The Ideas Versus The Man

Some ideas are good in themselves, and others are bad in themselves. Most ideas though are neither good nor bad in themselves, but rather a means to an end. The end can be either good or bad. This class of ideas are rather like tools. Tools are morally neutral. They may be wielded for good purposes or for evil ones. In either case the outcome is not due to the tool, but rather to the person who uses the tool. The tool is not responsible for how it is used, but rather the man should be responsible for how he uses it.

Donald Trump is now the President-elect of the United States. I will pray for him, as I prayed for Barack Obama, though I voted for neither man (why do Americans continue to vote for candidates from the two DC-run, globally funded parties which have done so much to bankrupt the nation both morally and fiscally?).

Though he changes his story so often that it is hard to say exactly what his real policies will actually be, during the campaign he suggested many ideas which a localist should support. He expressed a desire to leave or re-negotiate trade deals which undermined our national sovereignty. He supported de-escalation of tensions with Russia which have come about by the actions of prior administrations acting as self-appointed "world police." He wants secure national borders. He has suggested that tariffs are a viable option for cheating trade "partners". He expressed support for the idea that even our political elites should be prosecuted if they have committed crimes- instead of our current situation where we have a ruling class which is effectively above the law. He said he was opposed to Common Core. He grumbled (vaguely) about the Federal Reserve system. He has declared that many controversial issues should be left to the states.

It really is an agenda that a localist could get behind even though the media has not called it by that name. They are stuck on calling him a "nationalist" even though some of his positions- like leaving many issues to the states and fuming about the federal reserve, actually indicate a man who wants much of government pushed below the national level. A nationalist is the second worst type of political outlook to have - next to a globalist. But Trump is not even pure nationalist. There is some bit of decentralization in his campaign rhetoric. Nationalism is better than globalism. True federalism is better than nationalism, and localism is best of all. At least this side of heaven where government is necessary.

In spite of this I did not support him. This is because I looked beyond the tools the man was proposing to use and firstly considered the character of the man who would be using them. Donald Trump is not a just man. He has never made justice a goal of his walk in life and it is highly unlikely that he will start now. Because the man is not virtuous, his use of the tools that I agree should be used will not be virtuous either. If he follows through on his campaign promises at all, which is very much an open question with him, I fear he will put the proper tools to an improper use. I fear he will give the tools themselves a bad name by his poor use of them. If so, for decades hence the thoughtless masses will not give a fair hearing to the idea that those tools should be used, but used properly. Instead of a real argument, the detractors will say "that sounds like Trump" and sound proposals will be unsoundly dismissed.

For example, tariffs are properly used as a firewall between an unjust economy and your own. It is just and like paying insurance premiums to protect your own economy from going down when the unjust one inevitably collapses. If an economy has a captive labor force for example, a tariff could  make the cost of doing business with them more like a true free market transaction if they actually had a free economy. That is a proper use of tariffs. Another just use of tariffs is when substituted for an even worse tax- like individual income taxes. This is with the understanding that government has to be funded somehow and tariffs are bad but not so bad as what they would replace.

I don't think that is how President Trump would use tariffs. I think he would protect specific industries, not specific just values. I think whoever was good to him would get a break and whoever was not would not. Tariffs are a policy tool, There is just and an unjust way to use them. He is not the man to lean on for a just use of tariffs, or anything else. His complaints about the federal reserve for example, could be turned into a demand for more reckless spending without financial consequences (until the imbalances caused by that become so great that even the fed loses control and the dollar crashes). Every idea he has that I like can be used in a way that I don't like.

I want the tools which he was proposing in his campaign. I probably favor them more than he does. We will see how many of them he was just saying to get elected (which shows how popular these anti-globalist tools are) and how many he is really committed to. But because I do favor these tools, I don't want to see their use discredited. The tools are not to blame for the use which they are put to by the unjust. Rather, the workman who used them poorly is to blame- him and the ones who handed him those tools to being with.

Tech Guru Discovers Appeal of Localism in Wake of Trump Victory

The Wall Street Journal had a piece up recently entitled "New Populism and Silicon Valley on Collision Course." Basically, left-leaning globally orientated techies are in shock that the nationalist Trump won the election. When Barack Obama was holding the gun, they didn't seem to mind so much. After all, they largely agreed with him. Since it was pointed at those loathsome heartland rednecks it was perfectly understandable that there should be only one set of rules for the whole nation- and that the central government should enforce those rules on the backwards hinterland whether the inhabitants liked it or not.

But it turns out there was a whole lot more folks in those backwoods than the tech gurus thought. Now Donald J. Trump is about to hold the gun, make the court appointments, and what have you. Suddenly, centralization doesn't seem so attractive. Now it occurs to them that maybe the entire continent wide nation of 320 million people should not be forced to adhere to the same rules about everything under the sun.

Silicon Valley tech guru (and CEO of Century 21 Bitcoin) Balaji Srinivasan had this to say:

“My Stanford network connects to Harvard and Beijing more than [California’s] Central Valley,” says Mr. Srinivasan. Eventually, he argues, “there will be a recognition that if we don’t have control of the nation state, we should reduce the nation state’s power over us.”

Silicon Valley gurus are talking about how they do not want to live under rules made by people they have nothing in common with. That is exactly the point that the heartland has made about the two coasts for some time. Both are right. Localism provides a framework by which we might all get along. 

If government is necessary, then we can either have a decentralized government or a centralized one. Right now we increasingly have a centralized one. Decisions for the whole nation are increasingly being made by the residents of one city. The nation itself is divided and every four years one side of the divide must live in terror because the other side wrests control of the gun away. Rather than endure this struggle which guarantees that half of our society will always be unhappy, why not let localities make the rules as they see fit, and make it a lot less important who the President is? 

Localism is for people who can sleep well at night even though people they don't know in a city they have never been to are doing things that they don't approve of. In other words, it is for mentally healthy people who are not controlled by the unattainable fantasy that someday the government in Washington is going to force everyone to live just the way they think people ought to live. Sadly, our society has been conditioned to make snap judgments based on emotional outrage on situations from afar where we hear only one side from a news report. Its not healthy, either for the individual or for the society since it produces an environment were demagogic strongmen can thrive for a while.

The New Silk Road Shows Loss of National Sovereignty Not Necessary for Trade

One of the tenants of localism is that nations should never enter into trade agreements in which compliance is adjudicated by some trans-national body. Lateral trade agreements, preferably bi-lateral, are the only type of agreement a national government should be constitutionally permitted to enter into in a localist society. That is to say, only agreements where each participant is a partner who determines for themselves when to enter or leave, and how to administer, said agreements.

The ruling class in the west have been pushing the idea that the inevitable way forward economically is to create supra-national trade zones which give binding authority to some sort of commission to adjudicate disputes as to when one nation or the other is abiding by its terms. This turns self-government into a farce, since any laws your legislature makes which run afoul of this un-elected commission of foreigners can be ruled null and void. This is not a condition which can honestly be called freedom.

