radicalism

The folks at ACTIVE have come up with an interesting idea. They're calling for a nationwide strike of citizens against the government, turning the international socialists' tactics against them and possibly launching a movement which will have even more impact than the Tea Parties have had.

At a time when the extreme left has become the establishment, those who support traditional American values of liberty and free enterprise are by default the radicals, just as we were in 1776 when we opposed the tyranny of British rule. I don't agree with all of the beliefs and methods which groups like ACTIVE and the Patriotic Resistence and Bureaucrash advocate, but this idea of adopting the methodology and rhetoric of the radicals of the 60s in the fight against the growing power of the leftist state in America is very appealing.

Back in the early days of the Libertarian Party this is very much the approach which we took. As editor and a columnist for Liberty magazine back in those days I was constantly writing articles which sought to capitalize on the enthusiasm of student radicalism and direct it against the terrible policies of the Carter administration. In the SLS we were borrowing ideas from the SDS which had preceded us by about a decade, and we were drawing on the hardcore anarchism coming out of the anti-government riots and the punk music coming out of England in the late 70s. At the time there was only so far we could go with the idea, because Carter's incompetence made his administration too soft a target and the entire dynamic changed when Reagan came into power and drew a lot of libertarians including myself more into the political mainstream.

The days of Reagan are long over now and the champions of liberty are the underdogs again. This time we have a statist establishment to oppose which is much more powerful and much more dangerous than Jimmy Carter ever dreamed of being. The time really is ripe for a liberty revolution, and the tactics of the revolutionaries of the past are now ours to use. The liberty movement has made a lot of strides in the last couple of years and generated a huge diversity of organizations and issue groups, both inside the Republican party and among independent voters, but it's clear that a lot of these groups are looking for opportunities to take action in more radical and dramatic ways.

The Tea Parties brought a lot of different groups together with a common goal, but their effectiveness is inherently limited and they have been successfully undermined by a media disinformation campaign to portray them as "astroturf" events because of the involvement of Republican party groups and big money advocacy groups like FreedomWorks. As an idea they have also lost momentum from being overused and have pretty much run their course as an effective protest campaign.

Whatever succeeds the Tea Parties needs to go even deeper into the grassroots and nothing could do this more effectively than a protest which is purely based on individual action. Instead of gathering together into a group and marching or rallying, every person can take action on his own, but coordinated on a nationwide basis. That's what makes something like a general strike such an appealing idea. If enough people can be involved to really represent the high level of dissatisfaction in the country, the results could be impressive and impossible to ignore.

The only problem is the timing. I assume that those who have proposed a date of November 4th picked that date because it's the one-year anniversary of the election and because it gives plenty of time to organize a nationwide protest. The problem is that by then it's likely to be too late for even a wildly successful strike to have any impact on the most serious threats from the Obama regime. If we don't stop Obama and Pelosi as quickly as possible we are going to be out of luck. Cap and Trade and ObamaCare will be done deals by November 4th and we'll be well and truly screwed as a nation. These socialist programs will never be reversed once they are implemented, so we need grassroots protest on a huge scale before the end of the Summer.

I love the irony of using classic radical tactics against this government, because the truth is that they may have started out as radicals, but they are now the establishment and we are the radicals. So grab a copy of Rules for Radicals, Steal this Book or Stir it Up and learn the tactics that used to drive our enemies, because they're ours now and it's time to turn the tables on them.

This nation was founded by radicals and it will take a new generation of radicals to reclaim our stolen liberty. Founding radical Sam Adams said: "It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." We are the new irate minority – sons and daughters of liberty like Sam Adams – and a general strike might be just the kind of brushfire we need.

It's always tempting for those who study the American Conservative Movement to brush us off as a bunch of situational ideologues held together by anticommunism, and who were doomed to collapse with the Berlin Wall. Much as I believe this narrative to be wrong, it has an interesting point with regard to the fundamental nature of conservative criticism. That is, conservatism aims to "conserve." It has historically been a defensive ideology, which tries to beat back encroaching hordes by its nature. It was this defensive nature of conservatism which repelled the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who once wrote that conservatism was "a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change" while also noting, perhaps sadly, that "There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense."

We can quibble with Hayek's usage of the word "liberal" to describe the American tradition, but even if he is correct, by his definition, even "liberal" conservatives seem to still fight with their backs to the proverbial wall. Thus, when there is nothing to fight, conservative ideology runs into the difficulty of flailing at phantoms. As such, along with the question of what we are fighting for (what to conserve, in other words), we also have to ask what we are fighting against.

