From SLM News Blog:
06 October 2010Little by Little, the War between the US Government and Americans is being recognized
It's reaching a major tipping point and the speed of recognition is increasing. Please read The Insurgency by the Chicagoboyz.
Ultimately, secession will be the only solution. We will not be able to get the US government under control through the electoral process.
Posted by Pat H. at 7:14 PM
From Chicago Boyz:
« Why the Left Needs Its Own Tea PartyUndertime: Why High Marginal Taxes Are Like Anti-Overtime »The Insurgency
Posted by Lexington Green on October 3rd, 2010 (All posts by Lexington Green)
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Once many years ago my father was sailing in a 30 foot sailboat on Nantucket Sound. The water was clear, and deep down in the water he saw a shape, that was unclear at first, but it got bigger and bigger, and soon its top fin broke the water. It was the largest shark he had ever seen. It was longer than the boat. It swam alongside for a few seconds, and probably not smelling anything good to eat, dipped back down and disappeared into the depths. If he had not been looking, he would not have seen it. He knows what he saw. Take it or leave it.
Something very big may come out of the dark, deep water, and if you are looking in the right place, you will see it coming.
I recently had a two part post on Right Network about the mass political movement which is developing in the USA, which I have called The Insurgency. Maybe I am all wrong about the size and importance of this movement. Maybe the shadows will not form and harden and rise into clarity and solid form. Maybe the mass movement will fizzle. Maybe politics will remain muddle and kludges. Or maybe I am looking in the right place at the right time. Take it or leave it.
The first post is here.
The InsurgencyThe times, they really are a-changin’. by Michael J. Lotus
The Insurgency, Lexington Green, Michael Lotus, bailout, stimulus
in 'Politics'
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Editor's Note: This is the first installment of The Insurgency, our description of the current crisis in American life. The conclusion will appear tomorrow; what this series proposes and foresees is a transformation of American culture and politics.
Mass political movements often begin with a single, striking event. The Insurgency began in the fall of 2008, when President Bush, Senator Obama, and Senator McCain appeared together to endorse the TARP bailout. At that moment the lights came on for many Americans. It was glaringly obvious that both political parties jointly operated the system, and the system existed to protect the well connected at the expense of everyone else. The public opposed the TARP bailouts; the banks got their money anyway. The Insurgency, long brewing, began.
The Insurgency is a movement of citizens directed against unsustainable government taxation and regulation, and spending, both of which benefit insiders rather than ordinary people. The target of the Insurgency is a leviathan in Washington, D.C. that will ruin us all if it is not dismantled.
The Insurgency is part of a long tradition of mass political movements in our history. It has the potential to make a fundamental change in American life—for the better.
1. What is the Insurgency fighting against?
The American government has become a gigantic regulatory juggernaut. It decides the fate of individuals, businesses, whole industries, and entire regions. A few lines in a statute, or a paragraph in one of the many administrative codes that enmesh our productive lives, can mean wealth or ruin. This is a huge, unchecked, and increasingly unaccountable power. Where there is such power, as our Founders knew, it will be abused. Picking better people won’t solve the problem, because where such power exists, it will corrupt the people who have access to it. This is a political law almost as universal as those of Newton and Maxwell in the realm of physical phenomena. A regulatory state this powerful will necessarily be corrupting, venal, and suffocating.
"The most powerful force drives the leviathan-state:
rational self-interest."
This inevitable process is not a matter of party affiliation, or of Left versus Right, or of business versus government. It is much worse than that. The most powerful force drives the leviathan-state: rational self-interest. The self-interest of the politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists and their employers (mostly businesses), drives this vampire-leviathan to grow more and more powerful, to consume more and more of the assets and energy of the American people, to became the only path to wealth and status and independence. Americans who once would have sought to invent and create and innovate, to seek wealth and status and self-fulfillment in private enterprise, are driven instead to become courtiers and lackeys and wire-pullers. The regulatory state has become wealth-consuming, wealth-destroying, and wealth-preventing. It is hollowing out the enterprising and autonomous spirit of the American people, as well as bankrupting them.