There is a competing model though. It is one which is compatible with the ideas of localism, and thus true-self government and freedom. It has taken shape in the new Silk Road. It came together as a network, not a hierarchy. Every nations is participating in a voluntary manner to do something which benefits all of them- without the need for an extra-national body to enforce corporate rule. This Forbes article described it like this....

"There was no clear power structure, no defining architecture, no overarching legal regime. It wasn’t a trade pact, it wasn’t a treaty organization, and it wasn’t a customs zone. It was basically a loosely adjoined, multifaceted array of bilateral and multilateral partnerships interlinking the EU, the Eurasian Economic Union, Eastern Europe, the lower Caucasus states, Iran, and ASEAN with China that would be held together by a newly enhanced transportation and energy grid. It was just a network...." 

It is just a network. But a network is all you need if it is truly in the best interests of each participant in the network. The compulsory aspects of what is often today dishonestly called a "free trade zone" are only needed if pushback from the population of one or more participant nations can be expected. The way the west is conducting international trade is creeping toward global corporations hijacking national governments and using treaties as an end-run around self-government.

Don't let them tell you that such agreements are "necessary" or "inevitable". Another model has spontaneously emerged in the New Silk Road. Its not a new model either. It is simply the way trade has always happened until corporations got so big that they realized they could capture entire governments and pushed a contrived model of trade as part of that plan.

If you are opposed to corporate governance, then you should support the ideas in localism that would prevent it.

God Save Us from the Virtues of the New Civil Religion

"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."- G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” (1908)

Chesterton was a giant, Even more so in insight than in stature. Though he wrote those words over a century ago, and we have largely transitioned from a modern to a post-modern world, they are still profoundly true today. Humanity does not just need to be saved from our sins, we need to be saved from our virtues. It is our out-of-balance virtues which allow us to self-justify the sins which spring from what our run-away virtues improperly de-emphasize. 

Some examples of these imbalanced virtues: It is good to follow scientific truth as such, but Social Darwinism gives a scientific veneer of truth for the idea that our upper class should forsake charity to our lower class. It is good to be a conscientious steward of the environment. But it becomes a flaw when the young can disregard the often difficult requirement to love their actual and flawed parents so long as they "love the planet." Regard for the feelings of someone whose sexuality is deviant is not wrong, its good. But not at the expense of truth. It becomes a snare if it prompts one to lash out in anger and hatred at people who speak the truth in love about what should be repented of rather than celebrated. 

Today's godless post-modern society is not immoral or without virtue. Rather, it is self-constructing its own false morality and its own contrived lists of sins and virtues to go along with it. The State, in partnership with big business and big religion, is building up a new civil religion which has its own code. This is why those of us who hold to the original Christian morality upon which Western Civilization was built don't understand the self-righteous certainty with which adherents of the new religion revile us. What we see as sin, they see as virtue. It is not that they are lacking virtue, it is that they have redefined virtue un-moored to underlying truth. In their view of things, traditionalists are the sinners. 

Men have gorged themselves with forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sustained by that fruit they have become "like God", determining for themselves what is good and what is evil. We can not settle the question of which of us is sinning until we answer the question of which of us is operating from a foundation of truth. The question is whether there is a God-ordained moral order to the universe which applies regardless of human desires or whether we can construct our own morality which is as valid as any can be. A morality built on the foundation of the feelings of collective humanity.

The church today cannot speak repentance to the youth because the youth are offended at the idea that they have done anything for which repentance is needed. The state controlled media is providing them with a new works-based system of "righteousness". All they have to do is hold the correct viewpoints on whatever issues the popular culture is pushing at the moment and radiate indignation toward those who don't hold them. In the new civil religion that counts for "righteousness." Backed by mass media reassurances, so certain are they of the rightness of their cause that dialogue is weakness. Dissent is disease. Neither is something they are the least bit interested in, other than in shouting them down as a moral good.

But support for their view is not just a PR campaign. They can point to evidence that some things really are getting better. Violent crime is down. Robbery is down. Rape is down. Education is up. Life span is up. People with some kind of health care coverage is up. There is a lot of evidence they can point to which indicates that things are getting better. The new civil religion is, in their view, working. It is building a tomorrow which is better than the past build on the old morality. The new civil religion is "saving" collective mankind.

This is where I must go back to Chesterton. He said that vices are indeed let loose, and they cause damage. But the virtues wrongly applied can cause more damage. It may be that we are less rowdy than we once were, but more venal. Sin has not been eliminated, but rather society has become better at covering up the costs and harm of sin. Has prostitution and rape gone down? Yes, but its not because there is less sexual sin and aggression. We just have access to torrents of pornography now. Objectification of women in our lives may be less because we now have much more access to digital women objectifying themselves. So there is not less sin, but the costs of sin are deflected into areas where the harm is for a time less visible. This will continue to appear to work, until it doesn't.

In the same way, even while we have rejected a view of the poor as created in God's image we have created new ways to care for the poor which masks our growing lack of compassion. We have EBT cards now, so no one has to see soup lines as they did in the Great Depression, We have programs to deal with "those people" now. Just support the programs, and you can consider yourself "moral" even if you have no real affection for any of the real people "served" by them.

Those programs are not even being paid for by ourselves. Instead, we create debt which we pass to the next generation to fund these programs. So we feel no pain in giving. The cost of our "giving" is not felt by us. So things seem to get better, for a time. Someday though, our ability to fund welfare through government debt will vanish. Then we will see how compassionate people are when they actually have to pay for it rather than simply radiate self-righteous indignation at those who challenge the costs and the methods of these programs. Yet as with the other, it will continue to appear to work. Until it doesn't.

Once the professional thief had to go out and take risks to steal. He had to see that he was taking real stuff from real people who were hurt by the loss. The social welfare thief today is not forced to confront any of those risks, and the immorality of his actions is lost in abstraction. He is getting his check from "the government" and they seem to always have money. Or at worst, from "the rich" whom he never has to see as real individual people. Indeed, even if he were to meet a wealthy person in his community which he liked personally, he would not ever have to make the connection that this is who he is stealing from. Voting for the government to rob your neighbor "legally" is a lot less risky, and easier on the decayed conscience, than the old style of theft. It is no wonder the officially measured rates of "theft" have gone down. But this is not because greed, envy, or covetousness has decreased in the least amount. Those things may be worse than ever. But the form of modern society has covered and concealed those sins by interjecting itself between the sinful heart and those hurt by it.

Notice how in all of the examples above the actual condition of the human heart can grow worse while the outward behavior of the human has a less noticeable social impact. It does so because these "solutions" actually weaken our ties to each other and increases our connections to some abstract intermediary such as the state. So we bother each other less because we have less connection to each other, not because our hearts have been made better. Everything in the drive to separate sexuality from commitment and family to separating the generosity of the giver and the gratitude of the receiver does this. And this is not limited to those examples. I sense a repeating pattern in this regard. The new civil religion consistently isolates us from one another so that traditional sin is more effectively covered up rather than repudiated.

