Category: Politics

Another placeholder from Jonah Goldberg, excerpted from his weekly newsletter, The G. File. As usual, it signifies far-reaching truths beyond the events of the moment. My remarks will follow in a separate post.

The Trumpian Flood

The deluges of nonsense in our political era are changing the ecosystem of the right, maybe forever.

Dear Reader (and people who won’t let the light of covfefe ever die),

Yesterday, I drove for nearly 100 miles with my hazard lights on—and not for the usual reason that I forgot to turn them off after double-parking outside a liquor store. It rained like one too many chemtrails from one of the planes owned by “Big Air” had finally burnt a hole between our dimension and the water-verse and all the wet from the Earth where everyone has gills was pouring into our reality. I stopped at the Joe Biden rest stop in Delaware—yes, that’s a thing—where I ran in to go to the bathroom and get a cup of coffee (though not the coffee from the bathroom). For a second, I thought the fire alarm was going off, until I realized a gaggle of people around me all had the same shrieking sound coming out of their pockets and handbags. No, I hadn’t stumbled on a stealth lemur-smuggling operation; everyone’s phone was getting the same emergency broadcast warning about flash-flooding. I should have waited out the rain, but my kid got back from a very long trip, and I promised her a burger and a milkshake.

But that’s not important right now, except to explain why I am writing this from my mom’s lair, surrounded by very high-end cats, in an undisclosed location near where Alexander Hamilton, America’s First Rapper, had his last mic drop.

On my long drive, white-knuckling it like Bill Barr monitoring Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, I had a lot of time to think. I’m not sure that time is a river, but I do think events move as if they were floating on one. Canyons are formed by water carving a slice out of the surface of the planet. This process is very predictable until something—a meteor, an earthquake, a dam, whatever—blocks the water’s path, and suddenly the water seeks a new route. It seems to me we’re in one of those moments. Such periods can be brief from our perspective, or they can last so long that the chaos of the flood seems like a new normal.

I cannot catalog all of my objections to the “post-liberal” crowd’s arguments. But one thing I am inclined to agree with is that the old conservative consensus—limited government, liberal democracy, etc.—has indeed broken down, and it’s not obvious to me it will be restored anytime soon.

I think this is nuts. I wish it weren’t. I wish we could finish the Trump chapter in the unfolding tale of the right as a bizarre moment where the river merely broke its banks and will, after a respectable period, return to the old course. That’s what usually happens after a deluge—like the one I drove through yesterday. The rain stops and the water subsides; everything returns to normal. But sometimes the flood is so strong, the rains so heavy, that the old landmarks that kept the river on its traditional path get washed away.

I fear that is what has happened.

One small example: The Claremont Institute has long been one of my favorite landmarks of the conservative landscape. Its motto is “Recovering the American Idea.” It is dedicated to teaching “the principles of the American Founding to the future thinkers and statesmen of America.”

Well, Claremont just announced its new crop of Lincoln Fellows, long a fairly prestigious program for accomplished young conservative professionals (both my wife and my friends Steve Hayes, Tevi Troy, and Ross Douthat were fellows). This year’s crop includes…Jack Posobiec and Mytheos Holt. Posobiec is one of the more successful trolls of the Trump era, parlaying his Pizzagate theories and stint at Gateway Pundit into a gig at One America News. Here he is explaining how Emmannuel Macron is a pawn of the deep state, which uses drugs for mind control.

Holt is somewhat less embarrassing, in the same way it’s less embarrassing to be caught in the window of Saks Fifth Avenue only pretending to have sex with a donkey rather than actually being caught in the act. He is a prominent defender of “white nationalism” and promoter of the idea that Trump is a man of great personal virtue.

Now, there’s an argument for recruiting immature young professionals into a program like this: to indoctrinate them—in the best sense of the word—to the faith. Literally to make them fluent in right doctrine. But the flip side to prestigious programs is also to send a signal to young professionals that certain arguments and behavior foreclose opportunities like the Lincoln Fellowship.

I would like to think that my friends at Claremont were, in an over-abundance of optimism, focusing on the former to the point that they lost sight of the latter. But I have little reason for confidence. The Claremont Review of Books, which is still a worthwhile journal that I often learn from, seems increasingly interested in reconciling decades of work championing the importance of rhetoric, statesmanship, and fidelity to constitutional principles with normalizing not only Trump, but also the projects of the various remoras (like Posobiec) that have attached themselves to his presidency.