The Insurgency is primarily a struggle against this power. It has come as a shock to the political establishment of both parties, which are used to carrying on with business as usual, and not being noticed. That is no longer possible.
No one is fooled.
The Democrats have been the main advocates of bigger government, so they are the most threatened by the Insurgency, and their servile allies in the legacy media have responded with the usual dishonest campaign of vilification. They have tried to demonize this new mass movement, and to alienate it from the center of the American electorate. So far, they have enjoyed only limited success in their shrill efforts at defamation. Labeling as “racist” all disagreements with any so-called Progressive position is an overused, worn-out weapon at this point, for instance—and leftists similarly overused and neutralized the word “fascist,” as George Orwell memorably recounted over 60 years ago. No one is fooled.
Nonetheless, the Republican Party will derive little joy from the Insurgency. It has similarly been stunned by the appearance of this massive outbreak of popular feeling and activity. The post-1994 decay of the GOP, especially during the Bush era, has shown the American people that no relief will come from the Republican Party unless it reforms itself first. The voters repudiated the GOP in 2006 and 2008, and with good reason.
The GOP seems to have initially believed that it could somehow ride public anger to victory in 2010 without offering any basic change in the way the game is played. The ongoing political massacre of establishment GOP politicians shows that this was incorrect; the public is onto their game. Time is running out for the GOP. The years 2010 and 2012 will be the GOP’s last opportunity to reform itself, and if it fails to do so, the GOP will be the first major victim of the Insurgency.
2. What is the Insurgency? Why now?
For now the Tea Party movement, ignited by Rick Santelli’s “Rant Heard Round the World,” is the dominant component of the Insurgency; Glenn Beck’s gathering of hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C. is another, overlapping one. The people who have gathered around Governor Sarah Palin form yet another part of the Insurgency, as do the libertarian-minded citizens who read blogs like Instapundit. Many of Rush Limbaugh’s, Sean Hannity’s, and Mark Levin’s listeners are part of it. Various long-established conservative groups that have always opposed big government are now parts of the Insurgency.
There are appear to be three factors that have caused the rise of the Insurgency now, and the particular form it is taking: 1) technology, 2) a new, heightened awareness of the problem, and 3) the shock of the current crisis.
First, new technology allows massive, decentralized and horizontal organizations to form quickly. The Tea Party is the best current example: There is coordination, but no central direction. There is no one in charge, giving orders, but rather many people and groups cooperating. This is only possible due to current technology.
"[Technology] enabled the Insurgency,
but it did not cause it."
Technology, however, cannot by itself explain the rise of the Insurgency. After all, the political Left actually pioneered in this area: MoveOn was a highly effective internet-based organization, for example. It does seem odd, in retrospect, that a tech-savvy Left would cast its lot with a top-down, government-centric political culture. And there may be some overarching affinity between libertarian-style thinking and the new technology. But that technology is ultimately neutral. It enabled the Insurgency, but it did not cause it.
The second source of the Insurgency is increased public awareness of government spending and government power, and a new realization that many others also want to solve those problems.
It is axiomatic that government power will be employed to favor those who are organized to obtain benefits from it. Businesses and other groups will lobby for laws or regulations that favor them, or seek government money directly. They do this instead of innovating or selling cheaper or better products, or otherwise benefitting the public. This is entirely rational behavior on their part, but it does not benefit society as a whole. These incentives are inevitable when there is a controlling regulatory state that creates its own momentum to become increasingly powerful, expensive, and burdensome. The people who benefit from this system, which they have rigged in their own favor, get enormous benefits from it, and they will struggle to keep it going.
"Society suffers 'the death of a thousand cuts,'
but finds it hard to understand why it is bleeding to death."
