A Republic, Unkept
In October of 2011, Patrick Buchanan released a not-so-direct sequel to his book Death of the West, titled Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? In its lines, Buchanan contemplates the problems which he had diagnosed in the opening years of the War on Terror to their progression in 2011. In particular, Buchanan notes in the introduction:
“America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What once united us is dissolving. And this is true of Western civilization. […] The state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars. As the bonds of brotherhood are corroded, a crisis of democracy impends.”
By the end of his book, Buchanan notes:
“Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton disbelieved in ‘one-man, one-vote’ democracy. We worship it. They believed in a Creator. We have exiled him[… F]or the 250 years after the settlers came to Jamestown, our fathers sought to build a Protestant and British country. From the Irish immigration of the 1840s, to the first Irish Catholic president in 1960, the United States sought to maintain its character and identity as a Christian and European nation. To assert that as an ideal today would constitute a hate crime.”
To congratulate Buchanan on the publishing of his book evaluating the American Empire’s decline, he was fired from his place as a columnist on MSNBC and decried as a hysterical racist, exactly as his writing predicted in its closing lines - and, indeed, in plenty other places in the book as well. And for four, long years immediately following the writing of his book, from 2011 to 2015, the American right was tortured with the lowest common denominator of American conservatism: Boehner-Ryan Republicanism, the “Young Guns”, and the worship of small government libertarianism. The Republicans did not take cues from Mr. Buchanan. And, much as his prescience had gone unappreciated in the famous “Culture War” speech of the 1992 RNC and the subsequent neocon purges, did his warnings in Suicide of a Superpower get brushed aside by its critics.
Through four years, numerous things happened that would come to haunt the American right and further erode its positions: the upholding of the Affordable Care Act by a dithering John Roberts, the nomination of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the “same-sex marriage” wave beginning its march towards legalization through judicial power, marijuana beginning its legalization march, and other socially destructive trends were appearing by the mid-2010s: transgenderism, BLM, the implosion of most positive social metrics (births out of wedlock, divorce, crime, patriotism, etc). The ideal “small government” could not act, they said, as the states, judiciary, and non-profits ripped down the foundations of society.
The Senate, under nominal Democrat control, experienced several embarrassments produced courtesy of Senate Republicans in the minority. The “Gang of Eight” — 4 Democrats, alongside Republican Senators McCain, Rubio, Graham, and Flake — agitated for anti-civilizational reforms, such as proposed pathways to illegal immigrant citizenship, undermining any purpose of citizenship outright. Zero control or party discipline was exercised as members actively were undermining the wishes of the party’s voters. The Senate obliterated the filibuster for judicial appointments, removing itself further from its purpose as outlined in the Federalist Papers and Constitution. What purpose does an upper house of the legislature serve if actively removes from its rules the few things that make it distinctly different?
The House that the Tea Party built, united behind John Boehner and Paul Ryan, saw fit to host several international leaders, among them Ashraf Ghani - the now disgraced, failed leader of a US-backed Afghanistan - Benjamin Netanyahu - the in-and-out president of Israel, who has approved espionage efforts against US officials and oh-so-graciously inhales billions of US aid every year - and Pope Francis - a Pope that’s become so controversial among conservative Catholics that I can’t begin to assess his true leanings, for I am not religious. All three visitors were symptomatic of a rut that the Republican party was in, for four years, spinning tires as it moved nowhere: falsely committed to an overseas “empire” of allies that hated and exploited us, motivated by a social conservatism that didn’t mean anything, and addicted to spending money that we didn’t have on causes nobody truly believed in.
The election of Donald Trump was supposed to have ended this endless wheel-spinning, elevating a populist conservatism. No longer would America tolerate abuses from others as a marketplace of the world, no longer would it tolerate the open violation of its borders, and no longer would the “elites” dictate what values meant to the voters. The voters elected a man designed to signify “FUCK YOU” to the reigning powers, in the strongest possible terms. And, for their trouble, they received an empire turned not outward, but now inward.
None of the above problems were truly solved. America still committed endlessly to overseas ambitions, accumulated debt, tolerated the dismantling of its demographic roots, and continued to come apart at the margins. You can blame a multitude of factors: administrative incompetence, the ability of states to intercede on matters which do not affect them (Hawaii blocking immigration measures, for instance), an endless sprawling web of non-profits and targeted lawsuits, and outright exhaustion from fighting on all fronts. Regardless of the assignment of blame, however, the four years may have been an economic success - perhaps due to easy money and minimal intervention - but they were not permanent, and they were not a policy success. Everything that was touted as a “success” was just as easily dismantled within 90 days in 2021.
We do not live in America anymore. We do not live, even, in “Joe Biden’s America” as FOX hosts love to remark. We live in a hollowed-out husk: a marketplace for sweatshop-produced, slave-labor-extracted, trash.
Our culture is trash, dominated by gossip magazines, recycled sitcoms, and movie remakes. Our people are trash: children rot their eyes on iPads, college graduates plunge into debt and move back home with their parents, and Boomers prepare to retire into homes where they will be suffocated by third-world caregivers. Our symbols and lives are trash: pride flags adorn children’s clothing and corporate logos, placed higher than our national emblems. Young people languish for true connection while being directly discharged from college back to their bedrooms, adorned with meaningless flags, posters, and decorations — all while ODing on porn and Prozac.
We live in a world made of, and for, trash. As Charlie Nash titled in his 2019 novel BUGEYED, we live in a 21st-century trash world. Everything is broken. Zoomers have not, and probably never will, experience economic prosperity or, in fact, prosperity of any kind. This is why we fucking despise all of you. We live in the ashes of something that you continue to reminisce about being a “great thing”, but you are gesturing at a corpse. Whilst you see a beautiful woman, the embodiment of America as Columbia, I see a prostitute who has been severed in half by a passing semi-truck, driven by an illegal immigrant, hauling Funko Pops to an Amazon warehouse. I have never known anything different, nor will I.
