America was sui generis.
Founded on a new continent by people brave enough to cross the ocean on
frail wooden boats. People who had the intelligence and courage to fight the
indigenous people and conquer a new land.
They brought with them the legacy of England's common law, a workable
set of institutions.
In addition to an intelligent and motivated founding
population, the United States generally enjoyed a high level of homogeneity.
The diversity that Benjamin Franklin lamented was that of Germans, who are by
history and blood very closely related to the English themselves.
Early America was small enough that people knew each other
and knew their representatives. There were under four million people at the
founding.
Those were considerable advantages – small, homogeneous, and
intelligent. Michael Woodley of Menie makes a strong argument in "At Our
Wits' End" that the intelligence of European peoples in general peaked
right about that time, and the downward slide has been accelerating ever since.
A democracy purports to seek "the common good." Each individual must be willing to concede a bit of individual resource and sovereignty in order to build a strong and productive collective.
"The common good" is a kind of deferred
gratification. Psychometricians find a strong correlation between intelligence
and deferred gratification. Smarter children will take two candy bars later
rather than one now. In previous eras we were smart enough to realize the
benefits of sacrificing for the common good. Moreover, we were sufficiently
homogeneous that we could readily equate the common good with our own good.
The common man was generally law-abiding, not because the
law was so rigorously enforced, but because each individual sensed that he
benefited from overall adherence to the law. Edmund Burke made the case very
well.
This has all changed radically in our age. The big
democracies, and the United States in particular, are not whatsoever
homogeneous. Most citizens feel racial or ethnic identities more strongly than
their national identity. Adherence to the law is a matter of fear of the law,
which has been increasingly strongly enforced. Moreover, the law is selectively
enforced. Those who accept it – the traditional white majorities – are held to
stricter account than minorities. There are neighborhoods in large American
cities, and "no go" zones in European cities, in which the state is
reluctant to assert its power over the citizenry. And, as has been amply demonstrated recently,
elites such as the Clintons can absolutely ignore the law.
This is the recipe for the decay of democracy. People are
becoming stupider for all the reasons that Woodley of Menie cites. Intelligence is hereditary. Smart people are not having as many children
as the less able and immigrants are not as smart on average as the native
populations. In the final analysis, they are no longer willing to accept
delayed gratification. They cannot accept that society's goods are distributed
according to a person's talents, and dim people do not realize that they are
simply not that talented. They have nothing in common with the people whose
possessions they covet, and which they would redistribute through their voting
majority.
Modern democracies do not function at all like the American
Republic of 1789. The people are not as talented and their political power is
not tempered by a hierarchy of echelons of government that would serve to
suppress the demand for immediate gratification. Instead, there is a mass
electorate that is swayed by the media. The electorate is not intelligent
enough to understand the issues. They
vote on emotional issues such as abortion and gun control, and politicians use
the media to sway them this way and that. Politicians are forced to lie in
order to get elected. They have little respect for the voter, nor should they.
Democracy has devolved into an oligarchy of rich people and
the media. Rich people increasingly appreciate the value of owning the media,
so these two have become conflated. Wealth is highly correlated with
intelligence, and it must be observed that the most intelligent segment of the
population, the Jews, while making up no more than 2% of the people account for
half of the richest people in the country and 50% of the donations to the
Democratic party – and 25% to the Republicans.
They have immense power over politicians and public opinion.
The Jews have a several millennium history as a separate
people. They have historically tended to
the interests of their people rather than whatever nation-state they happen to
inhabit at a given point in time. A testament to their power is the vigor with
which they are able to suppress writers who point this out. The English
translation of Solzhenitsyn's last book, "200 Years Together", about
the history of the Jews in Russia has simply been made unavailable.
The oligarchies that control America and Western Europe are
not whatsoever aligned with the peoples of those countries. In countries such
as Hungary, Poland, and Russia, in which political groups have come together to
contest the financial power of the prevailing oligarchy, such groups find
themselves under constant attack by the media and by the political entities
such as the European Union that remain under control.
Democracy, as pioneered by the Americans, is not working
well anywhere in the world. The open question is what will replace it. The
logical answer would be some sort of system of nobility that is aligned with
the interests of the people. None, however, seem to be emerging. The oligarchies that exist do not fit that
description and seem very unlikely to embrace the interests of the common
people.
At the time of the American Revolution, the outcome might
have been foreseen. People had been writing about representative government for
some time. The American Revolution had the support of several English and
continental philosophers, as well as a considerable number of the British
population. Our revolution was really an
evolution.
Times such as we are now living in, however, are extremely
unpredictable. The French and Russian revolutions, and later the Soviet Union
itself, spiraled out of control. While the existing political arrangements were
obviously untenable, it could not be projected what would follow their
collapse. That is the situation which the world finds itself today. The current
regime of uncontrolled immigration, ballooning debt, a lack of belief in
religion, state, or even institutions such as family, will lead to a collapse.
Something will arise Phoenix-like from the ashes, but it would be foolhardy to
attempt to predict what.
It will be tumultuous – there is no doubt on that score. The
personal virtues that have sustained people through hard times before will no
doubt be called upon once more. Jack Donovan (The Way of Men) cites the four
cardinal virtues of men: strength, courage, mastery and loyalty. All have been
denigrated in these of feet, populist times. Those who resisted this
dissipation, and raise their children to be strong individuals – German Mensch,
Russian chelovek - will see their bloodlines prosper.
We of the West may go onto the dustbin of history, swept
aside by the sheer numbers of Muslims and Africans, or we may survive in
isolated countries and communities.
Whatever form the transition takes, it will be a matter of
generations. We cannot prepare as
individuals, but must elaborate plans to see our children and grandchildren
through the chaos to come.
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