For a while, it is going to seem like they have succeeded. Succeeded in building a morality and religion without God. One that reduces outward misconduct compared to the past and produces wealth. But it is all being done on false accounting, even as the pillars of this faith are themselves built on falsehood. Rapidly advancing technology should make life better and produce economic gains. Those advantages are not the results of this new religion, but rather the new religion is garnering credit for momentum built up before it was ascendant.

In the same way the illusion of prosperity is maintained by writing a trillion dollars worth of hot checks on the accounts of the next generation- something past ages of people were less willing to do to the innocent. The present Masters of the World have not invented a system so perfect that no one needs to be good anymore. All they have done is found a way to hide for a time the outward costs of human evil. But the truth will out, and time will tell what happens to souls and to societies which are built on the shifting sand of collective consensus rather than the solid rock of transcendent moral truth.

O Brother Where Art Thou?

The Steeple of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and the Gold Dome at the University of Notre Dame

I am a localist who is far from his locality. The hills of Arkansas with the Greater Appalachian culture of its people is home for this heart. Honest, direct, peaceful. And just as essential, beautiful on its own. Beautiful in a way which man can only accentuate. It is not a blank slate on which he is free to impose a beauty of his own making.

It is a great place to live, but it has not always been a great place to make a living. So I find myself  and my family spending most of our time these days on a medium-term project in the Toledo area. It has its own pluses, but they are polar opposite to the ones which I identify with. The whole area was built up on a miasmatic swamp. There is beauty and order here, but its human component is much greater. This difference in the land is reflected in the attitudes and character of its inhabitants. I am a sojourner.

I cannot quite remember how I first stumbled across The Front Porch Republic folks other than it was by way of the work of Bill Kaufman. At some point I had an interaction with James Matthew Wilson, an earnest young poetry professor at Villanova. Wilson strongly reminds me of my nephew Zachary Harrod, who as near as I can tell has the same job and function at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He suggested that I meet with Jefferey Polet. I traded a few emails with the latter, but we never got around to meeting. Still, here were people not that far from where I was who freely used the term "Localism". I had written two books with that word in the title, and its not a word one hears often. I was very curious as to what they had going on.

I forked over the $53 attendance fee to their annual conference to be held on the campus of Notre Dame, and sent a message asking about the expected dress. On receiving a reply emphasizing that comfort rather than formality was the general rule, I set out my jeans, t-shirt and sweat top. I then set the alarm for o-dark-thirty.  The next morning I made the drive from Toledo to Notre Dame.  With no time for breakfast, I stopped only to pay the execrable tolls. Even though I took I 90 all the way, I had to stop four times at toll booths. There is not a single toll booth in the entire state of Arkansas. Most Arkansans have only heard of toll roads in books about the Middle Ages.

Once at the campus I asked the attendant for directions, and made my way to a parking lot near Bond Hall. As soon as I got out of the car a pleasant woman about my age introduced herself and said that she was told by the attendant to follow me. On the short walk to the hall we discovered that she and I had lived in the same small Arkansas town for a few years in the 1990s. "Well, OK" I said to myself, "this may work out after all."

I checked in, putting my name on my name tag with large, friendly letters. Then I went to the auditorium. The nice lady was lost in the crowd. I decided that our connection was not substantial enough to seek her out and took a seat more towards the back. I did not know anyone there, but they all seemed nice enough. Clearly they had a different idea of what constituted casual dress than I did. Some habits were in evidence. Many wore jackets. Most wore slacks. There were a lot of jeans there, but few tee shirts. Mine was the only sweat-top I saw.

The first session had three speakers. The first gentleman spoke of shifting property (and other) taxes to land taxes.All land in an area would be taxed the same regardless of the amount of capital improvements put on it. I heard much derision of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders from the podium that day, but this seemed like an idea that both of them could love. Sanders for its seamless integration with the attenuation of property rights and Trump because his Trump Tower would be taxed in the same amount as the one story chocolate shop down the block. Plus, speculators will always find ways to game the decisions of central planners, and this idea needed regional authority to pull off. I thought it was the exact opposite of localism. The scope of his lesson was far too great for the time allotted, and his time ran out long before he reached its natural end.

The next speaker was a young lady. I had read some of her stuff on FPR and she is a talented writer. She was not however, a talented speaker. Her voice was soft, indistinct, and did not carry well. Her New York pace of speech was too rapid for my middle-aged southern ears to comprehend. I was able to make out about every other word, which was really not enough to follow what she was trying to say.

The last speaker of the panel was Elias Crim. He was more engaging. Not in a barn-stormer sort of way, but he was thoughtful and what he said made sense. It was a little short on specific solutions and conclusions, but he did describe why local economies were worth saving.

As we took the first break I was a little grim. Mingling with strangers in a crowd during short breaks is not my strong suit. I was hungry. I wasn't sure what to make of the presentations either. I decided to take a little walk around and  get a couple of photos of the more magnificent buildings on campus. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart and the Gold Dome were prime examples of "papist" architectural splendor. I had to admit that the Baptist churches back home looked like tin barns by comparison. On the rare occasions southern Pentecostals get enough money to build a fancy building, it often comes off looking garish and awkwardly colossal. But then all modern architecture seems to be in decline. Government buildings constructed in modern times can't hold a candle to some of the old court houses either. Its a part of the cultural decline that these people were talking about.

 It was time for the next session. I took a seat next to another stranger and settled in for the panel on "Populism and Place." OK, now this was more like it. The speakers were orders of magnitude better, in particular the aforementioned Bill Kaufman. Apparently it is a proverb among these people that you do not want to have to follow Bill Kaufman at the podium nor be introduced by Jason Peters at the podium.

As the day went on I realized that what I saw that morning  was not representative of the event as a whole. Rather it represented a problem that small-school football coaches were familiar with. A coach may have twenty-five players, but only eight or nine athletes. Regardless, there are eleven slots to fill. What we all do (I coached just a bit) is work in players who are not as developed where we think it will hurt us the least. A day-long conference needs a certain number of slots. They are almost to the point where they can put a natural "athlete" in every one of them.

The second panel consisted of Michael Federici, a dead-ringer for Bill Nye the Science Guy, who argued against populism and in favor of elitism; Bill Kaufman who elegantly and with good humor spoke in favor of populism, and Jeff Taylor (who Jason Peters claimed won the Elton John look alike contest) helped show the audience that populism was not really one thing, but that several strains of thought could be lumped under the heading "populist". Whether it was good or bad depended heavily on what one meant by the term. If Taylor had gone first instead of last it would have been easier to see how Federici and Kaufman were talking past each other vis-a-vis definition of the subject at hand. I could tell by the questions from the audience afterward that the I.Q. of this room was stratospheric.

