Allow me to test some ideas by means of a kind of thought experiment.

Image that I was to sit down with a group of Chinese Communist leaders.  And imagine that I was to ask them—off the record—whether it was a good policy or not for the United States to undertake massive social spending in the midst of a deep recession.  Imagine further that I was to ask these socialists whether accumulating debt for “healthcare reform,” and undertaking trillion dollar deficits would harm America productivity. 

What do you imagine a boardroom full of Red Chinese Economic Wonks would answer? 

I believe they would respond by saying something like this:  America’s exorbitant social spending, especially in the midst of a deep recession unquestionably endangers the world economy and especially the Chinese investment in American treasury instruments. This spendthrift policy is so dangerous it threatens to destroy the value of America’s currency.   

Of course, this is not just a fanciful invention of a thought experiment.  In fact, this is the very message of concern that is coming from Communist China.  Apparently, the Chinese Communists have become smarter Capitalists than the new and improved “progressive” America of Barack Obama.

So what does it mean when a nation that has long shown the world the wonders of free-enterprise has moved so far toward economic experimentation that even Chinese Communists doubt the wisdom of America’s “progressive” left? 

I do not mean this as a flippant throwaway rhetorical question.

Allow me to offer a different perspective on this phenomenon, something which I hope will result in a much needed paradigm shift away from the standard model of political discourse which presently prevails in the conservative public square.

We are told that all the forces of “leftism” in America are presently arrayed to seize the golden moment of their political ascendency.  Swiftly are they hog tying the America economy and siphoning off as much wealth as possible in re-distributive payoffs to their various constituents. 

The voices of opposition, which once were called Republican, (but I restrain myself from using such meaningless expressions), voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Mark Levin declare emphatically that this constitutes a radical swing to the left, a monstrous power grab by the Bolsheviki to seize control of the engines of production and distribute American wealth as a grand socialist scheme of social engineering.

Isn’t this the common perspective of the political right?

The problem is that while these indictments describe what is going on, they do not explain.  Why would Communists and European Socialists view with skepticism the policies of Obama and the American Progressive Left, as they are euphemistically called, if their ideas were truly socialist?  The last socialist experiment in America under FDR, for all its foolish inefficiency and injustice, resulted in the electrification of rural America and the building a network of dams that were the envy of the world.  One of them was the Grand Cooley Dam-one of the great electricity producing machines in the world.  Many of the greatest public works in our history were products of big government.  Despite its wrongheadedness, New Deal socialism could proudly point to accomplishments that indisputably enriched and improved our country.  On the other hand, what policies advocated by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aim at bettering our lives or signal great economic improvement in any real “progressive” sense?

Allow me to offer another, perhaps more sobering, assessment of what is really going on, one that I believe explains more than the rather pedestrian analysis that is common among talk show hosts and Fox News personalities.  

I really do not think Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama is a socialist in any meaningful sense.  I do not think they are coherent enough to have a comprehensive if flawed view of man and the state.  I do not think Harry Reid is a socialist either for the same reasons.  What I think America is witnessing is something much more ordinary in the life cycle of declining states than anything as romantically revolutionary as a social or Marxist revolution.  What we are witnessing is the formation of a political cleptocracy.  Cleptocracy is and has always been, since time immemorial, the principle enemy of economic and political society.  International socialism is a relatively new phenomenon in history—and while it shares some striking resemblances, socialism and ruling class cleptocracy are not identical.  Cleptocracy is as old as the world.

This “revolution” is nothing more ideological than that which motivated Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, or Idi Amin, or Hosni Mubarak, or Anastasio Somoza or even Pablo Escobar.  All this is to say, that there is no ideological underpinning to what we are witnessing.  Rather, what we are watching before our very eyes is something vastly simpler and more obvious and it is not a conspiracy of socialist ideologues.  We are watching our nation becoming a banana republic, not a Soviet styled communist state.

Allow me, at the risk of being didactic, to begin with certain assumptions that are presently lost on our culture. 

The conservative mind in this most recent chapter of the culture war has fallen into the pathetic dialectical trap of arguing that the first and greatest enemy of the American experiment is socialism.  I am no friend of socialism.  I despise the notion that man is but a piece of a collective.  Nevertheless, the presumptions of this school of thinking have evolved out of the Cold War necessity of vigilance.  It declares that leftism is the greatest natural enemy of our way of life—that the enemies of our republic are primarily Saul Alinsky leftists or European style socialists or even Trotskyite communists.

Yet if you were to ask candidly those same Chinese Communists, in my thought experiment, whether or not this present course of America economic profligacy were good for us or for them, a committee of high Level Chinese Communists would probably uniformly tell us that we are behaving irrationally and self-destructively.  How can the Obama revolution be communists when the communists themselves think we are behaving with some kind of death wish?

