Tag Archives: American Empire

American Dumpster-Fire Culture

31 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in American Federalism, Devolution, Federalism, secession, The Passing Scene

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Quite frankly, David Brooks’ recent column on the ways in which American culture appears to be coming apart is why I now identify exclusively as a Southerner and not as an American.

The South, despite its historical baggage, always has incorporated a sense of propriety, connectedness and reciprocity in its culture – that goes for black and white Southerners alike.

Much of what we are dealing with now is bound up in the pathologies of an increasingly deracinated American national culture, which really could be likened to a dumpster fire.

To those, such as the Biden regime and the rest of the left who would characterize such talk as sedition, I readily concede that the South has secured a measure of economic and material progress through its unity with a larger polity – certainly in the aftermath of World War II. And I am thankful for the progress black Southerners have made in the last 50 years, and I readily acknowledge that this could not have been achieved but for landmark civil rights legislation.

On the other hand, I think that many Southerners are entirely unaware of the extent to which Southern history resembles Irish history in many ways – at least, in the way that the Irish have long regarded their association with Britain and how the region long functioned as a kind of economic extraction zone. Moreover, I do resent deeply how we continue to be regarded as the national foils – how everything that is f*cked up naturally has to be Southern. Moreover, I resent the extent to which the South, derided as the problem child of the American Experiment, continues to supply a disproportionate share of the manpower to advance the regime’s foreign policy, much of which, as the debacle in Ukraine so richly illustrates, is entirely ill-conceived and inimical to the interests of rank-and-fill Southerners and other red state citizens.

Someone on a conservative forum to which I belong, apparently quoting someone else, said that the North was responsible for saving the Union in the 19th century, just as the South will be in the 21st. There are many ways to read this. I think that the brilliant classicist and commentator Victor Davis Hanson recently expressed the issue brilliantly. In a recent column he argued that the things that have historically defined America – the commitment to the rule of law, colorblindedness in the application of law and a genuine openness to debate and discourse is increasingly being expressed in the South as opposed to the purportedly more sophisticated cultural enclaves of the Northeast and West Coasts.

My argument for the past 25 or so years has been that the Union serve us only to the degree that it secures our freedoms and material prosperity while insulating us against the encroachment of an all-powerful state. As far as I am concerned the apparatus that functions in D.C. no longer is a government in any real sense but rather a regime. One prime example of this regime’s dysfunction: It insists on preserving the borders of a second world country (i.e., Ukraine) on the periphery of Eastern Europe, though it can’t even summon the will to preserve one of the most basis functions of sovereignty, which is preserving the integrity of U.S. borders.

And now, increasingly, the left and its operatives in the bureaucracy and the major institutions are working to silence any form of dissent. Call me paranoid and antigovement, but this seems as plain to me and millions of other people as the keyboard on which I am typing this response.

In many respects the pathologies of American culture are utterly inimical to to Southern culture as it historically has been understood. Yet, day by day, week by week, this dumpster-fire national culture is infecting to one degree or another the entire country, and, frankly, I don’t want to see my culture brought down by these pathologies.

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?

That “S” Word Again

07 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in secession, The Passing Scene

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The “s” word increasingly is becoming more bandied about in public discourse – and why shouldn’t it? Yes, we really do have to consider several geopolitical threats, notably China, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to growing numbers of American that one size simply doesn’t fit all.

The best alternative would be what some have proposed in Britain to stave off Scottish and conceivably even Welsh secession: the transformation of Britain into a rather loose federation sovereign states, with the central government in Westminster assigned a few all-union responsibilities. It may be that we will undergo a similar debate in this country as the national fabric becomes more frayed.

Flummoxed by Secessionism

20 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, secession

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President Ronald Reagan at his inauguration in January, 1981. Shortly thereafter he made an impassioned call for returning to federalism but faced opposition even from GOP governors.

To repeat a phrase that I have employed several times in this forum, the American Empire simply is too big to succeed.

Indeed it is the reason why an awareness of the increasing likelihood of secession is becoming the proverbial elephant in the living room, certainly among the growing numbers of us ordinary Americans in the red heartland who perceive what our malignant ruling class ultimately has in store for us.

Yet, I have been intrigued by how mainstream conservative commentators, recently Podcaster Dan Bonjino, have been absolutely flummoxed by this emerging  phenomenon. It undoubtedly is as readily evident to them that secessionist sentiment is spreading, yet they hold steadfastly to the same hidebound argument that a return to federal principles will resolve all of this.