This was a subject on which I had already thought long and hard and while the presentations sharpened my thinking it did not alter the substance of my previous opinion. If to be a populist was to believe that the voice of the people was the voice of God, then a faithful Christian cannot be a populist. But nor can one be an elitist, if that means substituting the voice of the "wise" or powerful for the people in the metric stated above. Neither group unfailingly speaks for God. Rather, God has spoken for Himself, and sometimes the Elites are furthest from His voice and sometimes the People are furthest. To make either group the standard is idolatry, but to have reflexive contempt for either group is to disdain their Maker as well.

The nature of man is such that class is no protection against sin nature. That is why we need both the elites and the people to serve as a check and balance on one another. This is just as certain as the idea that we need the branches and levels of government to check and balance one another. When the elites are closer to the heart of God, I am an elitist. When the hearts of the people are closer to God, I am a populist. Neither term should be considered a permanent identity, but as a permanently provisional label of convenience to reflect the belief that we follow those who follow Him. Our allegiance to these groups should shift as their relative acknowledgment of the truth and justice of God's law might change. As such, we should be the moderates on this issue. Also, the issue of local elites vs. national elites was barely touched on. I think at the stage we are in, it should be the focus of the debate.

Lunchtime came. I was famished. There were box lunches from Jimmie Johns stacked on the table. I took a #12, which comes two ways, in the hopes that they would have sprouts instead of lettuce. It had lettuce. The crowd had lunch on the steps outside on what was a glorious day of October weather for South Bend. I did not know who to sit with, and I did not want the refined and cultured catholic Yankees about me to be presented with the unsightly spectacle of my tearing into this big sandwich. I walked to my car and ate there. Then, with insulin levels properly reset, I went back to Bond Hall to listen to the Keynote Address.

The Keynote was by Patrick Deneen, but Jason Peter's side-splitting introduction was a tough act to follow in itself. Deneen made the case that modern liberalism is a failed ideology. He made the sell to me. But then I view all evil as ultimately self-defeating, because it makes war on some aspect of God's truth. Political theory is just a particular case of that broad principle. The ideology may be failed, but those who hold it still control the machinations of the state, including legal force even if that force has been denuded of its moral underpinnings. Meanwhile the left has been busy constructing an new morality, founded on ether, by which it might animate its more ignorant subjects into desired action against those of us whose faith in God has produced an unacceptable level of moral inflexibility.

That led us to Rod Dreher, he of "The Benedict Option." He is a former Catholic, and current Eastern Orthodox. In spite of some talk of the ecumenicism of the group, the whole thing seemed very Catholic to a southern protestant like me. I wondered if I were the only southern protestant in the room of 200-300 people. Back home, most people could not tell you the difference between an Eastern Orthodox church and a Roman Catholic church. The two would be sufficiently alike, and different from most of the rest of their religious experience, as to be lumped into the same category.

But if the ecumenicism of the room was a good deal narrower than my hosts imagined I lay the blame more at the attenuated intellectual condition of the Protestant Church than on any real or imagined error on their part. Protestant scholarship has suffered greatly by their running the machinery of the state for so long. They simply had the state house much of their intellectual institutions. When the protestant church lost that part of the culture, they consequently lost their scholarship too. What was left mostly retreated from the field with an unfortunate anti-intellectualism. The Catholics were never in a position to have the machinery of the state reflecting the nuance of their intellectual life. They had to preserve their own parallel institutions. In this respect there is a lot that the protestant church could learn from such a group, but I don't know that there is the interest. Satisfaction from hard thinking has given way to pursuit of good feeling. It grieves me to write those words.

Dreher spoke with grace, humility and sincerity. Dreher said it was time for Christians to admit that we had lost the culture war and we should give up on using the state to force outward conformity to a moral code which the population no longer adhered to. My wife has said much the same thing for years. He was somber in the certainty that increased persecution of the church is coming, and that we should prepare for it in every manner. He gave two historical examples of dealing with persecution in previous times- Czechoslovakia in the waning days of communism and of course the Benedictine monasteries during the decline of the Roman Empire. The focus was on preserving the essence of our western Christian culture through times which might otherwise destroy it.

After he finished his speech I finally got the nerve up to ask a question- my first and only of the day.. Since most members of the audience were asking high-brow questions full of nuance which assumed the listener understood the most tenuous of connections, I decided to be less blunt than my usual redneck self. I asked if he might be essentially "fighting the last war" in using the monastery model and wondered if the Czech experience might be more germane? After all, the Roman Empire had nothing against the monks. Roving barbarians were the problem, not the state. In the Czech model the failing state was the enemy. And in that case the resistance had to very quickly step into the public arena when the state's failure became obvious.

Dreher is too honest to claim that he has all of the answers, and he did not try to do so here. But he replied by way of giving an example of how the monasteries helped re-launch civilization by teaching the locals farming techniques, even in the face of roving bands of barbarians. Apparently to someone from religious traditions that have monasteries, the way you preserve cultural knowledge is to have monasteries. That is the way they did it in the past and so emulating them in principle is the way to do it going forward.

The Front Porch Republic tackles localism by answering the fundamental question of why we should preserve local cultures. It also gives us a good idea of what that means. What is to be preserved and why we should preserve it are the most seminal questions of localism. My area of interest, and expertise, is more derived. This is the question of how we might preserve what we preserve in localism. It has been said that the person who knows how will always work for the person who knows why. I accept the truth of that statement, but Dreher's presentation seemed to be the only answer they even considered to the question of how. It is the answer one might expect from their cultural viewpoint, but I am not convinced that its the right answer. Or rather I should say its only the middle part of the answer, which leaves the first and last parts without the great thought and discussion which had been given to other aspects of localism.

Our culture should be preserved not merely from wandering hordes of barbarians seeking easy plunder, but from an increasingly pitiless and totalitarian state which will brook no rivals or any universal truth claims by which the validity of its actions might be judged. They will not just be after our goods, they will be after the very culture which we wish to preserve. The great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu who wrote "The Art of War" said that to win battles we had to know ourselves and our enemy. The monastery model, as a stand-alone answer, does not take a proper account of who the enemy is and what their goals and capabilities are.

It does not fully account for our own capabilities either.  Yes I agree that we have lost the culture war and that we are going to have to face persecution. But Dr. Deneen was correct, liberalism and the leviathan state, is doomed to fail. There are other ideas about the state which can and have served mankind better. Those ideas too deserve preserving. The Republic has failed, but when we come out of the ashes we need to be able to tell whoever is left more than how to farm between barbarian raids. We need to be able to show them why it failed and what can be done next time to sustain a benign Republic. Since we agree the modern liberal state will fail, we should produce an alternative model to rebuild from. One which is based on an accurate view of who God is and who man is. One that takes into account the painful lessons learned from our history, and truly honors diversity as a pre-condition of freedom.