“America” as it once was is dead. While people who can even remember what “America” is may pine for an old “American” way of life, motivated by “American” civics and “American” traditions, that “America” is dead — it is not coming back. One has to reject the framing of being “American” because it is quickly becoming a mark of shame for having tolerated and enabled the zombie government that rules us.
This piece will serve as a catalog of all the reasons that it will not come back, no matter how much of a grand vision Republican politicians will promise to their voters. Corpses cannot be resurrected: they can, at best, be used as fuel for something new.
AN “AMERICAN” PEOPLE
“This is a nation — not a polyglot boarding house.”
Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech given May 27th, 1918
The notion of a “nation” of people — composed of a dominant, usually singular or near-absolute ethnic/cultural group — has been a contentious one in the United States. Regardless of one’s opinion on the claim in America’s past, it is entirely unsustainable now.
Shades of this issue began to appear in the 2000s, when the discussion of making English an official, de jure language of the federal government failed on the cause of being “discriminatory” to immigrants coming from abroad. And by immigrants, of course, the group in play was not Europeans, or even Africans, who often spoke English, or Asians, who at least made efforts to learn the language. The group in play was Hispanics.
Hispanics, especially in places like California, as Suicide notes, rejected notions of assimilating with the norm of the United States. “California is going to be a Hispanic state. [Whites] should go back to Europe,” said Mario Obledo, founder of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton.
California seems to be the model for the impending “new American majority” and the process of “browning America” — these have become common refrains of the “coalition of the ascendant” as some refer to them, or the “coalition of the fringes” as Steve Sailer calls them, or as Christopher Caldwell states plainly in Age of Entitlement:
“American politics had re-sorted itself around [the] question — which came down to […] whether one had benefited from or lost by the transfers of rights, goods, and privileges carried out under the new constitutional dispensation that began in 1964. The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities, but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, [and] lawyers.”
The beginnings of this rising majority can be observed beginning in the same era as the Civil Right Act’s emergence: the Immigration Act of 1965, or as it came to be known, the Hart-Cellar Act. The Johnson Administration’s push behind the bill eventually gave it enough weight to make it through a Congress which was concerned with its contents and implications of reform.
The Johnson administration, as well as their lackeys including Senator Ted Kennedy, made it clear that on several occasions:
“[This is] not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. […] This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here. […] The days of unlimited immigration are past.” - Lyndon B. Johnson
“Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually… […] The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset… [This bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any other country area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” - Edward “Ted” Kennedy
Those men lied, and with those lies, they killed the Nation of America.
The immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century was often derided as changing the composition of the country hopelessly, yet, by the conclusion of the Second World War, the United States had more or less constructed a cohesive identity of Americans. That cohesive identity of the “WASP” has received such hate from academics for years, and began in the 1940s when the identity became cohesive in the embers of America ascending to superpower status. Its first written remark was from “human rights activist” (and communist sympathizer) Stetson Kennedy, who remarked in 1948,
“In America, we find the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) ganging up to take their frustrations out on whatever minority group happens to be handy — whether Negro, Catholic, Jewish, Japanese or whatnot.”
In a way, Hart-Cellar was intended as a sort of revenge on the WASPs. Almost 60 years later, it has obliterated the nation of Americans and has now set White Americans on the path to reaching minority status by sometime in the 2030s or 40s, replaced by a rising coalition of Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Caps were set on Europeans; they were not set for the rest of the world. The rest can be observed in a few simple graphs.
The nation that was defined by the WASP has been destroyed, and it is not coming back. But this was just the “legal” immigration that was signed into law, absent a referendum or vote by the populace that was being replaced. Illegal immigration has been and will continue to be opposed by people who value the rule of law: but that has continued much the same.
The Biden regime has made no effort to conceal their contempt for the law concerning immigration, as a cursory glance at any Border Patrol data will easily show:
Immediate efforts were made by lawyers in the Biden Administration and Secretary of “Homeland Security” Alejandro Mayorkas towards disposing of the border as a meaningful legal entity. Title 42’s revocation/expiry, non-application of immigration law, endless extensions for hearing dates, the CBP ONE app (a quick and easy way to hide increasing immigrant numbers by “allowing” them through border checkpoints and then claiming they are not illegally crossing) — all constructed specifically to defy the law and allow as many immigrants into the United States as possible.
The reason for this is simple, as Democrats have said themselves several times. It is the issue that defines “celebration parallax”: Democrats cheer the “browning of America” and write smug op-eds entitled “We Will Replace You” — but to notice this celebration is White Supremacy. To suggest that, maybe, this may be part of a larger electoral strategy to allow immigrants into the country, and then either legalize them or allow their children to vote through a delusional reading of the Civil War amendments, so that they may permanently ensure a Democratic majority — well, that’s just unconscionable.
Supreme Court rulings make additional headway. The hellish shadow that the Burger Court inflicted on the United States included several rulings related to immigration, but the most important among them was Plyler v. Doe. As is standard fare under the Second Constitution of Civil Rights, this case used the 14th amendment as a reason to say that access to public utilities and services such as education could not be denied on account of one’s immigration status, even if that person was in the country illegally. The fiscal timebomb had been set in education and healthcare for unaccountable illegal immigrants to make permanent use of American dollars at no cost to themselves.
This was further reinforced by the denial of democracy that California experienced in the aftermath of Proposition 187, which sought to deny illegal immigrants access to the use of public dollars through utilities such as education, non-emergency healthcare, or any other public social services. And, in typical fashion, this measure was overtly destroyed by District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, who said that because California “sought to regulate” immigration, which was a federal duty, they had no power. Never mind that the purpose of the act was to identify and report all offenders to INS for deportation — California was not permitted to act at all. The endless tide of Hispanic immigration that continued to follow into the state, allowed endless access to the state’s coffers by Plyler, ensuring Democratic dominance by the 2000s.
