Talking Some Politics and Other Matters

 Politics is on the minds of almost everyone today, especially considering last night's Presidential debate in which the current virtual houseplant occupying the White House (Biden) made yet another ass of himself on the debate stage, and Trump easily won that as even Democrats are saying this morning. In recent years, this so-called "woke agenda" has permeated everything and it has caused more trouble than necessary.  The whole "White man bad" mentality, along with a plethora of fictional gender identifications and the use of "personal pronouns," is starting to wear thin with many in our nation. Most people now (including myself) are more concerned with how we are going to meet next month's rent or we are taking calculators to the grocery store now due to the fact that buying a carton of eggs almost requires a second mortgage on one's house (thank you Democrats!).  Then there are illegal aliens - in the past month, there were three high-profile murders of two young girls and a mother of several kids by these criminals, and in the news yesterday there was mention that the laxity in border enforcement has allowed about 50 potential terrorists associated with ISIS to cross into our nation and they are hiding out in our cities.  My guess though is that there are far more than 50 - we could be talking of hundreds or more.  And, with the whole Gaza issue, Jewish people are being targeted by what are essentially neo-Nazi mobs sporting "pride flags" and yet those same assailants call Trump a "nazi."  I don't see Trump or his supporters beating the crap out of innocent Jewish people on the streets of LA and New York though, but I do hear the genocidal chant of "from the river to the sea" being yelled by the same people who throw a tantrum if you use the wrong pronoun to address them.  All of this started to make me think, and as I was making some revisions on my dissertation manuscript this week, it all came together for me and I now have a name of the theory I actually subscribe to.  Let me get into that now. 

In 2017, conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza wrote a very insightful book entitled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017).  In this book, D'Souza makes a very eloquent point that many of the people who love labeling their opponents "fascists" or "Nazis" are in reality closer to that ideology themselves.   This sentiment has been echoed in other publications, such as Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York: Broadway Books, 2007) and Kevin Slack, War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism (New York: Encounter Books, 2023).  As I began working on my dissertation, I had always held the sentiment that Nazism is essentially left-wing and not truly conservative based on much of its own ideology.  That is actually one of the questions I am tackling in my own research, and although academically I have concluded that Nazism was similar in many ways to Peronism in Argentina - it had both leftist and far-right expressions, in other words - on a more reflective level for me, I see Nazism as a leftist movement that is just a non-Marxist brand of socialism infused with rabid nationalism.  The way I would see it now after doing my research for my dissertation is something like this - Nazism was a reactionary movement with revolutionary aims, a conclusion I reached after being challenged by my dissertation chair to address the question.  However, I am not going to write about Nazis here (read my dissertation later for more on that) but I am addressing the current American political/social situation.  I want to first give a sort of scenario to quiz you, and then I want to describe the political theory I found that has made the most sense to me in regard to all this.

