Isn’t it special how Harvard has been negotiating with the peaceful protestors camping in Harvard Yard and has agreed to look into a Center for Palestine Studies at Harvard?
Let us imagine, for a moment, anti-abortion activists standing silently outside one of the leading abortion clinics protesting about the lack of babies born to Ivy League women university presidents? I wonder how many pregnancy termination reductions the folks at Planned Parenthood would negotiate.
Yes, it’s a presidential election year here in these United States and there are mostly peaceful protesters as far as the eye can see. Again.
WARNING to non Ivy League Americans: Do not try this at home! If the United States can indict the former President of the United States for a ham sandwich… Well, you get the picture.
Can you spell I-N-J-U-S-T-I-C-E?
Of course, life is unjust in these United States. Politics is not about justice; politics is about Power.
Why do I think that? Because I have experienced a sea change in my thinking in the last few years. It started with my introduction to Gaetano Mosca and his idea of the “political formula,” courtesy of Curtis Yarvin at American Mind. A political formula is what ruling classes preach to the masses to justify their rule. Our present ruling class advertises its moral right to rule because it fights for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.
Then Yarvin introduced me to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his Concept of the Political, that politics is all about Friend vs. Enemy, and that is all.
But more recently I have been reading On Power: The Natural History of its Growth by Bertrand de Jouvenel. I must have bought it years ago, but only started reading it recently. De Jouvenel taught me that the modern era is not a glorious age of freedom and human rights. Not at all. Freedom and human rights and rule of law have nothing to do with the case. The modern age is all about Power. Back in the day your average feudal monarch or feudal baron didn’t have that much Power. For instance, he could only go to war for a few weeks a year because he didn’t have the money to fight for months. Today, the government has the Power to pick your pocket every day and spend the money on its supporters, and it does. It has the Power to commandeer your wealth and income for a world war, and draft your son as cannon fodder any time it feels like it. And it does.
mumbles on about Democracy:
Democracy is the rule of law. Democracy is free and fair elections. Democracy is about an independent judiciary.
I say: Here’s what de Jouvenel writes:
The history of the democratic doctrine furnishes a striking example of an intellectual system blown about by the social wind. Conceived as the foundation of liberty, it paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.
Let’s mash de Jouvenel and Power with Schmitt and his Enemy vs. Friend.
Rulers use Power to fight and destroy their Enemy. Yesterday it was the Soviet Union. The day before yesterday it was Literally Hitler. Today the enemy is white oppressors and populist presidents and religious believers. and people standing outside abortion clinics, and Wrong Thinkers — “haters.” And armed insurrectionists.
Our rulers are determined to use their Power to empower and support their Friends, the oppressed peoples, with grants and programs, and by exempting them from the laws, as in illegal immigrants, blacks, LGBTs, Ivy League students, shoplifters, violent criminals, forgetful presidents, regulatory administrators and regime-adjacent protesters.
It’s not that our rulers are good or evil, smart or stupid. It’s The Science: the more politics, the more enemies and the more Power — and the less is left for ordinary people to live their lives.
From Schmitt, we understand that politics is just a war on the Enemy. From de Jouvenel we learn that war just increases the government’s Power to tax people and draft them into fighting wars — everything from peaceful protests to world wars. From Mosca we learn that it’s all held together by the lie of the “political formula.”
And that is why the world of our liberal friends is so empty. Because their world is reduced to a political formula about the oppressor vs. oppressed binary plus peaceful protesting in keffiyeh scarves from Amazon. Their world is a barren landscape of Power and the fight against the Enemy and a mountain of skulls. And yet they are the folx endlessly jabbering on about Genocide.
Hey liberals! Wanna know the way to Genocide, do not pass Go? Reduce human life to political formulas, the Enemy, and Power.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Pexels/France Trottier
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