Decius Revisited
The same author who penned the excellent ‘Flight 93’ election article responds to his critics. Please note that the critic’s criticism are all Leftwing in tactics and tone, that is, personal attacks, attacks, attacks, and attacks, without an ounce of wit or substance.
I have said before: we live in a Dark Ages. Before Trump, I had never seen the Right behave in the same low, craven and illogical fashion as the Left.
Decius makes this remark, which bears repeating:
I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually doanything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.
Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.
Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.
To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.
My comment:
My loyalty to the Conservative cause is not only betrayed, but betrayed dismissively, as if the cause of limited government was outside of what polite people may soberly discuss, that I now believe the RINOs far outnumber the true pro-Constitutional conservatives by a considerable margin, both in the party leadership and in the rightwing press.
Even one year ago, I would have dismissed the idea of a two-wing monoparty merely arranging a Punch and Judy show to distract the rubes as the talk of a conspiracy theory nut, on the same order as faked-moonshot true believers. Now I listen soberly and nod: nothing else explains the selection of sure-to-lose candidates like McCain, Romney, and Dole.
Nothing else explains the vehement Two Minute Hate against Trump, who is certainly no less pure a conservative than Bush or Nixon. (Since when is strengthening our decimated Navy unconservative? Enforcing current border control laws? Abolishing socialized medicine?)
You see, we had a deal, my fellow Republicans, and I lived up to it. A gentleman’s agreement: you support your candidate with all zeal until the convention, and then you support the party’s candidate with all zeal until the election. If you are not willing to abide by the outcome of the vote in the first place, your vote was fraud. Your vote was an attempt to bind me but not you to the outcome of the nomination process. You are a cheat, and I am your patsy and chump.
Because I actually held my nose and pulled the lever for all your loser bland half-Lefty establishment candidates, including Mitt ‘Socialized Meds’ Romney.
Listen: I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We have the worst governor since Grand Moff Tarkin. He is a Clinton fundraiser fellow with no political experience who is left of Trotsky. He won against a staunch anti-abortion and fiscal-conservative candidate named Cuccinelli, whom I loved. The establishment GOP turned on Cuccinelli, and even then it was a photo finish.
At the final vote, the margin by which he lost was equal to the margin of the Libertarian voters who threw their protest vote to a third party candidate. The Libertarians, allegedly in favor of human freedom to the greatest degree possible without imposing on the freedom of others, failed to support the ideologically impure but viable candidate in order to support the ideologically pure by nonviable candidate, and this split the vote just exactly enough to suck Virginia into the boiling corrupt swamp of the Clinton machine. Our governor has already broken the Virginia Constitution and offered the franchise to felons. Because racism.
So I blame the Libertarians for not making a simple distinction between ends and means. The end is human liberty. The means is to use the vote to move the nation toward classical enlightenment constitutional principles and away from machine politics. In this case, the Libertarians used the voting mechanism to make a symbolic statement, or express their inward conviction to the world. This decision threw the election to the foe, and harmed conservative and libertarian alike.
And now this is happening on a national scale again.
I am pondering what term, other than conservative, is apt for me to call myself and mine hereafter, since now the brand has been marred, and it means only the pretend-opposition and designated loser-with-dignity of a one party managerial state. It means a RINO. It means someone who believes in no conservative principles at all.
If the word conservative now means anticonservative, what word describes conservatives? Aside from sucker, of course.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