Allow me to offer a different paradigm than the shrill champions of anti-communism.

You see the first and greatest enemy of self-government is, and always will be ARISTOCRACY, which is to say, elitism and rule by a privileged class— not, socialism.

·         The American Revolution was not fought to overcome Russian style communism; it was fought against the prerogatives of a king who felt entitled to rule other men without consent.

·         The War of 1812 was not fought against socialism; it was fought against the imperious high handedness of royal policies that disregarded the rights of men.

·         The Civil War, the greatest conflict in our history, was not fought against European style leftism; it was fought against a ruling class in our own country who presumed to order the lives of men without their consent.

·         The First War World and the Second World War were not fought against Communists; they were fought against rulers who presumed that their countries were personal estates.  So was the War in Panama, the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan.  So was the first war we ever fought as an independent country: the war against the Barbary Pirates.

Because we are using the language of the Cold War, we are unable to see what is plainly before our eyes.  What America is witnessing, is the war of the Aristoi on the bourgeoisie, the war of royalty against the power of those who would and can govern themselves without the prerogatives of a ruling class.  

Enlisted into this modern royal army against the middle class is first, the age-old ally of aristocracy—the university trained bureaucrat.  Universities were created and patronized in Medieval Ages primarily as institutions for training up men to work in the administration and counting houses of kings.  That is what the great Universities in America have become, training grounds for the apologists of a new aristocracy, those who take seriously the “rights and privileges” of their special training to manage and order society better than ordinary “untrained” people themselves.

The second natural ally of a ruling class is hard for the America mind to fathom.  Nevertheless, there has always been a natural relationship between the underclass mentality and the ascendency of an aristocracy.

The underclass, notwithstanding popular myth, has been throughout history, the greatest champions of monarchy.  Why?  Because aristocrats profess to protect the poor man from the rich man.  That is what Jefferson Davis professed to do by resisting Northern industrialism.  We laugh now.  But he claimed to be protecting the wretched slave from the oppression of the industrialist and the overwhelming challenges of an overwhelming freedom  That was the claim of all the great monarchs of Europe.  Only men of special talent and class have wisdom and prudence enough to govern men who are too lazy and unwise to govern themselves.  That was the argument of Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun against the soulless urbanization of the North.

An aristocrat always claims to protect the poor and lowly from the exploitation of self-sufficient men.  Indeed, the very promise of a king, as we witness in the Book of Samuel is that a king and his men will fight our wars for us.  No longer must free men oblige themselves to fight for their own interests.  Royalty serves the instincts of sloth by providing a class of nobility that will do the business of governing in behalf of those who cede that power to them.  The Southern aristocracy used this argument to assure to the world that slavery was a positive good for those intrinsically unable to govern themselves.

At the risk of over-explaining, the French Revolution was not an uprising of the poor; it was an uprising of the middle class.  The poor loved the monarchy.  They wept at the death of their beloved royalty who had provided them with cakes and circuses.  Indeed, history shows that the poor serfs of France stood beneath the scaffolding in the Place de Concord to bathe their unwashed bodies in the blood of the monarchs they adored.  You see aristocracy, professes its moral right to rule because of a superior sensitivity to things, particularly benevolence for the common person.  And why?  First, because the poor generally work for and are organized by middle class people.  The middle class is the stratum of society that creates wealth and organizes labor.  This makes the middle class the apparent enemy of the poor.  This makes the middle class the common object of hatred of both those who feel they are morally superior and those below who resent their order and self-discipline of success.  Second, the common man believes he cannot protect himself—at least that is the opinion nurtured by the ruling class.  The king and his nobility rule in order to govern for the benefit of the weak and the poor.

The impulse of aristocracy is to operate with contempt for self-sufficiency.  Aristocracy by its nature needs to be needed.  It needs to be justified.  Despite the aphorism of the political right that limousine liberals are motivated by guilt, the better answer is more obvious.  The wealth of the left, accumulated primarily as a result of privilege, and university training, and not work, is justified by the noblesse oblige of being members of a ruling class that “cares” more deeply for the down trodden and the destitute than heartless businessmen. It is not guilt. It is the noble duty and obligation of a ruling class. Even where there are no destitute or downtrodden, the creation of such a class is necessary for the self-justification of a ruling class.  

For those who are naturally independent and self-sufficient, they have no need of kings.  People who earn and make money, design and create things do not need the king’s men to assist them.  The middle class, or what has been contemptuously referred to as Bourgeoisie, do not need the largess of monarchs or the vicarious excitement of royalty to fill up otherwise empty lives.  Free men are free because they distain the instinct to find meaning through the glitter and awe of a ruling class.  Freemen have identity outside and apart from men who claim to rule over them. The despondent, the undisciplined, the depressed, the drug addict, the mindless drone of TV dramas, must live through the energy and vicarious thrill of celebrities, TV stars, basketball heroes, and “Camelot”-like political celebrities, like Louis XIV, John F. Kennedy and now, Barack Obama.  These are men of style, charisma and je ne sais quoi,—or to rephrase it: the ruling class.

Noblesse oblige: it provided the games in the Coliseum of ancient Rome at public expense.  It explains why Obama worked so hard to get the Olympics into Chicago.  It explains the deep psychological need to lead and manager others.  It is the age-old formula of despots.  An aristocracy casts farthings from their royal coaches in return for the adoration of those who have little or no respect for themselves. 

The enemy of our country today is not socialism; rather it is the emergence of a definitive ruling elite.  But more tragically, it is the emergence of an indoctrinated class of men and women who view themselves as objects of charity rather than respect.  It is the slow decaying of the dignity of liberty and self-sufficiency.  Too many of us have been told too many times by elitist advancing their agenda— that we are disenfranchised-- and we believe it, because it caters to the worst qualities of self-pity.  Hard work and self-sufficiency takes character. Then behold! The champion of those wretched underlings arrives on horseback to share not the promise of equality, or the challenges of liberty, but an equal promise that allows men to live through the greatness of those who are above them. In short, we may work so that a better class of men and women can do great things in our behalf.  For this rising class of modern thralls, we are no longer the land of the free, or the home of the brave.  We just want to live through the majesty of those we set over ourselves for great tasks, and for the honor of receiving on occasion a deigning look and brass penny from the passing royal coach.

There is inescapable fact in human history, something the foolish Green Aristocracy cannot fathom.

Nations and people are in competition with one another.  And those who are effete, delusional and weak, will be overwhelmed and supplanted by those who hold to the messy facts of existence: things like crying babies, sweat equity, and the rugged elation of making and building things with callous hands.

The Green Mind surveys these uncouth distractions with bemused condescension.  Such proletarian preoccupations belong to those who hold no graduate degrees—the Heraldry of the Green Nobility.  Such soiling indignities are not part of the life of privilege promised to Green Princes who live on the inheritance of their parents and their countrymen.  Like all children of Royalty, they live their thoughtless lives through the work, thrift and blood of other men. 

The Green Nobility, rather, spiritedly undertakes the noblesse oblige of all privileged classes to rule over other men-- always ruling for the sake of others, and always from spacious estates overlooking Malibu. Common folk, you see, with common dreams, are but uneducable subjects to peep about beneath the mighty protecting limbs of their Green Overlords-- For they, by right of intellectual primogeniture wield the Green Royal Mace and manage the affairs of man and nature in Adam’s behalf.  
 

Of course, that is the same claim of every king of antiquity. The Green Aristocracy, however, is clearly of better breeding than those nasty brutes of the Old World. Whilst the Boubons and Stewart ruled in Royal Purple. These better, more progressive Rulers, wield unchallengable power in a more lovely shade of Green.  

There is nothing new under the sun. You see, the Green Nobility wraps itself in the same mantel that claims royal prerogative over the entire inheritance of Adam-just as Louis XIVof France or Charles I of England or Phillip of Spain.  The Aristocracy of Environmentism  rules the Earth with the same imperious certainty of those who claimed to rule as an inheritance of Adam. (I encourage you to read Sir Robert Filmer's justification for the rule of kings).

For all its education, The modern Green Mind is really the Old Purple mind. They, like the Hapsburg princes of Austria are whispered lies by their tutors--and told they hold perogative power over an estate to which no one has given them authority. Like the georgic kings of legend which they imagine themselves to be, they are not friends of the common people, a la Wendell Berry, they having never turned a plot of earth with a hoe or worn their backs stiff with a scythe.  They, in their affluence, preach the dignity of poverty, and carefully catechize other men in the dogma of “less is more”--all this while sipping lattes in Carmel in the remote tranquility of their own Versailles.

Nevertheless, and in spite of these vain imaginings, every nation and race, who raises children and joys in building things and creating wealth, will transform the world in their simple bourgoise appetites, whether or not the ancien regime has decreed it, or whether the Green Intelligentsia likes it or not.  Whether their vassals in the UN declare Africa a World Heritage Site or California goes solar and never drills off Santa Barbara again, or whether Congress declares Alaska out of bounds to development, men of different languages and races, the seething, moving population of the world, will change the physical landscape of earth in an inevitable urge that cannot be stopped--because God put it in man and commanded it of man. 

