Chaos Manor View, Friday, February 26, 2016
“This is the most transparent administration in history.”
Barrack Obama
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
From here on in, it’s the matter of Trump. You may be for him or against him; but he is a serious contender. I do not think he really wants to be saddled with the pressure of the duties of President; but more and more turn to him to save what they think is America. This is the rise of pragmatic populism. There is something Jacksonian in his rise.
Peggy Noonan today
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected-1456448550
Not one of her best written pieces, but I think she nails it.
P
And in fact, she does. Trump is a populist and speaks for those who have given up on a system that is no longer the consent of the governed.
From Noonan’s essay:
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
The fundamental premise of the United States is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Our governing class no longer has the consent of the governed, and many of them are shocked when you point that out. The protected – the governing class – pretty well consents. Why would anyone object? The intentions are good. And in fact it is so: they have good intent. They are well-wishing with a vengeance.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
The Protected and the Unprotected are not quite the same as the Enlightened and the Benighted, but the Enlightened, who know what’s best for everyone, have gained more power among the Protected and are using it. As I have been saying for two decades, we sow the wind. Now comes the reaping.
As Noonan notes, it is the same in Europe:
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
The Road to Serfdom ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0048EJXCK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&%3B%3Bbtkr=1&%3Btag=chaosmanor-20, but you can find copies elsewhere including some for free) discusses this same phenomenon.
Why Trump Is Panicking Robert Kagan.
<http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-trump-panicking-robert-kagan-15329>
Apparently, Rubio actually said this: “I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at all, who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.’”
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Roland Dobbins <roland.dobbins@mac.com>
FBI vs. Apple, Google, Facebook, and the American People
Jake Anderson put this best, I’ll post the links to WSJ after his bit:
<.>
Now, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed that there are actually 12 other iPhones the FBI wants to access in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism. According to an Apple lawyer, these cases are spread all across the country: “Four in Illinois, three in New York, two in California, two in Ohio, and one in Massachusetts.”
With each of these cases, the FBI’s lawyers cite an 18th-century law called All Writs Act, which they say is the jurisprudence needed to force Apple to comply and bypass their built-in proprietary encryption methods. Is it any wonder the only case the public hears about is the one that involves terrorism?
</>
http://anonhq.com/we-just-found-out-the-real-reason-the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-into-the-iphone/
This is where we come to terms with the balancing act of liberty and security; I defer to Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Fine by me, so long as the friendly men in black ski masks with automatic weapons realize that I’m not with “those” people…
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Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
