RUTHFULLY YOURS

His very flaws may be his strengths

The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy.

Tragic heroes, as they have been portrayed from Sophocles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes) to the modern western film, are not intrinsically noble. Much less are they likeable. Certainly, they can often be obnoxious and petty, if not dangerous, especially to those around them. These mercurial sorts never end well — and on occasion neither do those in their vicinity. Oedipus was rudely narcissistic, Hombre’s John Russell (Paul Newman) arrogant and off-putting.

Tragic heroes are loners, both by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them. Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments are Trumpian to the core — something akin to the sensational rumors that at night Trump is holed up alone, petulant, brooding, eating fast food, and watching Fox News shows.

Outlaw leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), in director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, is a killer whose final gory sacrifice results in the slaughter of the toxic General Mapache and his corrupt local Federales. A foreboding Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), of John Ford’s classic 1956 film The Searchers, alone can track down his kidnapped niece. But his methods and his recent past as a Confederate renegade make him suspect and largely unfit for a civilizing frontier after the expiration of his transitory usefulness. These characters are not the sorts that we would associate with Bob Dole, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney.

The tragic hero’s change of fortune — often from good to bad, as Aristotle reminds us — is due to an innate flaw (hamartia), or at least in some cases an intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait that can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune. The problem for civilization is that the creation of those skill sets often brings with it past baggage of lawlessness and comfortability with violence. Trump’s cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier.

http://edgar1981.blogspot.com.au/2018/04/nazis-then-and-now.html

Whoever was surprised by the hate-fest against the National Rifle Association and conservative Americans in general that followed the Parkland, FL school shooting must not have been paying attention. Over the past half century, a ruling class formed by our uniformly leftist educational system and occupying the commanding heights of corporate life, governmental bureaucracies, the media, etc. accuses its targets of everything from murder and terrorism to culpable psycho-social disorders (racism, sexism, and so forth).

Leaders, marchers, and rioters speak from identical scripts. They do not try to persuade. They strengthen their own side’s vehemence. They restrict opponents from speaking on their own behalf, and use state and corporate power to push them to society’s margins. While demanding deference to themselves, they mention right-leaning Americans and their causes only to insult and de-legitimize them.

Republican politicians and Fox News grant the respect denied them. They respond with facts and reason. But the Left’s reasoning is war’s reasoning: helping one’s own by hurting the enemy.

Political-war-by-accusation-of-crime is common in the world. As a rule—Charles de Gaulle was not the first to note it—“peoples are moved only by elemental sentiments, violent images, brutal invocations.”

But in America, political war used to be rare. The Federalist Papers begin thus: “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.”

Was America ever ruled by reason? For the most part, and relative to the rest of the world, yes it was. How did this come to be? In 1816, Thomas Jefferson answered: “our functionaries have done well, because… if any were [inclined to do otherwise], they feared to show it.” In short, America was exceptional because the American people were exceptional.

Today, Americans seem to be regressing to humanity’s sad norm. “Elemental sentiments, violent images, brutal invocations” have become the currency of American public life. Hence, reasoned arguments about the common good have as much chance of getting attention, never mind of giving pause to persons who hate you, as do pearls cast before swine. In politics as in economics, bad currency drives out good.

Everything about Voltaire was confected, starting with his name — only one of 178 noms de plume that he used. (Admittedly, he would not be the only would-be celebrity to reinvent himself.) Most of the bon mots attributed to him are spurious, including his last words. (Asked on his deathbed to renounce Satan, he supposedly said: “This is no time to make new enemies.” But this joke was first attributed to him two centuries later.) Others, such as “the best is the enemy of the good”, were plagiarised. Or take one of the most commonly quoted: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Not only did Voltaire never say it, but nothing in his life suggests that he would have defended anyone or anything to the death.

For Voltaire was an arch-egotist. He made one fortune, inherited another, and pleased himself. From his cavalier treatment of women — his mistresses included a widow, a married woman and his niece — to his envious treatment of younger rivals such as Rousseau, he demonstrated little of the nobility that posterity conferred on him. On the contrary: he admired and was admired above all by enlightened despots. He was only too happy to correspond with Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great, neither of whom were friends of liberty. Frederick, indeed, lured Voltaire to his court: the first in a long line of French intellectuals to serve as useful idiots. Napoleon “loved” Voltaire, finding him “always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic”.

