Observations on the Calcification into Two Camps
One of the Historical phenomenon’s we’re currently experiencing is the radicalization and calcification of the “Two Camps”. This is the forerunner to every major conflict.
This time around, it’s not about Nation States, though; it’s a transnational, intra-state splitting. The two main camps seem to be the Progressives (those advocating for a scientastic materialist utopia) and the Nationalists (the traditionalists, the red bloods, the harsh moralists). This reflects the divide in American politics, but it’s higher than it – both the Republicans and the Democracts are being subsumed into these two movement, rather than the reverse.
On the Left, you can see this through their progressive speech policies – censoring comments on Newspapers, and mobbing anybody who steps out of line on Twitter. On our side, you can see our patience drying up. We’re pretty much done trying to speak to these degenerates, and have instead opted to ridicule them, and short-circuit their narcissistic delusions through the techniques developed by people like Anonymous Conservative (his book’s over on the sidebar).
Things are heating up, and lines are being drawn. Dialogue is a dwindling option.
As for how we got to this particular state – how the different actors decided which side of the divide they were going to be on – the following comment by Stephen J over at John C. Wright’s blog is particularly illuminating.
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Stephen J. says:
A couple of historical events suggest themselves (if I am not being too humourlessly literal about things), none of which will surprise anyone but which might be interesting when seen collected together:
- The New Deal, which convinced a number of people not only that large-scale government economic intervention was morally obligatory but that it could be reliably and practically effective;
- The Lambeth Conference, the Sexual Revolution and the Pill, which dismaying numbers of us (Christians and Catholics too) bought into as a viable basis for all relationship commitments, i.e. that they should be evaluated solely on how beneficial we find them and freely abandoned if they become unsatisfactory;
- The Baby Boomers’ counterculture, where the standard generational reaction against predecessors was boosted by unprecedented personal luxury and freedom as well as unprecedentedly powerful and cheap mass media distribution;
- The Vietnam War, which enshrined the self-deluded image of the Press as sober objective reporters of facts, and which proved to America and the world that (to quote blogger Neo-Neocon) all that was needed to beat America, and by extension any Western democracy, in an armed conflict was to turn domestic public opinion against that conflict;
- Watergate, which enshrined the image (both self- and public) of the Press as noble government watchdog and exposer of corruption;
- The scandals among both the Catholic priesthood and several major Protestant televangelists, which catastrophically tarnished public faith and credit in Christian beliefs in general;
- The 2000 American Presidential election, which an astonishing number of leftists still believe was stolen by the Supreme Court;
- 9/11, the Iraq War and the War on Terror, which had enough poor decisions by both factions for both sides to find fodder for further polarization.
Stephen King once wrote that conspiracy theory paranoia was actually the last struggle of a mind to be rational: to say, “Something is going on here! These things do not just happen!” And one of the fundamental and most appealing elements of the mindset is the conviction that something can always be done about things; that Evil never has to be accepted as ineradicable, save at the cost of a greater Evil, and therefore forgiveness need never be required either. The American psyche has always resonated with such Miltonian defiance, I think, and that is a large part of why it has become so prevalent.
I do not see solutions, only trade-offs, and the closest I might describe myself is a Libertarian Nationalist – trade with the rest of the world only when there is an absolute advantage (bananas from Panama because you can’t grow them in North Dakota) but let very few people in, and certainly not when the cultures are incompatible.
The numbers on either side seem disconcerting, however. You also have to consider the left’s propensity to band together so smoothly when there’s any form of competition, even if they cannibalize themselves after winning. A quality over quantity approach may not work when the quantity in question is so outrageous.
OK, let’s wargame America’s third civil war. The first went to the rebels in 1783 and the second to the loyalists in 1865.
On the rebel side:
* Every non-criminal who owns a gun.
* Overtaxed citizens who produce real goods for a living.
* All conservative Christians.
On the loyalist side:
* Coastal liberals who won’t let their children touch toy guns.
* Obese welfare mamas and their gangster baby daddies.
* Speculators who profit from reckless money-printing.
The military is a wildcard — they can’t be happy about Benghazi or all the diversity that’s being crammed down their throats. With Obama’s incurious, hands-off, lead-from-behind management style, it would be easy to feed him misinformation and pretend to obey his orders while secretly aiding the rebels.
In the struggle to keep the false dichotomy between feudalism and democracy, people on both sides seem to equate democracy with universal suffrage. The prime examples of Athens and (dear to my heart) Polish Commonwealth were nothing like that. Looking at how poorly the monarchic regimes were doing recently, I don’t think the answer lies on either end.
When an acquaintance of mine posted a petition on basic income, I had this thought: It’s dangerous, but it would be better than the current parasitic bureaucratic incarnation of welfare state. What is the feedback mechanism that could prevent this from becoming full fledged socialism?
And then having recently watched Starship Troopers, I came with this: What if you would implement basic income, but require active voters to be net positive.
The cost of capital preservation made clear. No hard feelings, but if you don’t produce more than you eat, you don’t get to decide how it’s spent. Even a modest basic income would be much more expensive over 4 years term than what you have to pay for a vote with marketing today. And with such price tag on it you would think very carefully how do you use it.
I believe that there is a role for welfare. It is here to prevent non-criminal (desperate to eat and find shelter) people from making stupid decisions. Examples from Poland include: disassembling the $100K bridge for scrap metal worth of $10K. The criminal ones is another story. That’s where police and military come in.
Dhill, there are two problems I see with your argument. First, I’m sceptical that it is possible to reduce the franchise without eliminating it entirely.