The famous “Flight 93 Election” essay was, according to its fans, a kind of shot heard round the world launching this shift. To me, it was the dull thump of the canary hitting the coal mine floor. If the author of the essay hadn’t deleted his work at the old Journal of American Greatness, I’d offer a link. But here’s something Michael Anton, then called “Decius,” wrote in an argument with me:

Here’s what’s really going on. The old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups, content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it—but also demands that we keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright that “these rules don’t apply to our side….They use our commitment to American principles the same way that Islamic radicals in the West use Westerners’ commitment to Western principles to cow us into acquiescing to anti-Western measures.

Antonious Decius certainly had a point about the left, as I have argued countless times. But as anyone who read the CRB over the years knows, the point of having principles is that they are principles. If owning the libs is a more important priority than sticking to your principles, were they ever really your principles in the first place? Harry Jaffa, whose ideas form the soul of Claremont’s founding mission, held to his Lincolnian principles against all enemies—liberal and conservative alike. Lincoln’s principles made his job harder. The Founders’ principles inspired them to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on their behalf. The reason they’re considered statesmen is that they managed to achieve victory while holding onto their principles and for the sake of those principles.

The old notion of fusionism tried to merge classical liberalism with traditional conservatism. Today’s new fusionism is trying to reconcile traditional conservatism with nationalism, populism, Trumpism, grifterism, and the jackassery of the Broflake mobs who think it’s incredibly manly to whine about how unfair the libs are to them. (I credit Scott Lincicome with the term, which is a perfect marriage of the snowflakey arguments tie-dyed in testosterone rhetoric.)

A minimum requirement for every argument for principle is some truth claim. One needn’t argue for transcendental truth or cosmic truth. Some principles can simply be pragmatic and empirical. For instance, it’s an observable fact that markets are better at producing wealth than collectivism. We can argue about the moral or epistemological super-structure that makes this so—Divine Plan, natural rights, whatever—but the data don’t lie. So much of what passes for conservatism these days isn’t about defending truths, but about fabricating the veneer of truthiness around demonstrable lies.

And the hamster spinning the wheel of this Rube Goldberg (no relation) machine of bullshit is the president.

The Clown Summit

A vast industrial complex dedicated to turd-polishing churns day and night, working at convincing people they should not believe their lying eyes. No granule of B.S. is too small that it cannot use a little buffing. Again, my favorite example: Remember the “covfefe” tweet? That was an act of brilliance!

Trump’s reference to his now-deleted covfefe tweet even got printed and blown up yesterday at the White House “Social Media Summit,” ostensibly dedicated to the glory of free speech.

Free speech, you might recall, is one of those principles the Founders thought to be important. And let me stipulate: There’s a serious argument out there, with reasonable people on every side of it, about how to apply and protect free speech principles on social media. Senator Josh Hawley, a serious man with serious ideas, was there. He wants to protect free speech by empowering commissioners at the FCC to enforce some modernized version of the Fairness Doctrine. I think that it’s a bad idea, for the reasons David French lays out here. But, again, it’s a serious argument, even if I have a hard time understanding how giving the administrative state— and that’s what the FCC is most emphatically part of—the power to enforce ideological balance on private companies is an effort to protect free speech.

Then there’s Donald Trump’s contribution:

“And we don’t want to stifle anything, we certainly don’t want to stifle free speech. But that’s no longer free speech…See I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech either, because it’s so crooked, it’s so dishonest…So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad, to me that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it…But that’s not free speech.”

As Thomas Jefferson said, “huh?”

I understand that it’s often hard to pick through the president’s word salads to find the croutons of meaning or reason, but it sure seems like what he’s saying is that free speech is the speech he likes. Meanwhile, the audience he’s speaking to was plucked from the elite cadres of his meme war shock troops. In other words, they were there because he thinks free speech boils down to whoever is most willing to make the shiner’s shammy snap while polishing turds. I have twenty years of criticizing the mainstream media under my belt, but by what sane criteria are the mainstream media not practicing free speech but the folks at Infowars are? For the President of the United States, people like the savior of Flight 93, Bill Mitchell, and QAnon are champions of free speech because, in the president’s apt words, “the crap you think of is unbelievable,” but The New York Times isn’t?

We’re Not Going Back

It’s because of garbage like this that I think we can’t go back to the way it was. Too many people and institutions chose to float with the tide rather than grab sandbags and fight the onrush. Too many owe their credentials to the fact that they served bravely in the meme wars. Too many have changed their minds about the free market, free trade, and free speech to suddenly start extoling Reagan and Lincoln as if Trump never happened.

I don’t want to go apocalyptic because I sincerely believe things will eventually get better. But Yeats’ lines do come to mind,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Not too long ago, Paul Ryan won the Churchill award at the Claremont Institute’s annual Churchill dinner. This year, I am reliably informed, his image was greeted with boos when it appeared on the big screen. Tim Alberta’s important new book recounts how Paul, a man I am still happy to say I admire and consider a friend, retired rather than fight the flood. He’s been excoriated by many for it and in honesty some of that is deserved. But at least he recognized the rising waters for what they were and decided to retreat to higher, drier, ground rather than just go with the flow.

I have more respect for that than for the Kent Brockmans who, at the first glimpse of giant ants, welcomed our new insect overlords.

I was devastated the other day when I learned that Jonah Goldberg is leaving The National Review. He, more than any other writer, has helped me to maintain my sanity in the socio-political realm over the past three years. Yet, I was heartened to learn that he intends to form a new conservative platform with an emphasis, not just on conservative analysis, but hard reporting as well. And by conservative, he doesn’t mean FoxNews 2.0.

It was a happy coincidence then when I read his latest newsletter, The G-File. His thoughts on abortion are (as usual) presented in a more crystallized form than I could ever have done.

So, enjoy Mr. Goldberg; if a topic such as this, complete with blood-soaked history, can ever be enjoyed. Here he is:

I don’t like debating abortion, but every now and then I get dragooned into it. The other day, I was on Guy Benson and Marie Harf’s radio show, and we got into it because Ben Sasse’s Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act bill had just gone down in flames. I like Marie quite a bit, and I think she tries very hard to give conservatives a fair hearing, so I don’t mean any of this as a personal criticism. But she ran through all of the usual arguments, the chief of which was the old saw about how conservatives are hypocrites because they want the government out of everything, yet they want the state to regulate women’s reproductive choices.

My problem with this argument is that it suffers from a profound category error. The first obligation of the state is to protect human life. This is what Max Weber was getting at when he said the state has a “monopoly on violence.” In a decent and free society, this monopoly has only a handful of legitimate exceptions. The most important and obvious is the right to self-defense, which is an absolute natural right that is prior to any form of government. You cannot pass a just and enforceable law barring people from fighting for their life when attacked.

The other exceptions are fairly minor and still fall under the regulatory power of the state. Boxers need licenses after all. Police have discretion about how to deal with bar room fights. Whether or not spanking is good or bad for kids, I think parents have a right to do it. But we all recognize that the state has a right to intervene when parents go much beyond that kind of thing. A swat on the backside for a misbehaving child isn’t the government’s business. A parent who beats or burns their kid should have their kid taken away.

This sliding scale has an analogue in the abortion debate — not theologically or scientifically perhaps — but culturally and politically. Most Americans favor abortion rights shortly after conception through the end of the first trimester. Even larger majorities are opposed to late-term abortions.

Again, putting aside the philosophical, scientific, and theological arguments, this simply makes sense. People can understandably debate whether a young embryo should be considered a human being. But there is simply no credible moral argument that a viable baby should not be considered a human being. A late-term fetus strikes most reasonable people as a baby, not some abstracted and euphemized thing called “uterine contents” or whatnot. And a delivered baby outside the womb or in the process of delivery is, simply, a baby. The Barbara Boxer view that a baby miraculously becomes a baby only after you bring it home from the hospital is a moral monstrosity.

And this is why conservative pro-lifers are not hypocrites when they say the state should intervene on the behalf of babies. The real hypocrisy cuts the other way. Liberal abortion rights supporters — speaking broadly — have no principled objection to the state regulating the size of our sodas, banning plastic straws or regulating free speech. But going by the statements and votes of the last month — by Ralph Northam, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, and so many others — they draw the line at regulating infanticide.

