While our Democratic friends congratulate each other every hour on the hour about the wonders of presidential candidate Kamala Harris we might as well take a break from developing our critical theory of the ongoing undemocratic process of Defending Democracy unfolding before us.
So never mind lecturing our Democratic friends on the difference between a democracy and a republic. Mark Lewis goes into details about how President Biden is talking bologna when he says that “Democracy is the essence of who we are.” But who cares?
“Democracy” and “Republic” are just magic words that political hypnotists use to put the voters into a trance. The words mean nothing. And the names of the political parties in America — Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Democratic, Whig, Republican, Progressive — mean nothing. Although the Bull Moose Party might be a bit different. All these words are part of serving voters with the Current Narrative, the Glorious History, the Founding Myth. And we usually fall for it, just as our Democratic friends are all in a swoon right now about Kamala Harris.
At some point, when the current Age of the Educated Class stumbles into ideological stupor, philosophers and ideologists will construct a Narrative of Decline. I dare say it will parallel the Narrative about the Roman Empire that declined from world domination to extinction in the Dark Ages until the glory of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment led to a world of Logic and Reason and Freedom and Justice.
Only I don’t agree. I believe that the last 500 years, the Age of the Educated Class, is not a golden age of Logic and Reason and Freedom and Justice but an Age of Religious War and Slavery.
The Reformation led to a century of religious wars centering on Germany and culminating in the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 in which about one third of Germans died, mostly from famine. Of course the Brits were doing their bit, with Cromwell the Puritan getting the Catholic Irish sorted in 1649-53 so that about 15-20 percent of the Irish died.
twenty percent of the 200 million population died in the 25-year French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
A century later, Europe had progressed so far that it featured two ideological World Wars in half a century, with 40 million deaths in World War I’s war against the emperors and 50-85 million deaths in World War II’s war against the Nazis. That’s progress.
I don’t know how you categorize the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Best estimates are that Communism killed 100 million people in the 20th century. Does that come under the category of war or genocide?
Now let’s talk about slavery. Of course, we know that after a victorious war the Romans would celebrate a Triumph in the city of Rome where they paraded the loot and the slaves captured in the victorious campaign. A little later the Venetians developed a nice little trade in Circassian beauties that they would buy in Caffa in the Crimea, and then sell into the harems of the Middle East. Pretty soon the Venetians expanded their slave trade and began supplying slaves to the start-up sugar plantations on Cyprus. And a little later the Brits tried the same thing on Barbados. Then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and plantation slavery boomed in the Southern United States until Gen. Sherman politely asked them to stop. What a shame! But never mind. In the 20th century lefty intellectuals invented the Communist slave state where everyone was enslaved except a few top Party members.
By the way, what do you call a state that spends 35-50 percent of GDP on government programs and who knows what on economic regulation and DEI? Would that be a society based on serfdom?
Do you see the point? Our rulers have gussied up Narratives to show how magnificent and progressive they are. Maybe they are right, or maybe they are lying to themselves and to us. But it’s much more fun to create Counter Narratives.
Recently, of course, our rulers have pushed the “1619 Project” Narrative to advertise that the United States was founded on slavery. Maybe they are right. But I have advanced a “1584 Project,” based on the idea that the U.S. was built on a foundation of White Trash serfdom, the “waste population” of Europe that was first dumped on these shores in 1584. And I suspect that one day experts will agree that the centuries-long subjection of White Trash in America is one of the great injustices of the ages and that President Vance will sign a bill to create a fourth victim museum on the Washington Mall: the Museum of the White Trash American.
Now back to your regularly scheduled regime Narrative about the wonders of Kamala Harris.
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: Public Domain
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