Yet each individual person in society—all of whose members bear the burden of this system—only personally suffers a small cost from each new inefficiency, new regulation, each new complication in the tax code. Furthermore, the most important cost is invisible: the jobs that are never created, the new products that are never invented, the businesses that are never started, the innovations that never see the light of day. Benefits are concentrated, but burdens are widely diffused. Lost opportunities are never seen at all. As a result, it becomes very hard to mobilize opposition to the regulatory state. Society suffers “the death of a thousand cuts,” but finds it hard to understand why it is bleeding to death.
Today, this is changing. Alternative media, including talk radio and particularly the Internet, have opened up new sources of information and allowed more people to understand how the regulatory state is hurting our country, and each of us. The new media have also shown that there are millions of people who want real change. More and more people are outraged by the smug and increasingly brazen corruption and favor-seeking that makes up life in Washington, D.C. However, this growing awareness of the problem—and the number of people who wanted to change it—did not get the Insurgency going. People grumbled, and they blogged, but they did not go outside and protest. Something big had to happen first, to set it off.
"Unemployment remains high,with no relief in sight."
The third element that made the insurgency happen was the 2008 financial crisis, and the onset of the ongoing Second Great Depression. The outrageous Bush-Obama TARP bailouts came as a shock, and President Obama’s so-called stimulus package was a second blow; the trillion-dollar bailout of his political allies was obviously not going to stimulate anything. Unemployment remains high,with no relief in sight. The government cash bonfire continued with the passage of the unpopular (and unread, by legislators) health care legislation.
The ongoing, unfair, ineffective and unsustainable spending binge in Washington has caused genuine fear about the future of the country. The total financial obligations of all levels in government seem to go up by trillions of dollars, week by week. Everyone knows we cannot afford what we have spent already.
If something cannot go on, it will not go on. A massive change in how we govern ourselves is now mandatory and long overdue. The existing game in Washington, and at all levels of government, can no longer be paid for. This realization is swiftly spreading.
The Insurgency is mobilizing in response to this disaster. So far, the Insurgency has mostly opposed Obama and his policies. It has also begun to purge out the Republican Party, to make it fit for the necessary task of reform. The Insurgency, through its web of connected citizens, is getting started on the more difficult work of crafting and promoting its own affirmative policy package.
So how should the Insurgency proceed?
The second post is here
The Insurgency, Part IIThe Road Aheadby Michael J. Lotus
The Insurgency, Michael J. Lotus, Tea Parties, Antiwar Movement, Vietnam
in 'Politics'
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This continues our two-part piece on the Insurgency, and what it means for the future of American life and governance.
Before we go forward, it's worth taking a look at how we got here.
3. Lessons from History for the Insurgency
Mass political movements have come along several times in American history. Some have transformed the country, and others have fizzled out.
The movement that elected Andrew Jackson, against the vicious opposition of the existing establishment, swept through all levels of American government, rewriting state constitutions and extending the franchise to all adult White males. Jacksonian democracy caused a permanent and irreversible change in American life.
The Populist movement looked like it would have a similar impact. Led by the charismatic outsider William Jennings Bryan, this movement held gigantic rallies and seemed like a revolution in the making. It provoked fear and a hostile response from the establishment of its day, in both political parties. Yet the Populists ultimately failed to make a significant impact on national policy, and were absorbed into the Democratic Party.
Today’s Insurgency could go either way. Success is not inevitable.
A more recent example, which provides some guidance for the Insurgency, is the Anti-War movement from the Vietnam era. Whether you believe the Anti-War movement was a good thing or a bad thing, it undeniably had a massive impact on American life and politics. The original Anti-War movement arose from growing outrage over tens of thousands of young Americans, mostly draftees, being killed and wounded in the Vietnam War. In its early stages, the opposition led to a Constitutional amendment that lowered the voting age nationwide to 18—draft age. The Anti-War movement was also part of the reason the U.S. ultimately withdrew its military forces from Vietnam. But the biggest impact of the Anti-War movement was ending the military draft. This was a major, permanent, and probably irreversible success for the Movement.