Yet there was a fanatical side to Voltaire. He liked to depict himself as a scourge of “superstition”, which could mean Catholicism or Judaism, and as a foe of religious persecution; but he himself had no time for religious freedom. He urged his fellow philosophe d’Alembert to annihilate “infamy”, by which he meant the Church: “écrasez l’infame”. To Frederick (a notorious unbeliever) he wrote: “Our [religion] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most sanguinary that has ever infected this world. Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service by extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and are apt for every yoke; I say among honest people, among men who think . . .” Such words have a sinister resonance today, when Christians are widely persecuted. And Voltaire’s open contempt for the masses gives the lie to the suggestion that he was any kind of liberal, let alone a democrat, or even that he had really learned much about what makes a free country from his time in England.

In these contentious times, various forms of censorship or discouragement of free speech are continually being fiercely debated.

National Review Online writer Kevin Williamson, hired by the Atlantic for his scorched-earth attacks on Donald Trump, was fired after one column because of his scorched-earth attacks on women who’ve had abortions. Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham’s show has been boycotted by nearly 20 corporate advertisers because of her tweet mildly tweaking David Hogg about his failure to get into some universities. Hogg, of course, is the 17-year-old survivor of the recent mass shooting at a Florida high school who has become a petulant catspaw for the antigun lobby. Meanwhile, revelations of private data being sold or left vulnerable by Facebook, and the continuing censorship of political views by that platform along with YouTube and Google, have heated up calls for subjecting social media to government regulations.

Seems like dangerous times for our first inalienable right, the one protecting free and open speech. But before we endorse policies that end up making matters worse, we should be clear about why the Founders gave us a right that few other nations, including the E.U. states, allow their citizens.

What our Constitution recognizes is that free political speech is indispensable for exercising political freedom, the ability to openly participate in political deliberations. From its beginning in ancient Athens, the constitutional government that made the people sovereign also created the idea of free speech. If people are free to deliberate about and vote for the policies the state pursues, then citizens have to be free to speak publicly without fear of legal restraints or retribution. Unlike elsewhere in antiquity, in ancient Athens there were two words for “free speech,” one of which was also the name of a warship, bespeaking the importance of that right for citizens. And each meeting of the Assembly of citizens opened with the question, “What man has good advice to give the city?” which Euripides praised as “the call of freedom.”

Nor could subjective standards of decorum or “proper” speech be allowed to silence the citizens. In Fifth Century Athens, the rules governing speaking in the Assembly focused mainly on keeping inept, abusive, or repetitive speakers from wasting the citizens’ time. Outside the Assembly, there were no rules. The tragic and comic stages were one of the most important venues of political debate. The policies of Athens, particularly its brutalities during the Peloponnesian War, were criticized in front of 15,000 citizens in the Theater of Dionysus the Liberator, the cult name of the god linking theater to political freedom. Comedy was particularly brutal, depicting politicians by name on the stage and accusing them of every sexual depravity, along with being the spawn of foreign prostitutes and betraying the city for money. So important was this freedom of expression that Aristophanes’ favorite target, the demagogue Cleon, failed to persuade the government to silence the poet.

1) The Obama administration’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to come into Syria ostensibly to stop the use of weapons of mass destruction. The latter did not happen, but after an over 40-year Russian hiatus in the Middle East, Putin has recalibrated the region, and Russia will be far harder to expel than it was to invite in. John Kerry did not get rid of WMD; he ensured that he got more of it.

2) The Ben Rhodes/John Kerry/Barack Obama Iran Deal. It was a disaster precisely because a) it was unneeded, given the ongoing strangulation of the Iranian economy due to tardy but finally tough sanctions, and b) it was embedded within so many side deals and payoffs, mostly stealthy, that it became a caricature, from nocturnal hostage ransom payments that helped fuel terrorists to whole areas of the Iran nuclear project exempt from spot inspections.

3) The FBI and DOJ blanket exemptions given to Clinton skullduggery over the Obama administration. For eight years, one or both of the Clintons cashed in and felt that they could run the family foundation as a rogue entity, play wink and nod quid pro quo with the reset Russians on commercial deals like Uranium One, set up an illegal server, and, when caught, destroy communications and electronic devices, encourage subordinates to mislead investigators, compromise the attorney general, warp the DNC to massage a primary and town-hall debate process, hire opposition researchers to smear a political opponent, drawing on paid-for Russian sources, and collude with obsequious media to direct its furor elsewhere.

4) The panicked appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. There was good evidence in Mueller’s past concerning the Bulger scandal and the anthrax scare that he was mostly incapable of self-reflection and prone to zealotry; and when the Comey gambit paid off and Mueller assembled his “dream team” of partisans, it was clear that mythical “collusion” was merely a useful key to open every imaginable door of inquiry to stymie a president — on the theory that threats of imprisonment and financial ruin are great ways to flip minor subordinates to say something, anything useful, and if one digs deeply enough, every American has something to hide. Mueller reversed his mandate: Assuming first that a citizen was guilty, his mission became finding any sort of crime to prove it.

