George Rebane
A barren desert is now the middle ground separating Americans from their woke and fundamentally transformed brethren.
Racism has been an enduring theme on RR for years – e.g. back in 2010, through the years, and a more recent commentary in 2019. With readers we have dissected it 20 ways from Sunday. Even liberals have joined in. Unfortunately, their contributions have been limited to calling the rest of us ‘racists’ without being able to even define the word. From Lewis Carroll we read once again –
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
I recently visited Bob Crabb’s site to pay homage to his excellent cartoon (here) and return the favor of his visits to RR. What caught my eye was Bob’s brief but meaningful commentary posted below his cartoon –
We are reaching the tipping point, and I don’t mean just tipping old confederate statues. Our competing ideologies have retreated to the far ends of the spectrum where any kind of compromise is seen as treachery. … Can cooler heads prevail? I’d like to think so, but when the extremes are obsessed with winning it all, it seems unlikely. … As I have said here before, it’s too bad that we are bent on destroying such a nice country.
Bob now perceives the tipping point that in my Great Divide screeds I claim we passed long ago. But what I took to task was his claim that both “extremes are obsessed with winning it all”, which on its face is not true. I then entered into a dialogue with some liberal worthies that turned out to be predictably unproductive, save that it illustrated the barren desert of our middle ground. As I’ve mentioned before, and with no apologies to the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sides can and do have their own distinct and widely varying opinions, facts, histories, morals, ethics, systems of logic, and desiderata for the future.
The referenced desiderata of the two sides are significantly asymmetrical. The Left sees the notion of a Great Divide as completely inimical to their designs, and therefore even treasonous to contemplate. They know their own constituencies, and don’t want to let go of the more productive elements of our current citizenry. So their plan forward will include immediately prohibiting the export of private wealth, closing the gates on separation and emigration, and will focus on corralling the known counter-revolutionaries and ‘re-educating’ the re-educable, as have their ideological forebears of the USSR, PRC, Vietnam, Cuba, … . Were it otherwise, they would be more than content to have us gone, so that their loyal proletariat could welcome their brave new world happy dancing in the streets.
The Right’s ideology has no provisions for the forcible laundering of recalcitrant minds. In my long years, I have met no fellow travelers, nor read any of their writings that prescribe, let alone depend on, the reorientation of the collectivists’ beliefs no matter how minor. And to undertake the re-education of our tens of millions of gimmes is definitely equivalent to relieving oneself on the weather rail. History teaches those of the Right the blessings of individuality, enterprise, open markets, capitalism, limited government, and liberties known and yet to be discovered. Our desire is to live in harmony with those who share those values, and spend our energies in self-fulfillment – whether that entails creating enormous wealth, mastering the violin, conquering diseases, building trans-humans, going to the stars, or any combination of these and the yet to be imagined. The main principle is that we, not the state, will determine what floats our boats.
If there is any form of discrimination that we share with the Left, it is to fashion our respective social orders in which minor factions will find it difficult to change their functional forms and power structures (as bequeathed by our Founders). As we see, our Left is already attempting that in their daily labors at all levels of government, supporting bureaucracies, street demonstrations, and rioting thugs. Our political Right, as embodied by the castrated Republican Party, cringes in fear of its endurance in the public mind, and is frantically trying not to miss the march on the next layer of virtue signaling and concessions to the mob.
By any reasonable definition, Donald Trump is not a racist, and has done more for minorities in his short years than the Democrats have attempted during the last half century. For all the support he is getting from our national Republican electeds, he is not even the de facto head of the Republican Party. A party which does its best to distance from the President’s unfortunate foot-in-mouth disease, instead of focusing on and lauding his domestic and foreign policy accomplishments. To the congressional Republicans, Donald Trump looks just fine swinging alone in the wind. The sooner Trump is gone, the better, so that the GOP can get back to its likeminded apparatchiks and business as usual. However, that is not what the tens of millions of the deplorables want, those of us who voted for this bodacious interloper in order to bring about change from the same ‘ol same ‘ol.
Were it possible to convince the ghetto gimmes that the Democrat Party has made our cities in their image into the cesspools that even they are now eager to vacate, to take their dysfunctional social policies into territories yet untrammeled, then Trump and the Republicans would be shoo-ins. But that is not to be, nor should any political plan forward be based on such a miracle. Therefore, this November a President Bumblebrain with a ‘woman of color’ in tow is a distinct possibility. And the shortlist women of color are all devout disciples of BLM, Antifa, and vocal prosecutors of ‘America’s racism’. From my perch, before his term is up, Bumblebrain will honorably withdraw from office, and anoint our first female president. At which time will also ascend the Democrat lunatic fringe, singing their paeans to socialism and busy itself with our fundamental transformation.