I know of only a few cases where the franchise has been narrowed but not eliminated. The first was the Spanish Constitution of 1845, which reduced the electorate to less than one percent of the population. However, under the previous Constitution of 1837, the electorate was only about five percent, so the franchise was already quite narrow and most adults were unaffected by the change. Further, I understand that situation didn’t last long, considering the Constitution of 1869, the First Spanish Republic (1873-74), the Bourbon Restoration, the Constitution of 1876, and the development of turnismo.
The second example was King Charles X of France reducing the electorate in the 1830 “July Ordinances“, which led to the July Revolution, and the abdication and exile of Charles X.
The third example was also French, and not much later. After the overthrow of Louis Philippe I in the revolutions of 1848, the Second French Republic, under the Constitution of 1848, established universal manhood suffrage (before this, the electorate was less than one percent of the population). However, the electoral law of 31 May 1850 reduced this: “It required as a proof of Electors three years’ domicile the entries in the record of direct taxes, thus cutting down universal suffrage by taking away the vote from the industrial population, which was not as a rule stationary.” (from here.) The result: populist support for Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, and his restoration of universal (male) suffrage in his coup of 1851, and the establishment of the Second Empire, with him as Emperor Napoleon III, a year later.
There’s always a Gracchus waiting to gain populist power by promising to expand the franchise, and as the above illustrate, taking the vote away from people is even more effective at fueling this sort of uprising. Add in the fact that, under the system you propose, the racial makeup of the electorate is likely to differ significantly from that of the general population, and recall how poll taxes and voting restrictions were overturned previously in the US; your plan would additionally be denounced as “racist”.
Secondly, there is the problem I see with Basic Income systems, based on my personal experiences with both those on public assistance and with Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend. That is the fact that many of those who need government support are poor at least partially because they have poor future-time orientation, low ability to defer gratification, and cannot handle their own finances well. Given a check, they won’t spread it out over time to pay for food, rent, bills, etc., but instead blow it on status/luxury items, “toys”, booze, and so on. They need things like food stamps/EBT, rent subsidies paid directly to landlords, and other such paternalistic constraints to prevent this. Under a Basic Income system without these, they will waste the money, find themselves “desperate to eat and find shelter”, and generally will resort to crime, requiring the state to support them in jail/prison. A Basic Income could work in a homogeneous, low-time-preference Scandinavian-style society where most of the poor truly are simply “down on their luck”, but most (all?) of the Anglosphere doesn’t have that; what we have are a large number of people incapable of managing their own lives, and requiring some form of paternalism to support them.
@dhill I think you are going in the right direction, but you are still trying to interfer with natural law. People who don’t produce more than they consume are tyrants great or small, unless they die under their own weight. Why relieve them with institution? It is hubris born of propagandic conditioning. The only institutions worth having destroy institutional answers and certainly don’t offer institutional answers. The big guarantee is the natural sin. Welfare that is not personal and informal is The Problem. If someone is not worth carrying in anyone’s personal network, it is better for society that they go per the only collective judgment that has any integrity: the free market.
@Kevin C.
I think it’s not so much a one sided proposition compared to what you recall here. After all it’s a trade of a vote for basic subsistence. To be honest, I never had a good history teacher and I’m hardly catching up now, when I finally understood the importance. I just throw this idea and watch if it catches wind. I didn’t really think about America and I have never experienced any racially heterogeneous society. Racism is not so much of a problem in Poland, as we are too poor to actually gather any substantial immigration.
@’Reality’ Doug
Well, I’m looking at it from the very selfish perspective. I just want a cheap solution to prevent loss of capital (the bridge example). I’m not entirely sure this would work, but I think it’s worth a try. Looking at what happens in USA in terms of prison population and Obama election, I’m inclined to think, that denial is not the best strategy. I’m not sure what do you propose. If it’s some form of eugenics, then except for voluntary approach, it makes me very wary. There are free sterilization programs in Brazil, that seems mild enough too to bundle that with some basic income.
And there is also a lot of headroom in the tinkering with the coefficients. One could start with a very modest subsidy, that would skim 10% of the votes. The idea was meant to be feedback mechanism. Both sides have to come up with the right amount that will not enrage those who loose the vote and burden the net positive side too much. On both extremes anarcho-tyrany awaits.
@dhill,
Yes, I get it’s a trade, I just don’t think it’s a trade anyone will accept. First, why trade your vote for government support when you can get both, as under the current system? Secondly, there’s the degree to which people have internalized the norm of universal adult (citizen) suffrage as a right that cannot be hindered save possibly for outright criminality; and the various UN and EU documents further codifying these norms. Far too many will see any attempted narrowing of the franchise as “undemocratic tyranny”. If the electorate can’t be reduced when 1. already limited, and 2. only recently expanded (as my examples illustrate), then what hope when it is 1. universal, and 2. long-established as such? And while in Poland, you might not have the problem of disparate impact denounced as “racist”, you do have the EU bureaucrats in Brussels? How would they react to this plan? Not well, I’d imagine.
And again, even if this were somehow implemented, how would you keep politicians and parties from re-enlarging the franchise to expand their voter base? The franchise is subject to a ratchet: easy to expand, with there always being politicians ready to benefit from such, and nigh-impossible to contract.
@Keven C. is correct. @dhill, for those reasons and more of the same ilk, I propose government doing nothing to solve the ‘problem’ of poverty. That would solve the problem. Evolution is a eugenics program of sorts, free of human hubris to ‘save the world’. Institutional solutions ARE the problem. It scares you to not have a government safety net. The net costs more than you benefit from it. It is a well consuming resources for nothing. You should trust in individuals who can, and trust in individuals who can NOT. The former will make things work and the latter will die out of the way like they should. Do you have so little faith in yourself that you would never want your freedom? That ‘security’ has damaged your self-respect and your respect for human potential.