Times Like These
Modern American political theater unrolls ceaselessly up the murky coastline of political thought much like a tsunami, or tidal wave. Pause now perhaps to review video footage of a tsunami, likely different than you might expect. It is shockingly different than you might expect, and a very appropriate image for modern American politics. It is a wave of trash which was very accurately called a tidal wave - an inflow resembling an instant high tide along the seafront, higher than the seawalls which separate ocean from land.
We need a new understanding of political mechanics to predict and avoid maximum damage from the political tides. Rubrics learned in the days of calm are useless while whirled about in the American political maelstrom.
Why Civics Education is Absurd
I have read that what we need in America is good, old-fashioned civics education in the grade schools, so that students may learn how America really works.
I consider this proposal sadly amusing. The last thing to push for is further dry comparative religious study in the classroom. American Civics qualifies as dry pedagogy about dead religions. Classic American Civics - how a bill becomes a law - is now as mythical as any study of the Roman Pantheon. People may nowadays study the Roman and Greek gods, their interpersonal vicissitudes, and analyze what aspects of nature and character which they personify. Any suspicion that people still reach to the Roman gods in hopes that they exist should rest easy. Nobody believes in the Roman gods; studying them does not run afoul of religious study in the classroom.
But American Civics is put forth as a study topic because people seem to believe that it still exists. More likely, they wish to believe in public and doubt in private, for a public acceptance that American Government as it once was assumed to be no longer exists, is disquieting to many.
Civics is only of didactic importance if there is still genuine belief in its connection to something which genuinely exists. The America of the Founders has slowly bled out and been transmogrified into something entirely different; and study of the Founders’ principles is akin to learning a dead language for liturgical purposes.
This essay is not about the past, the Seven Deaths of the American Republic. Rather, I wish to offer a handbook of revolution, in order that we may find a path through modern times, and reach a quieter stretch beyond the rapids to formulate a plan of governance of the future. Our enemies are the revolutionaries, of course.
Lord Acton was right - great men are never good men, and power corrupts. We live in a time of unbridled lust for power; but this is nothing new or special. What is new and different is that such things are no longer embarrassing within American governance.
Handbook of Revolution
Parade of the Fools
The overture to the New Revolution is The March of the Gladiators by the Czech composer Julius Fučík. Go on, listen to it. It is one of the most famous musical pieces in modern history; you all know it.
The incipient Revolution is presaged by the apparent seizure of power by the stooges, the puppets of the true revolutionaries. The stooges play the role of circus clowns - familiar yet unreal, merry and amusing but cartoonishly frightening.
The fools covet power, and appear in all ways to genuinely threaten revolution. They seem to believe in their own abilities, showing the popular expression of the day - the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the modern take on an old observation that the vain and arrogant inevitably overestimate their own abilities. Arrogance and ignorance are truly a toxic combination.
Look back through the history of revolutions, and you will frequently see that the fools arose as revolution was afoot. Sometimes, the later dictators play the fool’s role in the early days, as the rag-tag Nazi’s did in the 20’s in the Bierkeller Putsch by Ludendorff and Hitler. This is the exception; usually the fools are meant to be marched out to draw the audience’s attention, but later quietly discarded.
America has celebrated an amazing team of political fools over the last decade. These clowns really belong in greasepaint - they are astonishing beyond measure. Common to all is a wacky expression of lust for power. You know their names.
Revolution Is Not About Power
Throughout history, successful revolutions do not result in the enthronement of the group which holds the most power. Revolutions are wars of endurance, and the victor is not the one with the most power; rather, the victor is the last one standing.
The culmination of the October Revolution in Russia was not the coalescence of Bolshevik power, but the onset of a bloody and enervating Civil War which drained Russia of its energy. At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks were feeble. They could have been easily brushed aside by any of the powers remaining after the February Revolution; but none of them were left. In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
That is why the fools are trotted out just before things get busy in the revolution. They stir up the audience, and let slip the forces which lead to the first stage of revolution, the hammer.
Part One - The Hammer
A fitting entr’acte between the Overture and the Hammer is the “Anvil Chorus” by Verdi - the Coro di Zingari chorus from act 2, scene 1 of Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 opera Il trovatore. Again, you all know this music. Listen and think a bit before continuing; for this music is the anthem of the first act of the Revolution.
The subtle but essential change in the body politic involves a sudden shift from the traditional, calm Apollonian rationality of Renaissance thought, into the thrilling chaos of the Dionysian mob mentality. The serenity of liberal democratic thinking gives way to the rush and tumult of the mob, and the most important catalysts for this shift are the Great Public Fools who lead the way.
The Make America Great Again movement tortures the Apollonian liberal democrats in its disdain for reason and objective truth. Reality and myth change costumes; what I say, you say or he says becomes an equally valid Truth in the metaverse. One need only to dream things to make them so; there is no frustrating toil as is often the case in changing Reality - you can just reclassify things in your mind.
You can see the Dionysian exhilaration in the faces of the worshipers at a MAGA ceremony. The immense power that comes from claiming control over one’s private reality is flush on every visage.
Such intellectual drunkenness horrifies Apollonian Objectivists. Ayn Rand would be infuriated to see the dredge that washed up nearly a century after her writing from a much different movement that originated with her thoughts but culminated in the solipsistic reality of the Trumpians and McCarthies.
But the Vanguard of the Revolution at this time is the crazies and fools, the McCarthies and Taylor-Greenes and Santoses and other suicide bombers of the Republic. It is not enough to tolerate craziness. It is necessary to go full mad-on Fear and Loathing in a manner which would have shocked Hunter S. Thompson. All that remains now is to hand out hammers to the idiots.
And hammers - or by the grace of God and the Second Amendment, the American Hand Gun - for all. Apollonian firearms owners are a dull and accountantly bunch, following Cooper’s Rules to a tee, as well as the implicit and obvious standards like Don’t chamber a round when you’re mad. and Don’t handle handguns when you’re likkered up. Such people are hardly a threat to the Republic.
We need bozos. Bozos with guns. Phase One of the revolution involves the hammer
Not all that falls to the blow of a hammer is a nail. Inculcating a lust for smashing things is the message of the first part of the Revolution.
Anything off the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange will do for a theme of The Hammer. Wendy Carlos’ stunning rendition of Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary from that album comes to mind. Rossini’s lilting and lyrical The Thieving Magpie lends a whimsical lightness to the ultraviolence inherent in the First Part of the Revolution.
This is so disquieting, but a great, inventive framework.