Category Archives: Imperial Decline

Our Decaying National Identity

17 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in Censorship, Imperial Decline, Southern History, The Passing Scene

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A portion of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery

I can’t say that the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlingtin National Cemetery was my last straw. For some thirty years, I have grown increasingly ambivalent about the United States, its greedy, morally debased government class, its declining empire and, frankly, the whole concept of being American, playing into the idea of Lincoln’s propositional nationhood as it was initially espoused by him and subsequently has been refined and updated by succeeding presidents and sundry public intellectuals.

In fact, reflecting back across the veil of time, which, as I should stress is exceedingly thick at this juncture in my life, I recall one especially jarring encounter on a chartered bus in June, 1977, en route to West Point after a daylong tour of New York City. We were on the bus with other families whose husbands and fathers, all Reserve Army officers, served as recruiters for the military academy.

During the ride back, a neatly coiffed, very refined young lady approached my mother, an equally attractive and refined lady, apparently on the basis of my mother’s very noticeable Southern drawl. Upon learning that we were Alabamians, she proceeded to heap scorn on Alabama and my mother, apparently simply for her summoning the temerity to live and to raise her sons in such a despicable place.

My mother, who played classical piano, and quoted and wrote reams of poetry and who also held a graduate degree, handled it with her characteristic grace.

For my part, I never forgot it, and it was my first lesson in propositional nationalism – how such a weak form of nationalism necessarily requires a foil and how the South necessarily has supplied this foil.

Perhaps my rambling here is somewhat fraught with irony. As I have pointed out before, the bulk of my forebears were Southern Unionists and even Southern Unionist soldiers, one of whom even had a hand in the burning of Atlanta.

While I readily identify far more as an Alabamian and a Southerner than an American, I am not driven by any burning desire to resurrect the old Confederacy. Yes, I remain a steadfast admirer of the Permanent Confederate Constitution for how it further refined the role of the general government and safeguarded the role of states and even introduced some aspects of the British Westminster Model to the American constitutional system. Yet, despite my strong Southern cultural and political proclivities, I harbor no intention of raising the Stainless Banner above Richmond.

Yet, the fact cannot be denied that this country was rebuilt and a measure of national unity established on the basis of the valor of the Southern fighting man and the post-bellum U.S. Government’s determimation, however initially reluctant, to honor this valor, even as the plutocrats who took the reins after Appomattox succeeded in turning the South into a huge resource-extraction zone as well as capitalizing on Southern martial traditions to build the rudiments of what has become, certainly within the last generation, a corrupt empire.

What we are witnessing today with this monument removal and the widely reported removal and incineration of the Lee Monument is the foreshadowing of a reckoning, which some of the left have likened to the unconditional surrender imposed on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.

This only serves to underscore the degree to which the cultural and political elites who run this regime despise the South and the rest of the red heartland with which this region shares so many cultural and historical affinities.

These are all reasons why I and growing numbers of Southerners and other residents of the vast red heartland have grown increasingly sympathetic to some form of national divorce.

We are governed by a morally-debased corrupt plutocracy that, in employing empty terms such as “our democracy,” simply serve to underscore how the snake oil of propositional nationalism no longer supplies any form of national palliative. What remains of American national identity is squeaking under the strain of wokeness and leftist rot in general, and it behooves us to begin imagining what must follow, which, hopefully will, to one degree or another, harken back to the vision of our Founding Founders.

Texit Inches One Step Closer

08 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, secession, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics

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I find this development encouraging. The Texas Nationalist Movement has drawn a step closer in securing a secession vote on the 2024 ballot.

Anyone courageous enough to take a deep dive into U.S. history knows that the U.S. constitutional system was regarded as experimental and that it was intended to function as a modified confederation, albeit one that secured the general government with sufficient revenue to conduct a cluster of all-union responsibilities – hence, the national motto: E. pluribus unum, underscoring that the United States is a community of republics.

The column linked above is especially instructive terms of how the appearance of a secession initiative on the 2024 Texas ballot not only would enhance the likelihood of the mainstreaning of the Texas National Movement but also would foster serious discussion about secession in other red states, as none of these states could look forward to a viable future within American Union without the presence of the red behemoth of Texas.

