As Steve McQueen once said, “You’ve never played the game until you’ve played for more than you can afford to lose.”
Maybe it’s time to re-think the term “civil war” in light of current events. Abraham Lincoln fought to preserve the Union. And for most of that rest of the century the two sides used different names, “War of the Rebellion” in the North, and “War Between the States” in the South. But while we want to preserve the Union, we don’t want to preserve most of the current government we’ve watched evolve for the past 25 years, which incidentally, also represents a form of slavery. And we certainly don’t want to preserve what clearly has evolved into an inter-marrying government that seems to want to anoint itself as hereditary and royal. Besides, there’s scarcely any state has hasn’t at least 25%-to-40% of its citizens who aren’t rooting for the other side. Red or Blue.
It looked like this in 2016.
And apparently it looked even more red in 2020, which is why they locked the vote down at midnight. State by state, it would have looked like this, from an election map the Germans got to see before that shutdown.
We’d actually gained ground over 2016.
Think of our 1776 Revolution, when neighbors, the friend sitting with you at the tavern, the merchant down the street, the farmer down the lane, all had to make a choice. It’s a gut-wrenching thing to have to sit down and choose between deeply held beliefs on the one hand and friends, public station, and financial interests on the other.
So, are they revolting against us, or are we revolting against them? As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what your definition of “revolt” is.
So I want to put you in mind of the choices those men and women had to make back in 1776. Try to recall that part of the Declaration of Independence almost no one reads, the much longer portion after the Preamble, where Thomas Jefferson laid out a bill of particulars, an indictment, against King George. Jefferson was calling down the thunder on the British Crown for a war they had actually begun a year earlier at Lexington and Concord, and had lathered and primed for several years earlier.
At Thomas Paine’s nudging with the book he wrote, which their constituents all read, and then at their insistence, the Continental Congress had to give the Revolution a legal license.
That’s where we are now…all over again, for in like manner, millions of Americans, ordinary citizens, have already made an irrevocable choice, just like those men at Bunker Hill. I’ve seen them almost every day, since 2010, just pawing at the ground, itching to see something they can join. What those American rebels have been waiting for are leaders to step forward, and scribes to set it all down, so as to give them a keener direction and form to what they are doing. They need leadership, and some sense of what they can do locally and regionally.
No one yet seems to know what shape this Rebellion will take, but we know it has to be carried out from the bottom up…in part, just to prove to God we deserve it.
You see, this “thunder” is like a rolling peal, not a sudden clap which goes away as quickly as it got here. It’s been “rolling” since 2010, twelve years, come November.
Let’s just hope this isn’t wishful thinking, for the other side also knows our hopes, and has their own plans to deny us. Let’s hope they’re thinking inside their box, too, for theirs is a non-existent dystopian view of reality wrapped up, like a taco, in an indigestible crust of vanity, privilege, and power-mad indifference. Nature never allows these to survive for very long, but it does not deny them the power to destroy as it dies. Sometimes, those deaths are slow and lingering.
Just don’t forget, whatever this is, politics-gone-bad, socialism, totalitarianism, it cannot be cured by a single election, or even a string of them, for we also know the enemies of liberty in this country have been at work in extra-legal ways for years, and will continue to do so, no matter who runs Congress, the state house, or sits in the White House. Today they arrogantly move and behave as if there is nothing we can do to stop them. They feel they are holding all the aces. They have hundreds of millions of dollars and are wiling to spend them. And while we have several millions less, we seem less willing to invest it…and worse, don’t seem to know how, because we can’t really agree on the size, scope, or seriousness of the threat.
Trust me, those rebels who have already declared themselves, and hit the streets, they know.
I belong to a loose group of analysts who see this fight progressing in a similar way to 1776, at least for a few months. There may be a quickening, which we are not prepared to do anything about right now, I’m afraid. And that is also why I am talking to you here.
When there’s a fight, even in a saloon, the natural inclination is for most people to hold their counsel quietly and move off to the side to see how the more vocal holders of those positions fare, slugging it out. That seems to be the conventional wisdom. Hedging their best, they just wait to see who would win, so they could sidle up to the winner and say “I was always in there pulling for you, George.”
Only which George?
Betting parlors in London were laying 14 to 1 on King George.
In that first civil war, back in 1776, most of the people indeed did sidle off to the side, and wait to see who would win. Almost half, in fact. As you might guess, this sentiment was more prevalent in the north and larger cities, like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, but also in southern ports like Norfolk, Savannah and Charleston.
Why? You guessed it, working for the King…called “state jobs” these days…was good business, especially in those cities. Probably no more than a third of the people openly declared for Rebellion, mostly small farmers and small business, the Sam Adamses (my personal hero) and Ben Franklin, and, while only about 20% sided with the King, most of them had a vested financial interest in seeing him stay in power. But the Tories didn’t have to enlist to fight. The King sent his own armies, many of them hired, while the rebels had to raise an army from their 35%, and couldn’t tax a soul to buy rifles or cannons or uniforms.
As savvy businessmen, you know you never gamble with your sentiments. As a Kentucky Wildcat football fan, I learned that rule early. You keep your mouth and your wallet closed.
And just like today, it was largely a class issue. The colonies had a rich merchant class, but an even older landed gentry, a true aristocracy alongside the many small free farmers. A couple even had “Sir” in the front of their names. People forget that many of the southern delegates to Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were from this landed aristocracy, and all…all…were roundly chastised, then denounced, then expelled by other members of their class for having taken the side of the common man. Thomas Jefferson, being Virginia aristocracy, was especially berated for this “betrayal of his class”.
The second point is a question; Just when does an economy cease being an economy?
In my view that occurs when the economy no longer operates according to economic principles, but rather political ones. To date, Adam Smith still puts this into words best. And European mercantilism wasn’t much better to the Smith’s free market ideas about capitalism than was Karl Marx’s.
Now in truth, every aspect of our economy has operated under some sort of political umbrella…some free market purists would even call it a “cloud”…especially since the days of FDR. But leafing through history it’s easy to see that an economy is no longer free when it only shows good numbers when the politicians want it to show good numbers. If you knew some old timers who recalled the Great Depression, most everyone of them will tell you that FDR saved them, even though the unemployment rate hovered around 17% from 1933, when he took office, to 1939, when they stopped keeping records. (And then the War.) It was an illusion of sorts. You can cook the books, or you can simply have the media say the sky is blue when it isn’t, or it looks like rain, when it isn’t…and people will respond by either believing you or not believing you. They believed FDR, in part because he sounded kindly and gentle on the radio, but also in part because (and there is some history to back this up) his administration intentionally made things worse so that the people would accept almost any policy by the government that would bring back a sense of normalcy.
After six years, 17% unemployment was made to seem normal. Six years is a long time. By 1939, an entire generation had moved into adulthood in that period. Do you know how many young adults in America today weren’t even alive when the Soviet Union existed, what, just 30 years ago? Add to that the number who were in diapers, or 1st Grade, or even middle school. Then you can see what just six years can do for a president with a “grand plan”. (Many think of Obama as ancient history.)
FDR’s master-planners needed several years to set into place the bureaucratic institutions they wanted, so they didn’t want any quick fixes in 1933. They had to drag it out in order to set the “bureaucracies” into stone. Making time work to their advantage is a thing our adversaries know best…a thing that we seem not to pay too much attention to anymore.
We still have many of those institutions they created in the 1930s, just as the 1913 Income Tax Amendment (16th Amendment) has grown to where taxpayers are now paying for teaching 3rd Graders how to demand a sex-change procedure. Bureaucracies have all been a cancer on our economy since. What no one has figured out is how to get rid of them.
The feudal system hovered over Europe for a thousand years for the very same reason.
My business has been learning the minds and arts of those central planners, and I learned this from the masters in the communist bloc, the old USSR. I can say with certainty that what our Left wants to achieve today is a level of control over our economic comings and goings that was undreamt of even in FDR’s day and which only a generation ago would have been viewed as criminal and treasonous. (And it points to several points of connection between Marxism and Nazism as secular-religions and a general disinterest in human lives except those in their own circles.)
For thirty five years I have preached against the cancerous effects of large bureaucracy, and have often called for an across the board reduction of 35%-50% in big business and big government. You may not agree, or think that this is even feasible. Still, I could do it with my eyes closed. I won’t argue that here. But what you must know is that on the other side of the table have been men, who for twice as many years as me, have called for a reduction of 20%-25% in the overall size of the US economy, in the private sector, and for that reduction to be stapled to a near no-growth national economic policy. Now they are moving toward a 20% reduction in the population…only not among their class.
Obviously, this is not something they want to advertise…mainly because of you (and your guns). They want to keep you, American small business standing on the sidelines…forever hoping for the economy to turn around.
I don’t wish to start a debate here, but simply ask you to go home, pull out a piece of paper and sit down and compute where you and your business or job will fit into an economy that is reduced by 25%…forever.
I can tell you tonight, as the great Nez Perce Chief Joseph said, if they have their way, “from where the sun now stands”, the economy as you knew it will never be allowed to come back. And you (we) are the last generation to even know how it worked.
My point is, those people who hold to that no-growth economic viewpoint now surround our president, and were hired by him as “czars”, circumventing the public vetting process before they took their new positions. They can wield a power no Constitution ever permitted. And on that you have to take sides.
Why I say these things now, is, as I stated earlier, the thunder is about to be called down…with you or without you.
Stay tuned.