Harris, a 2020 hopeful who voted against Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse’s bill, would not say if abortion was ever immoral.

“I think it’s up to a woman to make that decision, and I will always stand by that,” she told The DCNF. “I think she needs to make that decision with her doctor, with her priest, with her spouse. I would leave that decision up to them.”

Harris supports the Women’s Health Protection Act (as do Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders). It would eliminate nearly all limits on abortion from late-term bans to abortions based on sex-selection (one wonders how they would feel if transgender fetuses could be identified in utero).

This isn’t ordered liberty; it’s the freedom of the jungle which says you can do whatever you can get away with. It’s fine to argue that “abortions” of viable, healthy, babies are rare (putting aside all the begged questions implicit in the word “healthy.” Do otherwise healthy kids with Down Syndrome count as unhealthy?). But what we’re talking about is the principle. If I said, “Look, it’s extremely rare for women to kill left-handed dudes named Todd who think E.L.O was better than the Rolling Stones,” that would be a true statement. It would not be an argument for killing that poor unlucky Todd with terrible taste in music (Jack’s view notwithstanding).

Just as socialism represents an atavistic impulse to return to pre-modern understandings of politics, the new push for killing inconvenient babies — in principle — is a barbaric step backward to pre-civilized past. Infanticide in our natural environment was incredibly common. This is from part of my book that didn’t make publication:

With the exception of the Jews, virtually all ancient societies, Western and non- Western, routinely butchered, burned, smothered or otherwise slaughtered their own children (and the children of their enemies even more). The Svans of Ancient Georgia murdered newborn girls by filling their mouths with hot ashes. In parts of Ancient China, female babies were killed by submerging them in buckets of cold “baby water.” In feudal Japan, the practice of Makibi (a term borrowed from rice farming meaning “thinning out”) was widespread. Unwanted babies — mostly girls, but also some boys, particularly twins (which were considered unlucky or dangerous in many pre-modern societies) — were snuffed out with a wet cloth. In India infants were sometimes thrown into the Ganges as sacrifices or had their throats cut.

As the anthropologist Laila Williamson famously wrote:
Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

In pre-historic times, which were no Eden, our ancestors often killed their offspring because they were a real burden and adoption agencies were few and far between. And when I say a real burden, I mean a real burden. Mothers often didn’t have enough milk to feed two infants, which is why the killing of twins was so common. Crying babies when enemy tribes or predators are about are as inconvenient as hungry toddlers when food is scarce.

One aspect of the amazing miracle of the environment we live in now – i.e. civilization — is that killing babies is no longer a necessity, but a luxury. This move to disguise this hideous luxury as a new form of necessity is not a sign that we are advancing as a civilization, but that we are regressing, back to when killing babies was natural and normal.

I keep meaning to write more blog entries and I sit down at the keyboard and nothing comes out. It’s like a guy who eats a block of sharp cheddar, straining on the pot at two in the morning after his gut ache keeps him awake. The primary focus of this blog was supposed to be politics, but I also write about pop culture, blindness, and occasionally, some personal observations. Politics frankly depresses me right now. So, for that matter, does pop culture. Living here in Omaha with the state of things as they are means that blindness issues now depress the holy hell out of me as well.

So, I guess I better write about something cheerful like… Monsters.

There are all kinds of monsters out there in the world. You’ve got giant mutant dinosaurs and comic book monsters and the kind that derive energy from the screams of little children and you even have Cookie Monster. Then you have real life monsters, like Cardinal McCarrick, Louis Farrakhan and Nikolas Cruz. They are all very obvious monsters.

Then, you have the monsters that aren’t so obvious. Exhibit A is Donald Trump. He’s a narcissist, a bully and a chronic liar. He has cheapened the office of the president to a level that I fear is irreparable. I call him a monster because he has done a great deal to beautify the demons of our nature.

Yes, a lot of people love to hate Donald Trump, but I find the protests of his most ardent detractors to be suspect. How many of them were happy to fuel Monster Trump before he assumed the highest office in the land?