Barring wholesale red state secession, some form of serious decentralization is vital to the preservation of constitutional liberty as it is historically understood in this country.

As I have stated before in this forum, I agree with the late diplomat George F. Kennan, who argued that a United States governed by a centralized state of managerial elites is an untenable one and that the most ideal arrangement would be one in which the overwhelming bulk of power is consigned to individual “constituent republics,” roughly the size of Texas. Hopefully, a successful Texas secessionist movement will prime this discussion and contribute to the rapid dissolution of corrupt, centralized power.

Tearing off One’s Nose…

23 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by in Imperial Decline, Secularism, The Passing Scene

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I have mentioned before that I reflect a lot on long-deceased relatives who were raised in straitened circumstances, earned college degrees, ascended to the middle class and spent the rest of their lives marveling at and extolling the civilization that made all of this possible.

As a Southerner of British and Irish heritage, I am thoroughly ambivalent about Israel and value it only to the degree that it serves the interests of the West. But I will never understand why more young people who, driven by their hatred for the civilization that has secured so many freedoms and blessings for them, would go to such lengths to abjure it, embracing a faith that in some forms embodies a searing, implacable hatred of the West and all of the civilizational, scientific and technological achievements associated with it.

I am reminded of a saying my parents repeated to me time again and again as they helped me work through one of my occasional inconsolable childhood rages and the self-defeating behavior that invariably followed: “You’re tearing off your nose to spite your face!”

This mad dash to Islam by disillusioned women is interesting within the wider context of religious history. Roughly a century ago, the British Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc perceived a similar appeal with radical Protestantism. All of this underscores how the sheer complexity of Western civilization, despite all of the material and intellectual effects it has created, is, in historical terms, radically new and, needless to say, jarring to the human experience.

Many of you likely were as affected by the classic film “Dances with Wolves” as I was and likely for the same reason: It depicted in a brilliantly disruptive and creative way why quite a few 18th and 19th century whites went “native” and why others chose to return to tribal life after being “rescued” by other whites. There really is something about minimalist lifestyles that appeal to moderns.

Speaking of movie classics, the enduring appeal of “Being There” essentially reflects a similar yearning. We – some of us, at least – find something far removed from the complexity and noise of modern life to be deeply appealing.

Perhaps it is not all that surprising a comparatively lean religion of the book such as Islam and, for that matter, very radical forms of Protestantism arguably generate the same appeal in terms of offering a more approachable form of curating all of this complexity bound up with modern life.

The appeal of minimalism among younger people also is interesting to me and arguably speaks volumes about a deep yearning to restore some mastery over life.

That is the remarkable thing about culture and civilization: It is characterized by nuance and a stunning degree of complexity. None of us ever succeed in mastering it entirely, which should not be at all surprising to any serious student of history.

Even so, speaking as a serious student of history, particularly of religion, I am not convinced that conversion to Islam, at least the radical forms of it, constitutes an adequate solution.

The Weathered American Experiment.

04 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, American History, Devolution, Federalism, Imperial Decline, Patriotism, secession, The Passing Scene

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I wrote this tribute to American independence some nine years ago, and reflecting on it today it doesn’t seem to have weathered all that well.

Indeed, with each passing year in the face of an obstinate and utterly corrupt ruling class that stands at the commanding cultural heights and that stares down with withering contempt at the deplorables, the ancestors of whom caused the previous proprietors, the British nobility, a measure of heartache, I wonder how much time remains for the American enteprise, long regared as history’s most conspicuous experiment in self-government.

This hard truth has left me with a resolve to offer what aid I can toward preserving a saving remnant of the the American project – the sprawling American heartland – what I have come to call the “Ruby-Red Republic.”

As the British surrendered at Yorktown, they played “A World Turned Upside Down,” apparently to underscore their disbelief that a ragtag league of states comprised of provincials and peasants could defeat an army of the greatest empire in the world.

Indeed, for a very long time, Britain and the other great empires of the earth did not consider this feuding aggregation of post-colonial states a nation in any real sense. During a hot, sultry summer in Philadelphia, these provincials rather reluctantly convened to forge an agreement to unite their cantankerous states, one that ultimately worked not only to secure unimaginable levels of freedom and material prosperity for citizens but that has also been emulated to one degree or another by nations throughout the world.