That is on the back-end. But I would also say that we need to talk a little more about the front end. That is, what if anything can we do before the darkness falls to lessen the severity of its impact? I agree that engaging in national politics at this point is a waste of valuable energy. I agree that engaging through the means of the utterly corrupt and captured major political parties is worse than useless, it is actually harmful to our cause. But can it really be that it won't matter in the coming storm who our sheriff is? Who our mayors are? Perhaps it will be that due to the vestiges of our federal system that the severity of the persecution might vary from state to state- as it did from province to province in the times of our Roman forebears.

There are other levels at which one can engage in public life besides the national. There are other offices at stake besides the Presidency. And if there are no worthy political parties available to participate in, perhaps we should have our own loose network of friends to promote moral candidates in local offices. People who would not owe their office to any national label, but to the people around them. When the courts of Rome became corrupt, our spiritual forebears did something similar- setting up their own parallel system of courts. In time even the unbelievers turned to the ecclesiastical courts for justice.

Jesus said "If they persecute you in one city, flee to the next." If we followed His command it would not be too long before there were critical masses of us in a number of cities. We cannot exclude the possibility that the monasteries should try to save the cities, and if they do so they might find that the cities will become instrumental in saving the monasteries. And when the season of darkness for this nation ends, as they all must end, the faithfulness we have shown in a small thing may help make us ready for faithfulness in larger things.

The last panel saw Wilson and Peters being joined by Andrew Balio. They did a fantastic job of answering the what and why of localism in the fields of poetry, music, and vocation. We have values that are real and true, even if temporarily out of vogue. We have beauty, which the post-modern state wishes to replace with ashes. Only our view of the world can produce beauty in the liberal arts and satisfaction and belonging in the utilitarian arts. Those are among the whats that we should sacrifice to preserve and some whys we should preserve them. This is what FPR does so well. I recognize the pre-eminence of that mission over the part of the equation where my own primary interests lie. Perhaps their part in this question is not the same as my part. It does not make either of us wrong. It does make both of us incomplete, but I knew that of myself before I hit the first toll booth.

On my way out the door I noticed boxes of cookies, untouched. "Take them please" said a young blond lady who had been assisting with the event. I grabbed three cookies, one for each child I had given up a Saturday with in order to attend the event. Then I walked back out to my car and began the lonely ride back to not-home.

Mass Murders and the Central State

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I see that CNN is touting a poll showing support for new national restrictions on firearms. This is not surprising considering the large amount of publicity recent mass shootings have been given. Each one of them is a tragedy, and I grieve not just for the victims, but that we are being shaped into the kind of society in which such senseless violence is manifesting itself. While over-all murder rates have reached a 30 year low, the perception is that mass shootings by mentally unstable people are on the increase.

The largest mass-killings of civilians in historical terms have been perpetrated not by any particular type of private citizen, but by government itself.  If you have any doubt at all about what central governments with a monopoly on firepower tend to do to their own people then have a look at the figures from R.J. Rummel who wrote the book "Death by Government." Or I will save you the trouble- governments with a monopoly on firepower have a very strong tendency to butcher large segments of their own populations. The 20th century is known for its exceptionally bloody wars, but governments in that same time span actually murdered six times as many of their own citizens as were killed in war. 

If civilian mass shootings are in fact higher than they were previously, and we wish to reduce them to at or below their previous levels, then the sensible thing to do is to find out what changes caused them to increase. That way, we at least have a valid idea of what to correct. This would allow us to construct effective policies to reduce mass shootings instead of imposing ineffective policies as a reflex response just so we can feel better about "doing something". Such emotion-driven non-solutions may have ghastly unintended consequence later. 

Up until the 1960s, mass shootings were very rare and when they occurred they tended to be a deranged family member attacking other members of their own family. Going to a public place and murdering people that were either strangers or that you did not know well was unusual. The increase in mass shootings that we see is due to an increase in attacks on the larger society.

I think it is pretty clear that unstable people lash out at what they feel has let them down or what they are uncomfortable with. If they feel alienated by their family when their expectation is acceptance and support, then they lash out at their family. If they feel alienated in their society, especially when that society makes a large outward show of accepting and tolerating almost everybody, then they lash out at society. 

For some time now the ruling elites in the west have been imposing policies on their populations which virtually guarantee there will be an increase in resentment and alienation among the various sub-groups in our society. Policies which undermine family, faith, and community reduce our ties to one another. At the same time that the state has been pushing policies which reduce our ties to each other it has supported programs which increase our ties to itself. This has resulted in a nation full of people who feel alienated, isolated, and unconnected. Man does not live by government social guarantees alone. A large proportion of the mass shooters are either people whose families are recent immigrants from alien cultures or from sub-cultures which have been most alienated from society by government programs which replace traditional families with a case-worker and a government check. 

Access to guns is not what has changed. Americans have had access to guns for a long time. We have had semi-automatic handguns since at least 1911. We had "assault rifles" in the 1950s. And if our weapons then lacked some features available to us today then understand that last week in France an individual fitting the profile I described killed scores of people with a truck. Yesterday in Japan, a man with a knife murdered 19 people and wounded at least that many. In 1966 Charles Whitman murdered 14 people and wounded 32 others, mostly with a bolt-action rifle. And he would have killed many more people if armed civilians had not assisted police with covering fire, forcing him to retreat to positions which limited his own field of fire.

Access to guns is not what has changed in society. Nor are guns necessary in order to kill or maim large numbers of people. What has changed is our sense of connection to one another. Consider the weakening of these connections as the (possibly) unintended consequence of government programs which replace family and community with central state mediation. Consider also the (possibly) unintended consequences of subsidizing day care at the expense of children who are raised in their own homes by their own families. Further consider the cheapening of life and family through state-subsidized abortion, and divorce laws which discourage marriage but not co-habitation. Consider the lessening of connection when community schools become federally-directed schools. 

Consider the (possibly) unintended consequences of a society which is forced by the ruling class to absorb waves of people from cultures whose mores are sharply contrasting with our own. This is also isolating and tension-creating. It has created pockets of alienated sub-groups within immigrant communities and simmering resentment in the formerly dominant culture. Different groups of people can have very different ways of looking at the world. Perhaps throwing these different groups together at a high rate of speed and attempting to dictate from the top what the population's attitudes and values to such cultural interaction should be is a bad idea- unless one is cultivating a "divide and conqueror" strategy in which government creates its own market for mediation services between hostile groups.

I have not even touched on the over-prescription of powerful psychotropic drugs. Many of the mass shooters were on such drugs which masked rather than treated underlying problems of social deficits in their lives. Indeed, the long term effect of such drugs is to make the problem worse since the state of mind produced by many of them is not conducive to making and building new social connections. Young people can walk around in a "zoned-out" mental state for years only to wake up and realize they have no true friends, and a dysfunctional family. They feel no connection to a society which has done nothing for them but drug them so that they won't be "a problem" for the authorities.