In this regard, I believe the modern conservative movement has become confused. Stripped of  communism, we have reverted to the most obvious option and decided that liberalism is not only an enemy, but the enemy. This is an absurd belief. Liberalism is not the enemy. Liberalism (or progressivism, depending on your choice of words), at least in its modern form, has neither the spine, the principle nor the conviction born of that principle to be the enemy. Indeed, even in the days of communism, liberalism was never the enemy, even domestically. The Alger Hisses of the world, the Owen Lattimores of the world, the Stalins, the Kruschevs, the bought-off newspaper columnists who opined about how they'd "seen the future, and it worked" - they were the enemy, and whatever else they were, they were not liberals. The liberals were men like Edward R. Murrow, who was too busy being angry at Joe McCarthy to spare a few nasty words for the real traitors in our midst. The liberals were men like Dean Acheson, who famously said "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." To be sure, these people were counterproductive, but they were only useful idiots, not the puppet masters pulling the strings.

The same goes for the strife on campuses that occurred in the 60's and 70's. The Eldridge Cleavers, the Huey Newtons, the Bill Ayerses, the Bernadine Dohrns and the Tom Haydens - these people were many things, but if you think they'd ever call themselves "liberals," you'd be mad. These people were radicals reacting against liberalism. They hated it. The only reason they got away with so much when attacking it was because of who the liberals actually were. They were the tolerant university Presidents, like Clark Kerr and Kingman Brewster, who dutifully caved in to every demand the radical exponents of negation made. Again, these people were not only counterproductive, but spineless and pathetic in their worst moments, but they were by no means the primary threat.

And even today, at the close of the war of culture and at the beginning of the war on terror, the liberals still cannot rightly be called the primary threat for a very simple reason - liberals are just too darn reasonable to threaten anyone intentionally. They're too obsessed with their own sophistication. Too blinded by their own (often imagined) intellectual superiority. Too "scientific." Too morally apathetic. These characteristics make them great toadies, but are poor qualities indeed to have in muscular ideological leaders. Throughout history, liberals have been at worst the battered wives of the enemies of conservatism, constantly protesting that their bedfellows are just misunderstood and that they don't hurt them that badly, while ignoring the bruises which slowly accumulate all over the body of civilization. If you want to look for the roots of this gutlessness, look at one of the founding members of contemporary liberalism, John Stuart Mill, whose faith in the power of rational discourse to change minds was perhaps the defining nature of his political philosophy. It's no surprise that his wife, a much more principled radical socialist, eventually ended up defining her husband's worldview.

To explain why liberals tend to assume this role would take too long, though I will suggest one option: for all their claims not to be superficial, liberals do have a shocking shallow and naive vision of human nature. For evidence of this, look at the contemporary liberal view of Sarah Palin, or the constant sneers that liberal comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw at George W. Bush for "thinking with his gut." For liberals, human beings are defined by two things - their capacity for reason and their capacity for empathy. Sarah Palin, who believed in such seemingly absurd things as creationism, and who could argue with a straight face that she supported small-town values while arguing for economic policies which were (in the liberals' view) shamelessly royalist, appeared so severely challenged in both regards that she was unacceptable. It was inconceivable to a liberal that a woman who couldn't rattle off Supreme Court cases she disagreed with could ever claim to be a fit potential leader of a country, because liberals simply don't understand any concept of superiority other than the purely intellectual. Some conservatives have this problem too, but it's much more pronounced among the "reasonable" exponents of center-Leftism. Their sense of morals, being defined primarily by emotive urges, is far too underdeveloped for them to use as an argument against someone, though they may mutter about it among themselves at cocktail parties.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that an emphasis on intellectual capability and knowledgeability is at all wrong. It's entirely  reasonable, and quite desirable, and its absence  can be potentially disastrous. But it's not the only thing that matters, and making a fetish of it is sheer stupidity. Liberals tend to side with the enemies of western civilization for a very important reason - frequently, the people supporting it are just too...well, vulgar. Worse yet, tradition is very difficult to defend intellectually as an end in itself (I've tried), and most liberals don't like the idea that something as potentially irrational as human experience could or should be allowed to trump scientific rationality. Sometimes (see also: segregation) they have a point. But that doesn't mean you should throw out tradition entirely. In fact, as postmodern radicals are far too fond of pointing out, the rules of logic and reason themselves are traditions which have evolved with time. Liberals are thus trapped in a completely self-refuting argument - they are trying to defeat tradition using tradition.