Today this union of states holds the fortunes of an entire planet in its hands. To be sure, its immense power and cultural influence invokes jealously, resentment and, in not a few cases, hatred in some quarters of the world. But after almost a quarter of a millennium, it continues to inspire countless millions of people of all races, nationalities and creeds. It remains the world’s indispensable nation. Happy Birthday to the United States of America.

The Unbridgeable Chasm

19 Monday Jun 2023

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Woodrow Wilson, whose ascent to the American presidency marked the advent of the managerial class.

This column speaks volumes about the deep and increasingly unbridgeable chasm that characterizes cultural and political life in the United States, one that pits our ruling class (i.e., the managerial elite that presumes to run things) against ordinary Americans who chafe under their rule.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, his presence only has served to expose the deep chasm between the ruling class and ordinary Americans.

To be sure, a number of astute political observers – mostly journalists and columnists but even a few academics – have been warning about the rise of the managerial class for the past century, certainly since the advent of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.

Many perceived even that far back how the Hegelian mindset of these reformers, in the course of enhancing the efficiency of centralized government, would erode the sinews of constitutional governance, particularly as this historically was expressed by Madisonian federalism. Indeed, that, in fact, was one of the expressed intentions of these American Hegelians: to replace this quaint anachronism with a higher standard of governance, which involved governance by a highly educated, credentialed and, consequently, far more enlightened class.

What I find fascinating is how long this elite-imposed social order has soldiered on despite the misgivings of millions of Americans, including the 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower, who devoted much of his presidential farewell address to warn American about its potential harm this class could cause to American liberty, particularly in the singular conditions prosecuting the Cold War in the face of the Soviet menace.

To be sure – and Eisenhower, the former Allied Supreme Commander would be the first to acknowledge this – it’s central coordinating competencies carried the country through World Wars I and II as well as the Cold War. Even so, over the course of time, this imperium has been subject to a measure of second guessing, particularly at the end of the Cold War, as this managerial class arrogated to itself the task of imposing a post-Soviet global economic order which, among other things, required the diminution American manufacturing base to accommodate industrialization in other countries.

This has had the effect, certainly within the last 30 years, of rekindling the spirit of what could be broadly characterized as the Old Right political vision, the older version of American liberalism that viewed the role of the federal government simply as one focused on preserving American national sovereignty and economic prosperity, not on imposing a global imperium.

Meanwhile, the managerial class doubled down on its efforts to build a post-Cold War global order, increasingly more inclined to employ U.S. military resources and disformation and, following the 9/11 attacks, even prescibed forms of torture against presumed captive terrorists. This was augmented by other efforts to “protect the homeland” against both foreign and domestic threats, which have prompted many within this class to call for the circumvention of constitutional rights that previously regarded as sacrosanct.

To paraphrase the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, we are are now engaged in a cold civil war testing which side, conceived in widely disparate views of liberty and governance, ultimately will prevail.

Until recently, I reluctantly would have placed my bets on the managerial class. Within the last couple of years, though, several disruptions, a few entirely unexpected, have led me to wonder if ordinary Americans finally have marshaled a new resolve – the necessary pluck – to oppose this ruling class.

The most heartening development of all was Elon Musk’s acquiring and transferring Twitter into a major medium of free discourse. One occasionally is struck by the impression that this application not only is marshaling and focusing pervasive and implacable national discontent in this the United States but also is helping growing numbers of Twitter users to connect the dots and to cultivate an increasingly refined understanding of the manifold shortcomings of the managerial class, particularly its sense of entitlement, its sweeping corruption and its enduring disdain for ordinary Americans.

A Masterful Observer of the Post-Soviet Russian Legacy and American Future.

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Conservatism, Devolution, Imperial Decline, secession, The Passing Scene

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Dima Vorobiev

Within the past couple of years I have become an avid Quora follower of the former Moscow State University-educated Soviet propaganda apparatchik Dima Vorobiev.

Granted, Vorobiev is no red-state conservative populist – far from it – but he does serve up candid views of the late Soviet Union, his part in it, and, even more fascinating, how this legacy continues to play out in post-Soviet Russia and throughout the world.