The mere existence of sanctuary cities is a reinforcement of these ideals — jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement for the deportation of illegal immigrants. The Democratic party’s electoral strategy necessitates the continued residence of such individuals so that they either eventually receive amnesty (i.e., through DACA) or eventually have children, who through birthright citizenship, vote for Democrats. The withholding of funds was a strategy for the Trump administration for some time, and was suggested as a policy for compelling cooperation — but was blocked by repeated legal battles and injunctions that finally cleared in 2020 before immediately being repealed by the Biden regime in 2021. Democrats understand the patronage game, and protect their voters — or the parents of their soon-to-be-voters.
The groundwork for this complete failure of endless amnesty-chasing was established by Ronald Reagan in 1986 when he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act — principally designed to punish businesses that hired illegal immigrants and toughening restrictions — though it was eventually watered down to enable over 3 million illegal immigrants to claim citizenship, in exchange for nothing. The provisions for enforcement of actual border security were unenforceable, and promptly died when referred to bureaucrats to execute. Ronald Reagan signed away California, his home state, in exchange for nothing. 1984 was the last time that California voted for a Republican presidential candidate.
As American Whites languish away, by either old age, drug abuse, deaths of despair, complications of obesity, or suicide, a rising coalition comes to take their place. One that is no better — their rates of addiction and other socials ills like births from wedlock are similarly abysmal, and they’re just as unhealthy and obese — but their population is constantly reinforced and shored up by overseas immigration. And, eventually, the constant unknown quantity of illegal immigrants in the country will receive amnesty, either through executive action (DACA), congressional amnesty (Rubio’s Gang of Eight, but successful), or judicial fiat (probably from yet another creative reading of the 14th amendment).
What will Republican voters do when, in 20-some years, a Democrat-packed Supreme Court, or a Democratic Congress and President, officially throws open the gates to the world? What ground will we have then, having failed to defend the American nation — the American people — for entirely of our lifetimes?
AN “AMERICAN” SYSTEM OF VALUES
“This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government.”
— Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015
Christopher Caldwell, in Age of Entitlement, describes how the passage and creation of culture around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created a sort of “Second Constitution” which relied largely on the text of the legislation, upheld almost solely through the 14th amendment. As he goes on to explain in the opening chapter of the book,
“The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions […] Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation. […]
Immigrant rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of the aged were not in the civil rights legislation, but they could easily be induced from it. The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life[.]”
The civil rights monster has come to engulf everything in American life and has destroyed the freedoms that the Constitution sought to permanently enshrine through the Bill of Rights. Specific rights, it was feared, needed no enumeration - fearing their abrogation through their specification alone. Ultimately, however, their specific protection through the Bill of Rights only ensured their destruction.
The first of these freedoms to be destroyed was that of freedom of association; a lesser-mentioned, lesser-understood element of the First Amendment. Created not directly through the text, but through the reading of the text — how can there be free speech, the right to petition, and a free press without free association? — the right itself permits others to exist in meaningful capacities. If it can become illegal to associate with a group or to intentionally not associate with another group, speech becomes all but impossible.
In a talk, quoted by Caldwell in Age of Entitlement and given by Leo Strauss, Strauss remarks on freedom of association:
“The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society — in a word, the destruction of liberal society.”
Whites in the 60s were sold a false bill on civil rights: when they were told that desegregation and civil rights would be creating a truly equal society, it instead created affirmative action, outlawed meritocracy, began bussing, and created political correctness. Legal warfare was now legitimized under the expanded civil rights regime. The concept of disparate impact created the legal framework to destroy anything that revealed a difference between groups of people.
The first catastrophic blow to be dealt to American society, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., outlawed IQ testing in employment for the sheer reason that outcomes among races were not equal. The case justified this through the differences in education, circumstances, and socioeconomic class in North Carolina’s Black and White demographics, and that the decision to require these tests on the basis of trying to “improve” the quality of the workforce was “without meaningful study.” In a swift blow, the doors to lawfare were open to anyone that could prove that anything in private industry had a “disparate impact” — and promised them a reward if they could do so.
The expansion of such rights as a consequence of the Civil Rights Act was happening simultaneously along the judiciary’s separate erosion of morality, through cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut, Levy v. Louisiana, Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas. Time after time, non-explicit creations were written into the fabric of American law, mostly as an offshoot of Griswold’s “penumbras” of rights, created through — of course — the fourteenth amendment. Differing from the right of free association, the “privacy” of this kind was originally only applied to “marital privacy” — quickly expanded to unmarried couples in Eisenstadt, of course, on the basis of the fourteenth amendment, then universally in Lawrence. Even the Court, at the time, struggled to couch its writing in reality.
Other cases, such as Levy, were striking down statutes that existed for civil and social stability. As John Harlan, then-Associate Justice in 1965 wrote in his dissent:
“The Court has reached a negative answer to this question by a process that can only be described as brute force.
If it be conceded, as I assume it is, that the State has power to provide that people who choose to live together should go through the formalities of marriage and, in default, that people who bear children should acknowledge them, it is logical to enforce these requirements by declaring that the general class of rights that are dependent upon family relationships shall be accorded only when the formalities as well as the biology of those relationships are present.”
In one fell swoop, the judiciary had eliminated the judicial distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. Since then, the state has been unable to make that distinction as well. Rates of wedlock and single parenthood have only increased since then. Lawrence v. Texas has, in its own right, done much the same by eliminating sodomy laws and any governmental authority to at least try and maintain civilizational behavior.