Imagine a nation in turmoil.  A youth movement springs up that begins to question urbanization and industrialization - it is anti-capitalist and it also rejects many traditional norms.  These youth become very expressive in their behavior - they begin to worship nature as well as dabbling in some esoteric occultic practices (a few outrightly become Satanists even), they are into weird sexual experimentation (homosexuality and polyandry, among other things, is widespread), they mess with mind-altering drugs, and they loudly reject any value their parents held.  In time, some of these individuals become hyper-radicalized, and they begin to riot and attempt revolutions - they beat up people they don't like on the streets, they burn down businesses of "evil people," and they start rallying to enact totalitarian policies in the name of "saving democracy."  In time, they take over, and they lead the nation into a devastating series of wars, they bankrupt the economy, outlaw Christianity and other religions that don't agree with their agenda, and in time they bring their nation to ruin.  Who are these people?  Are they 1960s rogue hippies, or are they 21st-century Antifa and BLM activists?  While both of those movements were characterized by this behavior, this example describes neither.  Now, brace yourself - here is who that illustration is talking about. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Germany, there arose a youth movement called the Wandervogel, and it consisted of young people between the ages of 12 and 30 who wanted to reconnect with a romanticized version of Germany's pre-Christian pagan past.  This meant rejection of the older generation's values, and many of these youth would engage in practices such as nudism and nature hiking in order to re-establish what they thought was a pantheistic reconnection with the land.  To do this, many engaged as well in the growing Victorian fascination with occultism, and they also experimented with drugs such as marijuana and opium.  In time, the pantheistic connection between "blood and soil" began to merge with a new political ideology called Volkism, or the Volkisch movement.  This movement was radically nationalist and it lamented that Germany was weakened by not only urbanization and industrialization, but also through "blood poisoning" from foreign races they deemed "inferior."  So, the solution was to "cleanse" the German soil and German blood of those "foreign" elements, and they used a romanticized mythological framework that was given scientific credibility by Darwinian biology to advance this new thinking.  In time, these radicalized youth would be joined by disaffected German and Austrian war veterans after World War I called the Freikorps, and from this concoction of weird and radical ideologies would emerge in 1919 a movement called the Deutsch Arbeiterpartei, or DAP.  A young vagrant Austrian war veteran turned political agitator named Adolf Hitler would join this movement, which later would undergo a name change to the NSDAP, and it would be infamously known later to history as the Nazis.   This is a somewhat oversimplified summary of what happened, and my dissertation goes into more detail than a short time-constricted blog article could, but you get the idea.  Radical politics often ends up in the same place regardless of whether it is called "right" or "left," and what is scary is that we have been seeing this repeat itself in the past 20 years - replace the term "Nazi" with Antifa or BLM, or the "volkisch" with "wokish," and you see where this is going.  Replace the writings of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Theodor Fritsch with the books of Robin D'Angelo and Nicole Hannah Jones, and then compare them side-by-side, and the evidence is frightening for what is going on in America right now.  So, why are these movements so similar?  Believe it or not, a political theory addresses this, and I want to talk about that now. 

Note the illustration above - it is in the shape of a horseshoe.  If you will notice how a horseshoe is constructed, it has a connecting arch at its top and the two ends are almost close together.  This is the illustration of a very compelling political theory advocated by individuals such as the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye (b. 1925) and others, and it is of course called the "Horseshoe theory."  While many would disagree with this idea - notably Simon Choat, who says that the problem is that both decry "elites" but do not agree on who those are - others, such as Kathleen Belew, say the concept is valid yet the illustration is not - Belew proposes a circle instead of a horseshoe, as she correctly notes that radical extremes end up in the same place; tyranny (Kathleen Belew, "The Crunchy to Alt-Right Pipeline" The Atlantic website, December 14, 2002, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-left-alt-right-share-beliefs-white-power-movement/672454/ - Accessed 6/20/2024).  This would actually be in concordance with peer-reviewed historians such as Richard Overy and Michael Lynch, both of whom have written volumes that compare Stalin and Hitler. Choat and Belew are actually on the political Left, and one (Choat) is in denial of the facts while the other (Belew) astutely observes some ominous trends in society at present.  I personally think the "horseshoe theory" is a valid one, and am thankful for discovering it as it gives a term to a position I had already held for some time.  Extremism - regardless of the ideology that drives it - is a danger to normal society, and when it starts to spread, we need to pay attention as the very future of the nation may depend on a proper response to addressing it.  This is why I personally believe that the Ku Klux Klan and Black Lives Matter are in reality two sides of the same thing - they are both evil, they both threaten Western civilization, and they need to be countered and checked in regard to the influence they have.  And, that leads to a couple of personal observations.

Do you really want to know how to take care of radical extremists?  I have an answer for you on this which is my own personal opinion.  I believe that we should round up all the Kluckers and the Antifa hacks, lock them in a room together, and just let them kill each other.  It is a form of self-inflicted punishment and it would be like chemotherapy for a nation - these cancerous movements could be eradicated from society for good.  Then, I propose that any Establishment elitists who aided and abetted these individuals (Democrats in Congress and in local governments primarily, but also a few suspect Republicans too) should be stripped of any authority and blacklisted as subversive.  Then, the billionaire elitists who are funding many of these acts and the groups who perpetrate them (Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Bill Gates, and a ton of others) need to have all their assets confiscated, and those assets should be allotted in two ways.  First, a portion of them could be used to balance our own national budget and eradicate the huge deficit we have.  The combined personal fortunes of billionaire oligarchs would value in the trillions, and not only would they eradicate national debt, but there would be plenty left over to help struggling developing nations to get what they need.  This is true redistribution of wealth, and the average American would not be adversely affected by it because we could still retain our own assets and even benefit from a stronger economy.  I am going to get into more details of that shortly, but let me now briefly give a crash course on the relationship between the elitist and the extremist.