The Hollywood left are the main culprits. That is, Hollywood, New York City, Washington D.C. and the entire space of “Flyover country,” in between. They loved The Donald when he was an eccentric millionaire mogul, beauty contest magnate and a ratings-winning reality TV star. How many of them smiled and nodded and said, “I don’t judge,” when news of his rampant philandering came out. How many just dismissed it as crap from the National Inquirer, never thinking that his actions might translate so easily to, The Swamp?

I’m not saying that Trump- was always the kind of guy who ran around yelling, “Mexico sends us nothin’ but rapists and drug dealers!” If he’d done that, his celebrity goose would’ve been cooked years ago. But how many people wrote off those same behaviors; the narcissism, the bullying, the casual misogyny, the glib lying as merely, “The Donald being The Donald?” I dare say that quite a number of folks who subsequently voted for Hillary in 2016 knew full well who and what they were getting long before it really mattered. They saw the monstrous behavior, but they did nothing to stop it. Why? Maybe fear. Maybe apathy. Maybe deep down, many of those self-same leftists who wring their hands and bay at the political moon over social injustice actually liked and admired his behavior.

If you doubt me, just google old headlines featuring Trump back in the ‘90’s and the first decade of this young millennium; headlines written by journalists who now count themselves as proud enemies of President Trump? Read some of those stories and you’ll see how Monster Trump took root.

That brings us to Exhibit B; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Apparently, she’s a very pretty monster, indeed. You might look at her and say, “C’mon, Ry! You’re overstating it. She’s not a monster. She’s a principled woman who believes in what she believes.”

Faugh!

This is the young lady who said, ““I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” This wasn’t a statement uttered in dripping sarcasm. She wasn’t speaking in error. She wasn’t even speaking in self-parody. She honest-to-God meant what she said as she defended herself to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. People who love to compare the Trump era to 1984 would do well to study the Orwellian concepts in that classic novel through the prism of AOC’s remarks.

Cortez is a monster because of the toxic ideas she purveys, all wrapped up in pretty paper and bows. In America, socialism is the Frankenstein monster taking it’s very first baby breath in Victor’s laboratory. In Venezuela, Elizabeth is trying to figure out how the hell she’s gonna breathe with a crushed trachea.

And why does AOC have such traction amongst the young in particular? It’s because many mainstream citizens, particularly Republicans, chose not to care about what their young were learning on college campuses, where socialism has been allowed to flourish. If little Johnny or Janie came home with all A’s, or made good on the football field or theater stage in spite of shitty grades, mommy and daddy didn’t care. They didn’t take a larger interest in what is being taught on campus, or in the classrooms of their local high schools. Just vote no on the latest school bond issue and go on your marry way.

There are many other monsters flourishing out there under the tent of ignorance and apathy. Abortion is one. A law was just passed in New York that grants a woman the right to terminate her pregnancy up to the point of birth with a doctor’s approval. Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me. If America didn’t care about Kermit Gosnell, why would they care about a post-birth baby being murdered? The same goes for the gun debate as referenced by a friend of mine. “If people weren’t moved to take serious action after Sandy Hook, nothing will move the needle.”

Sure, many pro-lifers cared. I don’t mean the nutjobs who bombed abortion clinics or shot down abortion doctors in church. I mean the true believers who go to the March for Life every year, and who hold picket signs and stage peaceful protests. Yes, the media ignores them, but that’s not the real reason why they fail. They fail because too many people just don’t care. Oh, they might be opposed to abortion in the safe space of their own mind and heart, but they are the same people who sit quietly at a dinner party when the topic of abortion comes up because they want to be invited back. Being liked is more important than being principled.

It is apathy, more than anything else, that allow monsters like Kermit Gosnell and Adam Lanza to come out from under the bed and drink the blood of the household.

There are monsters everywhere. And as I contemplate this unsettling truth, the wind rattling outside my balcony door, the thermometer dipping below zero, I’m reminded of a quote from an underappreciated TV gem, Homicide: Life on the Street.

“You don’t have to be afraid of things that go bump in the night, if you become the thing that lurks in the darkness.”

Trump, Cortez, Gosnell, Lanza, McCarrick… They are all our modern Prometheus. They are us, and we are them. We just kid ourselves into thinking otherwise because we haven’t really survived the darkness yet.

