It's Their Country Now

The Madman Was Right

A quick post about power, political tribalism, and madmen.

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Big cheese conservative Sohrab Amari has written an article about former peaceniks who’ve now joined the pro-war bandwagon.

It lacks any insight into the issue and its claim that Barbara Lee was “courageous” and “prescient” is ahistorical, leading to a wholly distorted picture of the run-up to the Iraq war.

Why have former peaceniks become pro-war advocates? Power.

Amari omits mentioning that a passionate antiwar movement spontaneously erupted in the months leading up to the Iraq war. There were massive demonstrations. I remember the atmosphere in the city well: it was almost like the great Moratorium demonstrations of 1969, which helped to stop the American war in Vietnam. I didn’t go because I was (and am) torn. When you agree with a goal but despise the people on your side…

I knew people on the antiwar side. For a few heady moments, they thought they had stopped the momentum to war. One of them boasted to me that they had. It did seem that way.

Nothing about that in Amari’s article.

But they were drowned out. The war happened. Even so, is this accurate?

Lee—who indeed showed tremendous courage and prescience in opposing the disastrous post-9/11 wars

I don’t think so. If anything, being antiwar boosted her creds in the progressive movement. What consequences did she suffer? Being insulted in the conservative press?

As Hemingway said, “remember correctly.”

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Let’s talk about power and its bastard stepchild, political tribalism.

I have nothing to add to the great insights of political scientists and philosophers who’ve written about power, and historians who have written about its follies. Go read them.

I’m just going to quote Lord Acton:

Note how Lord Acton modified simple “power” with a “tends to” but dispensed with the modifier when addressing “absolute power.”

Some people or systems can survive relative power relatively uncorrupted. No system or person can survive absolute power without being corrupted—absolutely.

And that’s where the US is now. Or so we think. I think we’re deluding ourselves and we’ll be discovering the consequences of our delusion in years to come. But as things stand now, the mighty hegemon bestrides the world like a Colossus.

The Democrats have absolute power in the US. I’m not speaking about party politics. Yes, there’s a Republican party, and they do exert themselves on abortion and guns. And maybe Ron DeSantis will win and put a cork in the gushing wounds caused by corporate rape of the culture.

But as we speak, the culture is entirely in Democrat hands. From the law schools to the med schools to the entertainment industry to the universities to the public schools to every goddamn advertisement you see on YouTube—it’s theirs. And they are absolutely corrupted.

When a baseball team invites, disinvites, and then reinvites a group of genderfucks to a game, and issues a groveling apology—who is in power here?

Barbara Lee is a Democrat, so of course, she’s on board with spreading this ideology worldwide. She will not do one thing to oppose her party’s lock on power.

Amari thinks that Lee is changing spots, when in fact she’s stayed the course. And I’m not even sure she was truly showing prescience, she was simply representing her constituency. (Granted, the article is from 2005 but I’m positive it was true even in 2004.) For that, I tip my hat to her. Aren’t congresspeople supposed to represent their constituents?

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About political tribes.

I’ve circled warily around political tribes all my life. Who doesn’t love the feeling of fellowship with other human beings, working towards a common goal?

But political tribes always involve the loss of autonomy and overcoming the “strange bedfellows” aspect of politics. Lots of Vietnam antiwar activists were actual Communists or pro-Communists. You sucked it up and went on the marches to get the boys out.

But at the end of the day, to me, a strange bedfellow is someone you want to kick out of the bed, not wake up with. And that’s how I felt about Iraq. There were too many outright shits among them for me to want to stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

One of the political tribes I’ve observed from the sidelines in the aughts was a group of wacky, right-wing nationalists that included the late Lawrence Auster.

You can leaf through the archives of his website, A View From The Right, here. I always thought that the name “Amnation,” a portmanteau of “American” and “nation” was uncomfortably evocative of “Damnation.” The site is kept up by a batshit-crazy acolyte who shall remain nameless.

I met him once. In person he was a surprisingly genial, affable man, attractive in a late middle-aged upper-class British author sort of way. His manner of speaking was as diffident as his writing style was savage. After that, I exchanged some e-mails with him. This indicates no special status or even membership in his circle; Larry was a voluble man, rather lonely, and always up for an engagement.

As genial as he was in person, when it came to ideas Larry was rude, blunt, took stray comments personally and magnified them all out of proportion. David Horowitz once wrote to him, online: “Larry you’re a big pain in the ass.”

Our email exchange ended on a bad note when he chewed me out for some nothingburger. Who needs this? I thought and didn’t answer him.

Larry really was a big pain in the ass.

Plus, at the time, I thought Larry was bonkers. Three sheets to the wind. I enjoyed his keen intellect, his verbal acuity, his barbed wit—but at the safe distance of the computer screen.

All this said, Larry kept a level head when it came to quotidian political analysis, and his observations about Obama’s second campaign were accurate. The media gin up every little thing. I can’t locate this on his clunky website, but I distinctly remember that after the presidential debates of October 2012, the media were gnashing their teeth at Obama’s supposedly poor performance.

Larry would have none of it: he said forthrightly that he saw a solid debate performance and predicted that Obama would win. He dismissed presidential approval polls as meaningless static.

He was right. When Obama won, he concluded despairingly, “It’s their country now.”

I thought that was one of Larry’s overreactions, but in the last year, the phrase has come to haunt me and I’ve concluded:

Larry was right.

“Much madness is divinest sense.” If we keep the accent on the “much” and see that she didn’t write “all,” Emily nailed it.

The madman saw the truth. Larry ranted and raved and wrote about what he saw as the destruction of his beloved country, its culture and its people. Despite his fusty Anglophile demeanor, he was a typical Boomer in many ways. He loved baseball and the Constitution and Bob Dylan. This “pain in the ass” saw things with terrible clarity. He saw what happened with Obama’s second win:

The country was no longer his, or ours. In his madness was divinest sense.

Staring into the abyss killed him.

Rest in peace, Lawrence Auster, January 26, 1949 – March 29, 2013.

You were right.

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I don’t have Larry’s guts. I can’t look into the abyss the way he did. I have to preserve a slender filament of hope that the monstrous power of the Democrats, of America, will be ended.

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Here’s the whole poem. My favorite part is the last three lines.

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –