America At A Crossroads — Time Is Not On Our Side
One of the ideas that jumped out at me in American Moment’s interview with incoming Solicitor General Theo Wold was the way in which he recognized what time it is in the life cycle of the American Republic. I firmly believe that the great divide in right wing politics today is between those who understand the precariousness of this moment and those who are oblivious, whether willfully or not, and fervently hope to wake up tomorrow to 1955, 1984, or 2014, as if the last eight years have been a bad dream. They assume that the madness of our time is temporary, fleeting, and that we will soon return to a comfortable pre-Trumpian normalcy.
These people, whether sincere or not, are whistling past the graveyard.
One man who recognizes the lateness of the hour is Glenn Ellmers: author, commentator, and Salvatori Research Fellow of the American Founding at the Claremont Institute. Ellmers recently wrote a provocative piece for American Greatness that began like this:
The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree.
Glenn Ellmers, Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities
The whole essay is well worth reading, though it might be a gut punch for those of you who still hold out hope that our system can still be salvaged. I sympathize. We all love our country, and we all love the way in which our Founding Fathers built our government, the one that Abraham Lincoln called of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet Ellmers makes a convincing case that the current American regime bears little resemblance to the one our Founders established:
…in terms of supplying a guide to how our federal government works, The Federalist has become the owner’s manual to a car that no longer runs, or was stolen long ago. What Publius describes about the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—as well as the countervailing powers of the states—has almost no connection with current reality.
Congress doesn’t write, the executive does not enforce, and the judiciary does not interpret the laws. Power and wealth have become massively centralized in Washington, D.C. Federalism, judicial review, executive authority, the legislative process, appropriations—none of this remains operational in a way James Madison would recognize. And now, the country’s most powerful corporations are in active collusion with the federal security apparatus to enforce the regime’s authority. That’s practically the definition of fascism.
Glenn Ellmers, Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities
Ellmers identifies what he calls the administrative state as the cancer that has eaten the heart out of our Republic. The administrative state is the vast overreaching collection of federal bureaucrats and NGO employees who actually run the country, and Congress has delegated more and more authority to this blob since the New Deal of the 1930s. The administrative state is often called the managerial state, the deep state, or simply the swamp.
It is so tempting to believe that our problems are both recent and easily repaired. Unfortunately, the rot in our country did not start with Barack Obama, and there is no magic bullet to fix it in one go. We will not be saved by electing the right president, instituting the right new laws, or even by convening an Article V Convention of States. (Sorry.) Our country has been going down the wrong path for more than a hundred years, and it is quite likely we are past the point of simply patching the damage and continuing to move forward.
I just listened to a great podcast where Auron MacIntyre hosted a YouTuber called Radical Liberation who explained the way in which Franklin Roosevelt essentially stole Americans’ gold and then deliberately inflated the currency, which has directly led to the situation we have today where all our paper money grows more worthless by the hour. This is just one example of the way in which our country began going off the rails before most of us were even born.
The globalist left has been altering the parameters of our national system for a long time, but in our shortsightedness we too quickly become accustomed to the new normal. We have accepted that an unaccountable Federal Reserve rightly controls our money supply. We have accepted that the President has the authority to deploy our troops throughout the world without a congressional declaration of war. We have accepted that the federal bureaucracy has the authority to manage our retirement accounts, welfare, and endless regulation regarding the conduct of businesses and individuals alike. Now we are being asked to accept that ballot harvesting is simply The Way Things Are Done.
Glenn Ellmers, who discussed his essay with the Three Whiskey Happy Hour podcast hosts last month, argued that adapting to the left’s perversion of our society is a losing proposition. “Accepting, even in the short term, the regime’s authority to perpetually rewrite the rules of the game is the true surrender,” he wrote. “They will always win if we repeatedly acquiesce to their legitimacy, chasing after what they define as normal on their terms. Worse, there won’t be a republic in the long term worth having.”
One of the most frustrating things about our current situation is the lack of a villain toward whom we can direct our righteous ire. Joe Biden is an empty suit, our Congress has delegated most of its real power to the federal bureaucracy, and even men like Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and Klaus Schwab are merely interchangeable pieces of a great totalitarian machine. If I could snap my fingers like Thanos and transport these men into prison cells right now it would not change the overall situation. Our enemy is not a single person, a dictator or tyrant, rather it is the very administrative state that Ellmers describes in his essay. Yet it is greater than simply the federal bureaucracy, because it spans governments, corporations, universities, media outlets, and more. Political philosopher Curtis Yarvin coined the term cathedral to refer to this system.
The cathedral was the center of spiritual power in medieval Europe. It did not matter who happened to be the bishop, or even pope, because the system that was the Church was greater than any one individual. Like the medieval Church, Yarvin’s cathedral is not a top-down conspiracy but a wide range of people who are already on the same page with regards to how they intend to shape society. The system is explicitly designed to weed out anyone who is not on board with their agenda. Prospective employees of government bureaucracies, NGOs, and newsrooms are marinated in propaganda through thirteen years of public education, at least four years of college and university, and a lifetime of cultural pressure. By the time they arrive in positions of power and influence, they don’t need to be explicitly told to behave in a certain manner because they have already been conditioned to do just that. Their worldview has already been determined.
Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs about his desire to break what we now call the cathedral or deep state by the late 1960s:
I won the 1968 election as a Washington insider, but with an outsider’s prejudices. The behind-the-scenes power structure in Washington is often called the “iron triangle”: a three-sided set of relationships composed of congressional lobbyists, congressional committee and subcommittee members and their staffs, and the bureaucrats in the various federal departments and agencies. These people tend to work with each other year after year regardless of changes in administrations; they form personal and professional associations and generally act in concert. I felt that one of the reasons I had been elected was my promise to break the hammerlock Washington holds over the money and decisions that affect American lives. I wanted to break open the iron triangle and start turning money and power back to the states and cities, and I wanted to throw the red tape out the window. But Washington is a city run primarily by Democrats and liberals, dominated by like-minded newspapers and other media, convinced of its superiority to other cities and other points of view; from the beginning I knew my chances of succeeding with the kinds of domestic reforms I had in mind were slim.
Nixon dared attack the swamp, and the swamp fought back, elevating a minor scandal into a national story that brought down the President of the United States.
By the time Donald Trump came into office, the swamp had only grown more powerful. “The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century,” Ellmers wrote. The DC system has been around for nearly a century now, and entire generations of bureaucrats and activists have grown up within the confines of the cathedral. The swamp now zealously defends itself, because the swamp ensures the prosperity of those inside it.
Ellmers addresses the attempt by Donald Trump to fix the broken system in his essay:
For all his flaws, Donald Trump at least recognized that defending the sovereignty of the people (the most fundamental and meaningful definition of Americanism) meant striking at the legitimacy of the administrative state, especially its assumptions of rational expert knowledge. Trump correctly perceived that mockery and derision were effective, if indelicate, tools for challenging this hubris.
But Trump erred grievously in thinking he could accomplish everything he wanted on his own. The art of the deal doesn’t work when the other side holds almost all the cards. Trump underestimated this situation. And he was simply foolish and vain in thinking he could overcome it on the strength of his abilities alone and ignoring his duty to fill every available appointment with people loyal to—and willing to fight for—his agenda.
Glenn Ellmers, Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities
There are few public figures who represent the swamp better than Elizabeth Lynne Cheney.
The year she was born, her father Dick Cheney took a job on Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles’ staff, and soon moved to Washington to work in the federal government. Liz Cheney grew up in the swamp as her father climbed the ladder, watching him serve as Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford, Congressman from Wyoming, and Secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush. It was during the latter stint that the young Liz began her own political career, gaining a minor job in the State Department. In 2002, with Dick Cheney now serving as Vice President, Liz was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, a springboard for her own political ascendance. She bought a home in Wyoming in 2012, despite having lived her whole life in DC, but lost the 2014 Senate primary - she was correctly tagged as a carpetbagger. However, she managed to win election to the US House in 2016, serving there until her devastating primary defeat earlier this year.
Now that you know Liz Cheney’s story, is it any wonder she not only voted to impeach President Trump in January 2017, but spent the last two years enthusiastically trying to destroy him and tar his supporters as insurrectionists? Liz Cheney does not represent Wyoming, or even Republicans, but serves the interests of the same blob, the same cathedral that has enriched her family for decades. Yet as with any of the other deep state figureheads, removing Cheney is not going to solve our problem. There are hundreds, thousands of Liz Cheneys who were spawned in the swamp, each one ready to take the place of anyone we manage to remove.
Unfortunately, I believe that this swamp has completely engulfed the American Republic that our founders created nearly 250 years ago. Glenn Ellmers agrees, but his essay is not just doom and gloom. The radical possibilities that he alludes to in the title include the prospect of building something new on top of the same principles of freedom and liberty that our founders cherished. Our enemies have no foundation of morality, no appreciation for human nature, and in many ways lack the competence necessary to run the total tyranny they desire. If and when their power begins to crumble, we must be prepared to institute a new system that can protect our natural rights and ensure a future for our posterity in the same way our founders did in 1789.
Yet we cannot simply sit back and wait for the current system to collapse; time is not on our side. We need to be building power where we can - in our communities, our counties, and our states.
We stand at a crossroads: Either we capitulate to a tyranny that will condemn us to living in pods and eating bugs for the next ten generations, or we embark on a second American Revolution - not necessarily fought with weapons of war, but with rhetoric, with organization, by working within the current system with the explicit goal of creating a new one. We must present a positive vision for what America can be, one that appeals to the hearts and minds of a people that is rapidly losing hope.
Brian Almon
A descendant of American pioneers, Brian writes about the importance of culture and about current events in the context of history.
