The pains we suffer in real life from overweening government power, censorship, medical impositions, betrayal by so many once-respected institutions, and ongoing attacks on regular people simply trying to live peaceful and normal lives have become too much. In other words, we might not need to see the movie when we are already living the reality.
When did your own sense of foreboding begin? Everyone to whom I speak has a different answer. Some people date it from the 2016 election and the rage of the establishment against the populist movement that voted the “wrong person” into office. The deep state targeted Trump voters as the enemy and decided democracy wasn’t working.
Others say it really began with the Obama presidency, which was nothing but a stalking horse for corporatist takeover in the name of social justice. Others trace the breakup of the United States to the response to 9/11, in which the United States institutionalized massive statism at home and abroad.
For me, it was none of this, although I was against all these trends at the time. Still, these issues seemed solvable within our normal processes and parlor debates. I never seriously considered the possibility of a complete collapse of American liberty and nationhood. I never imagined the possibility of a literal sacking of the country, with rampant violations of basic property rights, bands of illegal immigrants flooding major cities, and whole states toying with literal secession as a means of survival.
For me, the realness of all this hit hard on March 12, 2020, the beginning of extreme and unprecedented travel restrictions, and then the hour-by-hour tightening of restrictions over the coming days and weeks. Churches and businesses were closed, and schools, too. The whole of American life and liberty were overthrown in a seeming instant and under a pretext that was mostly built on a fictional threat to everyone from a virus that was medically significant for a small and known cohort.
The entire effort was born of a kind of rationalistic insanity, but the point was that it was real, not imagined. It flew off the models straight into our lives. All the rules, institutions, and traditions of this country suddenly melted away, and the population was left completely unprotected from brutal impositions from a class of people that no one elected. It was nothing short of tyranny. And the sheer joy with which the ruling class did this was disorienting in itself. Top leaders at the national and state level were making fun of the very idea of freedom.
In the first weeks of lockdown, I was on a podcast with some Europeans who were experiencing the same thing. They asked me what kind of language they should be using to help reverse this disaster. I suggested that they should all rally around one word: freedom. They all immediately rejected that idea, explaining to me that the word freedom had been discredited. I didn’t respond, but in my mind, I was thinking, “If that is true, all is lost.”
In any case, this was the period of my own shock and realization that we faced a generational fight for all that is true. And the enemies in the struggle are hugely formidable, not just government but allied private-sector partners in media, tech, academia, and medicine. As it turns out, the very foundations of a civilized society had eroded so much (and without my noticing it) that nothing could really stop the unfolding disaster.
It was barely a week into the calamity that Henry Kissinger went to the pages of The Wall Street Journal and warned that if this policy didn’t work and became discredited, the world would be set on fire. Those words really struck me. This is because I knew for certain that the policy would not work and that it would discredit everything and everyone involved. They would never admit error but instead would double and triple down on their despotism, which would in turn provoke a population-wide response.
How will it end? There is one easy solution. The ruling class needs to own up to what it has done and back the heck off. Just allow people basic freedoms again and stop trying to force people to say and believe things that are not true. Following that, there could be a series of commonsense reforms to dial back regulations, abolish the agencies that got everything so wrong, grant justice for vaccine injury, permit food and medical freedoms, and generally revisit the U.S. Constitution and start enforcing it again.
That is the one path to stopping this terrible trajectory we are on.
But how widely is this understood? Among regular people, it is widely understood. Among the elites in media, academia, corporate boardrooms, and government, it is not understood. Not at all.
“The real forces sending the United States toward ever-deeper division: inequality; a hyperpartisan duopoly; and an antiquated and increasingly dysfunctional Constitution.”
In inequality, granted. I once dismissed this problem as purely technical, but it came to matter much more when the overclass ordered laptop workers to stay home and the working class to deliver groceries to them for a couple of years. That underscored the point that the overclass, protected in its credentialed jobs and six-figure incomes, had become positively oppressive of everyone else. So this point I grant, even if he doesn’t get that the real problem here is the readers of The New York Times.
His point about hyperpartisanship is a truism: Yes, some people favor intensified tyranny while others want freedom. What are we going to do about this? I might suggest that the peaceful answer is for the would-be tyrants to give up.
His third point is the downright dangerous one: He just tosses off that the U.S. Constitution is antiquated and dysfunctional.
That’s interesting. The U.S. Constitution is a marvel the world over. It served as the bedrock of the freest and therefore most prosperous and culturally thriving civilization in world history. From the beginning, it had imperfections that we fought a civil war to rectify. Some later amendments compromised its core structure, particularly the 16th and 17th amendments, which should be repealed if we are serious about bringing back authentic freedom.
In any case, the Constitution is what prevents civil war. Without it, the government would be unconstrained and terrifyingly despotic. It’s hard to imagine any future of what we call America without the Constitution as a bedrock, particularly its main features: the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, and the federalist structure that leaves most crucial policy matters to the states. That’s the model. Without it, we are toast.
But here, we have a writer in The New York Times warning of a coming civil war even while calling the Constitution antiquated and dysfunctional! I’m telling you, the best way to ensure a civil war is to continue these outrageous attacks on the core structure of the American nation and gradually dismantle it even further.
Sadly, about a third of the Supreme Court seems to not understand the basic features of the Constitution, including even the First Amendment. We have absolute proof of this now from the oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri. We heard three justices genuinely puzzled about what free speech even means or why we should have it!
This is the way toward civil war. The way to prevent this is to reembrace that which heals divisions and restores normal civic order; namely, freedom itself. It seems that there are people extant in the highest levels of media, government, and corporate culture who are completely against freedom itself. If they get their way, this new and terrifying movie will in fact become our own reality.