Of course, one would be amiss without talking about the benchmark of the expansion of Civil Rights in our lifetime: the court case that defined the Obama administration and heralded the coming insanity that the expansion of the rainbow coalition would bring: Obergefell. Foisted on a nation not through popular support or legislation, but through sheer judicial power. Perfect legal agitation through specifically selected plaintiffs, and an array of civil rights organizations, billionaires, corporations, and social actors came together in a “military assault on the Constitution” to destroy the final pre-civilizational, antecedent institution that remained: marriage.
Proposition 8 in California gave a taste of what was to come: the harassment, naming, and shaming of those who dared to oppose gay marriage in California became the norm. Even in Blue California in 2008, gay marriage was still popularly unpopular. The culture, combined with elite money, had turned against the values of the heartland. With the power of the Civil Rights Act. combined with the unlimited money and plaintiffs that billionaires could sponsor to go to court, a conflict was inevitable.
Obergefell had the additional consequence of being a Supreme Court case that was litigated almost exclusively because of the incumbent president: indeed, without President Obama’s nominations of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, there would have been no Obergefell. Kennedy, along with the rest of the majority, could have no tenable position: his overriding of the Defense of Marriage Act was on the basis of rejecting federal involvement in marriage, yet Obergefell was written on that standard. The liberal judicial analysis does not need to be logically consistent; it needs only reward its patrons and allies.
This process has been further and further expanded in mere decades, thanks in part to so-called “conservative” and “originalist” judges who seem to respect the Civil Rights Act of 1964 more than the Constitution. Anthony Kennedy, the notorious disappointment of Reagan’s second term, has been upstaged by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch in cases such as Bostock v. Clay County, which added sexual orientation and transgender status into the readings of the Civil Rights Act.
Cases such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative from recent memory only reinforce this — there is an unlimited liberal money machine designed to constantly agitate cases to the Supreme Court for the explicit purpose of using an unholy combination of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment to obliterate what remains of American freedom. While these cases narrowly allowed expression and freedom in favor of the individuals, Masterpiece Cakeshop shows the willingness of the “American” left to use the Civil Rights Act to obliterate all that remains.
On the day that the original case was agreed to be heard at the Supreme Court in 2017, a transgender activist and lawyer (a common combination, of course) ordered a cake of the transgender flag with a blue exterior and pink interior. The shop owner refused on the basis of his civil rights and was almost immediately dragged back into the process with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, finally resolving again in January 2023 — in his favor once again, but having had to pay for six years of a legal battle to keep his business and livelihood. After a more favorable packing of the courts of the shop’s jurisdiction takes place, I do not doubt that another attempt will be made.
The creation of these “rights” — which do not exist in the Constitution — stems principally from the equal protection clause viewed through the lens of the Civil Rights Act, which has become a bludgeon to destroy American life. The new “American” life allows no freedom of association, except from the plebes and rubes of the heartland, while those who do not live there have every right to intercede and demand inclusion into their lives.
An all-out assault has taken place on the American Constitution. Conservatives, blind to their enemies’ actual weapons and tools, defend the legacy of the Civil Rights Act — without understanding that it is at the heart of what’s killing them. Goldwater tried to warn them — but they would not listen.
But what can Republicans do? What will they do when a Republican candidate emerges pointing out that Americans have lost their freedoms to a piece of legislation that has a name that suggests, surely, no sane politician could oppose it? How can Republicans frame their opposition to the Civil Rights Act when they still claim Martin Luther King Jr. as one of their heroes? What will they do, when Democrats pack the court in the defense of “civil rights” — and Republicans stand powerless to stop them, the judiciary having given away the Republic?
AN “AMERICAN” REPUBLIC
[I]t is dangerous to open So fruitfull [sic] a Source of Controversy and Altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters. There will be no End of it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell.
— John Adams, in a letter to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776
The oft-lampooned, tradcath-adjacent, “based unions” wing of the populist movement — men like Sohrab Ahmari, and others who often write at Compact — recently wrote about the “American tradition” being against inherited wealth and its privileges — in the aftermath of the overturn of affirmative action at the Supreme Court. Ahmari wrote at length in “Down With Diversocracy—and Meritocracy” pointing out that the founders, specifically Jefferson and Madison, wanted to maintain a bare minimum of wealth or land for the body of the people. Jefferson wrote that it should be the goal of government “that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.”
Ahmari laments that “six generations” must pass before generational wealth and advantage begin to disappear — missing that the alternative is the construction of systems that actively seek to hamper these advantages. If Ahmari had the opportunity to phrase this morality to the founders himself, they would rightly seek to cast him out from the continent. As I wrote in response to Ahmari at the time: if Jefferson had found out that the American people were tolerating open racial discrimination against Whites in the name of negating a supposed “generational advantage”, he would have ripped the doors off of Harvard and burned it to the ground. He would have then ensured none of the people who tolerated or enabled it would ever vote again.
Ahmari misses that American society cannot walk backward into traditional living, portioning every family a parcel of land to ensure yeomanry as a social structure. “America” is now a country of over 350 million — far beyond reasonable expectation of universal land ownership. Jefferson and Madison would have realized this in their own time, but Ahmari seems keen on applying his papal (Francis) morality to America — though “America” is not even a coherent cultural entity anymore. But Ahmari is not just lacking in the context of societal participation, or economic organization that makes a yeomanry ideal impossible — the expansion of enfranchisement has made such an accomplishment impossible, and indeed, has been the driving force that has given a stamp of approval to the destruction of America.
The expansion of the franchise, and the quick sliding of America from a Republic to a Democracy, began with the erosion of the initial property requirements imposed on voters, even in the original 13 colonies. Across all 13, requirements were made to either own land, or to make a profit from land that one owned and was leasing for profit. Less than 75 years later, those requirements were obliterated — and the franchise was made universal to all men through the 14th Amendment. This was the end of the “yeoman” dream — America’s political founding was predicated on realities of voting in limited quantities, moderated by the electoral college, from a voter base of property-owning heads of households. It was not built to survive the onslaught of the industrial worker base, by the hundreds of thousands, flocking to the polls in every major city.
