of the monarch.
nathanjevanss,
Authority indeed descend from God and it may descend on an individual (i.e. monarch) or to a people (i.e a republic). There had been Christian republics and there is nothing inherently un-Chirstian in the republicism properly understood.
I can agree that not all Republics are ordered in such a way. but modern liberal democracies are inherently modeled on the notion that every man is a king in his own right. Aristocratic republics and even moderately democratic polities in small city states are OK, so long as they are not modeled on liberal ideological notions of popular sovereignty.
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Politics has become just another false religion, saturating the culture with its relentless utopian lies. Constitutional government is so far removed from the general public’s awareness that its concept is nearly incomprehensible. Unless the Spirit moves, the smoldering fires of Rome will be inevitably rekindled to remind us that our hope should have remained in the Lord. Period.
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