There are forces at work in the world beyond the silly dicta of little Green Princes.

You see, God’s second commandment to the entire family of man (after he enjoined us from eating of the forbidden fruit) was and remains even now-- “go forth and multiple and subdue the earth.” To stand against this commandment of Nature’s God, is to stand before the tsunami of history with a trite Green incantation to stop.  It is King Canute striking the sea to command the waves to cease.

The impulse of man will transform nature whether the Old Order likes it or not.  Man will do it, because it is part of the nature of a Creator to make and build things. And man is made in the image of that First Creator. It is only the claim of a Pretender to rule over things to which he holds no title. The order of God's creation resonates in every human bosom that still holds warmth and breath, brcause the world is given to every man to make a place in it. The Wide World is not the dominion of some few to rule over in our stead. That is but the presumption of a Green Aristocracy.
 

One would think that the modern secular humanists who embrace this desire to reclaim the Patrimony of Eden, would understand the basics of what Darwinism teaches and the materialist creedo the Green Aristocract uniformly claim to embrace. To understand nature as Darwin and Hobbes described it, only the strong survive in a world where life is "nasty, brutis and short." The world is no place for those who embrace the delusion of peace and natural prosperity in a fallen world.  The world is a hard place that demands blood.

Only the old and senile of this ancien regime, who are lost in the fantasies of second-childhood, could image the world as anything but a place of struggle and conflict. They, like the spoiled Princes of yore,  see nature as a child’s playground to return to—like the faux ruins in the gardens of French aristocrats.  Little do they understand how the world really works.

Without repentance, the world is hard.  It eats the old. It pitilessly consumes the weak.  It devours the dreamer, the poet, the diffident and the coddled children of universities.  It breaks the teeth of those who do not fight or grow strong or reproduce or stand four-square in the certainty of their moral preeminence.  This is the true inheritance of Adam--in his sin. It is a fallen world.

Gardens without men are but graveyards.  That is all the Greening of America promises this generation that kills babies, tears down the work of human hands ,and worships the Sun as a mythic source of power. 

What the Green Aristocracy does not understand, like the insular Boubons who presuppose them, is that the only sources of energy and authority in this world is God, and the "image of God" in man. And the latter is the only royalty that exists by right to rule in this world. Green Princes have no such authority. You see, every man, woman and child possesses a royal coat of arms called the Imago Dei. It is not a special lineage of Green Academics, or Autocratic Green Czars. There is an irrepressible revolution that the Green Aristocracy cannot now suppress or ever will.

Fallen Nature and the Preists of the Green Aristocracy are but grotesque counterfeits to the goodness, truth and beauty of the one true and transcendent God and the image impressed in the spirit of his preeminent creation: man.  There is nothing in Nature's unsubdued, pestilent and postlapsarian condition to worship or preserve without human refinement Nature without the work of human hands offers but malaria, yellow fever, infant mortality and cave bears. Unrepentant nature is but a feast for flies. Fallen nature devours the innocent like Moloch's brazen furnace. She laughs with the buzzing wings of Baal at the children of men struggling by wits, sticks and stones to claim his narrow space in a brutal fallen cosmos.  Nature offers nothing but eternal blood-letting conflict, because there is no surplus to be had outside the energy and imagination of man’s transforming hand.  

The Green Aristocracy is just the most recent geriatric pathology of a culture that is growing old and still desires to courtiers to defer to their royal prerogatives. theirs is the incestuous intellectualism that breed Professorial Hapsburgs. And like that ancient royal family, the Dynasty of the Green Nobility will fade into irrelevance. There are energetic nations and races that do not genuflect before their feeble imaginary authority.

But more tragically, for those who are ruled by these intellectual in-breds, it is the death of our civilization, the Necrosance of the West, that age of the West which (unlike the restless, imaginative energy of the Renaissance and Reformation) desires to sit in the lovely sunset security of walled gardens, and delight, like Kublai Khan at Xanadu, in the large acreage of his national parks.  It is just another extravagant dream of the self-indulgent children of privilege.  He thinks he may cast breadcrumbs to the pigeons where hungry lions roam.

All his worship of Nature is the stuff of octogenarian despair. Having rejected the True Source of Order and Truth, he has nothing to cling to but a false goddess who promised that he would reign triumphant. It is the babbling of the senile monarchy who knows there is no dynastic line to follow him. In his dying, cold premonition of the coming fate of tired old age and irrelevance-- his is a feeble, sentimental  hand pulling weeds from a special plot of earth, for those who no longer view the broad expanse of the wide world as a place of hope and adventure. Rather, the Green Aristocracy dwells in a very small place of his own dim imagination to be protected and cared for, as the shadow grows longer over the open pit of faithless and terrifying mortality. 

