Auto Da Fe, 2019 Edition

     Nations that try to commit suicide usually succeed. It’s a testament to the resilience of America that we keep trying and fail.

     I could go into great and boring detail about the previous occasions:

• Southern secession, the Civil War, and the de facto rewriting of the Constitution;
• Woodrow Wilson’s proto-fascist autocracy;
• The corruption of the federal government under Warren Harding;
• FDR’s “New Deal;”
• The whole of the Carter Administration;
• The whole of the Obama Administration;

     ...but anyone capable of reading a textbook either already knows about those things or doesn’t care enough to be adequately educated. The remarkable thing about those episodes is how little we learned from them.

     To be coherent and enduring, a nation-state must possess certain characteristics:

• Its government must be generally deemed legitimate (a.k.a. “consent of the governed”).
• Its borders must be adequately maintained.
• It must not permit the formation of exclaves.

     Those requirements ought to “go without saying.” But there’s a factor that’s seldom been mentioned in this connection that’s so shriekingly obvious that it embarrasses me to have to mention it:

It must not tolerate traitors.

     It’s been said, and truly, that one traitor inside the gates can and will do more damage than a thousand outside them. The ability of a traitor inside the power structure to wreak havoc is limited only by the latitude others afford him: i.e., the degree to which they tolerate his presence in their ranks.

     Today we don’t have a mere lone traitor embedded in the power structure. We have an entire political party whose aim is the destruction of these United States. Regard the Democrat Party’s demonstrated attitude toward the legitimacy of the current federal government, the security of America’s borders, and the tolerance of Islamic and Hispanic exclaves, and tell me how you could reach any other conclusion.

     Yet a hefty fraction of the electorate continues to vote for these villains.

     Yes, I said it and I meant it: Any officeholder or candidate who affiliates with the Democrat Party is a villain. (That logic applies to quite a lot of Republicans as well, but that’s a tirade for another time.) Regardless of their personal representations, they vote in lockstep. They never deviate from the Democrat position as dictated by the party’s leadership. And the party’s leadership is utterly determined to delegitimize the Trump Administration, to eliminate the nation’s borders, and to tolerate the emergence of zones in which American law is contemptuously ignored.

     That a number of Democrats recently “came out of the closet” as America-haters shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Their party has given them a tacit nod for their behavior. This can only have one of two meanings:

• Democrat Party leadership has decided that the time has come to vie for permanent and absolute power;
• That leadership has become so weak that the party’s lunatics are comfortable in rebellion against it.

     Yet at least forty percent of the electorate will vote for Democrats in 2020.

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     It’s unlike me to take a dark view of things to come. Still, I’m having trouble imagining how there can be so many nominal Americans who are willing to vote for Democrats, given their demonstrated behavior in power. It’s not necessarily about love of country; it’s about the bedrock requirements one must meet to have a country. Grasping those things doesn’t require a lot of intelligence or insight. Yet millions of Americans are apparently either blind to them or indifferent to the consequences of neglecting them. How can this be?

     There are possible explanations, including an old joke:

     A Democrat candidate for office was haranguing the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak when one attendee broke through their numbers and shouted, “I’m a Republican! I’ve always been a Republican! My father was a Republican, and his father, and his father before him!”

     The candidate glared down at the speaker and said, “Well, sir, if your father were a murderer, his father were a rapist, and his father before him were a horse thief, what would that make you?”

     For a moment it appeared the candidate had scored a point. But the heckler merely smiled and said “A Democrat, sir! A Democrat!”

     Political affiliations are seldom the fruit of research or reasoning. They’re more often inherited from one’s parents than acquired in any other way. I’ve observed this myself on dozens of occasions. The sense that there’s a family obligation to be upheld might make zero sense from any rational or patriotic perspective, but the effect is undeniable.

     In a way, it’s much like a fandom. Sports fandoms aren’t rational; indeed, in this time of fluid trading and free agency, to declare oneself a fan of some particular team is, in Jerry Seinfeld’s words, “rooting for laundry.” It’s the same with an unthinking allegiance to a political party – not, in this case, because the “team” bears the name of “your” city, or because you like emblem on the uniform, but because Dad, Granddad, and Great-Granddad were all Democrat “fans,” and you believe at some level deep below rational inspection that loyalty is a supreme virtue – that being faithful to “your team” matters.

     Words fail me – and when you hear a professional writer say that, get out your diary and note the date, time, and place.

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     Glenn Reynolds and others have popularized the saying that “These are the Crazy Years; we’re just living through them.” The “Crazy Years” were a feature in some of Robert A. Heinlein’s fiction. He proposed that they would be followed by a resurgence of rationality and the emergence of “Man’s first mature culture.” That “mature culture” has yet to emerge, but the arrant, unbounded lunacy of our time is on garish display. With open America-haters claiming to be patriots, Senators demanding the elimination of the borders, candidates for president screaming that transwomen have a right to government-funded abortions, and the complicit media lavishing time upon all their ravings, you have to be willfully blind not to see it.

     And the lunatics have a fair-to-middlin’ chance of destroying the last, best hope for liberty and justice that exists on Earth.

     Have a nice day.