George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 June 2017.]

With all the anti-Trump furor going on, there is a more important national pot that is slowly coming to a boil, and it brings together a number of issues and recent happenings ranging from safe spaces, free speech, re-segregation, federalism, states’ rights, and even secession under the aegis of our ongoing Great Divide.

Over the past century the received wisdom from the Left has been that separation, discrimination and the desire for cultural cohesion are evil throwbacks to more primitive and less tolerant times.  All that is now changing as the Left’s intellectual champions have started re-segregating us along multiple lines that include culture, ideology, religion, ethnicity, and even race.

The bottom line here is that the modern Left finally acknowledges that people really do like to be with like-minded people whose behavior they can reliably predict and approve.  This ability leads to a powerful social outcome known as cooperation which Yuval Harari, in his acclaimed Homo Deus (2017), identifies as the attribute that made Homo Sapiens the dominant specie on the planet.  And since then those groups of humans that could better cooperate in turn became dominant over those who could not, despite their number and/or having a more favorable geography.

Cooperating groups that joined as clans, tribes, kingdoms and nations have always fought each other for dominance, or to ensure the security to perpetuate themselves.  After millennia of such warfare, in 1648 the political units of Europe met in Westphalia to end gratuitous conflicts based on religion or some claimed royal heritage of another’s territory.  The resulting Treaties of Westphalia formalized the then current borders, and identified the resulting regions as sovereign nation-states, no matter the divers forms of their governances – monarchy, theocracy, republic, etc.

All signatories agreed that what went on inside such borders was only the business of the so-defined nation.  And any nation that attacked another was automatically considered a pariah that could and should be dealt with by other nations through punitive sanctions, or even joining together in war against the offending state.  Westphalia became the basis for world order, and has remained so for the last 3.5 centuries.

While not perfect, what has given stability to Westphalian states have been their cohesive populations which seldom fought among themselves.  And when they did, it was either in a civil war or a revolution against the ruling regime.  The former gave evidence that the drawn boundary still enclosed two populations that for one or more reasons could not cooperate.  The latter because the ruling class had become intolerably oppressive against a large contingent of its own people.  This mainly by using force to prevent the oppressed from beneficially cooperating among themselves.

If you have followed all this, we now come to 21^st century America which today is riven and roiling with factions that divide themselves into the two main classes of collectivists and constitutionalists – neither trusting the other, and both composed of even more distinguishable factions.

What exacerbates this division further is that neither side agrees on what form of governance the US currently has, let alone what this form should be going forward.  The collectivist Left promotes the transformation of America into one or more globalist satrapies under a global order as envisioned in the UN’s Agenda 21 protocols. The constitutionalist Right sees a bright American future in its return to a democratic republic envisioned by the Founders that continues to profit in a Westphalian world order of peace and mutually beneficent commerce.

Today this tension greatly favors the Left for reasons we have previously covered.  Our current divisions are detailed by many, including economist Tyler Cowen in The Complacent Class (2017) and social philosopher Charles Murray in Coming Apart (2012).  To this we add the multiple leftwing movements to provide safe spaces to their like-minded that today includes re-segregating schools, living quarters, and other affinity groupings.  Our Left finally appears to understand the prerequisites and power of cooperation.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Addendum – There is so much happening in the evolution of the Left’s national mindset now that they have outed themselves as the unabashed ‘Resistance’ to anyone and anything that diverts America from its path to socialism that was formally launched under the leadership of President Obama.  Anyone even mildly keeping up with the news knows that the Democrats’ job one is to obstruct President Trump’s policy agenda at all points, and better that by promoting the national case that the man should be impeached.  The Republicans were equally incensed under Obama, but resorted to a different approach in order to regain political primacy – to which they now tenuously cling.

The major tectonic shifts in the American population and polity have been documented by many scholars, commentators, and intellectuals who populate our political space.  We take a brief look at some of these below that include links for further study by those interested.

We’ll start by again pointing out that historically the Democratic Party, for one reason or another, has always been the predominant home to political and social forces that have pulled us away from the vision of the Founders.