Notions of American exceptionalism inevitably will die hard, but then, conservatism in America is deeply rooted in this mindset. And given that so much of what passes for conservatism on this side of the Atlantic is rooted in propositional nationhood, this really isn’t all that surprising.

Interestingly, conservatives seem to have forgotten that previous attempts to restore old-time federalism have proven futile. Incoming President Reagan, way back in 1981, undertook a concerted effort to return to bona federalism, offering to return welfare policy back to the states. Virtually all the governors balked, stressing that  their states lacked the revenue base to support a safety net that dates all the way back to the New Deal and that people, blue and red alike, expect as matter of course.

That is why I am convinced that the political dynamics in this country ultimately will necessitate a secessionist movement that ultimately takes on regionalist rather than state unilateral action, as the late diplomat and political thinker George F. Kennan portended in his own writings.

We will likely see states banding into regional compacts, forming what could be described as incipient federations. These conflicts ultimately will prove essential to preserving some facet of the social safety net to which virtually every American has grown accustomed over the past century.

Whatever the case, to borrow a line from the late Betty Davis, “Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

What Follows the American Empire?

16 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Imperial Decline, U.S. Politics

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It is intriguing and, quite frankly,  heartening, that observers on both ends of the political spectrum perceive that the American Empire is in headlong decline and that something new invariably must  follow, whether this occurs years or a few decades from now.

For me, this decline became increasingly evident more than a decade ago when California governors, beginning with moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, began characterizing the Golden state as a nation within a nation, possessing all the accoutrements of nationhood, including one of the world’s ten largest economies.

Now such affirmations almost seem routine. Legislators in the nation’s second largest state, Texas, are even considering putting a secession initiative on the state ballot – an effort that has earned the endorsement of the Lone Star State’s prominent GOP leaders and that even has piqued the interest of GOP leaders in other states.

Granted, formal secession from the American Empire is decried by elites, particularly when these calls eminate from red states. But the rhetorical cat is out of the bag. Growing numbers of pundits on both ends of the political spectrum no longer are overlooking the obvious: the American Empire is in terminal decline, much like its erstwhile Soviet nemesis some three decades ago.

As this article in The Nation attests, the telltale signs of decline and collapse are readily perceptible. Yes, there’s the inevitable leftist pablum through which the reader must wade to encounter some truly interesting nuggets, notably mention of the challenges of constructing a new civilization from the imperial rubble.

As many of us on the right and even a few on left see it, there is only one basis on which this civilizational reconstruction can occur: It must begin with smaller political entities rather than the oversized, lumbering, bureaucrarized white elephant we’re contending with now.

Imperial Demise

08 Monday Feb 2021

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

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Photo: Courtesy of By Tyler Merbler from USA, Wikimedia Commons

One of the greatest intellectual odysseys of my lifetime was reading most of the so-called “prophets of the Old Right,” who, in the years leading up to the Second World War, offered a searing critique of American interventionist intentions and all the risks to constitutional liberty that these entailed. (Incidentally, one of the best surveys of this all but forgotten circle of talented men is the late Justin Raimondo’s “Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the American Conservative Movement,” written roughly a quarter century ago and still, fortunately, available in electronic form.)

As this splendid column, which appeared recently in antiwar.com, observes, the American Republic, at least, key elements of it, always was predisposed toward imperial ambitions, though these aspirations, thankfully, have have always garnered substantial opposition, which seems to have reached a fever pitch as we near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.

Honestly, given the last twenty years of U.S. geostrategic setback, is it any wonder that this union finds itself in its currently politically and economically depleted state? For that matter, is it any wonder that secessionist sentiment is on the rise in the country’s largest blue state (California) as well as red state (Texas)?

There are so many ways that 21st century America resembles the declining imperialist powers of the past, not only in the way it deals with its client states but also the way it administers domestic policy.

As self-described “radical-centrist” political commentator Michael Lind has argued, this nation’s northeastern mercantilist class, which harbored imperialist aspirations from the very beginning, has regarded most of the rest of the country as an economic outsourcing zone since this union’s inception. And today these elites retain their increasingly tenuous grasp on power by stoking tribal animosities of ordinary citizens, much as the British elites were accused of exacerbating religious division in 19th century Ireland to stave off Irish secessionist sentiment.

