Dark Forebodings

     If you read Captain’s Journal, as I do, you’ve undoubtedly seen one or more pieces on police misconduct. Cops smashing their way into private homes and taking innocent people’s lives. Cops using force to prevent bystanders from video-recording their actions. Cops shooting dogs for no good reason. Cops seizing cash from travelers, simply because they can. More to the point, cops getting away with all of that, and more.

     When the “justice system” systematically protects “law enforcement” from any penalty for such actions, people become fearful of the cops. That’s not a stretch of logic beyond the capacity of any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. However, it seems to have eluded those in the “justice system” and “law enforcement,” who have exhibited not one groat of interest in correcting it.

     Economist Keith Weiner has delineated the deadly process of devolution by which “law enforcement” becomes an organ of tyranny roundly hated by private citizens. It’s a perfect dissection of the most important undiscussed phenomenon of our time. Weiner lays the thing’s vital organs out on butcher paper for ease of identification. (Applause to Rurik at Knuckledraggin’ for the citation.)

     What Weiner doesn’t say explicitly, though given his penetration I’m certain he’s thinking it, is that there are people who want this process to go to its terminus. As he says early in the piece, “The end of that trip is a third-world dictatorship.” Does anyone doubt that in our political elite (a.k.a. “the ruling class”) there are many fans of third-world dictatorships? Must I name names?

     I didn’t think so.

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     Our moment is one of great potential for large changes. However, the direction of the change cannot be foreseen. Hearken to Kevin Williamson’s essay of February 5 for the reasons:

     As he stands to address the nation tonight, President Donald Trump represents a genuine crisis in the American political order, but it is not the crisis we hear about from rage-addled Democratic hyper-partisans and their media cheerleaders. The fundamental cause of our current convulsion — studiously ignored by almost all concerned — is this: In the United States, the ruling class does not rule. At least, it does not rule right now.

     Please read it all. It’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve seen at National Review Online in at least three years. It would be well for Williamson’s colleagues to absorb and comprehend its insights. Those insights hint at the central facts about a ruling class – the characteristics all ruling classes share.

     There’s a picture that’s made the rounds on the world Wide Web that’s powerfully apposite to Williamson’s thesis:

     Donald Trump – forgive me, please, for ever doubting that he would be a good president! – is more than just our current chief executive. He’s a barrier to the ambitions of the ruling class and its beneficiaries. Over the century behind us those groups have seized ever more of our wealth and freedom. Before the election of 2016 they were well on their way to criminalizing dissent: making it impossible, de jure if not de facto, to express opposition to their schemes. Can anyone doubt that were the First Amendment gutted, the Second, our sole bulwark against a Chavez or Maduro of our own, would swiftly follow?

     Don’t imagine that the extra-legal doings of cops, who are not federal but state and local government employees, are disconnected from the machinations taking place at the federal level. And don’t imagine that the total subjugation of America is purely a drive of the Left. There are plenty of Republicans aligned with it, and their hatred of President Trump is quite as volcanic as that of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

     If President Trump succeeds, they will fail – and vice-versa.

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     One man standing against a horde faces long odds. Horatius pulled it off because he only needed to stand off the invaders until the bridge he defended was pulled down behind him. Popular support is valuable, but it is not sufficient. The president needs allies within the corridors of power. He also needs to expel his enemies, to the greatest extent possible.

     But the president cannot “fire” a legislator. Neither can he set the law aside by decree and flush out the bureaucracies that oppose his agenda. Neither can he silence the courts, which have played an important role in impeding him despite their lack of jurisdiction over the president’s Constitutionally assigned executive authority. And of course there are the media to deal with, as well.

     The members of our political elite know all that. They’ve marshaled their forces to prevent any further incursions upon their bastions. To this point their defensive operations have succeeded. The plaints of pro-freedom intellectuals have failed to weaken them. Moreover, their counteroffensive, in the guise of unending “investigations” of the president and his private-life activities, has succeeded in deflecting attention from their ploys toward wholly imaginary Trumpian misdeeds.

     It’s enough to wear many a good man down.

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     The question is, as always, “What, then, must we do?”

     I have no answer. The media could help by reporting candidly on the crimes of the powerful and their armed minions, if some fraction of the media remains uncorrupted by “access.” Private companies could help by fighting back vigorously against the demands of activists and the political powers that promote them, if any of its barons retain the backbone appropriate to captains of industry. Pro-freedom organizations, especially those that defend the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, could help by never compromising with the powers of darkness, if their spokesmen are unfazed by the prospect of “bad press” from the media handmaidens of the ruling class.

     Far too many ifs. Whether any of that will materialize in time is uncertain. What We the People can do as individuals, beyond striving to be informed, voting only for pro-freedom candidates, and supporting one another in need, is unclear.

     The struggle over the future of the Republic, however it is resolved, won’t be over quickly.

     The aim of the High is to remain where they are. -- George Orwell