But the franchise had further to expand still. The Senate, its members originally appointed by state legislatures, had grown controversial with inaction and corruption. Some states turned to plebiscites on the appointment of Senators to avoid roadblocks in the legislatures on the issue alone; alas, the 17th amendment came to pass. Now, the Senate and House were alike in their duties and election, different only in their abilities slightly through appointments and appropriations. The popular vote had expanded to both houses of Congress, invalidating the purpose of the Senate as a way of exercising checks against federal power — instead, now, the state governments had no power to counterbalance the federal government — laying the way for the steamrolling expansion of the commerce clause and federal power under FDR.
This elimination of the appointments to the Senate also made many bicameral divisions in state government pointless, such as county-by-county representation by Senators. This was later forced upon the states through an interpretation of the 14th Amendment in 1964 in Reynolds v. Sims — which was decided only two weeks before LBJ would hoist the Civil Rights Act upon the nation. Bicameral legislatures now do little more than squabble over petty disagreements and personal politics, both directly elected, as the most recent session in Texas has made abundantly clear. One man, one vote cemented that there was no aspect of state sovereignty in the Union — only the voter.
Of course, this discussion would be underwhelming in its scope if it did not address the largest expansion of the franchise in American history — the 19th Amendment.
What can be said of the 19th Amendment that Assemblywomen does not make a comedic prediction concerning? That our government has not tended more towards socialism and collectivism with women among the franchised? That our government is now driven by a sort-of “angry empathy” in its decisions? That our culture, led by women, is now tending towards elevating the ugly and broken? That Aristophanes’ play was intended as a commentary that the men of Athens were so much like women that they could exercise power in their stead with few good changes?
In an American context, there is an instance of such an influence: a Tennessee representative voted for the ratification of the 19th Amendment because his mother wrote him a letter telling him to do so, pushing it over the finish line for national ratification. When leadership itself was becoming meaningless — Wilson’s presidency a wonderful example of such “leadership” — women had begun to agitate for entry into the political sphere.
At a more base level, however, it can be viewed as simply as this: government is upheld by force. Force is a civilizing tool, but it is overwhelmingly and almost exclusively wielded by men. If the government is to be legitimized by a democratic process, it should at least be of a body of people capable of the underlying force — or, in more plain terms — capable of violence. To pretend otherwise is to disguise the purpose and mechanism of government. What right, in a universally franchising democracy, do women have to vote on what the government uses force against when they would never be drafted to fulfill that need for force?
Indeed, it seems that women are more persuadable on all issues through which empathy can be used. Women vote for more immigration, more welfare, more family programs. Men vote for restraint in these things — because the state must use their blood and treasure to fund them. At the end of the day, men can be forcibly conscripted, have all their property taken from them, and be left homeless without a care in the world. Not so for women. Further, women, in most polling, approve of the conduct of most government agencies which exercise force on their behalf (FBI, CIA, DoD) more than men, despite their recent incompetence and failures.
Indeed, the approval of these agencies is in contrast to their failures at every level to secure or at least maintain our nation. Our bureaucracies are critically unable to accomplish much of anything now. America outsources our scientific achievements, has disposed of the notion of an impartial justice system, and fails to handle crimes or criminals in any serious way — as Michael Anton recently wrote for Compact, “[t]he whole country is becoming the DMV.” Nothing works. Everything is a sustained, slow-motion failure in which Americans have been forced to be unwilling participants. The bridges have started collapsing, and the planes are inches short of crashing into one another.
Americans can’t test for competency — they’re not allowed to in most circumstances. The government still collects diversity metrics because it still values supposed diversity over merit. Bureaucrats actively oppose anything that they find objectionable, and as opposed to quitting, decide to plant their ass in a chair and collect a paycheck actively fucking things up. There is no sense of loyalty to a Republic, despite its leaders. The bureaucrats have shown that if they don’t like the Commander-in-Chief, all they have to do is survive for four years and use their intentional incompetence and malfeasance (and don’t forget plenty of leaking) to make re-election less likely.
A strong state, in our modern era, is inevitable. Its staffing is critical to ensuring that it’s effective and aligned with civilizational goals. When the pillars start eroding, not from sabotage but from ignorance, will Americans finally realize the government they’ve “voted” for isn’t working? Perhaps because allowing everyone’s voice, without condition, in the process of forming and electing government doesn’t produce civilization, but instead a looting frenzy?
AN “AMERICAN” ECONOMY
“I realized again why the Chinese side was so surprised by our approach. They were used to dealing with Americans who were more interested in a show than actual enforceable agreements.”
— Fmr. US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, No Trade is Free
The American economy has been broken for far longer than I have been alive. I have known nothing but the information age, led by the laptop and corner-office class, creating wealth and prosperity through the manipulation of money. The creation of tangible things in most Western countries and the United States is limited to things that are used completely upon their consumption — food, services, disposable consumer goods — but the machines, complex electronics, and creations of the industry which societies of the past would pride themselves on are no longer made in our country.
America no longer makes things. As Michael Anton suggested in his 2020 book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, an actual platform plank could revolve around the restoration of an economy that makes things:
“The animating spirit of our party is to change that, to pursue policies that encourage domestic manufacturing, create jobs, and raise wages. And not just any jobs—not just paper-pushing and burger-flipping jobs—but jobs making real, tangible things that real people want and need. Jobs that—to be blunt—Americans, and especially American men, want to do. That means a shift from a purely information-service-consumer economy to a more balanced economy that respects and honors manufacturing. It means moving away from relying almost completely on imports in favor of making things at home—and a return to selling some of what we make overseas. It means no more dumb trade giveaways or tax and regulatory policies that favor bankers and techies while shafting everyone else. It means protecting American industries and jobs when and where beneficial to American workers.”
