Government Of, By, and For the Ungovernable

Apologize for the Sun Ra freakout yesterday. Obviously my wires got crossed as a result of trying to blog while watching the Holder thingy, and that's what came out. Although Ra appears regularly in the 'Coon Club Au Go-Go showroom, I do not advocate him to the uninitiated.

It did form quite a contrast, however -- the penultimate retrograde reactionary establishment negro overseer of the Victim Plantation vs. the only-begotten post-racial interplanetary musical transponder of happy tomorrows: the entirely predictable type vs. the unprecedented and unrepeatable individual. I suppose Holder must have provoked his opposite number in positive space.

But none of this is actually irrelevant to our topic, which involves the limits of freedom. Much of Charles Murray's Coming Apart -- which is a must read -- revolves around the same subject, which ultimately comes down to the question of how a people can remain free if they reject the virtues -- i.e., the intrinsic limits -- that undergird the very possibility of freedom.

Murray cites various founders and foreign observers who were acutely aware of this. Indeed, in order to not know it, you must have either attended graduate school or else be among the underclass victims of the toxic ideology of our academic elites.

This is indeed one of the striking conclusions of the book, that our elites, instead of preaching what they practice -- i.e., the behaviors and attitudes that resulted in their own success -- preach exactly the opposite. In THE NEW CLASS: PROFITING FROM DECLINE, PowerLine links to a piece at Falkenblog that relieves me of the need to lay the foundation:

"Murray argues the well-off should set a better example by not apologizing for their squareness, but rather, by advocating their lifestyle and scorning those who fail to live up to it -- we need more of what is usually called ‘blaming the victim.'"

Nevertheless, the lower classes never stop hearing of "how great it is to be a victim, how noble it is to be poor, powerless, or discriminated [against]; to be wronged is the ultimate in righteousness." But this is not something our hyper status-conscious elites would ever indulge in themselves:

"Alas, successful people are ashamed to assert they have better genetics, values, and habits -- even though they quietly believe it to be true -- and so are content to let the media and intellectuals push the delusional idea that success is like when Paris Hilton had sex on a digital camera and built a career out of it: luck, connections, and chutzpah, but no discipline, ingenuity, and perseverence. With such examples it becomes defensible to suggest most of the rich are like that -- mere lucky hacks in the game of life. The flip side is that those who are unsuccessful are suffering for no fault of their own" (Falkenstein).

Speaking of Falkenstein's monster, the whole thing is a weird and twisted academic experiment in reverse-prometheanism: a misguided attempt to make man better by making him worse, or transcendence via regression.

I know many successful liberals who are full of covert (and not so covert) narcissistic superiority, which they deny through assimilation of the liberal sensibility described above. There is nothing empathic or compassionate about them. They live their own lives in a conservative, even blandly bourgeois, manner, and yet, advocate an entirely different set of values for the unsuccessful.

These unsuccessful victims of someone else's success function only as props in the liberal's personal psychodrama. They have no interest whatsoever in understanding the actual behaviors that result in poverty or in success. Indeed, they need the poor in order to elevate themselves, which helps explain their dogged adherence to policies that are guaranteed to create more of them.

Murray attempts to distill the cardinal virtues that resulted in America's unprecedented success -- which for him are marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity -- and in so doing, show how unique they were to America.

In fact, this is something everyone once knew, both here and abroad. He cites an example from 1825, when a European observer wrote that "no government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States, with a different code of morals."

Furthermore, our Constitution "can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government" (Francis Grund, emphasis mine).

How extraordinarily prescient! Yes, the ACLU is a strict adherent to the Constitution -- the perverse Constitution that results from a complete rejection of the spirit and values that inspired it.

Murray cites various founders, such as Madison: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea."

Franklin: "only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."

Patrick Henry: "bad men cannot make good citizens.... No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue."

Tocqueville: "travelers who have visited North America.... all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere."

Even Jefferson (not that his erratic thought process should hold any particular weight, except that he seems to be the perennial favorite of the adultolescent left): "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"

One could go on and on. The point is, self-government requires first and foremost government of oneself. But with the symbolic ascendence of Obama, we have reached the dangerous tipping point of a government of, by, and for the ungovernable. Or, perhaps of the insufferable over the ungovernable, the former enabling the latter with a poisonous and destructive ideology that is guaranteed to produce more of the victims that justify the ideology.

Again, all of the above goes to the ninth of our Ten Universal Principles, which concerns the limits of freedom. I couldn't possibly express it more clearly than Tocqueville, who is quoted by Murray:

"Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from" doing so. The latter "must be regarded as the first of their political institutions," for "Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other."

But as we have said before, leftism is quintessentially "the possibility of the impossible," endeavoring always to bring about what can never be, through ideas and principles that should never have been.

To be continued, but no posts for several days....