5) Assassination chic. Once the Resistance encouraged as acceptable all types of pushback to Donald Trump, it became a nonstop race to the bottom to outdo one another in macabre crudity, as everyone from Kathy Griffin, Snoop Dog, and Madonna to a Shakespearean troupe, Johnny Depp, David Crosby, and Kamala Harris has gotten in on finding both overt and “cute” ways to suggest that the president might be decapitated, stabbed, shot, blown up, burned alive, or eliminated in an elevator. Is the new normal that it is okay for celebrities and politicians now to imagine out loud the death of the president, but that it was not acceptable in the past and easily will not be again in the future — and that the omnipresence of such assassination chic will have no effect on normalizing in the mind of a zealot such an actual scenario?

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The humanitarian hoax of globalism requires clarification. Globalism is the internationalizing of sovereign nations into a federation of one-world government ruled by the globalist elite themselves. Globalism is internationalized collectivism.

Globalism is NOT to be confused with global trade. Global trade is the import and export of goods and services across international boundaries.

Why is understanding the distinction between globalism and global trade so important? Because the globalist humanitarian hucksters are busy conning the American public with promises of cheaper goods through global trade deals to disguise their sinister underlying motive of collapsing the American economy. Globalism requires a collapsed America to internationalize it into the globalist New World Order that the humanitarian hucksters intend to rule.

The humanitarian hoax of globalism is based on asymmetric information – Joseph Stiglitz’s theory of economics where one party to an economic transaction possesses greater material knowledge than the other party. The globalist humanitarian huckster relies on asymmetric information to sell global collectivism to an unsuspecting public.

Wiki explains the differences between two asymmetric information models. “In adverse selection models, the ignorant party lacks information while negotiating an agreed understanding of or contract to the transaction, whereas in moral hazard [models] the ignorant party lacks information about performance of the agreed-upon transaction or lacks ability to retaliate for a breach of the agreement.”

Globalism exemplifies both the adverse selection model and the moral hazard model. This is how it works.

Collectivism, whether it is called socialism, communism, Islamism, or globalism, denies freedom of speech and the ownership of personal property. Theoretically, collectivism means giving a group priority over the individuals who form the group. In practice collectivism awards all the power and privilege to the ruling elite Equality simply cannot exist in collectivism because there is always a power structure.

A free society requires free speech and the ownership of personal property – both are fundamental to American life and guaranteed by our Constitution. The Culture War against America is an asymmetric information war against both freedom of speech and ownership of personal property. The globalist elite are using asymmetric information as a war weapon to collapse America from within. A free society supports individualism and upward mobility – collectivism does not.

Collectivism, as an economic theory, awards control of the production and distribution to the group. Collectivism as a political reality enslaves the population and establishes a master/slave infrastructure – collectivism is the absence of individual freedom. The ruling elite has absolute power over production and distribution – it has complete centralized social and economic control over the group. The globalist elite know this and they are duping the public with asymmetric information.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dark-side-of-the-enlightenment-1523050206

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale.

These statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives. They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society, but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative tradition, adapting it to local conditions.

Country music legend Merle Haggard released “Are the Good Times Really Over” in 1982. Like his earlier songs “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me,” Haggard was looking back to simpler times, before the sixties revolution began the two-bit Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values,” especially the disdain for traditional virtues like patriotism and faith. Progressives and leftists dismissed Haggard as a naïve hillbilly at best, and a white racist pining for his lost privilege at worst.

But the question in Haggard’s chorus still persists in our culture and politics, with prophecies of doom coming from both ends of the political spectrum. So, are “the good times really over”? Or is anxiety over declinism misplaced?

After all, worrying over decline is universal. In constitutional governments, much of it comes from the melodramatic hyperbole of political rhetoric. Ever since ancient Athens, prophesizing doom is a way to frighten voters into choosing one party and set of policies instead of another. After the disappointment of 1968, the left-leaning Democrats particularly turned to hysteria and hyperbole to salve their wounds and jump-start the “fundamental transformation of America.” Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and his son were all cast as portents of the coming doom: the destruction of civil liberties, the dismantling of the democratic order, nuclear annihilation, the creation of a plutocracy––these are just a few of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse predicted by Dems.

The ongoing attacks on Donald Trump are just a more hysterical and hyperbolic version of this age-old staple of electoral politics. From Robert Kagan’s “this is how fascism comes to America,” to Thomas Friedman’s looming “constitutional crisis,” bipartisan disappointment seasoned with class prejudice conjures up these signs of imminent doom that only the elite political class can ward off. Yet for now, the resilience of the Constitutional order has made theses Jeremiads mere sound and fury.