The elitist is out for one thing - total control.  The elitist has money, the elitist has influence, and the elitist has an agenda.  However, the elitist often wants to conceal his activities, so he needs a mechanism to promote and enforce his agenda.  Often, that mechanism is the extremist.  The extremist also wants control, but in a different way - he wants ideological control.  If he finds common ground with an elitist, the extremist then has the resources at his disposal to implement radical action.  Both the elitist and the extremist are in this coalition then for the same ends, but if they are successful, one will need to go. We saw that in the Third Reich, when after gaining control of Germany Hitler essentially liquidated many of his own allies - his chief rabble-rouser, the homosexual SA leader Ernst Rohm - was executed, and the occultist who aided in the founding of the Nazi Party, Sebottendorf, was exiled and later committed suicide.  In that case, the extremist became the elitist, and ultimately the tyrant.  It is a strategy that is as old as civilization itself, and we even saw it in Genesis 11 with the tower of Babel - Nimrod was the first prototype of the future Antichrist we teach of in Christian eschatology, and as such embodied the true end of extremist turmoil and societal unrest.  To put it more in political terms, the anarchy of the extremist always will develop into the tyranny of the elitist, and in some cases the extremist becomes the elitist too.  This goes against everything that natural law and divine revelation have established, and this is the opposite of God's order of things.  That being said, let me now return to some ways to eradicate this cancer from our society.

The fuel of both the elitist and the extremist is an out-of-control, top-heavy bureaucracy.  While the extremist often claims to be "anti-establishment," in reality they want to control the Establishment and re-create it in their own image.  The elitist sees this as a tool to exert their own power, and they use the extremist agenda to plot their own takeover of the established order.  There are many ways to stop this, and I want to get into a few of those now.  First, government needs to be decentralized - a complex and cumbersome, overbloated bureaucracy is like a cesspool that breeds bad agendas and extremism festers in those cesspools.  This is one reason why so many have called the apparatus in DC "The Swamp," and it is an apt description.  In order to "drain the swamp," one thing that is needed is for its nourishment to be cut off. The "Swamp" is fed by tax revenue, and often these taxes are onerous, ridiculous, and unnecessary.  This is not to say taxation in itself is a bad thing, as a certain level of taxation is integral to the maintenance of the legitimate infrastructure.  But, the way the tax scheme is structured needs to be changed.  For one thing, we need to stop things such as income tax, estate taxes, and property taxes.  None of these are necessary nor are they ethical.  A more realistic and agreeable tax would be a fair sales tax on goods purchased, and the only tax then for property would be assessed and paid at the initial purchase, and would not be an annual penalty assessed punitively against someone just because they own their own home.  Same with income tax - who ever came up with that stupid idea needs to have their graves urinated on.  You should never be punished for earning a living at all in all honesty, and thus the income tax needs to go.  Tariffs and sales taxes would therefore be sufficient to fund necessary infrastructure such as law enforcement, schools, and roads.  Of course, what this means also is a reduction and decentralization of Federal government.  There is a top-heavy bureaucratic structure in our nation that stifles and cripples the average citizen, and many of those bureaucratic agencies serve no real purpose.  We could save so much in our national budget if we just cut out some garbage and deregulate some aspects of society.  With less government, there would be less need for excessive tax revenue, and local governments could fill the gap by instituting programs of their own based on the specific needs of their constituents, and a reasonable sales tax and tariff setup would be sufficient to fund those.  This also means that schools could be privatized in particular - the radical agendas that plague public schools now are the result of bureaucratic overreach, and it could be immediately resolved by privatizing the educational system.  There are three entities that should be in charge of education - the Church, private foundations, and the military.  With a need for skilled labor for instance, industry-specific organizations could operate their own trade schools.  The only national involvement in this case would be maybe to establish a standard such as a level of literacy, functional cognitive skills in math and science, and a few basics.  However, the way those are implemented would be left to the groups who operate the schools. I guarantee that if that were adopted as a model, our standards would be elevated.  Parents would not have to worry anymore about students being taught things that conflict with their values, and there would also be a more well-rounded educational experience for every kid in school. I will focus at another time on my personal educational program, but it is worth mentioning here. 