I found this Quora response especially interesting: How Russia and American views of freedom played out within their respective historical and cultural contexts – and despite both civilizations being essentially blessed with a large, relatively unsettled frontiers into which oppressed individuals could flee exploitation or outright tyranny. As things turned out in Russia, tyranny acquired the means of extending its reach deep into its vast eastern frontier, and, consequently, advancement in Russia historically been defined as the success one has in building literal walls to fend off predators.

Yet, it seems that we in the United States increasingly are cultivating similar practices – but why is that all that surprising given that our elites are now in the practice of staying in power by sowing discord among all the other classes, including even assigning a kind of Kulak classification to the beleaguered white American working class?

They do all of this with the assurance that they can retreat to walled enclaves high in the hills and mountaintops of major U.S. cities and with the full assurance that these walls will be augmented by a formidable array of cutting-edge technologies of robots, drones, sensors and other sophisticated gadgets.

This leads many of us to wonder: How much longer before class aspirations in this country come to resemble those in Russia – when a functional civic society no longer is associated with American success and destiny, when unscalable walls become the chief measure of high status?

Prophetic?

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Devolution, Federalism, Imperial Decline, secession, U.S. Politics

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From my Facebook vault from 2016 – true, though, sadly. I ended a very long friendship with someone because he invariably resorted to cursing, finger pointing and charges of racism whenever I stressed that the social and political cleavages in this country were dragging us closer and closer to an impasse that ultimately could lead to a national breakup.

Five years since this post the possibility strikes me as even more likely and even prominent intellectuals on both sides of the great divide are now weighing in on this troubling trend.

Somethings I fall into the temptation of regarding myself as a bit of an amateur political prophet, though I make it a point to dispel any sort of grandiose thinking and self-regard as a matter of principle.

A Ruling Class of Ciphers, Flim-Flam Artists and Pinheads

14 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Imperial Decline, Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene

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This time of year I am invariably reminded of The Wizard of Oz.

You see, during my childhood, we – at least, before the advent of cable, Betamax and VHS – were afforded only a handful of TV viewing options: CBS-, NBC- and ABC-affiliated local TV stations. Consequently, we were assured of viewing favorite programs – “The Charley Brown Christmas Special,” “Frosty, the Snowman,” and, most significant of all, “The Wizard of Oz” – only once a year.

My parents invariably recalled, far into my adulthood, how I would cry at the end of the “Wizard of Oz,” knowing that a full year would pass before I could view it again. And I can still remember the glee I would feel whenever I spotted one of the early November issues of “TV Guide,” the cover of which typically carried a screen shot from the movie as a teaser for the upcoming broadcast, which invariably occurred on the Sunday evening following Thanksgiving.

Still, despite my sheer fascination with this 1939 classic, I invariably found the last few minutes of the film, when Dorothy and her fellow travelers discover the real nature of Oz, well, rather disappointing and even a bit jarring.

We are exposed all through the film to an entity who seems magical, omnipotent, even godlike, in some respects, only to discover that he was a flim-flam artist from the American Midwest who had employed his wiles and verbal acuity to deceive an entire kingdom.

I was reminded of this childhood reaction reading Victor Davis Hanson’s latest piece on what amounts to the unmasking of the leftist elite class, which once struck millions of ordinary Americans not too long ago as standing at the cusp history – a talented vanguard of this nation’s elite-educated best and brightest who would finally consummate in St. Barack’s call for a fundamental transformation of what they regard as a flawed American Experiment.

As Hanson argues so brilliantly, we now have seen the left for what it is: a relatively small legion of weak, immoral, self-serving, sniveling ciphers – not talented or principled people at all, merely mediocre, grasping people not that much different than the mythical Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, who shortened his name to OZ after it occurred to him that the first letters of his names spelled out “O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.”

Pinhead, after all, is a self-defeating term for a flim-flam artist with lofty aspirations.

But it’s a term that fits our benighted ruling class pretty well.