By the end of the Bush era, American manufacturing was already firmly in its decline. But what was replacing it was not something similarly concrete — replacing it was the manipulation of money, trading stocks, and “professional and business services” — leaving an economy of suits, sitting in designer office chairs, creating nothing.
A true indictment of this breakdown is that now, government spending is bigger than manufacturing. The creation of jobs through federal funding had finally reached its turning point: it was now doing more for the American economy than actually building things. Filling yet another office in the DC metro area with a lackey bureaucrat, assistant, or diversity monitor — that is now doing more for America than building things.
Even in the new “main” sectors of our economy, the degradation of service and values can be observed in the spread of programs such as ESG. ESG itself is an outgrowth of endless civil rights litigation — ESG is a mandated diversity-through-civil rights scheme. It seeks the destruction of boards with not enough black members over “disparate impacts” and the mandating of green tech because of its supposed impacts on minority communities. Anything to avoid litigation over racism, or the appearance of racism, or discrimination in general. ESG investment is incentivized by the same forces that create political correctness. It is the applied financial arm of the Civil Rights Act.
The hollowing out of the American heartland has been the greatest accomplishment of the modern economy. The Midwest was once considered the combination of the greatest industrial and agricultural land that the world had ever seen, and powered the rise of America through the post-Civil War era, through to the beginning of the Cold War. Now, however, it is no longer a source of national pride — derisively called the Rust Belt or simply Appalachia, a source of shame, with rising poverty and despair. The stock of America whose ancestors fueled its glory is now languishing in its ruins and empty downtowns.
NAFTA is often looked at as the culprit, but some say monetary policy played a significant role. Others claim that our post-Great Recession reorganization was hopelessly doomed, and efforts made in its aftermath only made it worse. Some say that the ascension of China into the World Trade Organization cemented the end of American manufacturing, as the labor force of China was made open to the world. Whatever the cause may have been, Americans are watching listlessly as the rising economic centers of the world — the European Bloc, Africa, Southeast Asia, and China — are taking the economic space America is leaving behind.
But while some of these regions may try to cling to the notion of being a unified entity, they are far from it. Already, Europe is being torn apart over differences in areas such as China’s Belt and Road initiative, and may not survive the decade as a formidable economic force. The same can be said of Africa and Southeast Asia. America will then have to face China alone in economic power, a task that America is not taking seriously: America tries to challenge China and make our own semiconductors, but can’t help its liberal impulses. America tries to inject diversity initiatives into staffing the projects, slowing the progress significantly. America doesn’t even have enough programs to try and sustain such an effort because the institutions of higher learning haven’t been teaching anything useful since the 60s.
America doesn’t take trade with China seriously, and at a minimum, all administrations from Nixon to Obama didn’t take it seriously either. Millions of jobs were automated or sent overseas while China flooded our country with cheap plastic molds and textiles. Even when tariffs did begin seriously under Trump, it was limited in scope because the economy had become so hopelessly interconnected that it would take nothing short of a complete economic restructuring to survive anything more serious. Still, administrations brag about “bringing jobs back” to America through the government setting money on fire through “programs.”
All of these things are fueled by federal dollars, with which every dollar spent runs the debt up further and further. Americans have loaded up a debt bomb with voluntary spending on all sorts of federal projects, wars, and corporate welfare, and will continue to tick the debt higher as Americans continue to pay the entitlements of the Boomers — a debt that will be unsustainable as it reaches its peak. Zoomers and Millenials have no illusions about receiving Social Security. It will be insolvent by the time they reach retirement age. As such, they naturally ask the question: “Why should we pay for it?”
The economy is fake, the jobs are fake, and the promises about the benefits are fake. The programs are overengineered money laundering schemes, the colleges don’t teach anything, and the investment firms send the same stock back and forth to generate “Gee Dee Pee.” How does America survive when it doesn’t make anything?
AN “AMERICAN” FOREIGN POLICY
“How would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?”
— Senator Robert A. Taft, in a post-NATO treaty speech, July 26th, 1949
America is an empire. To deny this today is to deliberately avoid being genuine. The construction of this empire has consumed much of America’s resources and national will for decades — perhaps centuries, depending on your start date — but the world that the United States created came into full fruition after the conclusion of the Second World War.
All of the institutions created in the aftermath of the devastation that the Second World War wrought on the world — the IMF, United Nations, etc — principally were used as tools of the Western world (United States) as instruments of imperial control. We used the Marshall Plan to pull Europe back into recovery and fought for influence in Asia and Africa using our dollars and economic power, all in pursuit of keeping America as the superpower of the world.
The men who did so could have been doing it for good or bad reasons — it didn’t matter. What mattered is that they built prosperity at home, even with ideological cracks beginning to form in the foundations. Prosperity, however, was only going to last so long without the more violent implements of empire.
The Korean War was a preview of the best-case scenario of the maintenance that the empire would take to survive. Tens of thousands of lives were lost, with the provocation of the opposing powers — all to settle for a peace that was a continuation of the pre-war status quo with added tension on top. The Bay of Pigs was a futile attempt to further assert our empire’s status in our hemisphere, which failed spectacularly.
All as a prelude to Vietnam — the ultimate example from which America would claim to learn lessons from, but fail to learn anything at all. The lives lost in Vietnam would have their purpose obliterated mere years after a so-called “peace accord” that supposedly would maintain South Vietnam’s existence. The last chopper out of Saigon carried with it the majority of the United States’ international esteem until the 90s. The United States wallowed in its loss, jeered at the Soviets in Afghanistan, fought the Gulf War — and then it was over. The Soviets collapsed into looting, and America stood alone on the world stage.
