What Went Wrong with the United States?
Part 1

Endicott & Swett, Nullification . . . Despotism (1833). Courtesy of The New York Public Library.

3,059 words

Part 1 of 2

Classical liberalism tends to get a bad rap in our circles. There are reasons for that, of course. Although it didn’t turn out to be the final word in political theory, or a be-all end-all ideology, there are some valid principles from it which should be salvaged. More to the point, is democracy — or representative government, to be specific — washed up? It’s helpful to take stock of what worked and what didn’t. These lessons will be helpful to the furtherance of what Mussolini called the acquired facts of history.

What are we to make of the American experiment? Long after the Declaration of Independence, things are looking quite shaky for a number of reasons. No country lasts forever, and it’s about average in historical terms for a government to start hitting the skids after a couple of centuries. (Unlike some, I don’t regard this as inevitable, but there is an observable pattern.) The United States had a good run of it for a while. Still, things could still be going strong now, and in fact rather indefinitely, if not for some major problems.

The despotism problem

The fundamental problem arises when an overreaching ruling class, intertwined with the government, abuses the state apparatus to exploit or repress the public. Those who have vast amounts of money and power inevitably seek more money and power. (Billionaires could delegate running their business empires and go into semi-retirement, enjoying themselves and hardly having a care in the world. More typically, a billionaire will want two billion, and on and on.) Unrestrained abuse of power leads to the familiar scenario of a tubby King who commands muscular soldiers who subjugate skinny peasants. Throughout the last 5,000 years of human history, most rulers have been tyrannical to some degree or another. The fact is that despotism does work — until suddenly it doesn’t. Then, sometimes things come to a head.

Despotism is the oldest problem in politics. This goes all the way back. It was observed in the 234th century BC with the tumultuous reign of Chief Gruk of the Hill People. One of his famous deeds was to convince the tribe to deposit their gold nuggets with him for safekeeping. Better yet, he promised an enchantment that would make the nuggets grow a tiny bit bigger with each Full Moon. When pressed for details, he promised that there was an incantation to ward off all human intruders from the hidey hole in a secure location by the middle of the riverbank. Sadly, the magic storehouse called “the central bank” was in operation only a week before a gnome from the enchanted forest discovered it one night — so they were told — and the greedy little imp stole everything. The Hill People were crushed by the bad news at first, but fortunately the wise Chief Gruk had the power to make money grow on trees. He instituted the leaf standard and paid the depositors back in foliage – although taxes were still due in gold nuggets. The next proclamation, of course, was that everyone had better shut up about all this, or else.

Every society has a ruling class: the Roman patricians, the medieval nobles, the Dutch guild masters, El Jefe and his compadres in a banana republic, high-ranking party members in an ideologically-driven dictatorship, and so forth. In a representative government, the electorate should be in charge, since they pick their legislators — or so the theory goes. Sometimes a ruling class — elected public servants included — collectively begins to forget that their job isn’t really all about sipping cognac, raking in tremendous profits, and lording it over the peasants. There are serious responsibilities that go along with the perks of membership. Foremost among the duties of wise stewardship is to protect the public.

If a ruling class takes advantage of its position to the point that its habit of skimming off the top and exacting other harm upon the public starts to exceed any reciprocal benefits they’re providing, then it becomes an exploiter class. (Again, this is a very common theme throughout history.) If they’re neglecting their duties, this is a sign that this point was reached long ago. If they abuse the public, this provides a good philosophical argument for régime change, and the Declaration of Independence made exactly such an argument. One way or another, an exploiter class will eventually lose its grip on power. History shows us that either the public will get them off the gravy train one way or another, the government will collapse under its own weight when the misrule becomes unsustainable, or a foreign power intervenes.

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Long ago, Plato had a crack at the despotism problem. The results weren’t uniformly practical, but it made for some very thought-provoking discussions. After the toga-and-sandal days drew to a close, absolutist monarchy was pretty much the only game in town for centuries. Then came the Age of Enlightenment. This took a new shot at the despotism problem, arriving at a bundle of proposed measures: rule by elected representatives, the rights of man, limited government, separation of powers, and so on. This package deal was a bold departure from the way things had been done before. The question of the day was: Would it work?

The American experiment

The US became a proof of concept, which inadvertently turned classical liberalism into a for-export ideology. After this, the foundational principles underlying the Constitution turned out to be revolutionary — quite literally so, in many instances. Americans have become used to the entire world looking down their noses at us for being unenlightened Neanderthals, but up to some point in the mid-twentieth century, the US — warts and all — was generally regarded as a beacon of progress. Absolutist monarchy went the way of the dinosaurs, and today Saudi Arabia is the only major country still practicing it. Although things didn’t work perfectly, there was — and still is — something to be said for it.