Hot off the press is the just released The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017) by Edward Luce, Financial Times editor and chief US commentator.  Therein he makes the compelling case that “the backlash against liberalism is rooted in economics.  While the rich live in opulence, over half of Westerners are barely getting by.” (more here)  Nowhere is that more visible today than in the large coastal population centers of the US.  These big urban areas were founded on the exercise of rampant capitalism which built their factories and commercial centers that then attracted workers who then became the pawns of socialist sirens promising them sinecures that ignored the advance of technology and depended on a subverted public education system to limit upward mobility and self-empowerment.  A commentary on ‘The Zero-Sum Society’ with revealing graphics shows where these subverted regions are home to the country’s highest levels of economic and income inequality, regions that have been under Democrat controlled governments for at least two generations.

The above cited book by Tyler Cowen is a work rich in data to back up his conclusions that support its main thesis that Americans in the aggregate have become a population complacent in their current life styles and prospects with significantly less propensity to tolerate the risks that any changes, ranging from family mobility to entrepreneurship, may entail.  This attitude of stasis again bolsters the fortunes of socialist politicians who promise to deliver state guaranteed safety, succor, and stability for voting correctly.  (more here)

In the divergent views of our governance, federalism or states’ rights mean significantly different things for those on of the Left and of the Right.  The surprise here is that those on the Left are increasingly starting to agree that states should be more sovereign in such areas as immigration and harboring of illegal aliens.  But the foundation of this new embrace of federalism is again based on our growing political schism.  “The current rediscovery of states’ rights on the left is driven, in some instances, by the election of Mr. Trump and the fact that Republicans now control both houses of Congress. The states are their last enclaves of resistance.”  (more here)

Founder Thomas Jefferson was an early proponent of states’ rights.  In the Missouri crisis of 1819 Jefferson “railed against the aggrandizing force of the federal government and what it meant for the South. He became a more strident defender of states' rights than he had been in 1798 when he penned the Kentucky resolution justifying the right of a state to nullify federal law. He feared a breakup of the United States but declared that "submission to a government of unlimited powers" was much worse than a dissolution of the union.” (more here)

Meanwhile, the movement to re-segregate is starting on campuses as an offshoot of their ‘safe spaces’ initiatives.  This is a direct expression of the Left’s discovery that likes like likes.  For example, “Northwestern President Morton Schapiro … believes that because learning is frequently uncomfortable, students need safe spaces—which for him means places where people who share an identity can retreat, relax and recoup.”  Next on this agenda are re-establishment of black-only dorms and associations based on exclusionary ethnicities and ideologies.  The obvious driving principle is to insulate politically correct ideas that cannot tolerate debate from those that are not so fragile. (more here)

In championing the coherencies of the Westphalian order Roger Scruton makes ‘The Case for Nations’ in the 3jun17 WSJ.  There he argues –

• “Democracy means rule by the people and requires us to know who the people are, what unites them and how they can form a government. … Government in turn requires a ‘we’, a prepolitical loyalty that causes neighbors who voted in opposing ways to treat each other as fellow citizens, …”
• And prepolitical loyalty requires a “… legacy of social trust (that) depends on a common territory, resolution in the face of external threat and institutions that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the day.”
• “We are therefore in need of an inclusive identity that will hold us together as a people.”
• “National loyalty marginalizes loyalties of family, tribe and faith, and places before the citizen’s eyes, as the focus of their patriotic feeling, not a person or a religion but a place.”, “… the emergence of territory … as the primary objects of love.”
• “Liberals warn repeatedly against populism and nationalism, suggesting that even to raise the question of national identity is to take a step away from civilization.”
• “Patriotism involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology, which uses national symbols to conscript the people to war.”
• “… human communities are primed for warfare, and that when they fight, they fight as a group.” (see also Harari on cooperation)

More on Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus is found in Wikipedia’s summary of its Central Theses (here) – “Harari prophesies the replacement of humankind with a super-man, or "homo deus" (human god) endowed with supernatural abilities such as eternal life.”

Further readings on Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over “- where they maintain that “America is dividing itself in two” are found here and here.

That we are increasingly governed and coerced by an effectively invisible ‘deep state’ is argued by John Tierney in his ‘The Tyranny of the Administrative State’ – “Government by unelected experts isn’t all that different from the ‘royal prerogative’ of 17th-century England, argues constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger.”  This is more evidence that we are beyond the tipping point.

There is much more to relate on our progress toward the Great Divide, but I hope that the above record can at least motivate a deeper study of the evidence for it.