A second factor to bear in mind would be the imposition of term limits for Congress in particular.  Many career politicians have served in Congress for decades, and they haven't demonstrated their merit to be there.  That has to change.  Take, for instance, the former Senator of my home state, West Virginia.  I am speaking of course of the late Robert Byrd, who first was elected to office when my grandfather was a teenager in the 1930s, and then served until I was in my 40s!  That is ridiculous. The man had 70 years almost as a career politician, and he didn't do a hell of a lot in all honesty.  It is time to impose term limits on Congress, and in doing so a Congressman (House or Senate) can only serve a maximum of 12 years and then they need to step down. Along with term limits, a cut in salary is in order for some of these people too - Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and others are millionaires now, and they gained their fortunes often by unethical means.  A fair Congressional salary I believe should be $50,000 annually, and the Congressman should be encouraged to be bi-vocational in office. Many of them are already lawyers or successful businessmen, so they can still generate their personal wealth from their private businesses without bankrupting the national budget.  If that were to be implemented, I would guarantee that many Congressmen would be more effective at their jobs.  The salary of the President should also be capped at perhaps a realistic $75,000 annually - politicians should not be getting rich off the backs of the taxpayers, and if they had fewer perks they could concentrate more on leading and doing their jobs as they were elected to do.  This would mean then that many of these individuals would have to shop where the average person shops, and they would also have to deal with the issues their constituents face on a more personal level.  It would be a wake-up call to the bureaucrats.  Then, like President Milei in Argentina recently done, it is time to clean house in the government too - there are a lot of useless agencies and departments in the government that are not necessary, they are redundant, and they also tend to exert too much interference into the daily lives of most of us.  That junk needs to go.  If we did that, and instead focused some of that activity on the state and local level, our national deficit would be resolved practically overnight.  Small government on a national level is integral to the wellbeing of the nation as a whole, and the average person benefits more from it.  It is time maybe to implement that change. 

While I believe all of this is good stuff, realistically I don't see it happening soon.  Even a good Presidential candidate like Donald Trump doesn't address all of this, and as I have said on numerous occasions, I think the best way to save the nation is to let it die as it is and then resurrect it as a smaller and more stable entity.  I know that is a controversial take, and it may garner some hate for even mentioning it, but maybe the solution to the US's problems would be to break into smaller entities and preserve the aspects of the national legacy which are important to the regions affected.  It is not out of the question, as this happened in history to many larger civilizations - Rome is one.  The way Rome was preserved after AD 476 was in the successor states that emerged from the old imperial order.  In time, I feel this is the inevitable destiny of the United States as well - we will eventually become so bloated by our cumbersome system that it will undo itself.  Think of the US like a balloon - you can expand it only so far before it pops, as eventually there is no more room to grow.  It is coming, mark my words.  But, we must see it not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity to truly "build back better," but thankfully not the way Joe Biden means it.  And, it will "make America great again," but not necessarily the way Donald Trump may wish either.  Finally, it is a real "great reset" then, but not the nefarious version that elitist supervillain Klaus Schwab proposes - this new day will have no place for Schwab or his elitist friends.  

As long as the earth exists, there will never be a perfect utopian society - that will only happen when Christ returns.  But, that doesn't mean we can't be better than what we are.  As I often have said based on a phrase I heard years ago from a Pentecostal evangelist, our present position doesn't determine our future potential.   That is true for us as individuals, but also for us as a nation.  May that inspire us to at least attempt to rectify the ills of our current society.  Thank you for letting me ramble, and hope you all have a great weekend.