Ever-Vibrant Revolutionary Energy

16 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in American History, Imperial Decline, Patriotism, The Passing Scene

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I have always been one of those really odd misfits: a partisan Southerner who has always harbored a profound admiration for the firebrands of what is now known as “the Old Right,” those almost exclusively Midwestern and Western political leaders, many of whom identified with Progressivism, who hewed closely to the principles outlined in George Washington’s Farewell Address.

They regarded the United States as an undertaking not only conceived in liberty grounded in the principles of the 18th century Enlightenment but also one sworn to oppose intervention and imperialism at every turn.

America, after all, was the outgrowth of a coalition of sovereign States, former colonies, that had broken free of the most powerful and extended empire in history. It was emerging even in Washington’s presidency as one of the most singular nations in history, one that soon would be regarded as history’s most successful post-colonial enterprise.

Why would these former colonials want to squander it all by building an empire of their own? That essentially was Washington’s reasoning as well as that the Old Right tradition that was most prominent in the years between the two world wars.

I was discussing a similar topic earlier this week with a relative. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address not only is significant for what it warned about but also how it characterized the United States and how Americans historically have regarded themselves: as a people for whom the task of empire-building not only was an entirely new and alien concept but also inimical to Ameican experience and identity.

That is why I read with great interest this article about the protests that spontaneously broke out among American troops in every theater of operation in the months following World War II.

If there is one thing that I have learned through my long reading of history it’s that old habits really do die hard. A burst of revolutionary idealism was released in 1776 and it has never dissipated. And even the Old Right, which many people had assumed had exited the American political arena after the Pearl Harbor attack, has staged a remarkable comeback, certainly within the last 30 years since the Pat Buchanan presidential insurgency.

Passing a Forgotten Milestone

07 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Geo-Politics, Imperial Decline, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics

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The fall of the Berlin Wall, Nov. 9, 1989.

It is remarkable to think that in two days this seminal world event – the fall of the Berlin Wall marking the collapse of Soviet communism, arguably the greatest event of the last half of the 20th century – will have occurred 32 years ago, though it is now significantly forgotten.

Even more remarkable to me is the fact that a rising generation of Americans led by intellectual nonentities such as Ocasio-Cortez now embrace socialism with opeb arms, despite its being seemingly consigned to the ash bin of history three decades ago.

I recall that day so very long ago as it it were yesterday: As a Cooperative Extension professional I was returning from a visit to South Alabama and stopped off in Montgomery to visit my favorite used bookstore.

NPR was being broadcast on on the store’s sound system. There was talk of some opening of the Berlin Wall, though likely one that would not occur for several weeks. After purchasing a couple of books, I jumped into my little red Nissan truck and sped north up Interstate 85. When I entered the living room my wife was glued to the TV as ecstatic East and West Berliners danced arm in arm atop the Berlin Wall. My jaw dropped. It is a memory I will take to my grave.

Within a year or so of that event, one who emerged as one of the decades most fashionable and preeminent thinkers of the 1990’s, a neoconservative policy wonk named Francis Fukayama, even went to far to argue that the fall of Eastern European socialism served as a confirmation of Hegel’s dialectic – that supple, pro-market liberal democracy represented the end of history, the working out of humanity’s historical contradictions.

To many around the world, the United States, most notably its costly two-generational struggle against global communism, seemed entirely vindicated.

Thirty-plus years later, all this headiness seems so dated. And even more remarkable to me is how American life has come in many respects to closely resemble facets of the old Soviet Union and its Eastern European straps, replete with a nomenklatura that not only brazenly enriches itself but also its sons and daughters – one that even calls out a class of despised Kukaks (i.e., working class whites) as the direst threat to enlightened thought and and what our rulers now blandly describe as “our democratic values.”

In true Soviet fashion, dissidents not only are spied on but even consigned to prisons for months without being served habeas corpus, while a compliant media, on the elites’ behalf, sweep all of this incipient tolitarianism under the rug. And amidst all of this is a disenfranched population of tens of millions of ordinary, fed-up, put-upon people who, much like the Soviet masses decades ago, invent mordant jokes not only about the corruption of their ruling class but also how all of this is covered over by Legacy Media pixie dust

Millions yearn for the day when these corrupt nabobs finally will be served their long-awaited comeuppance – and, quite frankly, why shouldn’t they?

Welcome to #LateAmerika.