Confronted with unsavory choices regarding the deteriorating war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama is contemplating offering a cash incentive to Taliban soldiers in order to encourage them to lay down their arms. Boy, how I hope his strategy works! 

Unlike our secular-humanist President, however, I am not disposed to believe, like democrats, that the cure to all policy hiccoughs and inconvenient truths, is to throw money at problems.  This is the naïveté of materialist assumptions about man and what motivates people at the most basic level. 

The underlying assumption of the political Left is money is the source of human salvation and happiness--that beliefs, dreams, identity, and even religion, on the other hand, are all emanation of material things. To them, there is no invisible world; physical stuff gives rise to the illusion of metaphysic things-things like truth, nationalism and God, all of which are just pyschological constructs brought about by physical conditions. This false-credo is the proto-Marxist narrative religiously embraced by the intellectual class in America, which includes Barack Obama.

If you give a student a book and a brand new school, he becomes educated.  If you give free medical care to irresponsible people, they will become healthy. If you underwrite a mortgage, people will embrace that benefit and become responsible homeowners.

Of course, only the effete dogmas and the auto-de-fes of their political correct social religion could support such absurdities. The idea that Taliban gunmen, fanatic nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists will throw down their weapons for a bribe is so euphorically fantastic it makes Joan of Arc and St. Theresa seem like staid homestuns.

What Obama and his nihilist coterie of materialists cannot fathom is this—most men and women in the real world--
that terra-incognita outside the narrow curtelage of octogenarian European or the faux medievalism of American Academia, those people actually believe in things, and what they believe in is not for sale. 

President Obama’s false religion holds that the whole world works like ACORN, on the principle of bribes and filthy lucre.  These offerings of other people's blood to propitiate the irrational appetite of the Taliban, is all part of the counterfeit faith whose false Messiah and Priest King presently occupies the White House.  

If one really wants to be enlightened, sensitive and educated to other cultures in the true tradition of modern multiculturalism, Mr. President, one should begin by assuming that what people say they believe in, is in fact, what they believe in.  For good or no, we discredit ourselves and misunderstand our enemies when we are too arrogant to take others at their own words. Just maybe, everyone in the world doesn't embrace money as a saving faith as you do.

“Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet.  There is no other God but Allah.” 

I do not for a single moment believe any part of this ancient Islamic incantation.  I am a Christian.  But I am too well grounded in history and the experience of belief, to think they do not believe what they say they believe.  Only a cynical peddler of false religion could fail to understand the foundation that solemnly held beliefs play for ordinary people, even people who are your enemy.  

There is only one thing I share in common with the enemies of my God and my country, Mr. President,—and that is—I don’t believe in the god of Mammon, either.

Forgive me for elucidating on this famous maxim: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact,”  but there has been some discussion circulating on the web about this expression.

The statement became currency after Justice Robert Jackson's decent in the Terminiello case where race baiters had assembled and began to stir up so much trouble that they were shut down.  This of course gave rise to a First Amendment Free Speech question.  Jackson had been the United States Prosecutor in the famous Nuremburg Trials.  He had left the court temporarily at the request of the President to prosecute Reich Marshal Herman Goering among other nefarious Nazi war criminals. 

The experience deeply affected him, and he came back to the US Supreme Court a markedly different kind of legal thinker (see his Youngstown opinion--where he slaps down Truman's power grab of the Steel Mills).  Justice Jackson realized that certain kinds of behavior and even speech are dangerous to the public welfare--as were the circulating agitating gangs of brown shirt prior to the ascendency of Hitler. 

The idea that the Constitution is "not a suicide pact" derives also from Abraham Lincoln's defense of his suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus as necessary during civil insurrection.  Lincoln's retort to his critics was: "shall all the laws go unenforced, except one"--meaning: shall the constitution be destroyed so that Habeas Corpus be preserved? 

There are practical and prudential limits around the edges of law and how it works when the survival of civil society is in danger.  Poor feckless George W. Bush and his sub-mediocre Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, both tragically over their heads, had no clue as to how to explain the country’s predicament to the American people.  Of them, neither knew enough law or history to explain Guantanamo or the FISA court.  In the light of American history, there should have been much to revisit and illustrate.  Alack the day.

We've been here before.  And we will be here again.  There is nothing new under the sun...except for the Frat Boy sons of former presidents and the simpletons who play Mafia Wars rather than adventure into the much more interesting and dangerous world of reality. 

John Snyder