June 17, 2023

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” —C.S. Lewis

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When Donald J. Trump established himself in the president’s office in January 2017, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. That was a signal.

Andrew Jackson was an irascible war hero known for his blunt manner, explosive temper, and inclined to physical violence. He was elected President in 1828, his second attempt, as a reformer who promised to clean out the “deep state” corruption of his day.

By that time, our country’s founders had passed on, and power had been inherited by a motley group of inheritors and cronies (Hunter? Is that you?) who established a cozy kleptocracy to ensure their continued access to the public trough. Unsurprisingly, ordinary citizens were very unhappy to the point where southern states, led by Sen. John Calhoun (S.C.), Jackson’s future vice president, threatened to secede via federal “nullification,” while northeastern elites, represented by Daniel Webster, worked assiduously to enhance federal control over the United States and its riff-raff citizenry.

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Despite much howling, unceasing personal attacks, and violent opposition from the deep state of his time, Andrew Jackson persevered, fixed it…and was re-elected in 1832. Andrew Jackson, in other words, was a disruptor.

Image: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

All human organizations become corrupted. That’s in our nature. The Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek, explained the process by which this happens in his classic Road to Serfdom: all governments and other organizations start out formed and led by idealistic drivers but are gradually undermined by weak, self-serving bureaucracies vulnerable to depredation by sociopaths and psychopaths pursuing their own self-serving agendas.

Action leads to reaction. In American history, we have had a history of disruptors. Following the institutional neglect and corruption of James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln paid the ultimate price for disrupting the institution of slavery but cleared the table for a period of national rebuilding under President Ulysses S. Grant and a string of Civil War-hero presidents.

Wilson’s Progressive Deep State relentlessly impugned Warren Harding’s character and reputation as he dismantled Wilson’s Progressive police state, clearing the way for a national resurrection under Calvin Coolidge.

Harry Truman survived both character and physical assassination attempts as he wrestled to dismantle FDR’s Progressive Depression-era and War economies, leaving the field open for a national resurgence under Dwight Eisenhower.

The Deep State corruption we face today is the most serious our nation has ever confronted, as it is both broad and many layers deep, rife with grift and treason using tools of subversion never envisioned by our Founders…tools like electronic media, for example. In true Progressive fashion, it has progressed in a ratchet-like fashion, reaching for new limits of depravity. The Clintons to the Obamas to the Bidens have established themselves as a neo-aristocracy, immune from the law and without serious resistance from Republicans more interested in feathering their own nets, stroking their virtues, and loath to make a fuss in the name of a mythical “national unity.”