The Dissident Frogman's Epistle to the Libertarians, and Political Culture
The Dissident Frogman has broken a long silence to comment on the results of our election, and this article, "The Frogman's Prophecies," should be read in full. Because of the strong logic and utter beauty of its last few paragraphs, and its relevance to many I know who want to be purist libertarians (or even anarcho-capitalists) I think the climax of his essay deserves to be quoted in a multi-paragraph block, and hence have broken my usual practice
The various flavors of Social Democrats who run Europe (into the ground, admittedly), and share so many features and aspirations with Obama have learned the mistakes of the less subtle autocrats who preceded them. If France can teach you one thing, it’s that Obama will never bleed you dry or push you beyond the threshold of revolt, only to the nearest edge of it: you are now more likely to bleed from a thousand cuts over a thousand years than to get a quick, if violent, resolution to the relentless assaults against your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness-snarky Libertarians who opted to let Obama squat in the Oval Office unopposed on the deluded notion that "it doesn’t matter" and will bring the fall of Leviathan sooner, may want to take notice.
Even the French have not yet managed to completely plunder and ruin their comparatively much weaker economy, and the good Lord knows they’ve been trying for the best of the last 80 years or so.
Just like in France, the rates of taxes, duties and fees unleashed upon the good folks of the US of A will not only augment, they will also metastasize over an incredibly varied and ever expanding range of products and services, in addition to your income and profits. You will suffocate under an unrelenting onslaught of new regulations, red tape and audits by a growing army of government agencies and bureaucrats all tasked with the mission of controlling that nothing passes through their nets, and punishing you ruthlessly for anything that does.
And still: you will live through it, and you will live well enough-for a given value of "well"-to never really have a legally and morally unquestionable motive to rise up in arms and go full scale de oppresso liber on the tyrant. This will not be, as many of you imagine when they think about France, North Korea only with more cheese, wine and broads who don’t shave their armpits. Instead, you will find yourself in a multi-generations limbo of "too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards"-as, ironically, a Libertarian once said.
Just like in France, this will turn you into a depressed, cynical and pessimistic people, until they finally manage to kill your spirit whole, and nearly everybody is on the dole.
That’s when they’ve won. They do not need to kill you, they just have to break you.
The Dissident Frogman is absolutely right. We (and I include myself, in my more naive moments) tend to expect some sort of big dramatic showdown between the forces of Oppression and Resistance, because that's how it would work in a story, because a story has to compress the drama into the scope of a movie or book. So we fantasize about obviously-unconstitutional and clearly-tyrannical degrees, affecting everyone, being enforced by international mercenaries riding in black helicopters gunning down all opposition, or mobs of brownshirts marching through the streets smashing the livelihoods of all who oppose them.
But that's not how it actually will work -- not if Obama and (more importantly) the faction behind him actually wants to win, rather than just be a credible threat for story purposes. Striking swiftly and dramatically would arouse opposition: to take the most dramatic sort of example, if Obama got on TV tomorrow and declared himself Maximum Leader For Life of the American Mandate with totalitarian control over all aspects of life, almost everyone save for his most fanatical supporters would conclude that his Administration had lost its legitimacy. Congress -- even the Democrats in Congress -- would impeach him. The military and security establishments woulde refuse to obey him. If he was lucky, he would be escorted out of the Oval Office by the Secret Service into a lunatic asylum. If he was unlucky, he would find just enough military and security support that the bodies would pile up before he was pitched out of power in a short civil war, and then his final destination would be a parade ground with a ready firing squad.
And Obama probably knows this. Heck, I doubt that even Obama really wants to be a Third World style dictator, let alone Hitler or Stalin. He may be on a path that might eventually lead his successors to be this, but he probably doesn't know this, or at least admit it to himself.
What he wants is to create a society in which the important economic, and even many of the important cultural decisions, are made by the Federal Government (hereafter called "The State") rather than emerging from the free interactions of individuals and organizations limited only by the requirement not to commit unprovoked force or fraud upon each other. He wants this not because he intends to build a Barad-dur at the top of which he may gloat and laugh evilly at the sufferings of his subjects, but because he genuinely believes that such a society would be more peaceful, prosperous and sane than the alternative.