What of America’s present degradation? (The similar could be said for most other Western countries.) Even as a teenager, I could see which way things were headed. At the time, it seemed as if everything was going to hell, but conditions then were practically a dream compared to now. The decade after I observed all this with my eyes open, William Pierce summed up the situation in a broadcast on June 15, 1996 called “The Big Picture.” It included the following capsule summary, in which the rascally reactionary was more eloquent about it than I would’ve been:

First, America has been transformed from a white country before the Second World War, a white country in which the 10% non-white portion of the population was strictly segregated from the white population, into a multiracial morass today. The non-white population in America is increasing so rapidly that it will constitute a majority, and we will be a minority, within the next 50 years.

Second, America’s government is deliberately and forcefully implementing this racial transformation. The government, an institution which our ancestors created to be the guardian of our welfare, has become the deadliest enemy of our people. It is deliberate government policy which is responsible for the flood of non-white immigrants, both legal and illegal, now pouring across our borders. It is deliberate government policy which feeds and houses and encourages the breeding of the huge and growing non-white underclass in our cities. It is deliberate government policy which mixes the non-white population with the White population and encourages miscegenation.

Third, most of the white population in America is collaborating in its own destruction, partly from ignorance, partly from fear, but mostly from a blind, animalistic urge to conform to perceived norms of public opinion.

Fourth, the mass media of news and entertainment provide the guiding spirit for white America’s rush to self-destruction, and those media are largely in the hands of the Jewish minority. The controlled media, with virtual unanimity, push the party line of egalitarianism and multiculturalism and racial mixing. The controlled media, with virtual unanimity, push the party line of feminism and of toleration for homosexuality and of white “guilt” for supposed historic wrongs to non-whites. The media, by influencing the attitudes and opinions of most voters, wield the power which determines which politicians get elected to public office in America. The media — especially the media of film and television — have done more than any other institution to degrade the cultural and moral level of our people. And the people who wield the media as a weapon against us are Jews.

At the time I became enlightened, my teachers were piously instructing me in the virtues of democracy. Contrarily, I began to think of it as a false idol. To me, Third World immigration — the number one problem William Pierce later summarized — was a perfect example of this. Even in my former liberal days, giving away our territory didn’t make sense. I could see that these Third World arrivals kept coming in and weren’t going back. Even if they learned our language and customs, they would never be the same as us, and didn’t really belong. If democracy is indeed a safeguard against politicians carrying out destructive agendas, then why was mass migration from the Third World continuing year after year against the will of the people?

It was clear even to me, a smart-assed teenage nazbol, that our politicians who enabled this not only didn’t have a popular mandate, they were betraying America’s best interests as well as its future. The Democrats wanted more votes, essentially one of the ways they stuff the ballot box. The Republicans wanted to please their big bidness cronies who liked cheap labor, which also drove down the wages of real Americans. The politicians were getting away with it, too. (It’s been another four decades since then, and Washington is still up to no good, with the Bidet junta doing everything it can to accelerate America’s transformation into a majority non-white country in which the founding population loses control over its destiny.) When did the public ever vote on opening the borders and altering America’s ethnic composition? The country doesn’t belong to the politicians, so it’s not theirs to give away, anyway.

Representative government also wasn’t helpful when it came to curbing the other three destructive trends that William Pierce described in 1996. Fixing those problems requires stronger medicine.

The despotism problem at present is not only reaching an alarming degree, it’s the worst problem that our society is facing. All others are secondary. For example, as bad as multiracialism is, it was more or less a manageable problem as long as the ruling class sided with the white majority from which it originated. (Of course, segregation was only a half-measure — though that is another story.) Since the 1960s, the exploiter class deliberately worsened the multiracialism problem through open-borders policies and other anarcho-tyranny measures. They created a “both halves against the middle” dialectic against the dwindling majority. But as their endgame draws near, it turns out that they’ve badly destabilized the country. Although they fear and hate real Americans, they didn’t realize that trying to kill the goose that laid the golden egg was a terrible strategy.

By now, the mask is off. This is fairly easily discernable by everyone who can think for themselves and doesn’t let the TV make up their minds for them. The so-called “elites” are in effect waging war on the nation’s founding population. This obviously spells trouble. Again, it’s hardly unprecedented for a ruling class to start leeching off the public, thus becoming a parasitic exploiter class. Even so, it’s remarkably short-sighted for the powers-that-be to do boneheaded things such as to run subversion strategies in a country they already control. All told, this wasn’t how America was supposed to work.

Unanticipated problems

Now that I’m older and, I hope, wiser, I see that democracy wasn’t really the problem. It was subverted long ago. The problem is that the game is rigged, even though The System retains a nominal democratic veneer for image purposes. Interestingly, Plato described the type of transformation in which a democracy becomes an oligarchy. When I read his description of processes such as this in his Republic, I thought it was a bit of a stretch, but I’ve become more convinced now that I’ve seen more history unfold.