Many of the Anti-War protesters were “far out”—part of a subculture that was initially dismissed as longhaired and freakish by mainstream voters. It took a while for the movement to have a real political impact. As conditions worsened, more people listened. The basic message, over time, came to command a majority of voters. The public turned against the war, and the public supported ending the draft. Notably, while the main political home for the Anti-War movement was on the Democrat side, it was Republican President Nixon who seized the political opportunity to end the unpopular draft.
The Anti-War movement helped to elect a generation of Democrat politicians who permanently changed the course of their party. The Anti-War movement was not a top-down organization, but a loose confederation of like-minded people and groups. The connections and experience from the Anti-War movement created a permanent community of activists who could be mobilized for other causes, such as opposition to the Iraq War, four decades later. People who were intellectually and politically formed in the Anti-War movement went on to have a large impact on American culture and politics for decades after its initial goals were accomplished.
There are important lessons for the Insurgency from the Vietnam-era Anti-War movement:
1) Take advantage of troubled times to push major reforms through; these reforms will take some issues off the table forever.
2) Select concrete goals that will be acceptable to a large number of people. Advocate those goals, and stay focused on them.
3) Turn enthusiasm into political power by picking one political party as the primary vehicle--then take that party over, and change it from within.
4) Do not become completely incorporated into either party. Rather, try to influence both of them by changing the terms of the political debate: Move the center permanently.
5) Keep the movement decentralized and adaptive, and responsive to opportunities.
6) Don’t worry when the first round of self-selected, enthusiastic amateurs do not always put the best face on the movement; their energy and commitment are priceless. Competent leaders and electable candidates will emerge over time.
7) Build experience and connections and solidarity. Then, when the initial round of reform is accomplished, the movement can focus on further goals.
The United States has had experience with mass political movements in the past. We can learn lessons from all of them--including the Abolitionist movement, the Progressive movement, and the Civil Rights movement.
Mass political movements, when they are effective, generally signal the end of politics as usual. They mobilize citizens who would not ordinarily get involved in politics. Mass political movements are a self-corrective mechanism in our democracy. History shows that mass movements such as the Insurgency are the natural way for Americans to impose reform on themselves. They are the legitimate response to major failures in how we govern ourselves.
When the American political and economic system suffers a serious failure, we can no longer avoid taking a hard look at ourselves. We have to make fundamental decisions about what kind of country we want America to be. At such moments, people perceive that their basic values are being contested, and those who have a stake in the current system are, reasonably enough, afraid of change. People who see the urgent need for change resent the obstruction. Political rhetoric becomes heated, because a lot is at stake. This is also normal, as history shows.
The United States is now in the midst of a political and economic crisis. Our basic institutions are failing before our eyes; we are on the cusp of major changes. The leviathan state is in its final years of life. It will either be eliminated in an equitable and coherent fashion and replaced by institutions that work, or its defenders will prop it up with one “emergency” measure after another, until it falls catastrophically. Either way, the end of the political and economic world we have long known is unavoidable. It is not a question of “if,” but rather one of “when” and “how.”
My prediction is that we are in for a rough ride, but a happy outcome. The country is making a course correction, reinventing itself. No one else can do this like Americans can, once they decide it has to be done. We are carrying out a once-in-a-century creative destruction of our whole politico-economic structure, and we are going to leave the rest of the world gasping in amazement. These are exciting times, and we are lucky to be here for them.
The appearance of the Insurgency is right on schedule.
Michael J. Lotus
Michael J. Lotus blogs as Lexington Green at ChicagoBoyz.net. He is a lawyer in Chicago and practices at Cheely, O'Flaherty & Ayres He is currently working on a book about the cultural foundations of American freedom. He has a J.D. of Indiana University School of Law, and a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago. He owns thousands of books on military, political, and economic history, but he buys them faster than he can read them.
Stand by for an interesting historical period.
[I am more than usually interested in our readers' thoughts on this.]
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