This commentary is about crisis. What we are discussing is (1) a definite period of time dominated by great danger and (2) with emanate prospects for more serious consequences in the future. Historically, the so-called experts have identified and analyzed two general types of crises: those associated with war and those associated with economic (business) depression. The current national crisis addressed is a hybrid – a crisis of government and by extension a crisis of leadership. In many ways, the current crisis is tied to both war and economics, but mostly, it is about a failed state, led by a failed leadership. The current crisis is the result of what Ludwig von Mises called 'human action,' our crisis of confidence, our moral crisis is the product of a sick, incompetent ruling class.
The current crisis might best be characterized as a government in anarchy - leaderless and rudderless. It is a multi-headed hydra wallowing about in the muck, each head striving to pull the leviathan in the direction it wants to go, but unable to do so. Each hydra head representing a political faction stretching and threatening to rip it apart. As a group, these countervailing heads represent perhaps the worse class of rulers ever to hold office simultaneously in the nation’s history. They are failing history and this great nation, but in the end, they are reflective of the disastrous fragmentation brought on by decades of political deterioration and corruption (rot) and the incessant, nihilistic debasement of our society and culture – the destruction of our national sentiment. This fragmentation represents the praxeology of crisis that has spiraled the nation into competing factions and groupings each led by dictators (fragmentors) obsessing about who will control the nation’s direction and how they will impose it on the people.
What it all boils down to is a general crisis of confidence in both the nation’s rulers and in our selves. Crisis is contagious, spreading like sin to infect the whole, if it is not checked or dealt with in a forthright manner. The nation is in a situation where the state and its rulers are divorced from the will of the ruled as never before. If we lived in a parliamentarian system and a referendum were held today, I dare say, the ruled would give the rulers a vote of no confidence, throwing them out. This lack of confidence is transparent of the nation’s rulers, they are leaders lacking in leadership ability, and as servants, utterly failing to serve.
The current crisis of confidence is the result of two developments dominating the American landscape. Over the past twenty years, the state, despite its powers to spend, regulate, and coerce, has failed miserably to – enforce our borders (sovereignty) and maintain a serious foreign policy (fighting the world war against terror).
In both of these areas, the nation’s ruling class has given us nothing short of a national catastrophe. This failure has fragmented the nation spinning it into the periphery of a giant political centrifuge. We are now in a state of near paralysis (crisis) pinned against the walls by the g-forces of political incompetence. Each set of rulers, representing their respective faction, obsess about taking the nation in one direction in pursuit of one set of policies prescriptions. Most all of their concerns are built around incumbency, patronage, and power, rather than the nation and the people. As these fragmentors pursue their policies, and those of the pressure groups pushing them, the people are one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase – on the opposite side of the centrifuge looking across at the shameful, incompetent behavior of their rulers.
The rulers are incapable of dealing with the crises in a way that meets with the desires of the American people because they have abandoned American sentiment for the sentiments of others. As a result of this paralysis of action and substitution of sentiments, we are left with a crisis of confidence. It seems that there is no end in site, no solutions, except to watch the crises grow worse.
Consider the crisis of sovereignty, the nation has been invaded by an untold number of unidentifiable illegals. These parasites cross our border with impunity to fed off the host, i.e., the American economy and taxpayer. Somewhere between twelve and twenty million invaders have entered the country illegally.
They are openly and, in some cases, defiantly violating our laws and national sovereignty (they have been compared to home invaders). They are taking what they want without giving back or caring to give back to the system they are taking advantage of. They remit most of their earnings back to their country of origin living as regimented Spartans in crowded apartment buildings and houses. They reject assimilation into American society and culture and in many cases are openly hostile to it. They are colonizing into ‘barrios’ based on a kind of self-imposed apartheid all across this nation. They have brought with them a crime spree, social ills, and medical problems to our nation with the associated costs to society and our culture. And in some cases, and most frightening, they seek the host’s destruction and/or balkanization.
Our ruling class has tolerated a kind of ‘third world imperialism,’ where the barbarians have been allowed to invade, pillage and plunder with no real resistance taking what they want and leaving the rest. This is clearly a serious crisis of great proportion dealing with economics, culture, morality, law, medicine, and society but our so-called rulers do not and are not treating it as such. They choose to give us platitudes and triteness, when we need leadership.
To them, it is little more than a grand marketing scheme with the ultimate purpose - the extension of legal residency (amnesty) as a reward for lawlessness. Our so-called rulers have given little or no forethought about the long-run impact this invasion will have on the nation, our culture, our centers of influence and authority, and our society. Like Nero, they watch the nation burn while they fail completely to identify or even discuss the real problem – the corrupt, bankrupt, socialist nations from whence the invaders come.