He's wrong, of course, but that's not the same thing as being consciously evil, nor is it even the same thing as being stupid. Barack Hussein Obama is not the Obamessiah his followers imagine, but neither is he the Antichrist; he's not as brilliant as he thinks he is, but he's also not idiotic, and he has the support of a whole faction who has been thinking about how to change America into a socialist country, and has been thinking about it for a long time.
The key is to change the political culture, and this is a generational, possibly multi-generational task.
What do I mean by "political culture?" It's what the electorate expects and is willing to tolerate of the State in order for the State to be perceived by them as legitimate and hence to be obeyed for any reason other than sheer terror of its might. Even a dictatorship needs a friendly political culture -- a dictator who behaves in a manner that enough of his people, especially in key places, consider illegitimate will be assassinated or overthrown, by coup or civil war.
There are three things to remember about political culture.
(1) Only in an extreme crisis can it change swiftly
The classic example of this is a great depression or major war. Note that the three biggest past changes in the American political culture -- during the first of which we established our Republic and in the last two of which we began to slip away from the libertarian ideals of that Republic -- were in the Revolutionary War (major war coinciding with depression, and the depression lasted for years after the war); American Civil War (major war with regional depression in the South owing to the war followed by prolonged Reconstruction); and World War II (major depression followed by major war).
We are in the fourth such crisis. The war started in 2001 but hasn't yet become "major;" the economic downturn also started in 2001, and deepened in 2007. Obama's re-election itself is likely to ensure that both war and depression increase to "major" scale. No, Obama didn't plan it this way: he genuinely imagines that rainbows and unicorns come from his ass, and expects glorious success to increase his popular support. Yet, here we are.
The thing about swift changes in the political culture is that they are impermanent unless either the crisis lasts for a very long time, or they are ratified and made permanent after the end of the crisis. The reason why this is so is that the changes introduced during the crisis are understood by most to be temporary measures put in to deal with the crisis: once the crisis is over, unless the electorate then demonstrates that they consider them good enough to remain in "normal" times, the changes are likely to be scrapped.
In the Revolutionary Crisis, for example, while independence from Britain by its nature was permanent barring a British reconquest, the Union was not: it took the ratification of the US Constitution in 1787, four years after the end of the war, to make it permanent. Until then, the Republic was in limbo as a confederation
In the American Civil War, the reunification of America and the liberation of the slaves were by their nature irreversible as long as the South lay militarily prostrate. However, the South still needed to be politically reconstructed (restored to functional state governments) and black status needed to be defined. The key events here were the 13th - 15th Amendments of the US Constitution (permanently abolished slavery and established racial equality), and the compromise attending the disputed election of 1876 (Republicans got to see Hayes President in return for an agreement to cease enforcement of many aspects of racial equality in the South).
In the Great Depression/World War II Crisis, the vast and permanent expansion of the State required over three terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, followed by over a term and a half of Harry S. Truman. It was Truman's Presidency, not FDR's, which ensured the permanency of this growth, because Truman got majorities of the electorate to consent to these changes in the much less anxious environment of economic growth and cold war, as opposed to depression and hot global war. (Note, though, the key role played by the stress of having to fight Communism in the ratification of America's permanent involvement abroad: it was Stalin as much as Hitler and Tojo who killed American isolationism).
(2) Significant change can happen over one generation
If the crisis is perceived as great enough and the response by the faction in favor of the change is perceived as successfully and favorably resolving the crisis, people can in the course of their own life go from opposing (or at least fearing) to accepting the change. Consider a man born in 1750 assuming himself to be a loyal subject of the King who by 1800 accepts the United States of America and assumes himself a loyal citizen of the Republic. Or a man born in 1840 believing in states' rights who by 1890 accepts Federal supremacy. Or a man born in 1910 believing in fully-free-enterprise capitalism who by 1960 has accepted the State's power and right to interfere in the economy. Or a man born in 1980 believing in ???? who by 2030 has accepted the State's right to ????
In all these cases, the State is now doing something which, decades ago, would have led to protest and possibly violent rebellion, which is now just accepted as "the way things are," which is to say the change has become part of the political culture. These changes may be good, or bad from our POV. (Personally, while I'm not happy that the States are no longer semi-independent, I'm very happy that Lincoln liberated the slaves). This is irrelevant. The important point is that the changes are no longer controversial.
