No Second Chance

     In her landmark analysis of American government The God of the Machine, Isabel Paterson notes that political power, while easy to grant, is not so easy to revoke:

     Further, political power has a ratchet action; it works only one way, to augment itself. A transfer occurs by which the power cannot be retracted once it is bestowed....The difficulty of taking back powers once granted is illustrated in the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment; although it was demanded and carried by overwhelming sentiment of the citizens, the article of repeal contained a proviso which would retain numerous Federal jobs; it was impossible to make a clean sweep of the pernicious usurped power. The Prohibition Amendment was an assertion of absolute government, the indication of complete decomposition of the body politic.

     This is a special case of a more general phenomenon: the disproportionate power of groups with short, coherent agendas. This is part of the reason a group that has in some way “gotten a piece” of the power of the State possesses political influence far beyond what would be imagined from its numbers alone. Not only can it wield coercive power in its own interest; it also has greater motivation, greater capacity to raise resources, and more flexibility in creating alliances with other groups.

     This mechanism also operates within recognizable groups. Robert Conquest’s observation that:

     The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. ( Conquest’s Third Law of Politics )

     ...is yet another expression of that general law: one that embeds itself in any group that grows beyond a certain, rather intimate size. Which brings us to my main subject for today: the “major” political parties, particularly the Republican Party and the existential crisis it faces due to the rise of Donald Trump.

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     The following video came to my attention via American Digest:

     It is inarguable that there exists, within each of the major parties, an “establishment” group that wields far greater power over its party than any randomly assembled group of comparable size. That group’s motivations are known in their entirety only to its members, yet at least one of those motivations is the preservation of its power and perquisites.

     “Power?” I hear you cry. “How can a group of non-office-holding citizens within a voluntary assembly wield power in any objective sense? They have no ability to coerce or award privileges! What kind of libertarian are you, anyway?”

     To answer your last question first: the smart kind. The kind that doesn’t take his eye off the ball. The kind that bears always in mind that any group with a hierarchical nature sooner or later becomes an instrument for wielding power in some fashion. Once that happens, pace Hayek, “the worst” will get on top.

     The major political parties possess privileges denied to the minor parties. Their presidential candidates get Secret Service protection from the nominating conventions to the completion of the balloting. The mechanisms for tallying the votes report directly to the headquarters of those two parties. Presidential candidates “debate” one another by the graces of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Those “debates” automatically get television coverage denied to the minor party candidates. The legislative chambers on Capitol Hill are officially divided according to major-party affiliation. And so forth.

     Like it or not, the Democrat and Republican parties are organs of the federal, state, and county governments – all three-thousand-plus of them. Each of them possesses an Outer Party and an Inner Party. Within each Inner Party there exists a smaller group that holds the true helm of the ship.

     George Carlin, call your office.

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     The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell, 1984

     The “political circus” video embedded earlier contains statements and expresses attitudes by a number of individuals, each of whom possesses his own motivations. Do their statements reflect the whole of their motivations? Probably not; they’re politicians de facto, and even when a politician tells the truth, he never tells the whole truth. But of this we may be reasonably sure: each of them firmly believes that he belongs in the innermost cabal that steers the Republican Party.

     Perhaps some of them sincerely believes that he has the good of the party and the United States of America at heart. Perhaps all of them do! But that motivation will forever be counterpoised to each one’s desire to remain in his position within the party – and that desire is likely to be the stronger of the two.

     The rise of Donald Trump, an “insurgent” candidate whose past behavior, statements, and affiliations cast serious doubt on his authenticity as a Republican, threatens those power brokers. Should Trump capture the party nomination, he will also capture the party itself. For Trump is a Tyrant of the old style:

     You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

     Donald Trump seeks to hold all power in his own hands. Should he gain the GOP presidential nomination, he would countenance no opposition from within the party. He’d destroy the party rather than permit it. Yet the establishment that precedes him would fight fiercely for its position...and after the dust had settled, there would be no major party dedicated to the limited-government principles expressed in the Republican platform. Granted that elected Republicans haven’t exactly lived up to those principles in recent years.

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     Despite the accuracy of Paterson’s observation, there is a way to reclaim power once bestowed: revolution. But revolution is a messy business, which eventuates in worse tyranny at least as often as it does in greater freedom. So also would it be with a revolution dedicated to destroying the Republican Party in the hope that something better would replace it.

     The genesis of the Republican Party was in opposition to slavery. Yet the rest of its platform was very statist: protective tariffs, a central bank, federally planned, funded, and executed “public works.” It speaks to the importance of the slavery issue that Abraham Lincoln was able to rise to the presidency...and that the South, which found itself on the losing end of both its most passionately contested issues (slavery and tariffs), would secede from the Union in consequence.

     Today’s GOP is a far cry from that of the middle 19th Century. It’s not what I would like it to be...but were it to be taken over by Trump and his cronies, or destroyed in the reaction to their rise, where would we who love freedom and America find a home? The Conservative Party is essentially a Republican annex. The Libertarian Party is dominated by intemperate lunatics. The other minor parties offer nothing better.

     It falls to us – libertarian-conservatives – to determine the future of the GOP. Should we allow it to be snatched by the Trumpists or destroyed by its internal conflicts, there might be no second chance for any party of freedom to emerge in our lifetimes.