Much can be said for the things that the US Constitution got right. Its authors created a country with a new political system that was a bold departure from what had gone before. For a first attempt, it was done quite well. There were nevertheless problems that the Founders didn’t predict. These shortfalls unwittingly made possible most of the problems that presently afflict the country. They will need to be addressed in any future order.

One obvious missing piece was a lack of provisions for the orderly secession of states. Although the heirs of the American Revolution obviously believed that part of a country should be able to go its own way if circumstances warranted it, they didn’t codify this in the Constitution. To them, it went without saying. After all, if government exists according to the consent of the governed, then it implies that the public can choose independence and form their own government. Codifying this might’ve spared us some future problems in 1861. And there have been several other missed opportunities as well.

Partisan politics

The Founders assumed that exceptional men would come forward to run in elections based on their community standing and good reputations earned from worthy deeds. After a couple of terms or so, they’d retire from Washington and go back to their former professions. To them, being a politician wasn’t meant to be a lifetime career. These days, however, it often is. For example, Congress consistently has an abysmal approval rating — 11%, according to the last poll I saw. Even so, Congressmen get reelected about 90% of the time. Funny how that works, right?

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The formation of political parties was unforeseen by the Founders, as well as the problems this would pose. They came into existence shortly after the US took shape in its present form. This was a concern, and rightly so, for some of the Founders. By then the Constitution was already written, so it was too late to do much about partisan politics.

Although there are reasons for the Electoral College to exist, there are also drawbacks. Nearly all states have a “winner takes all” system in place. Also, there are no provisions for runoff elections. These structural factors inadvertently established a two-party system, which was a regrettable oversight. It’s nearly impossible for a “third party” or independent candidate to win. In fact, it’s never happened in American history, and it’s rare for one to even exceed single-digit results in the general election.

Now that electoral campaigns are highly-scripted media events, which in the case of the Presidency require two billion dollars to orchestrate successfully, they have become a major barrier to entry for any independent. Let’s suppose that you’re such a great mind at statecraft that you’d make Sun Tzu seem like Walter Mondale in comparison. Still, if you can’t get a nomination from either the Stupid Party or the Evil Party, and you don’t happen to have two billion simoleons handy, then you can forget about getting elected.

Moreover, in order to win each party must take a rather centrist approach to vie for the fairly slim fraction of undecided voters who determine the outcome. A center-Left and center-Right party therefore can’t diverge too much from each other, and as a result we are effectively left with little room for innovation outside the existing Overton window. (Electoral contests pretty much amount to kabuki theater, but more on this later.) Thus, the uniparty effectively offers voters the momentous choice between vanilla and French vanilla.

In such a two-party system, a significant fraction of the voters choose the proverbial “lesser of two evils” rather than someone they actually want. Moreover, votes for outsider candidates will tend to draw support from the Republicrat politician who is nearest in ideology. If anything, this helps the opposing Republicrat — quite a maddening paradox. Fearing an election victory by the bozo on the other side, people will speak of not wanting to “waste their vote” on a third party or independent candidate who they’d much prefer. With the Republicrats typically running candidates who are barely palatable to their own side and loathed by the other side, the results are effectively similar to a “good cop/bad cop” dynamic. As one of my co-workers put it in 1996, “I really like [Pat] Buchanan, but we need someone who can beat [Cupcake and her sidekick Bill] Clinton.” Worked out great, didn’t it?

Having only two viable parties is better than no choice at all, but it’s still pretty shabby as far as democracy goes. It’s not the way things were really meant to be. There’s a place for vanguard parties, but it would be helpful to have alternative candidates who have a chance of winning. This is especially so when the “mainstream” parties differ mostly on hot-button wedge issues of secondary importance, but don’t deliver the goods on matters of substance. Conservatives want to get back the nice, normal country they grew up in. Liberals want world peace and prosperity for the masses. Neither side gets what they want, even when their party has the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

Suppose that Lex Luthor wanted to subvert a democratic country in which only two parties are viable. Should he grease palms with the kingmakers in the center-Left party, or the center-Right party? Surely the big brain in his chrome dome would furnish the right answer– namely, that influencing both parties creates a “heads I win, tails you lose” dynamic. In real life, although there’s no single supervillain running the show, that’s how it rolls with the unofficial ruling class that is lately called the Deep State. Whoever you vote for and whoever wins, you get the same thing.

Although this arrangement completely undermines how things are supposed to work, this end run around democracy is not technically illegal. If there were a new constitutional convention to rewrite the rules, it would be a tricky matter to prevent the same problems from recurring. Strict campaign finance reform would surely be a big part of the solution.