In the aftermath, America attempted to assert itself as the sole superpower — now, and forever, if the architects of the “new world order” got their way. And in our stead as sole superpower, America used its vassals — sorry, alliance members — to stomp around in Iraq, then Afghanistan, then Libya, then Syria, to make them members and willful participants of our sphere of influence, or make the world “safer” for “democracy.” How did that work out?
Iraq is a puppet state of Iran after being completely destabilized, with the opening years of the invasion being allowed to foment and arm a massive number of civilians whose sole goal was to punish the United States for upending their lives. Pretenses for a war that ended as a disaster tactically and strategically, with thousands dead and thousands more sent home mangled and broken. The architects of this war are still heroes to the neocons on the right and are the new heroes of those on the left for their opposition to Trump.
Afghanistan pretended to be a “democracy” for 20 years under our stewardship, a fanciful projection that ended the moment America exited stage left. The Taliban ended the excesses of our occupation, like poppy harvesting and bachi bazi boys, while American soldiers stood by and let these indignities and abuses continue because it was convenient to our occupation — and in the end, Bin Laden was in Pakistan anyway. Obama could write it off as a win because it wasn’t his war, but in the end, every day of his administration was plagued by its existence and he is most responsible for the consequences.
Libya was meant to be an example of what Obama envisioned the Middle East’s democracy could be — and then he watched Gadaffi be sodomized with a pole on live television by radical militants, followed quickly by the return of chattel slavery. Boats carrying “refugees” (terrorists and economic migrants) began crossing the Mediterranean, and the spread of disorder and chaos engulfed much of North Africa. “We came, we saw, he died.” It didn’t matter that we created a hellscape; all that mattered was that North Africa was rid of another “dictator” in favor…something else.
Syria was much the same, with Obama’s line in the sand and the supposed use of chemical weapons by the Assad government — which was never confirmed conclusively. American agencies backed multiple factions of rebels that devolved into extremist groups, arming religious extremists, fighting each other, and sending further threats to Europe under the excuse of the refugee crisis. Syria remains fundamentally broken — not because of the inefficacy of the Assad government, but because America continues to chase the pipe dream with sanctions. Soldiers are still on the ground in Syria, but nobody talks about it.
Americans are seeing an expansion of this same trend, though we’ve hidden it under the guise of being “better” because it’s Europe and Russia has been assigned total blame by the media apparatus. I’ve written my thoughts on the Ukraine war previously. It’s a crisis America has stoked since the 90s with geopolitical errors because the United States no longer acts rationally on the world stage. Once one becomes the sole superpower, what objections could anyone else have to your actions? H.W. promised non-expansion and H.W. lied. Bush and Obama teased possible membership for Ukraine in NATO, and after Maidan, this was inevitable — if the possibility of US support on the ground for Maidan was at all a reality (and, judging from the leaked phone call and Nuland’s presence on the ground, it was likely that the US orchestrated some major parts) — Russia had no choice to act to preserve its interests. From ethnic Russians, to warm water ports, to not act was to accept total defeat on the world stage.
Ukraine’s conflict, however, has gone a step above — it’s a sacrifice of strategy and the abandonment of rationality for social approval. Ukraine’s unprecedented activation of bleeding-heart liberals in America has created a rabid, pathetic class of people to grace the face of the Earth. NAFO and their Democratic Party enablers have gone from anti-war during the Bush era to full-throated neocons, and their embrace of the Bush era cronies reflects that. America is now actively teasing warfare with a nuclear power over provinces and lands that not a single American truly cares about, and one that few could even name. As I wrote in March of 2022,
The United States, in the last twenty years, has only been engaged against insurgencies, or nations who are so hopelessly outmatched in a total war they are quickly wiped from memory. Most of these talking heads, capable of whipping their audiences and supporters into frenzies, have no idea what they’re talking about. They speak only in platitudes, in feel-good-gestures. War is abstract to them; only a consequence when they have to receive flag-draped caskets. American security trumps all other interests, and even then, the American people (and especially the military-industrial-government-media complex) don’t take into consideration that other nations exist on the world stage and that they may have competing interests.
If the administration and the media were honest, which they’re not, they would admit upfront they wish for war with Russia. But let us ask this — do any of us even understand the conflict that so many of us are so eager to enter? Do any of these blue check liberals understand the roots of this conflict; do they care? Do any of our representatives, who seem so intent on entering this conflict, understand the history of the region or the security implications of our actions over the past eight years, let alone the last thirty?
American apparatchiks and intellectuals never considered what the world would be like when Americans are on the receiving end of power politics. With the rise of China, there may finally emerge a truth that Americans are not comfortable with: they will be on the receiving end of consequences. COVID was a preview of that. Russia is China’s tool to burn through American munitions, and it seems to be doing a spectacular job of doing so. Leopard tanks burning in East Ukrainian fields, and IFVs were smashed to bits by attack helicopters. All material spent on this war is chasing a strategic victory in a goal that doesn’t matter, and one that most know doesn’t matter — Ukraine and Russia were close to a negotiated settlement until Boris Johnson decided to scuttle it in April of 2022, and in the process, may have scuttled far more than just peace.
America is overcommitted, overspent, and exhausted. Its debt balloons from equal parts commitments to the elderly, who Americans can not defame for their sacrifices in bloody wastes like Vietnam (being, alongside WW2, the cultural touchstone from which our country’s rotting is sourced) and our endless commitments and spending on a military that probably won’t win, as countless wargames and spectacular failures have shown. Touching the military’s budget is political suicide in part because of delusional paranoia, and in part because the US military is more-or-less a glorified jobs program with guns.
America doesn’t have a martial or political class that’s prepared for the sacrifices that a modern, full-scale war would take. Rationing or changes to the domestic economic situation of any kind that a war would produce would almost immediately lead to social collapse. A draft would take us to the darkest pits of urban hell that our cable channels have previewed from our cities, such as LA in ‘91 or Minneapolis in 2020. A single round of the draft lottery would probably produce a more unfit and deficient crop than McNamara’s morons, with how much our populace is drug-addled, obese, and morally debased.
