Blowback

 

Over at The Captain's Journal back on August 16, 2020, a poster going by "Ol' Remus" opined:

Middle class America is no less violent than any other people.   They seem passive because they’re results-oriented.   They rise not out of blood frenzy but to solve the otherwise insoluble.   Their methods of choice are good will, cooperation, forbearance, negotiation and finally, appeasement, roughly in that order.   Only when these fail to end the abuse do they revert to blowback.   And they do so irretrievably.   Once the course is set and the outcome defined, doubt is put aside.   The middle class is known — condemned, actually — for carrying out violence with the efficiency of an industrial project where bloody destruction at any scale is not only in play, it’s a metric.   Remorse is left for the next generation; they’ll have the leisure for it.   We’d like to believe this is merely dark speculation.   History says it isn’t.

Last night, Donald Trump became the most assassinated President in history.   Unsurprisingly, leftist social media is ablaze with (a) regrets that the assassin was unsuccessful and urging the next one (!) to get more range-time, and/or (b) claims that this was just another Trumpian publicity stunt designed to garner popular sentiment for a failing administration.

For those on 'the left', political violence is a rheostat.   It can be set low or set high or set to any point between, and they believe this is universally true.   It's not.   For those on 'the right', political violence is a simple switch.   Its present setting is 'off'.

I quote Ol' Remus above because I believe we are inching ever closer to the moment when some unsuspecting fool actor will accidentally flip that switch.   What will follow, I cannot speculate, but I suspect 'unpleasant' will be far too mild an adjective, and 'due process' will be largely determined by the contents of one's social media profile.

If I were a Democrat, I would be worrying, and I would be actively cooling my rhetoric, trying to 'get ahead of the curve', but that would only happen were I a sane Democrat, and there are damned few of those.

 

Due Process

 

There's a storm brewing over the issue of 'due process' as it applies to a certain category of people.  Whether you call them 'illegal immigrants' or 'undocumented tourists' or something else (and I'm not going to be drawn into that argument), the current furor is engendered by the position — widely held on 'the left' — that such persons may not be deported without 'due process'.

Estimates of the magnitude of the population to which this applies range from 11 million to 35 million, and the due process demanded is (apparently) a full jury trial for each such affected person.  Not to put too fine a point on it, doing so would take centuries and cost trillions, that is: a practical impossibility which, it seems, is the point of the demand.  Obviously, doing so is tantamount to granting permanent residency status to virtually all of them.

Lost in the uproar is one critical fact that almost no one is paying attention to:  'due process' is different for different categories of persons.  For an invading army that storms ashore on one of our beaches, 'due process' is a bullet.  To suggest that someone who bypassed recognized procedures for entering a country is entitled to the same due process that a citizen of that country requires is patent nonsense.

For the United States currently, we require those entering the country to present a passport or equivalent, and to possess an entry visa for certain countries-of-origin.  Someone who enters the US without doing so becomes an illegal immigrant, and the process due a person accused of entering the country without following the prescribed procedures (presenting their passport and being granted leave to enter) is to appear before a magistrate of appropriate jurisdiction where it can be determined that the certain person (a) is not a US citizen, and (b) has not been granted leave to enter.  If those two conditions are true, the magistrate orders the person deported.  No jury need be empaneled, and no other issues need be addressed, although the magistrate may consider other factors.  "Gang membership" is a red herring.  Whether the undocumented tourist is or is not a member of a criminal gang is irrelevant.

 

The Great 'Right v Left' Lie

 

Of all the memes that can lead our thinking astray, the notion that in American politics there is a "right wing" versus a "left wing" is the most common, the most incorrect, and the most dangerous.  It derives from the tradition in the French legislature that the royalists sit on one side of the assembly and the populists on the other, and this is what makes it incorrect in modern America.  Our legislators, both R and D, routinely claim to be working for the benefit of their constituents — and some do, on occasion — but their primary goal is clearly not to enhance their constituents' freedom, but rather to expand their own power.  They do this by "making a federal case of it" in every instance and on every issue.  They are all (with a very few exceptions) 'royalists'.  This echoes a remark by Judge Andrew Napolitano that there is only one party in American politics: The Big-Government Party, that has a left wing and a right wing.

This meme is so common that anyone who suggests it might be false immediately becomes suspect of having ulterior motives, whereas the 'motive' in such cases is merely to open others' eyes to the truth.  Such crusaders may be consoled by the knowledge that every true thing was first believed by a single person before being believed by dozens, hundreds, millions, and, finally, everyone.

The meme is dangerous because it leads us to believe that those politicians who identify with our side are correct and others who identify with their side are incorrect when, in truth, they are all on the same side, the side of The Big-Government Party.  We thus support those who are guiding us toward ever more intrusive government, ever more dilution of our freedom, in the mistaken belief that we are on the side of the angels.

So, if there really is not a left-right distinction, what accounts for the division so evident among Americans today?  What defines the divide we can so clearly see?

The division is between individualists and collectivists.  It is a statist-v-libertarian conflict.  On one side are those (statists) who subscribe to the notion that the citizen exists for the purposes of the state; these are opposed by those who place the individual above the collective, who insist that the collective exists to fulfill the individual, rather than the other way around.  This is, in fact, the guiding principle upon which our nation was founded.  We find in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson asserting that "...to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...".  The bedrock of our system is libertarian in nature: that the state exists to fulfill the individual.

Note that it says "to secure these rights", not 'secure our safety'.  Our government was created to keep us free, not safe, yet when the USA PATRIOT Act was proposed in the wake of 9-11 only one Senator (Russ Feingold) and one Representative (Ron Paul) objected and voted 'no'.  Every other member of Congress voted to give the government enormous power over its citizens, power that was unconstitutionally usurped from those same citizens.  With few exceptions, we the people have sent to represent us those who think their job is to keep us safe — even if it means enslaving us.

Whether Democrat or Republican, left or right, nearly all of them are collectivists.  Why?

It derives, I believe, from our natural tendency to acquire.  Whether we understand it or not, economic principles are burned into our very being.  We understand intuitively that it is better to have and not need than to need and not have, and so we gather wood before winter and save our pennies for a rainy day.  Along comes a politician who says "Elect me and I'll see that you have whatever the current hot-button issue is!" and our natural reaction is "Great!  That means I won't have to do that for myself!" and we cast our vote accordingly.

A politician who promises to get government out of our way so that we can do things for ourselves is much less enticing than one who promises to do those things for us.  It's only natural.  How can we delude ourselves into thinking that we are about to get the mythical free lunch?   We can because we want to.

At the very base, our problems with intrusive government start with our desire to have a pony.  Adults are supposed to know that a pony is expensive to start with and requires more expenditures for food, health care, and lodging, but, like children, we ignore those uncomfortable facts when it's our pony.

The fault is truly not in our stars but in ourselves.

If you're content with being a secure peon rather than a free person, you need not change a thing.