Meanwhile, the decline in the vast American heartland is painfully evident. For the past five years, I’ve seen it firsthand as I’ve returned to my native corner of northwest Alabama to care for ailing parents and then to close our their estate following their passing. Recently, my brother, preparing our parents’ home for sale, discussed the state of the current economy with a local man who was undertaking pest treatment on the house. He expressed surprise that neither of us had been confronted with meth addicts who typically occupy vacant homes, even in fairly upscale middle-class homes.

For now and despite the growing chorus of discontent, the empire lumbers along, but for how long? The demonstration that ultimatley resulted in temporary occupation of the U.S. Capitol,which our oligarchic class and its agit/prop predictably have portrayed as full-scale insurrection comparable to the 9/11 attacks, likely serve only as a portent of what is to come. But for now, the very classes denigrated as deplorable and irredeemable by our Mandarin class and characterized and surveilled by our national security apparatus as budding insurrectionists, in come cases, even enthusiastically, supply a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s enlisted ranks. And this raises the question: In this increasingly class-ridden juncture in history, how long will these decent young men and women continue to play along with this charade?

This remains an open question.

An Open Letter to Sen. John McCain

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Conservatism, Federalism, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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John-McCain

Senator John McCain

I know that the world is complicated, Mr. McCain, and I know that the rest of the world has benefited immensely from American largesse.  And, yes, I know that your generation is deeply invested in the post-war American global legacy – small wonder why you would interpret the anger expressed last November as a harbinger of “half-baked, spurious nationalism.”

But we are 20-plus trillion dollars in debt. Our imperial burden is disproportionately imposed on the most immiserated segment of American society: the working class. And our government has come to resemble that of every other bloated, corrupt empire in world history – the very outcome our Founding Fathers took pains to avoid almost a quarter of a millennium ago.

Yet, there are disadvantages that come with being a global behemoth. A generation or so ago, I had the great privilege of reading most of the writings associated the noninterventionist Old Right. Virtually all of these Old Right sages offered trenchant observations of the  consequences that would follow from America’s spreading its tentacles throughout world as the self-anointed global hegemon.  Indeed, much of what they wrote proved to be prophetic. Many among the New Left dusted off those books and re-read them in the late 1960’s to marshal an effective critique of the American war in Vietnam.

None other than Dwight Eisenhower, one of the principal architects of American globalism, warned of the attendant risks associated with the military-industrial complex. The national security complex that has grown out of the Cold War strikes me as especially unnerving , especially now that there appears to be ample evidence that it increasingly is being used by the political class to monitor and even to silence U.S. citizens.  Equally alarming, this apparatus has apparently, if not inevitably, developed its own interests, some of which appear to run counter to traditional American views on the divisions and limitation of power.

Before I close, I’ll return briefly to Dwight Eisenhower. The second and last volume of his presidential memoirs deals with the wide range of international visits he undertook at the conclusion of his term. The turnout among common people in many of these post-colonial, developing countries was quite astonishing – a million, as I recall, during one visit. Even Eisenhower, an old hand at diplomacy, expressed surprise, if not astonishment, at the levels of enthusiasm he encountered. But should he have been surprised? At the time, America represented the most successful former colonial country in history. Even as the struggle with communism escalated, the United States still enjoyed a lingering reputation of a constitutional republic that not only was anti-colonial but also opposed to imperialism. Recall that our behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts played a significant role in wrenching India free of the British Empire.

Yes, there have been positive achievements associated with Pax Americana – I’ll not deny that – but we have paid a price, – an egregiously heavy price. And considering that noninterventionism and anti-imperialism have been long and revered intellectual traditions, I do consider it a grave injustice that our political class express shock and outrage that millions of Americans are asking probing questions about the legacy of the American globalist undertaking.

I’m not so much affirming Trump as I am the anger and frustration of much of the American working class.  Many of the divisions in this country are inextricably bound up with how one defines nationhood. Many of our Founding Fathers viewed the American nation as an Enlightenment experiment, but all of them to a man conceived the United States as a republic focused first and foremost on its national and economic interests. That is the crux of the American Experiment, and working and middle-class Americans deserve more than its being whittled away through a series of executive orders and agreements carrying, in many cases, the force of treaties.

To express it another way, Mr. McCain, the vast majority of working-class and middle-class Americans still view the American Experiment within the traditional nation-state terms – as a commonwealth. Many of them are weary of being lectured as provincials and even crypto-racists for holding that the nation-state remains the greatest guarantor of their liberties and economic well-being.