History is Largely the Story of Everything Going to Hell.
Kurt Schlichter's We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America is his chronicling of the concatenation of E-T-T-S moments that followed the Pinnacle of American Greatness, which he identifies as late February, 1991, when his armored carwashing unit had precisely ... no tanks or trucks to decontaminate, as the Vaunted Republican Guards decided being martyred in a losing cause wasn't going to curry much favor with Allah. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union ceased to function, and Gosplan stopped doing the balances on abacuses, and all was well with the world.
In Book Review No. 10, we'll shift focus from the Earnest to the Satirical. There is a serious message in We'll Be Back, which is that national fragmentation and civil war is a condition people should avoid. The way in which everything went to hell, however, might be more satirical than earnest. While the Colonel was prepared to have his decontamination station contaminated, I was approaching middle age, and exposed to some of the forces that might have shaped history in that inferno-bound direction. It's possible, as he notes at page 25, that after a half-century of Crisis Mentality and Grand Constructions, people wanted a blow. "We were rich. Why not party, since there was nothing else to do? So, of course, we elected the perfect party president in Bill Clinton." That might be how things turned out, but during that 1992 election, I heard a lot of "after twelve years of Reagan and Bush," generally as prologue to productive people not paying enough taxes, or health care as a matter of right, or the continuing statistical disparities in school leaving or imprisonment or what have you.
Back then, though, the body politic still had an immune system robust enough to limit the infection of Hillary Rodham and Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner and the rest of the American Prospect crowd, and those middle-aged Southern philanderers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich could pretend they had balanced the budget, while making more than a few of my colleagues say things about Bill Clinton being a pretty good Republican president. They meant that in a complimentary way: and those conversations preceded Operation Just Because in Yugoslavia.
The seeds of the conservative populism Mr Schlichter analyzed, much more instructively, in Militant Normals, were sown then. Let us call the roll: immigration reform, free trade agreements, a contested Florida recount, nation-building wars. There's enough in that list to provide either a Donald Trump or a Barack Obama maneuvering room. The discontent, as he documents at page 32, is less easily compartmented into the existing partisan structure. "But if you listened to the Tea Partiers - which the establishment did not - then you would understand that while they detested the Democrats, they utterly despised the Republicans who were part of the same corrupt bipartisan establishment." Mix in twelve of the last sixteen years of the Jarrett regency implementing a destructive agenda and calling it "progress" and "things seem as though they can only get worse."
When things can only get worse, there are lots of ways people can respond, including various forms of rebellion, or electing governments with less incrementalist, authoritarian manifestoes, and the front-runners for both major parties' presidential nominees depressingly run on same: and while a polity is embroiled in internal turmoil, there are opportunities for other state actors to exploit it. And thus we have the national divorce scenario, two different sorts of civil wars, Chinese adventurism, the suspension of the Constitution, or perhaps a rediscovery of the political tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. Those scenarios give him opportunity to work in what might be out-takes from the Kelly Turnbull adventures, which have to focus on the guns being drawn by the principal character.
Perhaps, as Mr Schlichter lives in California, he might be forgiven an observation at page 245, "The elite is not noticing the unrest because the people whose patience is being lost are not the people dwelling in their bubbles. In the liberal bubbles, the conformity is rigorously enforced."
Bubbles, though, are susceptible to popping, and popping is an emergent phenomenon. We'll Be Back was printed well before the 2022 midterm elections, and the repudiation of the Democrat majority in Congress never materialized, in part because some prominent Republicans, rather than take the win in Dobbs and return abortion policy to the states (in good Tenth Amendment fashion) sounded off about setting a national abortion ban. Oops. Meanwhile, the local insurgencies that have restored voter interest in school board elections have now stressed the liberal bubble. Who knew that the so-called rainbow coalition attempted to bundle observant Moslems with the alphabet people, and that the political bundle that sails under the banner of diversity, inclusion, and equity is unsustainably big? Better for the Normals to build coalitions without purity tests, and let the loony left complain about opportunistic poaching.
The elite? "They get nothing, not our obedience, our cooperation, or our complicity." That, from page 283, might be a valid stance, with contempt well-earned: and yet, the positive populists have to offer something positive. "They have offered the Right a choice, not an echo of Trump. One path leads away from the Founding and toward marginalization and contempt. The other builds on the American political tradition and resonates with public aspirations for advancement and growth. Choose wisely."
