January 6, 2016

Domestic imperialism.

Chilton Williamson, Jr., now editor of Chronicles magazine wrote a great review of Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century (2012). Mr. Williamson is now the editor of Chronicles magazine in Rockford, Illinois, which publication I cannot recommend too highly as a source of literate, entertaining commentary on all matters political, historical, economical, and philosophical.

Williamson quotes Marshall DeRosa (“The Tenth Amendment Awakening, the Supreme Court Be Damned”) that “the transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics.” (Emphasis added.) That's an illuminating way of describing our wholesale stampede into the arms of progressives, Marxists, communists, fellow travelers, communist dupes, liberals, "conservatives," neo-cons, frustrated academics, Utopian feminist infantrymen, Hollywood and media social engineers, men who wear ear rings, and (other) ignorant, reckless, and mentally disturbed people everywhere.

Why bother with 58 state legislatures when you can purchase all the government power you want at the federal level? One-stop shopping for people who think you need help in spending your money, choosing your neighbors and your ideas, and deciding which foreign leaders needs a healthy dose of Obamanian arrogance. Das Reich am Potomac.

"Domestic imperialism" is also a term that aptly points out the hypocrisy of the far-left, anti-white zealots who infest us.[1] They engage in all manner of conniption fits over Western imperialism as though white-on-black, white-on-brown, or white-on-yellow is the only kind of oppression and exploitation there is or ever was.[2] If it's leftist whites doing the oppressing and exploiting, well then, what could be finer in Carolina, especially if it also accomplishes black and brown dreams of revenge and changing places with whites. One of these days those white leftists will figure out that part about "changing places" but for now it eludes them and the political symbiosis between the left and minority rejectionists thrives. Black lives matter!

If you have some ridiculous plan to achieve world peace, perfect justice, or political, economic, and cultural suicide or otherwise to go 15 rounds with common sense its own self, well, what could be more lovely than a federal government 5,000 times its constitutional size that makes a mockery of any notion of representative government.

With the lunatic fringe who have such ludicrous goals in mind, consider then what Williamson writes which is, as we say, where the rubber meets the living Constitution:
As Kent Masterson Brown [a contributor to the book cited above] . . . suggests, the meaning of the Constitution in respect of the relationship between the central government and the states is so extravagantly clear that neither intellectual density nor even incompetence can explain how the compact theory [Madison, Jefferson] was gradually overwhelmed and defeated by the nationalist one [Hamilton, Webster, Lincoln]. It was raw mental and political will that did the trick, abetted by intellectual dishonesty, demagoguery, and sheer mendacity.[3]
A great and horrible deformation of our national life has taken place and, like a boa constrictor, the coils of one dumb ass, confiscatory scheme after another have been wrapped around us till we can hardly breathe. I do not have to repeat here what you well know about the decline of middle class wages, the enthusiastic export of manufacturing jobs to a communist dictatorship, the creation and nurturing of a parasite class, the punishment of the productive, the pursuit of malinvestment, and, inter alia, the evil importation of foreigners to take American jobs and debase our culture. Good luck opposing any of that. Our congresspersons are eager to hear from us and their 599,999 other mooks constituents.

This doesn't seem to bother even one of the 58 state bar associations or a significant number of Republican congressmen and senators for whom a nation operating under a bastardized, post-constitutional, all-powerful, federal government is something to be celebrated even as they pay lip service to "representative government," "enumerated powers," and "the rule of law not of men." A mighty barf there, good buddy.

Only yesterday our putative president purported to issue one or more executive orders having to do with guns in private hands. As with the Dept. of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, one can search the words of Article I, Section 8 with a powerful flashlight to find education, pollution, or private gun ownership as proper subjects for federal legislative control. If you can't find stuff in Section 8, anyone who tells you he can is a liar. How easy is that?

But . . . anyone challenging these or other federal power grabs will be in for a long and expensive ride through the federal courts in which judges, with the rare, brave exception, will ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution and exercise exactly "the intellectual dishonesty, demagoguery, and sheer mendacity" Brown and Williamson point out are the essence of the judicial and political destruction of the American constitutional republic.

Notes
[1] An aside. Can I say "far-left" these days? The accepted political taxonomy from Fox News on down is "moderates" on one side and "far rightists" on the other, viz., "Nazis."

I prefer "far left," on the one hand, namely, communists, fascists, progressives, and anyone who believes using a government (or private) bullet or knife (or massive uncontrolled third-world immigration) to achieve political ends (preferably for resentful minorities) and "far right," on the other, namely, people who believe in limited government, rule of law, free speech, freedom of association, personal responsibility, and cheap, domestic beer. I'm not sure who's in the middle of my (hardly original) spectrum. I suppose it's people who believe that a little bit of theft from their more productive fellow citizens through the mechanism of elected legislatures is ok, even a "right." The Goldilockian mean. I benefit but know it's horribly bad news.
[2] As, inter alia, Hottentots, other residents of Africa, Tibetans, Han Chinese, Vietnamese, Montagnards, Spaniards, Greeks, Hungarians, Serbs, the Philippinos, Koreans, Malayans, certain people of the Indian subcontinent, Russians, and various neighbors of the Lakota Sioux, Comanche, Iroquois, and Aztecs can attest.
[3] "The Long March Through the Constitution." By Chilton Williamson Jr., Chronicles, 5/1/14 (bracketed text and emphasis added).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Yeah well if any of these political whores had a brain they would know the system has collapsed. Bringing in millions of foreigners who don't play by the rules has poisoned the well, and now nobody believes this crapfest can continue. Trump may be just an entertainer, but the other candidates suck so bad, he looks great in comparison. There aren't any Caesars or Ciceros vying for the Purple here. This looks like a Marx Bros version of Citizen Kane.