Firearms are not the problem and more central government mandates concerning the ownership of firearms are not going to solve the problem. The problem is a loss of family, community and connection. This precipitates a commensurate increase in isolation, alienation, and hostility. Firearms are simply the tools by which a few individuals pushed past the edge sometimes manifest the true problem. Were they not as readily available, other tools, perhaps deadlier tools, would be sought out. 

Federal government policy has done nothing to address the real problem, other than make it worse. They have undermined families, communities, and other institutions such as churches. Government policies have systematically reduced the effectiveness of all competitive institutions in favor of strengthening its own hands. Reckless immigration policies have increased people's anxiety while the centrally mandated politically correct attitudes which they have attempted to impose from the top down are driving people apart instead making space for the natural process of their coming together over time. 

Because the true nature of the problem is an artifact of the central government's policies, the solution cannot be found by that government taking up more authority for itself. By its very nature, a vast central government cannot provide connection, community, and family. It can only undermine them or not undermine them. It has chosen to undermine them, and as a result individuals on the fringe of various sub-groups are lashing out at the culture they feel has not provided them what every human being needs.

Therefore the solution to this problem must be that the governments which have been creating the conditions which precipitate mass murder should change their policies and quit creating those conditions. Repeal laws which substitute government in place of family, in place of community, and in place of faith. Stop deliberately throwing together groups of people who do not wish to be around each other and demanding that they express the "proper" attitude for one another. Allow quarrels to be resolved at a lower level rather than Washington- even if Washington does not always like the resolution. Stop trying to do so much and stop trying to prevent others from doing it instead.

Unfortunately there is no serious possibility that the central government will do this any time soon. The negative societal consequences of central control and supplanting of other institutions will be suppressed by yet more controls and rules and policies which will result in yet more tension, isolation, and eventually lashing out. I fear they will even violate the principle of the Rule of Law and impose even more restrictions which are beyond their legitimate constitutional powers to impose. While they may manufacture a temporary fake political approval of their actions, in the long run when government and those at the highest rungs of it are clearly acting above their own laws it only fosters more resentment and anger. When it comes to building a stable society, suppression is no substitute for justice.

Did Donald Trump Blackmail Roger Ailes to Flip on How FOX Covered Him?

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At least six women have come forward alleging that FOX News CEO Roger Ailes sexually harassed them. " For example, Kellie Boyle said Ailes once told her "If you want to play with the big boys you have to lay with the big boys" back in 1989. Really loathsome stuff. Ailes is already being sued by former employee Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment.

Early in 2016 FOX was backing Marco Rubio in a very blatant manner. Even though Rubio was performing poorly he was being pushed hard by FOX. By early March that had changed and there were reports that Roger Ailes declared that "We can't do the Rubio thing anymore." This is a tacit admission that up until that point they were "doing the Rubio thing."

They still went after Trump though, so much so that he skipped a FOX news GOP debate because Trump felt that FOX in general and Megan Kelley in particular were treating him unfairly. That changed by mid-April, dramatically, after Kelley visited with Trump in Trump tower and Trump had a private lunch with Roger Ailes.

After that, it was like a switch had been flipped. Suddenly the network which had been relentlessly anti-Trump was giving him favorable coverage around the clock. So obvious was the bias that by May, less than a month later, rival Ted Cruz complained that "Ruppert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have turned FOX News into the Donald Trump Network."

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots here. I hypothesize that Trump had the goods on Ailes. Just like he threatened to "spill the beans" on Heidi Cruz, he threatened to do the same to Roger Ailes. Only Trump had enough beans on Ailes to ruin him, not simply embarrass him as he had done to Mrs. Cruz.

None of what I have written so far is the important part. Please do not focus on the salacious details of what I have written above to the detriment of missing the important point here: We think we are making informed choices as to who leads us, but when our information comes from a few centralized and  interconnected sources then the choices we make are not informed. They are mis-informed. The conservative movement in the United States is largely informed by FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, and a couple of nationally syndicated talk radio talk show hosts. Limbaugh is almost as connected to Alies as FOX. Of course those kinds of conservatives are losing the battle for the government and the culture in this nation. When people get their information from a source which changes the narrative on a dime in order to cover up the misdeeds of the guy running it, they are going to be mis-informed.

FOX News was never the "conservative" media in America. They only pretended to be because local and regional media stars were starting to pop up spontaneously all across the nation in the 1980s. The system had to start a fake national news network to "represent" them or a real one would eventually form. By creating FOX they filled the niche and prevented the legitimate sources from filling it instead.

My answer to better media is the same as my answer for better government- decentralize everything. There should not be a single conservative channel, there should be a dozen of them. If the "conservatives" you listen too live more than a state or two away from you, try to find one closer to home. We have to get America to stop looking to New York and Washington D.C. to find out what is happening and what it means. The Establishment Media does not exist to inform the public. It exists to protect The Establishment.

They Swapped Positions and Their Partisans Never Noticed

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This is a clip from a Bush-Gore debate in the year 2000. The topic is foreign policy. Please listen to it even if you think that you remember it. I thought I did, but once I heard it again I was shocked to realize just how fully and completely these two men changed positions. Al Gore justified foreign interventions on the grounds that America was the leader, and needed to continue to be "the leader." George W. Bush took the opposite tack. We should help people, but not go around imposing ourselves, and we should not nation build!

Amazing. The two completely switched positions and their partisans just continued backing the one and attacking the other. Could it be any more obvious that a very large segment of the American people has been programmed to follow Persons and not Principles? Is it not clear that they have been conditioned to rally around party labels and not ideas? 

All I knew in 2004 was that George W. Bush did not have the kind of foreign policy that he said he would have when running. That is why I did not vote for him the second time around. Now you may say that 9/11 changed "everything". But it didn't change everything. It didn't change the Constitution. It didn't change the principle that we shouldn't tell the rest of the world how to live, or nation build. A humble foreign policy which recognized our limitations was a good idea before 9/11 and it was still a good idea after it.

George Bush the elder ran for re-election on the basis of his ability to have a grand coalition and impose our will on Iraq. Bill Clinton said he would "focus like a laser beam on the economy." The American people chose the domestic promises of Clinton over the New World Order visions of Bush the Elder. But then Clinton got in office pursued the same policies as Bush. The interventions continued. We dropped bombs on more countries during the Clinton years than we did during WWII. So then Bush the Younger comes along and says things like in the video above. We voted for him over Clinton's successor Al Gore (who wants us to decide that we are the world's "leader" without ever bothering to ask the world about that).Yet he too goes on a global rampage- some of it justified by the 9/11 attacks, but much of it not. So then Obama comes along talking peace and people choose him. Then he continues the Bush-Clinton-Bush foreign policy of military meddling around the globe.

For twenty years Americans have been voting for whichever candidate promised them peace, and for twenty years no matter who we voted for, we got a globalist, interventionist foreign policy. The One Party with Two-Faces Cartel which has led this nation to ruin (both fiscally and morally) must hold this nation's people in great contempt. Too many people have accepted the conditioning to back team-red or team-blue, even when the teams keep switching policy positions. They switch positions while they are running, but once in office they quickly implement a foreign policy of global interventionism no matter what they ran on.