Yes, and bet on emergence, and expect the unexpected.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
In Book Review No. 10, we'll shift focus from the Earnest to the Satirical. There is a serious message in We'll Be Back, which is that national fragmentation and civil war is a condition people should avoid. The way in which everything went to hell, however, might be more satirical than earnest. While the Colonel was prepared to have his decontamination station contaminated, I was approaching middle age, and exposed to some of the forces that might have shaped history in that inferno-bound direction. It's possible, as he notes at page 25, that after a half-century of Crisis Mentality and Grand Constructions, people wanted a blow. "We were rich. Why not party, since there was nothing else to do? So, of course, we elected the perfect party president in Bill Clinton." That might be how things turned out, but during that 1992 election, I heard a lot of "after twelve years of Reagan and Bush," generally as prologue to productive people not paying enough taxes, or health care as a matter of right, or the continuing statistical disparities in school leaving or imprisonment or what have you.
Back then, though, the body politic still had an immune system robust enough to limit the infection of Hillary Rodham and Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner and the rest of the American Prospect crowd, and those middle-aged Southern philanderers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich could pretend they had balanced the budget, while making more than a few of my colleagues say things about Bill Clinton being a pretty good Republican president. They meant that in a complimentary way: and those conversations preceded Operation Just Because in Yugoslavia.
The seeds of the conservative populism Mr Schlichter analyzed, much more instructively, in Militant Normals, were sown then. Let us call the roll: immigration reform, free trade agreements, a contested Florida recount, nation-building wars. There's enough in that list to provide either a Donald Trump or a Barack Obama maneuvering room. The discontent, as he documents at page 32, is less easily compartmented into the existing partisan structure. "But if you listened to the Tea Partiers - which the establishment did not - then you would understand that while they detested the Democrats, they utterly despised the Republicans who were part of the same corrupt bipartisan establishment." Mix in twelve of the last sixteen years of the Jarrett regency implementing a destructive agenda and calling it "progress" and "things seem as though they can only get worse."
When things can only get worse, there are lots of ways people can respond, including various forms of rebellion, or electing governments with less incrementalist, authoritarian manifestoes, and the front-runners for both major parties' presidential nominees depressingly run on same: and while a polity is embroiled in internal turmoil, there are opportunities for other state actors to exploit it. And thus we have the national divorce scenario, two different sorts of civil wars, Chinese adventurism, the suspension of the Constitution, or perhaps a rediscovery of the political tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. Those scenarios give him opportunity to work in what might be out-takes from the Kelly Turnbull adventures, which have to focus on the guns being drawn by the principal character.
Perhaps, as Mr Schlichter lives in California, he might be forgiven an observation at page 245, "The elite is not noticing the unrest because the people whose patience is being lost are not the people dwelling in their bubbles. In the liberal bubbles, the conformity is rigorously enforced."
Bubbles, though, are susceptible to popping, and popping is an emergent phenomenon. We'll Be Back was printed well before the 2022 midterm elections, and the repudiation of the Democrat majority in Congress never materialized, in part because some prominent Republicans, rather than take the win in Dobbs and return abortion policy to the states (in good Tenth Amendment fashion) sounded off about setting a national abortion ban. Oops. Meanwhile, the local insurgencies that have restored voter interest in school board elections have now stressed the liberal bubble. Who knew that the so-called rainbow coalition attempted to bundle observant Moslems with the alphabet people, and that the political bundle that sails under the banner of diversity, inclusion, and equity is unsustainably big? Better for the Normals to build coalitions without purity tests, and let the loony left complain about opportunistic poaching.
The elite? "They get nothing, not our obedience, our cooperation, or our complicity." That, from page 283, might be a valid stance, with contempt well-earned: and yet, the positive populists have to offer something positive. "They have offered the Right a choice, not an echo of Trump. One path leads away from the Founding and toward marginalization and contempt. The other builds on the American political tradition and resonates with public aspirations for advancement and growth. Choose wisely."
Yes, and bet on emergence, and expect the unexpected.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.