But if liberals aren't the threat, then what is? Unlike communism, there's no concrete "evil State" for conservatives to oppose, so the confusion is understandable. The threat we conservatives face today is something much more abstract, much more insidious, and doubly dangerous, especially in the age of international terrorism and postmodern education. This threat, much like communism (the "second oldest religion," according to Whittaker Chambers), is also timeless.

With all due respect to Mr. Chambers, communism is not the second-oldest religion (the oldest being worship of God and his Creation). It's actually the third oldest. God, in creating the universe, had to do it by forcing an amorphous, "formless and void" existence into patterns. To put it bluntly, God created the world from Chaos, and as such, the worship of Chaos is actually the oldest religion. It is this force - Chaos - that conservatives now have to  fight.

And some conservatives - not the ones I usually like best - have recognized this threat, albeit incorrectly. Rod Dreher has written that "Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom." With respect, I obviously disagree that individual freedom is to blame. The threat today comes not from too much individual freedom, but  from the wrong individual freedom. To explain this, I offer the following hypothetical:

Suppose that, in a hypothetical society, people had the legal right to murder each other, but no right to free speech, or property, or assembly. Surely we couldn't criticize this society for having too much individual freedom. Rather, we would reproach it for protecting the wrong freedoms. Mr. Dreher's argument essentially boils down to the idea that because corporations are behaving irresponsibly, economic liberty is a dud. He's wrong. What is at fault is that we have rampantly deregulated some elements of corporate life while keeping other regulations in place which punish small businesses and shield larger corporations from competition. In other words, we've created an economic system where wealthy "philanthropists" can defund peoples' entire life savings using fraud, but where banks are still required to give bad loans to people who can't pay them back because of a redundant, obsolete economic policy from about three decades ago. This is not a system that protects too much individual freedom. This is a system that protects the wrong freedoms. And a society that protects the wrong freedoms is doomed to slide into chaos, which is what Dreher seems to be rightly reacting against.

The market is a wonderful tool for social improvement, but like most competitive games, economic action only improves the world when the rules make sense and in our rush to deregulate, we haven't considered the effects on the whole system, which has made the market an unwitting agent of chaos and caused it to become the scapegoat for all sorts of undeserved blame. I'm no friend of regulation, and I defy most people who tell me it's necessary, but it's only wrong situationally, not conceptually. Most free market economists support antitrust laws, for instance.

But as instruments of chaos go, financial deregulation is the least of our worries. There are much more conscious agents of chaos floating around. I have already alluded to two - postmodern education and terrorism. But these topics are so big (and this post is already so long) that I will save them for later. For now, it suffices to say that conservatives need double their usual amount of creativity to fight these threats, and more than anything else we need unity. As I did in a previous post, I will close on a plea to all those who use this site to think about how this unity might be achieved.

Once again, 9/11 is upon us. I speculate that the people at MSNBC will not run all day coverage of 9/11/2001. Nor do I think that they will broadcast, like they did last year, the unfolding of the morning of 9/11/2001. I may be wrong but, I don’t think MSNBC or CNN would like to show the images of planes going into buildings this year. Perhaps it might make the viewer think, 7 short years after 9/11 and one Muhammaden slip by Obama bumbling about his "Muslim faith" and the fact that his middle name is Hussein, just how absurd it is that this man is even being considered for the job of President.

If you don’t wish to watch coverage like this please tune into Chimpsy Radio. All day on 9/10 & 9/11, we will remember 9/11 in our own way www.chimpsyradio.com/ctl.html. It will begin at 1pm Est and end with my show at 9:30pm Est. I will speak about Obama and ask not where Obama was but, what exactly what was he thinking just days after 9/11. I will not be talking about 9/11 truthers. Been there, done that so many times.
Of course, with every year approaching 9/11 the truthers come out. I’ve often advocated beating the fuck out of them when they approach you with your ideas but I think now it’s just a matter of tuning them out. Some of you may know them. They might even be your friends and while I’ve ended a couple of friendships over this scurrilous viewpoint. No, I don’t think you should do the same. But if you must engage them, please bring common sense. The truthers hate that shit.