And consider the world war against terror, the nation is engaged in a life or death struggle. The barbarians are not at our door, they are in our house. Islamo-fascists will not fight us face-to-face, instead they pursue the ways of the coward employing Soviet style spitznak (guerilla/ Klan) and propaganda as their primary tactics with the overall stratagem of collapsing the West and particularly the United States with targeted strikes. Their aim is clear – they seek to break our will to fight and once they have broken that resistance line, the gates of hell will open.
This too is a serious crisis dealing with the very survival of this nation, but what of our so-called rulers? Too many believe it is little more than a bumper sticker and if only we would cut and run, the problem would miraculously disappear. Our rulers, at their best, think of our brave young men and women in uniform and their mission only as an after thought, which speaks volumes about their own mental capacity, intellectualism, and vision of order.
These are the two seminal events of our times. As we walk through this period of time, the landscape is dominated on either side by two mountainous crises threatening our very survival (the danger). The great problem - why we are locked into a national crisis of confidence is our rulers are failing the leadership test. They are failing because they do not fully comprehend the seriousness of these events and they are seemingly incapable of addressing them in a forthright manner.
The reason they can not deal forthrightly with the crises is because they have abandoned truth and reason choosing to build policy responses and compromises on unintelligent choice. Their central policy formulations are built on the impulse of reactionary equalitarianism seeking to use the mechanism of the state to force everyone (radical egalitarianism) and everything (multiculturalism) to be on the same level as a solution to all the world’s problems.
At the core of the crisis of confidence is the fact that our rulers have taken up the sentiments of everyone and everything else; elevated them above our own sentiments; and are now in the process of forcing through artifice alien-third world-barbarian sentiments on our culture and society.
By turning their backs on American sentiment, a process that has been underway for much too long, our rulers have been pursuing a furtive dismantlement of the filter (the visions of order) through which the American people have seen and judged the world for years.
Historically, American classical sentiment was forged through a heated partnership between reason, truth, true knowledge, and honor to define our intellect as a people and the culture and society we live in.
That is why the current crisis of confidence is so despicable, it marks a clear break with both our past and future. The current crisis is in essence a moral, intellectual, and political crisis of potentially nation dividing power. [Note: It is not too strong an assertion to claim that the current actions of the political class raise the real specter of civil war.]
What we are witnessing is another wave of assassinations being systematically carried out against the sentiments of the American people by a political class elected to supposedly represent our views – our sentiments – our vision of order. With this wave, what our esteemed rulers are doing is continuing an interventionist trend that has been in place for decades. The trend is the incremental dismantlement of American sentiment and its replacement with the sentiments (visions of order) of others. In the current crisis, the rulers are trying to force feed a kind of third world imperialism as a good for the nation.
In exchange for our votes, we are told we (1) do not understand the problems; (2) do not understand the intricacies required; (3) should defer full authority to the ruling class; and (4) accept their proposals as the only solutions to the crises. On top of this ‘deference,’ we are summarily ignored and smeared in a concerted campaign of immediacy and intimidation to isolate those who disagree with their solutions.
On the one hand, our rulers are trying to (1) reward barbarism and lawlessness for violating our sovereignty and (2) force the American taxpayer to bear the burden of an illegal invasion.
On the other, our rulers are willing to reward barbarism, lawlessness and terror by cutting and running from the fight in the Middle East peddling the idea that we (America) are the source of the problem.
To base policy formulations on such things as compassionate conservatism, estatism liberalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, and other such nonsense leaves much to be desired in a fight for our survival. They might make some feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but they don’t ameliorate the current crises facing this nation or the growing crisis of confidence internally.
Certainly there are factions within the ruling class who understand the unfolding events and seek to address them in a forthright manner. It is our duty to support and champion these leaders.
However, they are in a distinct minority. Unfortunately, for the nation, control of the state’s (executive and legislative) apparatus is in the firm hands of the unintelligent – respective factions hostile to defending our sovereignty, on the one hand, and hostile toward the pursuit of victory over terrorism, on the other.
The rulers of our nation are woefully out of touch, just consult any reliable poll. They do not understand the events of our times reflected in their inability to (1) act on them and (2) speak about them in an intelligent manner that satisfy a great majority of their fellow countrymen and women.
It is as if they are divorced from reality, perhaps lost in space, perhaps living in Wonderland with Alice, perhaps intellectually bankrupt, or, like royalty, they simply choose to ignore us.
Either way, the nation is in the early throws of a serious political crisis and that is why there are emanate prospects for more serious consequences down the road.
THE END