When America reaches the precipice of disaster, be it nuclear war from Russia or a total war with China over Taiwan and the stability of the global economy and semiconductors, it won’t be ready. America has displayed its unserious nature on the global stage for the past 25 years. The American military is unprepared, crippled by personnel and equipment inadequacies, and with an industrial complex that’s more focused on boosting the S&P 500 than winning wars or building lethal technology. Can one genuinely assess the state of our country, its military, economy, and society, and conclude that it’d win a protracted, great power conflict? What aspects of “civilization” does America even reflect anymore?
IT’S TIME FOR THIS TO END
“What better place to embrace the ancestral desire for chaos than in a world on fire?”
— Mike Ma, Harassment Architecture
Unless there is a massive upheaval of the existing structures, we cannot fix these things. They are entrenched into the system because it has been constructed to continue them. An elected Legislature is incapable of fixing them due to Executive power. When our Executive is in power, they’re incapable of stopping it because of Judicial interdiction. When we staff the Judiciary, they turn out to be backstabbers that expand the domain of the institutions that are ruining us. An unelected fourth branch leaks documents and phone calls and blocks change through incompetency and deliberate failure. Repeat the cycle.
America is lapsing, and direct intervention is necessary to save what remains. Further decay is inevitable without a massive course correction, but what direction that correction should go is a frequent topic of discussion.
Will we take the path of history and pine for Caesar? Unlikely, given the decentralization of power. The military is effectively siloed, led by men in skirts, and has significant portions of its officer corps infected by communists and those who seek to inflict pain on the American people. Not to mention the racial politics and split loyalties of many who are in the military. A true man of Caesar’s cloth is unlikely to progress far in the current structure, which seems to disincentivize effectiveness, lethality, and love of country.
A path to any coup is unlikely. January 6th is so ridiculous in part because even if the protestors had taken control of the Capitol, or done more drastic things — what would it have accomplished? The bureaucracy and government of America are so sprawling, that taking of any single institution is meaningless. America’s security against coups can be partially attributed to the expansiveness and incompetence of its government. The military, even if it were participating, is not motivated by a highness of ideals or commitment to national pride like the French military was during the Algiers crisis. Today, it is motivated by nothing but a promise of a pension and a paycheck.
Can we call for a “convention of states” or rewrite a Constitution through a suspension of its rule in the vein of the French Republics? Unlikely, given in-built Constitutional requirements for 2/3rds of the states to approve, which the right cannot hope to control given demographic and political inertia. Even so, such a conference would be hopelessly infested with infighting and ridiculous libertarian-right malicious actors that would derail any hope of productivity. To completely oust the Constitution in the modern era would spark nothing short of a civil war, and so to discard it as the French did to their Fourth Republic will never work for America. “National Divorce” is ridiculous for similar reasons — if we value anything resembling freedom, to dismantle America is to hand global domination to the Chinese, through which they will instantly pummel us into the dirt.
Is a religious revival the solution? No. America is only growing less religious by the day, and the Protestantism of American heritage has been so hopelessly debased that it stands little chance of revival. Catholicism and Mormonism are alien to American tradition, and their “trad” inheritors in the SSPX and other splinter factions don’t hold enough influence to even assert state control, let alone anything federal. They have begun sliding into American liberalism through their politicians in states like Utah and with their religious leaders like Pope Francis. I have my objections to the obsession with Christian morality and society on the right, but they will be elaborated on at another time. All I will say for now is that the Evangelicals already surrendered once, but instead of trying to take back their churches, they tilt at windmills with accusations of “Nietzchian” and “pagan.”
Should Americans retreat into the interior and hope to survive through the incompetence of our successors, as Whites in South Africa have tried? Not likely in America, due to the differing historical and racial histories — and the fact that the minority/majority difference isn’t as stark. The smallness of the White population in South Africa works in their favor, but a retreat to the states in America would only result in a complete loss of federal funds without any of the benefits of full secession…in other words, taxation without representation (meaningful representation, anyway.) That, combined with decreasing American competence, would make it a dead end to build anything of note. And even so, when they begin chanting to Kill the Boer, retreat won’t be enough.
But, after all, we may face something far worse, in part because of our government’s penchant for sprawl and grift. Nukes in the red states, combined with generals in the blue states and DC can only lead to one thing should tensions reach high enough. Other “former” nuclear powers like Ukraine and South Africa relinquished their weapons — in Ukraine’s case, because they were not theirs, and in South Africa’s case, because they did not want nuclear weapons ending up in the hands of the ANC post-Apartheid — and both these programs were minuscule compared to the scale at which America has deployed these weapons across its heartland, which fervently despises its ruling class.
As I said at the outset of this piece, we should not despair about the future: the future holds unlimited possibilities for us. What we cannot do is delude ourselves with notions of a return to what once was: America is gone. The right is civilizational, capable of greatness and vitality. Our opponents have never built anything that itself was not, at its core, designed to destroy or denigrate what once was. We can build in the chaos they bring; they can only tear down to ashes and wallow in their filth.
Hitchens-esque pessimism may have its place in countries like Britain, which have shriveled so small and weak after the collapse of their power that they may never have a chance to build anything great again. The land that we inhabit, the people that are the core of our country, the potential in what can be built here — they are all far greater than what our enemies plan on building. That is the reason to reject despair — because even with the brokenness of those who rule us, there is still something here. Imagine if we were not ruled by our enemies, what grand accomplishments could be within our grasp?
Your ancestors live through you. Your blood carries the will and strength of untold generations, culminating in you. Will you cower, hapless against the ascent of the all-consuming ugliness which has already destroyed what was once called America? Or will you join with the spirits which are rising, moving to build anew in the ashes and ruins?