This is what Obama wants to do, in his lifetime. He wants to secure the regulatory expansion of the 1970's and go a bit beyond it, and have these changes be ratified by his successors so that, by 2030 or so (when he'll have long since retired from politics) Americans just accept this growth in Federal purview as normal, and only a few extremists still regard them as controversial.
Think this couldn't happen? Imagine the position of a man in 1800 who believed that America should still be under British rule. Or a man in 1890 who thought that states should be able to nullify Federal laws. Or a man in 1960 who argued that it was malfeasance for the Federal government to deliberately inflate the currency.
(3) Really major changes require several generations to accept
Imagine that the current electorate of the United States of America was born in 1780. Would they have accepted the political and legal situation in America in 1980?
No, and for many reasons. Some would have bad (they would have been horrified at the sight of enfranchised poor people, women and blacks). Some would have been good (they would have been equally horrified at laws restricting the right of contract and the right to bear arms). But all these reasons would have had something in common -- they would have been a matter of dissonant political cultures.
They would have revolted at the sight of enfranchised poor people, women and blacks because their concept of "responsible voters" was limited to rich or at least middle-class white males. They would have revolted at laws restricting the right of contract and the right to bear arms because, in the America of 1801 (when they would have attained their adulthood), you could make and have enforced any contract which was not actually criminal under Common Law, and you could buy and own any weapon you wanted up to and including siege artillery (though for obvious reasons very few people actually did own siege guns).
When I say "revolted," I'm not engaging in hyperbole there. I mean that they would have found these laws so noxious that they would have been willing to pick up weapons and make an armed rebellion against the Federal Government. After all, their fathers and grandfathers had been willing to do just that against a British Empire which was far more similar to them in terms of political culture than would be the America of 1980.
This demonstrates that a really major change in political culture requires time. Specifically, it requires enough time for those holding the older views, who remember how things used to be, to die out and new generations to be born who accept the change as part of the background, the "way things are." Generally, a really major change in political culture takes roughly 40-90 years to be fully accepted, for different political situations and varying values of "fully accepted."
"Fully accepted" means that the new view has now become part of the legal and political background upon which nearly everybody agrees. Those who disagree are considered extremists, eventually lunatics. Once a change has reached this point it cannot be reversed save by the most radical measures.
For instance, people who think that we should return to the relatively free gun control laws of 1962 are considered moderate conservatives. People who today think the economy should return to the freedom it enjoyed in, 1912, would be considered extremists (libertarians, though the media would probably paint them as "conservatives"). People who think that blacks should revert to the slavery they suffered in 1812 would be considered insane racists (even most modern white supremacists want segregation rather than a return to chattel slavery). People who think that we should return to the British rule over America that existed in 1762 are -- well, almost nonexistent: loyalty to the British monarchy in modern America is a vague sentiment of sympathy rather than a political movement. And so on.
Conclusion
We've lost the election of 2012. What we need to do is get ready to win the elections of 2014 and 2016. And what we on the Right need to do to achieve this is to pull together, rather than pull apart. A lot is at stake -- if Obama is able to get more legislation through in 2015 and 2016, he will increase his support and may be able to jigger the polls in 2016 so that we can't win. And if another socialist is elected in 2016, then this could work out like the New Deal: and racism against whites, sexism against men, and hatred of the upper middle classes become fixed in our system for at least another 60-80-years. We have to win.
As the Dissident Frogman points out in reference to France, the French conservatives were utterly-ineffectual in their opposition to socialism in France, and now it may be too late for France. Generations have grown up now who simply accept socialism as "the way things are," and regard any attempt to turn it back as unrealistic at best, insane at worst. It has become part of the French political culture.
Let us on the American Right, both conservative and libertarian, unite to prevent the ratification of Obama's socialism before it simply becomes part of the political culture. I've already argued to the Religious Right that stopping Obama and his socialist successors is more important than opposing homosexuality; now I'm arguing to the Libertarian Right that stopping Obama and his socialist successors is more important than opposing religiosity or even crony capitalism.
Because if we fail, that's it for the American Experiment. America herself will endure, probably grow stronger by shifting from economic predominance to military domination over key resources. But America will endure as an Empire, not as a Republic.
Honestly, if someone has to be the "Roman Empire" of the Western Civilization, I'd rather it be America than, say, China or even France. But I'd much rather see the Republic live on.
Wouldn't you?