A (BRIEF!!!) History of My Political Opinions from 2016 to the Present

Or: It's Progressive's All the Way Down

Back in 2016 I was tripped up by what my wife calls “Richard’s Romans”. Reading the signs of the times, while squinting, I thought it was 88 BC.

So, 2104 years off? Could happen to anybody!

For those of you who do not routinely refer current political questions to an empire that collapsed 1500 years ago, 88 BC was the year Sulla, who had been illegally stripped of his consular command of the Roman army and fearing his personal arrest and proscription might be next, violated the deepest of Roman taboos by marching an army into Rome. Had never been done before. Officially the Republic would last another 50 years or so; it pretty much ended on that day.

The important thing about 2016, I concluded, was that it was the first time in our history that the loser of the presidential election—either candidate—stood a non-trivial chance of being arrested by the winner.

To my mind, that meant the end of the constitutional order. I wrote at the time, thinking myself witty and insightful (blame the Romans, my wife does!) “it’s our thug against theirs. I feel no delicate obligation to vote for theirs.” (Still don’t.)

What followed, Russia and resistance and massive attacks on democracy by the FBI and the intelligence apparat, supported by the press, only hardened my views. As so often happens with the Left, they struck first then projected their crimes onto us. Eight years later it is not less disgusting. She does belong in jail. Probably Obama as well.

But I was wrong about the death of the constitutional order. Evidence of its strength abounds where it is most important, in us, its ultimate enforcers.

I was also wrong about the nature of the contest and got more wrong as it went along.

Somewhat in 2016, more in 2020, and definitely by 2024, I defined the contest as “progressives vs some combination of conservatives and moderates.”

All wrong. I ignored not so much the true nature and history of MAGA, as the true nature and history of progressivism. Pay attention to that history and note the most important words I will ever write about politics: MAGA is a progressive movement. If it feels somewhat fascist, that’s because Progressivism was always America’s version of fascism.

Progressivism in the U.S. has always meant one thing, impatience, even scorn for process. Wilson apparently felt the Constitution mostly as an encumbrance to good government. Dewey, the Roosevelts, the whole crowd wanted to be left alone to govern in peace.

Disdain for democracy is precisely what the populists mean when they damn “the elites.”

Well, friends, if you don’t mind my asking, why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

All this populist talk about bringing back the strong gods and rejecting the thin gruel of classic liberal process comes to the same thing. Forget your precious process, get out of the way for us manly men to get the job done.

Read whole, Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech is quite fine. But one can hardly avoid the unnerving sense that the most famous passage is a tribute from Teddy’s ego to Teddy.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I wish the MAGA folk would dare a little less greatly. I prefer Lord Acton: “Great men are almost always bad men.” But surely worst of all are those who pretend to greatness but have no clue and have no clue because they pretend to greatness.

The great danger of the resort to power, as my great friend George Gilder has explained, is that it cuts off information. Power is noise where we want a clear channel for the facts. To remember that all I need is to read any two sentences from Peter Navarro.

BTW, I don’t think Trump himself is a fascist. Too cheerful and good humored and oddly even humble. Fascists don’t make jokes, but they do make wokes. But MAGA is much worse than its supposed master and, mastering him, will destroy both.

Worse still, morally, are the conservatives who pander to it all, rejecting a lifetime of principled defense of liberty for… for what. For a few more clicks? For Wales? You will be weighed in the balance.

The coming political realignment will be rooted in rejection of America’s fascism in both its “left” and “right” forms. The motto of the new liberalism could be this from Justice Frankfurter "The history of liberty is largely the history of the observance of procedural safeguards." (Thanks to Maggie Gallagher.)

And we will reject it, not because we are so smart or skilled, but because both the twin towers of American fascism have screwed up big time!

Glory be!

Praise God and pass the Constitutions.

More anon.

(Off the prescription pain killers. How anyone considers Oxy a recreational drug, I’ll never know.)