I referenced “A Conflict of Visions,” by Thomas Sowell in my last entry. It serves as the perfect Segway to address another conservative concept that I’ve been pondering for a while now. It is the essence of human nature itself and how it is viewed through different ideological lenses.

“A Conflict of Visions,” is a dense and dry read, but a worthwhile one if you can manage it. It speaks to the question that so many idealists love to pose at parties and in groups when they want to act as if they are above the fray of political strife. Why can’t we all just get along? If people would just drop the political partisanship and pull together, we would all be so much better off. Cue John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Sowell addresses that question with an answer that is bitter medicine to swallow, but valid none the less. People can’t all come together because human nature defies this reality on every level. As humans, we have irreconcilable differences that are simply incompatible in the arena of governance.

Let’s look at it through the prism of pop culture, using two of my favorite television shows as reference points.

On one end of the spectrum, you have Star Trek. This represents a liberal/progressive worldview. In this reality, humanity has risen above itself and has all come together as one. All of the evils of mankind have been eradicated; poverty, racism, sexism, greed, war, Lady Gaga, etc. Humans have perfected themselves to the point that they don’t even need money to survive. The thing that gives them the greatest joy is to explore space and seek out new life and new civilizations. Sowell would have referred to this worldview as, the unconstrained vision.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have The Sopranos. In this universe, every single person is greedy, corrupt, gluttonous, adulterous, selfish, vain and often, murderous. Everyone is on the take and therefore is subject to the worst instincts of humanity. Of course, David Chase needs to sell this particular worldview convincingly, so he uses the mafia as its vehicle. But in this world, even the civilians who are not a part of a criminal organization are slaves to the lower elements in the human soul. Mr. Sowell would have labeled this worldview as, the constrained vision.

So, there we have it. In the unconstrained worldview, humans can be bettered to the point of near perfection. The best way to help them to achieve this state of near grace is to implement a one-world government. This government would see to the needs of the people, solving all of their problems through food, healthcare, jobs and education. If humans could merely overcome their impulses toward greed, violence and selfishness, they can be made to realize that community is the most important organism for positive change.

In the constrained worldview, humans collectively tend toward the bad. Individually, they can choose to act in a benevolent fashion, but there is no greater good that satisfies all. Once one or two people fold into a larger group, the varying interests of various tribes begin to compete. Therefore, government must set down a series of laws that will prevent the larger group from breaking down into anarchy. Yet, the constrained vision dictates that a government is made up of the same collective of humanity that is itself collectively governed by those same lower impulses that drive the populous. It is therefore necessary to set such laws that will allow for individualism to flourish, while keeping the powers of a central government present, but in check.

This conflict of visions is at the heart of the irreconcilable differences that have driven competing agendas for centuries. What is the role of government in society? Those who adopt Sowell’s constrained vision view the government in a limited capacity, generally seeing to matters of national security and legal enforcement, while leaving most other matters to the local governments that are closer to their specific communities. Those who subscribe to the unconstrained vision attribute more power to a central government, including financial equity, healthcare, education and so-called social justice.

The inherent problem with the unconstrained view is that, while it remains popular in many circles due to it’s emotional attractiveness, human history clearly falls upon the side of the constrained vision. For centuries, mankind has collectively tended toward greed, war, corruption and the subjugation of its fellow man. This is why Gene Roddenberry set Star Trek 300 years in the future. In his view, mankind could only conquer its own demons through the use of technology.

The original Star Trek series came to be 52 years ago and technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the days of the black-and-white tube television. Yet, most evidence seems to indicate that the constrained vision once again holds sway. Even though we now live in a digital age when messages can be transmitted instantaneously, when medical equipment is at its greatest advancement, when food production is at a historic peak and when computers play a greater role in the classroom than they ever have, our world seems to be de-evolving into various factions with more and more rapidity with each passing year.

If you don’t care for my use of pop culture to illustrate my point, how about two historical examples; The American Revolution versus the French Revolution.

On the surface, the two revolutions appear similar. The Americans took up arms against an oppressive government because they were weary of being taxed without having a voice in a government that existed over 3,000 miles away from the colonies. The French Revolution occurred because the general populous was weary of being ruled by a monarch and the Catholic Church.

But there, the similarities end.