For instance, truthers like to make wild claims that building 7 was brought down in a controlled demolition. First, do you really think that a truther understands laws of psychics? Why bother with that? Simply use common sense. Ask them, can you explain to me why collapse would begin at exactly the point where damage was inflicted, since the conspirators would have had to been able to predict exactly where debris from the fallen North and South Towers would strike WTC 7? And while the makers of the documentary Loose Brains comment that WTC 7 "fell straight down, into a convenient pile," the TRUTH is that the pile of debris was 12 stories high and 150 meters across, hardly the kind of "convenient pile" described by shit for brains like Dylan Avery and Corey Rowe.

These brain dead losers will go as far to say that not only WTC 7 but the WTC 1&2 were controlled demolitions as well. Again, common sense. Please say: Dumbass, since the building was wired for a controlled demolition and targeted to be hit by airplanes why not just do the controlled demolition, ditch the airplanes and blame it on the terrorists of your choice? Go further. Doesn’t prepping a building for demolition takes considerable time and effort? Usually a building targeted for demolition has been abandoned for considerable time and partially gutted to allow explosives intimate contact with the structure of the building. But since all of the WTC buildings were occupied right up to 9/11, how did the government gain access to wire 3 towers for complete demolition without anyone noticing? Imagine trying to sneak wires and bombs into buildings while thousands of people are working in offices, riding the elevators and milling about in the halls that scenario is HIGHLY unlikely.

They love to start talking shit about the Pentagon.
Their claim that the plane never crashed and that a missile or a bomb did this damage. We’ve heard it before and the mentally impaired like to refer to this as Pentegate. Again, remain composure and let common sense prevail. Say this: You poor fool. A speeding Boeing 757 will not leave a snow-angel style impression of itself in a concrete building (vs. the mostly-glass exterior of the WTC buildings, which did leave an outline of a plane). And the contention that no remains of Flight 77 were found at the crash site is simply absurd. Many pictures taken of the area around the Pentagon crash site clearly show parts of an airplane in the wreckage. Allyn Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after Flight 77, spoke about his own observations as crashed. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane
with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box. His eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts."

You might want to follow up that factotum with: I guess Kilsheimer is just another Bush loving nea-con to you, huh? Who made up the fact that he was traumatized by holding peoples arms and legs? Take your medicine.
When discussing Flight 93 with a truther it might be difficult to keep composed. For most of us, Flight 93 was a valiant effort by heroes to fight back and stop further destruction and loss of life. Not to a truther. I know, it may be hard at this point to fight the urge to take the anti American piece of shit by the throat and choke the stink out of em! But, common sense is like the force and may it be with you.

Truthers have often claimed Flight 93 had landed safely in Cleveland. This has been rejected by every credible news outlet in the country. Then the unsupported assertions that the main body of the engine and other large parts of the plane turned up miles from the main wreckage site was too far away to have resulted from an ordinary crash. This is incorrect because the engine was found only 300 yards from the main crash site and its location was consistent with the direction in which the plane had been traveling. Let’s not forget the black box for the flight records the struggle onboard preceding the plane’s crash. Those are facts. Let common sense prevail: Excuse me you infinitesimal minded crack pot. Why would the same U.S. government that allegedly destroyed the WTC shoot down Flight 93 before it could cause similar damage to other buildings?
I can sit here and go on pages more. It’s your choice whether you wish to debate this subject, beat someone to a pulp or turn the other cheek and ignore. I personally recommend ignoring the ignorant. Remember, these are the same people who believed that George Bush was responsible for Hurricane Katrina by blowing up the levees because he hated black people. These are also the same people who for years believed that JFK was killed by the government rather than a lone and known Communist. And to them, the government that killed JFK is always a conservative government because, after all, they’re evil. Meanwhile, the JFK administration was liberal democratic. I guarantee you that if JFK was a conservative republican, Oliver Stone would’ve romanticized Lee Harvey Oswald instead of vilifying the government.

Finally, pity these fools. Seriously. Some conspiracy theorists themselves don’t really believe what they are saying. The main appeal of 9/11 conspiracies is that they are easy to understand and to accept. Like children, they are easily led to believe this easy brush off of a catastrophic event in which we, citizens of the United States, were the target. For most of us proud Americans who understand this catastrophe and know who did it to us, we realize how precious and fragile human life and liberty are. And perhaps that may be the greatest rebuttal to those who wish to live life pursuing delusions.