This problem, like so many others, will not be fixed from the top down. It must be fixed from the bottom up. I don't say that is true because I am a localist. I am a localist because that is true. We should work toward a nation where it is a lot less important who the President is because the legislature will do its job and check and balance the Executive. That will never happen under the two party system.  Legislative candidates should be elected by a completely different, and independent organization from the executive. A prerequisite for this is that the population must understand just how meaningless and utterly corrupt the current two-party system is, and that a third national party built with the same centralized structures won't solve the problem. Decentralization, like the Founders intended, will.

Why Libertarians Can't Have Nice Things

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I am not a Libertarian. I believe they try to cram too much moral reality into too little moral philosophy. They take something that is good (the NAP) as a principle (a principle is something generally true but to which there are exceptions), and attempt to make it into a law (a law is something that is always true and to which there are no exceptions). 

That being said, I am glad they are around. I have voted for Libertarian candidates in the past, and the only candidate I am personally helping to elect this cycle is a Libertarian. I also donated $500 to his campaign, just as I donated $500 to a Libertarian in the 2014 cycle. That doesn't even count my work for Ron Paul. If there are any Libertarian readers out there inclined to be hostile to me for what I have written in this space, I ask that you moderate your hostility in consideration of my deeds.

But despite this, I can't take the Libertarian philosophy seriously. Not because one of the candidates for Party Chairman recently stripped down to his underwear at the podium at their national convention, exposing his large, red, unfit body to the crowd and cameras. That was a consequence of why I can't take it seriously, not a cause of it. The underlying problem is that, unless one wants to play games with the definition of "aggression" under the non-aggression principle, this fellow was perfectly within his libertarian view of rights to strip in front of the crowd and cameras. He did not force anyone to look. He did not sign any agreement saying that he would not strip on stage. There was no force and no fraud involved. By the Libertarian's own creed, he had every right to do what he did.

I was amused at the way a good number of those Libertarians who objected to this conduct dealt with it. It was the way they consistently deal with such matters. That is by torturing the definition of "aggression" so that whatever conduct offends them is re-defined as "aggression". It was "aggression" for him to "inflict" his body on them. As if him standing in front of them with his cloths off was in the same category as a punch in the nose.

Look, either one accepts a limited and narrow definition of "aggression" and "fraud" or one does not. If one does, then acts like this are permitted under libertarian ideas. Who are you to impose your morality on his actions? If one does not accept such definitions, then Libertarianism becomes more oppressive, and at the same time more chaotic, than almost any other philosophy of government. In an age of touchy people where "micro-aggression" is a thing, almost any words or behavior those in charge don't like can be relabeled "aggression". The non-aggression principle can then become a tool for tyranny. But if those key terms are interpreted strictly and narrowly, then behavior like that displayed at the convention, and even very much more offensive, must be permitted.

The funny thing is that in my first book on Localism as a philosophy of government I put in a chapter at the end about why libertarian ideas were not as good as localist ideas, though there was broad overlap. I developed a scenario about a man I called "Mr. Mayonnaise" who had a thing for going around dressed in nothing but dressing. This chapter got me some harsh feedback, but now I see that art became close to life at the Libertarian's national convention. Those discussions actually helped me because it led to the second book, where most of the book is dedicated to explaining why the more extreme forms of libertarian thought are uncompelling in theory and unworkable in practice.

In the end friends, mankind is either going to be Localist, or Globalist. This is true if for no other reason than because no other philosophy of government has a workable defense against the stratagems used to advance Globalism.

The Dark Knight of Political Philosophies

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I have come to realize that Localism is the Dark Knight of political philosophies. It may not be the philosophy of government that most people want, especially people interested in public policy, but its the one they need.

 The first "Dark Knight" Batman movie explored the idea that there was a difference between the hero that people wanted and the hero that people needed. The good people of Gotham wanted an optimistic camera-friendly champion to work within the system that they were comfortable with. They wanted to believe their problems were not because the system itself was flawed, rather the answer was simply to change the identity of the person running it and that will fix things.

Except it didn't fix things. While its true that the right person can keep a soundly-built ship from running aground, if the ship has a structural flaw then a storm can expose it no matter who the Captain is. It is the storm which exposes the design flaw. At that point changing Captains won't help. One must go to port and do a re-fit, however much trouble it may be. In the movie, the emergence of The Joker represented that storm. He had an evil gift of finding and exploiting the ugliness of people, combined with an understanding of how to leverage the complex, interconnected, yet predictable form of the system against itself. When this gift was used against people in the system it was revealed that all of them had something they wanted more than justice.

Batman did not work within their system. He did not need the approval of the general public. He was not subject to media manipulation, or The Joker's manipulation. He did not lean on orders from headquarters, or the permission of people who knew less about the situation than he did. He just acted. Only one thing about him was predictable, that he would follow his own law and refuse to kill.

Harvey Dent and the good people of Gotham felt everything was basically fine, they just needed the right central figure to lead the system. The Joker knew that the system itself was flawed and those flaws would be amplified by exploiting the flawed humans which operated the system at all levels. In this sense, the size and complexity of the system simply offered The Joker more targets, more ways to aggravate stress points.

The Joker represents anarchy, the other extreme from Dent. I don't say that anarchists want to hurt people just to make a point like the Joker did, but that character would represent anarchists in this analogy. They have no illusions about the system and would like nothing more than the whole thing to burn to the ground. But he went too far in believing that everything was ugly, everything was dirty. It didn't all need to go, but it did need intervention from outside itself in order to function in a way that would produce any lasting good.

Batman was the hero that showed Gothamites that their system was not able to maintain itself without external correction. Batman showed The Joker that not all external corrective forces were hypocrites. The Joker's quest to prove that there was no difference between the respectable and the contemptible, that all heroes and authorities were at core just as amoral as he was, failed against The Dark Knight.

People who are attracted to politics tend to have strong feelings about using political power. Generally they are motivated by one of two things: either they like to rule others or they hate to be ruled by others. For those who like to rule, there is the present extremism of the central state. They think we can "make America great again" by picking the right hero to be our strongman. They have no patience for the thought that our problems may run deeper than that, and may in fact be systemic. People who love the Central State are interested in making other people do what they want. They have no desire for localism. Localism is for people who can sleep well at night even when people they have never met in a city where they have never been are doing things they would not approve of.

For the opposite group, those who hate to be ruled, Localism does not go far enough. They are drawn to philosophies of government which confirm their rejection of all authority. They want some of the more extreme flavors of Libertarian ideas, such as anarchism. Any state is too much state for them. The very concept must be discredited. They marshal some manner of intellectual arguments against the necessity of the state, but not so much as to withstand real scrutiny. Most of the second book about localism was devoted to showing why much of the  underpinnings of anarchist thought are uncompelling.