The French wanted (and ultimately got) their king’s head on a platter. The Americans merely wanted their king to leave them alone. The French rejected religion in all forms, while the Americans incorporated aspects of it into their founding doctrines, while making it clear that the church could not rule the nation. The French Revolution began in anarchy and was restored to order by a constitutional monarchy, which quickly collapsed and was followed by a reign of terror, a democratic republic, civil wars, internal revolts and ultimately, a military dictatorship under Napoleon. The American Revolution was fought by two traditional armies until England surrendered. It was followed by the implementation of a constitution and the formation of a representative republican government overseen by a duly elected president that has stood the test of time, even in the face of the American Civil War. The American Revolution succeeded because, once it ended, the Founding Fathers set down concrete principles of law in the Constitution for guidance. The French Revolution ultimately failed because it relied on sweeping generalities and abstractions as philosophical fuel.

How does this conflict of visions translate in today’s world? Although humans are very complicated, nuanced creatures, the modern manifestation of Sowell’s conflicting visions can be found on the left and the right in the western world. The unconstrained vision is most closely mirrored by Communism, while the constrained vision can be most closely identified with capitalism.

Both systems certainly have their good and bad points, but those who hold the unconstrained vision believe that a centralized government is best able to determine and see to the needs of its people. It is a matter of efficiency. A government can more effectively distribute wealth, prescribe medical care, feed its population and defend its borders by claiming title to and seizing the property of its labor force, which is the people whom it purports to serve. Yet, history indicates that governments who operate within this framework too often become wielders of absolute power, with the coercive imposition of idolatry for itself upon its citizenry.

Those who hold with the constrained vision believe that Communism has illustrated time and again throughout history why humanity collectively tends toward the bad. Communist revolutions from Russia to Cuba to China have always begun with noble intent, but have ultimately resulted in oppressive and totalitarian regimes lording the whip over the masses.

Capitalism, on the other hand, has been the rising tide that has lifted all boats. But while the boats are elevated by natural forces, it is up to each individual pilot whether they will sink or float. Although greed does crop up in capitalist systems, it also provides an environment in which individuals can most easily flourish and thrive upon their own achievements. Those who espouse the constrained vision acknowledge that humans tend toward greed and self-interest. It is far easier to care about your own self and the welfare of your family, rather than strangers. Capitalism, by its very nature, allows people to place their self-interests first. However, when a certain percentage of people begin to succeed and become wealthy, their own sense of self-interest infects those around them through free market commerce. Compulsory government intervention and confiscation is not necessary when an individual’s natural desire for food, shelter and employment will spur him or her on to either employment, or innovation, or possibly both. America is the most obvious example, though other western countries who have followed the capitalist model have met with success.

Sidebar: For a more thorough study of how capitalism has benefitted western civilization, read Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, “Suicide of the West.”

Readers seeking to poke holes in the constrained vs. unconstrained visions might point to the rise of Donald Trump as an argument that conservatism does not, in fact, champion the ideals of individual liberty. Yet, as I have tried to illustrate in these hallowed pages, Trump is not a conservative and his loyal supporters are not subscribers to modern conservatism. Trump represents populism, which is in itself a form of collectivism that exemplifies the constrained theory at its lowest form. While Trump’s adopted party now enjoys dominance in the American political arena, the pendulum will someday swing and, if so-called Democratic Socialists gain a foothold under a figure more compelling and articulate than Bernie Sanders, they too will swoon to the siren song of populism. Barack Obama served as a foreshadowing to what is to come, but more extreme times lie ahead for the American left.

I should point out that America does not represent capitalism in its absolute pure form. The government does regulate our economy to a degree; regulations that tend to fluctuate depending upon the party in power. Yet, the over-arching force that has shaped and continues to shape our country is capitalism. We are certainly not perfect, but our experiment in the cohabitation of government and the free market has largely been a success by any measure.

How do I view human nature? I think the Christian view comes closest to my thinking. We are all sinners living in a fallen world. If humanity is to receive any measure of salvation, it cannot come through human means, whether it be money or governmental force. It must come from a higher, more ethereal power, which is less tangible than anything that mortal hands can touch and mortal logic can comprehend. It must come from God. Sadly, most humans like myself are too constrained by our own limitations to fully grasp this very basic truth.