{"id":98753,"date":"2023-12-23T08:41:56","date_gmt":"2023-12-23T14:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98753"},"modified":"2023-12-23T08:41:56","modified_gmt":"2023-12-23T14:41:56","slug":"98753","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98753","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Civilizational Jenga<\/a>
\nBit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins<\/em><\/p>\n

Politics makes me sad sometimes.<\/p>\n

Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.\u00a0 Not even because politicians are corrupt.\u00a0 Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate.<\/p>\n

And it doesn\u2019t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds.\u00a0 Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human.\u00a0 (Though recent history is such that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)<\/p>\n

Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh.\u00a0 But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.<\/p>\n

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing.\u00a0 One by one, they\u2019re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse.\u00a0 They\u2019re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.<\/p>\n

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved \u2013 let\u2019s call them \u201cthe morons\u201d for convenience\u2019s sake \u2013 are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I\u2019m increasingly convinced that there\u2019s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it\u2019s doing, and is fine with it.<\/p>\n

Roger Kimball gets at it in a\u00a0recent piece:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the same old trick,\u201d Trump said when he got the news that the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to keep him off the primary ballot for the 2024 presidential election.<\/em><\/p>\n

Oops. Sorry. I got my papers mixed up. That was actually Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he got the news that some Southern states had voted to keep him off the ballot. Eventually 10 states did so.<\/em><\/p>\n

So here we are again. It\u2019s a bit like that Army Major in the Vietnam war who explained that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Just so, the virtuous people of Colorado have decided that in order to save democracy they need to destroy it.<\/em><\/p>\n

In fact, what they have just voted to preserve is not democracy but \u201cOur Democracy\u2122.\u201d Here\u2019s the difference. In a democracy, people get to vote for the candidate they prefer. In \u201cOur Democracy\u2122,\u201d only approved candidates get to compete.<\/em><\/p>\n

Donald Trump is the opposite of an approved candidate. The untrammeled hermeneutical ingenuity of the American legal profession had be let loose against Trump. As I write, he faces huge legal battle in four states. . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is. He is an enemy, not of the state, exactly, but of the state of mind that constitutes \u201cOur Democracy\u2122.\u201d When he unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the beautiful people, beginning with his opponent Hillary Clinton, couldn\u2019t believe it. They denounced the election as fraudulent. \u201cOur Democracy\u2122,\u201d you see,\u00a0 means \u201crule by Democrats.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Now they are warning that, should Trump be reelected, he would be a \u201cdictator,\u201d a new Hitler, etc. He would weaponise the Department of Justice against his enemies, they claim, and use the FBI to harass his opponents. Stay tuned for the seminar on what the Freudians call \u201cprojection\u201d: it meets this afternoon in a democratic redoubt near you.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a more civilized version of America \u2013 one that existed just a few decades ago \u2013 the notion of waging this sort of unrestricted lawfare against a leading presidential candidate, much less a former president \u2013 would have been considered ridiculous, and had it been taken seriously, would have been seen as enormously risky.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0 But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?<\/p>\n

Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump.\u00a0 What happens?<\/p>\n

Half the country \u2013 maybe more \u2013 will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn\u2019t follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat.\u00a0 They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.<\/p>\n

And they will be right.\u00a0 And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.<\/p>\n

What bothers me the most is that the powers that be today \u00a0don\u2019t seem to care.\u00a0 Perhaps they feel so secure in their grip on power that they expect never to be held accountable.\u00a0 (They seem very smug about their mastery of slipperiness and complex rules, but you know, the Gordian Knot was solved through a different approach. )<\/p>\n

Maybe they don\u2019t think they need legitimacy as long as they control the sword, the purse, and the press.\u00a0 But even dictatorships do their best to promote legitimacy, and think twice before going out of their way to convince half the population of their lack thereof.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, as some say, the Never-Trumper crowd is actually gearing up for a second\u00a0Civil War.<\/a>\u00a0 Certainly there seem to be some idiots on X (formerly Twitter \u2013 do we still need to say that, and why?) who are all in for it.\u00a0 Larry Correia has a minor\u00a0hobby<\/a>\u00a0in batting them down.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d have to be a moron \u2013 or China — to want an American Civil War.\u00a0 But then again, the Biden Administration is removing the\u00a0Reconciliation Monument<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a post Civil War memorial marking a return to American unity \u2013 as part of the post-George Floyd revisiting of the Civil War.\u00a0 As David Strom\u00a0writes:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cSpeaking practically, history has shown that even though the Southern states rose against the federal government, over the past century, our most patriotic and self-sacrificial defenders of our country have come from citizens of the South. Tearing down the reconciliation monument is spitting in the face of the memory of these citizens\u2019 ancestors and a rejection of recognizing the complications in America\u2019s history. It is, in other words, both offensive and stupid. I say this as an admirer of Lincoln\u2019s cause and a strong opponent of the Southern ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not far from my office is a memorial, erected by veterans of the Union and Confederate Armies, dedicated to a similar post-war reconciliation.\u00a0 Will it go next?<\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

This picture accompanied a blog post I wrote over\u00a020 years ago.<\/a>\u00a0 And while I have been unsympathetic to the rather tiny and pathetic fringe of actual neo-Confederates, I\u2019ve always felt that we need to admire the post-Civil War reconciliation.\u00a0 As I wrote then:\u00a0 \u201cThe monument shown above illustrates that; it sits about a block from my office. . . .\u00a0 As late as the Spanish-American War, there was considerable doubt about whether southerners would turn out to fight for the United States. They did. (My great-grandfather was one of them).\u00a0 There are a lot of reasons for that, but the American experience of reconciliation after one of the world\u2019s bloodier and more divisive conflicts is one that perhaps ought to get more attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, it is being erased.\u00a0 There\u2019s little enough of reconciliation in today\u2019s politics, and Roger Kimball is not the only one comparing the present to the pre-Civil War period.<\/p>\n

The thing about Civil Wars is, they don\u2019t come from the bottom up.\u00a0 They come from the top.<\/p>\n

And looking at who\u2019s on top today, and what they seem to want, makes me sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Civilizational Jenga Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins Politics makes me sad sometimes. Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.\u00a0 Not even because politicians are corrupt.\u00a0 Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate. And it doesn\u2019t matter if they hold … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98753"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98754,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98753\/revisions\/98754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}