What is the Future of Self-Government?

Does it have one?

Several friends are discussing the future of Western Liberal Democracy: Where can it go from here? Can it survive? Did the Enlightenment carry within it the seeds of its destruction? Was Locke wrong? Is Hoppe Right? etc.

I was born in the early ‘50s to a vet and his wife and grew up with two siblings in Southern California in what will be noted as the Golden Age of America; unquestionably the golden age of that once-great state. We had good schools, above-replacement-level fertility (the two primary foundations of any successful civilization), and an accelerating national prosperity as ours was the only major nation not sweeping up the rubble of war.

In our generation, as in all prior generations throughout human history, moms stayed home to raise their families and keep an eye on the education of their children, to make their house a home for their family, with church and Sunday school, a home and vacations on a single salary.

With one exception in our neighborhood of multiple kids, playmates and schoolmates (and a neighborhood elementary school of non-unionized teachers), dads had a high school education. All the dads were vets. All raised peaceful, productive families that were happy and that thrived.

Those days are over.

The US is an accelerating train out of control and about to derail at speed; nothing can stop it.

All three branches of government refuse their job of peacefully and fairly governing the nation under the Constitution of limited federal powers - and no one cares.

We return to power the same corrupt legislators, federal and state, at a re-election rate over 98%.

We elected as president a known liar, a man so dishonest as to have ended previous campaigns due to his dishonesty, who insists on re-telling the same lies day after day. To expect honest government from a dishonest man is to expect to hold-back the tide.

Ignoring the law can have only one result: lawlessness. Our lawlessness is packaged and sold to us as “democracy,” something we never were designed to be. We are seeing the anticipated results - why the Founders strove to avoid democracy - all around us.  

Too many cry, “America is a republic, not a democracy!” failing to grasp that, while true in a strictly legal sense, America became a defacto democracy when we made the franchise universal with the 19th and then 26th Amendments. And now the left wants to enfranchise illegal aliens and minor children.

It is ignorant fantasy to see America - other than the Electoral College that is being polluted beyond redemption via corruption and (unconstitutional) open borders - as anything but a democracy today. And the College may be on its last days as the National Popular Vote compact, already agreed-to by many states, nears implementation.

If you think we live under the rule of law, explain the differences in how citizens were treated for J6 and the 2020 BLM Summer of Love.

If you think our three branches of government believe in being limited by the Constitution each member swore to defend, explain a president who refuses to “faithfully execute the law” at the border, a congress legislating sports and bathrooms, a Court taking-up marriage or abortion. None of these are within their delegated authority, within the limits of their constitutional power.

If you think we live under a constitutional government of limited powers, explain Covid mandates, spying on your cell phone, the un-answered corruption of the FISA courts, a felonious-but-excused First Son, sending money and arms to Ukraine (neither an ally nor partner to any defense treaty, with no vote by our citizens or our representatives) to say nothing of generations of undeclared - and so unconstitutional - wars, from Korea to Iraq, and every military expedition between.

Our dishonest president has decided he can activate and deploy reserve and regular forces to Europe in support of the war he instigated on Ukraine with his comment that only a truly ignorant or corrupt leader could make, “It's one thing if it's [Russia vs Ukraine] a minor incursion.” How many millions of Ukrainians and Russians have been and will be killed or displaced by Biden’s appallingly thoughtless - as in no thinking involved - remark, a remark of enormous ignorance, hubris and import? No one knows. Worse, no one cares.

Do you know how The Great War began, how it kicked-off the bloodiest century in human existence? Major powers began mobilizing their forces; once they began, they couldn’t stop. And now Joe.

If you think we don’t live in an autocratic empire, explain our military being stationed in 189 countries around the world and invading - or threatening to - any who disagree with us or who openly discuss financial systems not based on the US dollar we demand to inflate, and have shown willingness, even eagerness, to confiscate if another nation acts in a way our corrupt leadership doesn’t like.

The politicians don’t care as they’re just in it for the power & money. The voters don’t care as long as they get their bread & circuses.

We have put the few over the many, catered to (and destroyed any free future of) the dumbest in pursuit of their votes while trashing those who built Western Civilization and the modern world. We pretend that those who could not envision - and so could not grasp the intricacy of - modernity and its increasingly-complex systems - can sustain that modernity. One need only look at South Africa to see this is a fool’s errand. Yet we continue.

Look at the anti-national dictatorship of the EU and tell me I’m wrong, the only other example of a large representative government designed to be a semi-representative autocracy, becoming dictatorial, yet aside from a vanishingly few complainants, accepted by the people. Those nations that voted against the EU treaty - got it anyway; those whose economies function with a supra-national currency were not allowed to vote on that surrender of sovereignty. Those who voted on the euro, rejected it.

Across the West, governments buy the votes of those who feel that implementing empathy and turning up the heat on the pot just a little bit “to help that poor xxx,” is both good and necessary. They will be the most-surprised and the most-vulnerable when the pot boils over.

I’m not at all convinced it can get better before it gets worse. I will not be surprised if the introduction of the CBDC is the catalyst for revolt; if it is not, we are over and it’s time to move to Hungary or the Nordics or, frankly, Russia.

Russia is the only nation fighting the GAE & WEF; I have no idea where Vlad goes from here but it may well be a better place to be than inside the fast-collapsing GAE and every global experiment in self-government. Russia is more thuggish than we today, but give us time - look at the direction of the NatSec State, the refusal of the political establishment to rein it in, and tell me we are not doing our damndest to best any country on earth in thuggishness and corruption.

The media calls Hungary authoritarian - and does so with the same straight face with which they supported Covid house arrests and internment camps. The same straight face demanding termination of bodily autonomy for an unproven – ultimately lethal – injection sold as a med to prevent infection or transmission when it was, in fact, tested for neither. The same straight face they used when they shredded the entire Bill of Rights, invaded Iraq for no reason at all, and demand that we bend over every year for trillion-dollar deficits to buy votes, creating debt for which our children unto the final generation will be taxed. Talk about “taxation without representation.”

We already have bested all others in debt. Our ruling class has eschewed policy to buy votes with borrowed money. Yet no one is addressing what happens to a great power built not on policy, but on debt, when no one buys their debt anymore.

We are governed on money borrowed from foreigners that we then inflate-away, destroying their investment in America and the dollar… yet we expect the continuation of a cycle ruinous to those investors as the BRICS are discussing a new, non-fiat currency to replace the dollar and over 20 countries are petitioning to join the BRICS.  

What happens to a nation governed by borrowed money when the borrowers cease their loans? Collapse.

As I often note, the only thing the American Experiment has proved is that self-government cannot work. We’ve tried it across multiple centuries, through internal war, external war, judicial overreach, rejecting the Law of the Land, through periods of intellectual stagnation and intellectual advances, through periods of limited, zero, and unlimited immigration.

Self-government died with Progressivism, the political philosophy that the voters are too stupid to govern themselves so must be led by experts. It is axiomatic that this is the antithesis of a democratic republic, but the people have been voting for it for a century. There’s a name for this: “Suicide.”

The politicians all have sold out the country with debt to buy power and votes. Joe is just the most obvious & egregious. And because of his position, the most dangerous.

Joe Biden is a traitor, has been for years. Why does anyone think he took home classified docs to which he had no legitimate access other than to sell their contents? And then left them all over the place because he doesn’t care about America, is too dumb to know they might be problematic, and has been so successful as a traitor, liar and cheat for so long that he knew nothing would happen to him.

And nothing has.

He is, always has been and always will be a dumb, dishonest, thoroughly corrupt man. That millions voted for him only proves my main point: people are too vain, too self-interested, too short-sighted and too willing to destroy others for their own gain, for self-government to succeed in a modern industrial or post-industrial world.

Self-government may have been great in a Jeffersonian agrarian world of a very limited franchise of educated men without major challenges other than Neolithic enemies they killed to expand and progress, and the weather, in a new nation drastically separated by an ocean from a great empire lacking the will to crush them due to other responsibilities around their empire and the cost of doing so.

It cannot work today.

The only questions are:

1. What comes next when America completes its accelerating failure and fall?

2. Do we assist that fall… or stand-aside and watch?

Because nothing is going to stop it.