Unfortunately the human tendency is to start with our emotions and afterwards make some attempt at formulating a logic which supports our previous emotional conclusions. For one who wishes to see power exercised over others, even people too distant to have any serious affect on their own lives, some rationalization for the central state will be constructed, no matter how flimsy. In the same way, if one's emotions lead one to rebel against all authority, unprovable premises will be adopted which allow for a philosophy which justifies it. It is the rare and healthy person who can dispassionately take a look at other ideas, especially those which begin outside of their emotional comfort zone.

Localism is a philosophy of government for emotionally and mentally healthy people. It is for those who feel no compulsion to rule over distant strangers yet accept the necessity of some kind of government for themselves. It accepts that we are not always the best judge of the nobility of our own actions- be we ruler or ruled. It answers the old question of "if man must be governed himself then how can he rule others?" by saying that both the governed and the governing must check and balance one another. Neither can be trusted with absolute freedom of action, either over themselves or others. Those few of us who do manage to break ourselves free of all restraint most often do so to their own destruction, whether individual or government. At the same time we acknowledge the present central state does not really restrain government, and presents only the illusion of freedom and accountability and not freedom or accountability itself.

Ultimately the Philosophy of Government we need is one that reflects the truth about us. About Mankind. Though statism and anarchism seem like polar opposites, they actually originate from the same mistaken assumption about man. Both the philosophy of the Central State and that of Anarchy start with the idea that we are basically good. The one says "our sort can rule others without corruption" and the other says "we can live unrestrained by external rules without corruption". They are both built on the ethereal foundation of our own purported goodness. For anarchists, this goodness extends to the common man. Adherents of the central state may think that only those of their viewpoint are so righteous as to be able to manifest this incorruptible and innate goodness. Each asks for unaccountable power- one over everyone and the other against everyone - on the same false basis.

Localism presents a more classical, and honest, assessment of humankind. Mankind is not good by nature. Mankind is sinful by nature, and being able to cover that up and put on a good show is just part of the sin. Further, few things bring out the inherent badness of man like a lack of accountability whether it be in the form of escaping all external authority over themselves, or the unchecked ability to impose such authority over others. This is not what we want to hear about ourselves, even if it is true. We don't wish to hear it even if it was the classical western view of man for over a thousand years, and that view produced a very great deal of human liberty. Perhaps it worked, but its not what we want to hear just now. From this classical and blunt assessment of human nature springs the political philosophy of Localism.  The Dark Knight of its kind. The one we need, even if it fails to flatter us.

NOW the Establishment Wants a Kind of Run-Off

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A "Brokered Convention" is kind of like a run-off election. If there is no clear winner on the first round of voting, you have a second round. It differs from a run-off election in that the people casting the votes in the second round are not the whole body of people who voted the first round, but a select group of delegates much more tied to the system which engineered the election to begin with.

For many cycles the Republican establishment in particular manipulated the process against outsider candidates who really wanted to limit government. They did this by encouraging a bevy of candidates who claimed such positions (usually without much basis in fact) into entering the race. The nationalist/traditionalist/limited government vote was divided many ways. The establishment Republican vote was divided few ways because the power brokers got together in advance to pick their candidate. I heard about George W. Bush as a candidate from a Republican county chair while we we still engaged in the previous election cycle.

They still tried to rig the process by getting all of the southern states, save Jeb Bush's Florida, into having their primaries early while the vote was decided on a proportional basis and many candidates would be in the race. Then Jeb Bush or some other globalist big government Republican could clean up by winning 35% of the vote and getting all of the delegates in "winner take all" primaries like Florida and Ohio.

They totally misjudged how fed up the country was with their policies, and the Bush family which has become the personification of it. They did hedge a little bit, in that they let an ambitious young Marco Rubio convince them to use him as a back-up plan if indeed people were tired of the Bushes. When Bush floundered they went to the back-up plan and pushed him relentlessly. But Rubio proved to be "not ready for prime time." Between that and a regional (at best) establishment (Kasich) candidate staying in the race, it was actually the establishment vote that has been divided.

The third thing that they did not plan on was Ted Cruz peeling off just enough of the establishment to raise some serious money while still keeping a substantial amount of the conservative anti-establishment grassroots in his camp. Normally by this time, the conservative challenger is out of cash and has not laid the groundwork for a rapid series of contests in large states.

Then of course there is the Deus Ex Machina Black Swan event that is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is now turning their own plans on their heads. He does not have anywhere near a majority of delegates. He barely has 100 more than Cruz. But until now delegates have been allotted more or less proportionally. We are about to enter a phase where the delegates are awarded by a procedure that the media has been calling "winner take all."

Now Trump is in a position to do what the establishment candidates did to the conservative candidates when McCain and Romney were running: Rack up tremendous delegate leads by winning 100% of the delegates by winning less that 50% (in some cases far less) of the vote. What they are trying to do now is arrange things so that no one gets over half of the delegates. Then it would go to a brokered convention where, if a few more rules get changed, they can get someone more to their liking in there.

This is not as impossible as it sounds. We are far along the process and although Trump has the most delegates of any candidate, he does not have close to half of the delegates. The remaining states are mostly "winner take all" but they also tend to be "closed" events. That is, only registered Republicans can participate. That eliminates the motivated independents that have been bolstering Trump's numbers. Trump comes off as an east coast authoritarian, and that does not play well in Western states. Indeed, except for atypical Nevada, Trump has not won out west. Cruz is stronger once you get away from states that are east of the Mississippi. The "border" states that have one border on the west side of the Mississippi are basically a tie. Trump wins east of that line and Cruz wins west of it.

I started out by saying that brokered convention is a type of run-off election. This gets to the real point I want you to see from this. The establishment media calls states that award all of their delegates to the one with the most votes, even if its not a majority of votes, "winner take all" states. In the general election they call it the "first past the post" method. Same method, different names. In each case the candidate who gets the most votes, even if its not the majority of votes, gets everything at stake, whether its a pile of delegates or a public office. And that's a problem. We should have run-off elections for every office on the ballot, preferably using instant run-off voting.

Why does the establishment want a brokered convention, a sort of run-off albeit one decided by those closer to the system, for itself but expect everyone else to be stuck with a "winner take all" a.k.a. "first past the post" method of determining who wins general elections in November? Any state legislature could change the election laws anytime they wanted. They just don't want to. It is in the interest of the two dominant parties to leave the "first past the post" a.k.a. "winner takes all" system in place in November because it is easier for them to game that system. They can scare people out of choosing a third party out of fear of "splitting the vote" and throwing the election to their least preferred option. They like it because it frightens people into line instead of helping them to vote their conscience. That they have not given us run-offs yet is dishonorable at any time, but never moreso than now, when the establishment of one of the major parties wants a sort of run-off for itself- in particular a run-off where only those most connected to the system get to vote on the second round.