As we see the daily chaos and listen to the talking heads attempting to explain it all, we should recall that all modern totalitarian regimes have to ascend a moral staircase to power. Our Left is no different. Their moral imperative du jour builds on America’s birth defect of slavery, and therefore they exhibit the elimination of racism as their raison d’etre to power – who could argue with that?
And in their task, today as they claim sovereignty over city neighborhoods, they demand that the country executes such a fundamental transformation over an interval of a few months if not weeks, essentially at the same pace that the Bolsheviks carried out their initial shock transformation of czarist Russia. However, what we must never forget is that it took the communists another five years of civil war with the ‘White Russians’ to gain complete control and consolidate their power.
As we listen to the radical Left and the Democrats of their legitimate political party, we are asked to make major decisions about our future on the fly as buildings burn, people are murdered in the streets, businesses looted, whole police departments cower fearfully, Republicans hiding in dark corners, our history (already destroyed in academe) now being destroyed in the public square, the lamestream media broadcasts wholesale lies, and our lives are ravaged by misguided response policies to a pandemic. Any decision America takes during this prime time of political panic plays into the hands of the furthest fringes of the Left.
Job one now is to stop the chaos in the streets, get back so some semblance of normalcy, and prepare for the November election. There will be time enough after the votes are counted and the dust settles to plot our new post-pandemic course. This is no time to decide anything for which we will surely be sorry tomorrow.
[update] Sen Tim Kaine claims US “created slavery” and “didn’t inherit it from anybody”. (here) This is the kind of utter stupidity or evil cynicism that pours out of Democrat politicians. We all know the dimensions of stupidity required to put out this magnitude of a Big Lie, but the more important point here is that this bullshit doesn’t affect anyone save the uncritically and terminally sclerotic Democrat voter who doesn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to understand how ludicrous such a claim is. It is those of the far Left leadership ranks of the Democrat Party who knowingly take advantage of their vast constituencies, especially those ‘educated’ in their own inner city schools, who have been prepared for generations to accept such tripe. That’s what makes the Democrats the demonic party, and such are the actual statements that cause the divisions which lead to the rage of rioters.
[Addendum] A reader asked, “If a great divide were to happen, would there be less bloodshed if it happened before or after the liberals/socialists/democrats take over the reins of power?”, an important question which deserves a longer answer suitable as an addendum to the above.
If we are to learn from history, then any bloodshed will happen only after the anti-American collectivists take over reins of power in such a way that it is clear to the remaining ‘deplorables’ of the Right that they no longer can make their voices heard through traditional constitutional means. Given the historically normative behavior of constitutional Americans, they will not initiate the use of force to rehabilitate the Constitution until after it has been unambiguously abrogated by the firmly ensconced Left. In short and sadly, the Right is vulnerable in the sense that it will only and at best become a reactionary opposition to the successful machinations of the Left – there will be no premature or anticipative Ft Sumter in our tea leaves.
As a virulent form of collectivism, socialism is fundamentally an autocracy of the elites on its way to morphing (perhaps through a pro-forma communism) into a tyranny of a closed single-party, ruling cabal (e.g. today’s PRC, Vietnam, Cuba) which then inevitably morphs further into a tyranny of a dictatorial personality cult (e.g. Stalin, Hitler, Mao). We note that both the PRC and Russia are well on their way to personality-cult rule through today’s progressive and ongoing perpetuation of Presidents Putin and Xi.
We also recall that tyranny is historically the most stable, enduring, and longest-practiced form of human governance. Once having established its rule over a disarmed, mostly ignorant, and massively monitored population, its ruling cabals and cults may periodically be replaced via various infighting and stratagems at the top, without ever affecting the masses’ quality of life. (Orwell described such a world where even the identity of the tyrants were successfully masked.) Advanced technology can now add at least an order of magnitude to the stability of such regimes (i.e. diminish the probability of successful revolution by an order of magnitude). So, in my view, there may exist a small window of time after our Left, with reins of power in hand, goes post-constitutional that there will be an opportunity to launch an armed resistance. However, if the Left is sufficiently astute to constructively disarm America (as it is doing now), and also ‘sanitize’ our military before closing the constitutional door, then we all will go quietly into that dark night of a condemned and compliant country that votes 100% for its dear leaders. The potentially non-compliants will quickly find themselves in boxcars on a different kind of one-way ‘sentimental journey’. It was ever thus.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment