Democracy can work if employed by friends trying to decide whether they are going to eat pizza or fried chicken for supper.  Likewise, it can be useful to any given people with common values to order their government.  But it will end in disaster if used to determine which way is up or down.

It is the nature of man to take the path of least resistance, to seek pleasure, and to avoid pain, be he an emperor or the Common Man, and he is only restrained by choice or counter-force i.e. he may choose the hard path, or be forced to take it.

If the people are indeed sovereign, then via democracy the people will inevitably redefine society and even human nature to suit themselves, unless they are possessed by some self-restraint or are blocked by some reality.

Via the democratic process and led by a revolutionary Progressive elite, the Common Man today is being led about by a leash that he believes he holds. He has been told, and in his simplicity and vanity he believes, that he has unshackled himself from the old order and that now he is soaring to new heights and horizons. But in reality he is not soaring, but falling.

Human nature and common sense, to say nothing of the revealed will of God (long since rejected by our intellectual elite), are now finally being rejected by the mass man, and the resulting irrationalities are, decade by decade, squandering our cultural inheritance and leaving us weaker as a people in every way, if we can still call ourselves a people.  Like the substance abuser, we interpret the high of this new freedom as the reality, when in fact it merely masks the pain while the body and mind wither away. Such is the state of what is left of American culture today as we collectively drive our civilisation soaring off the cliff with the pedal on the floor, via the democratic process.

Man is not innately good and his collective will is not inherently right.  Quite the contrary.  Where the people rule unrestrained by an objective standard of right and wrong, anarchy and/or tyranny are inevitable.

Future historians will look back upon this period as yet more proof that the mass man is unfit to rule himself and unwilling to pay the price of true liberty.  For true liberty is a burden to be carried by the self-disciplined for the benefit of all, not a license to be enjoyed by the profligate and indolent at the expense of all.  True liberty is born of responsibility and self-restraint, and it is an undeniable truth that, as suffrage expands beyond the self-possessed, liberty contracts for all except tyrants and demagogues.

If we are to save our culture and be able to declare once again without irony that this is indeed the land of the free, then responsible people must defy the march towards ever-expanding democracy, stop it in its tracks, and roll it back.

Only the responsible and self-possessed should have a political voice.  Some would say that to deny the fool, the sluggard, the corrupt, or the indifferent the right to vote will result in the reduction of his freedom, but that is not necessarily the case. And even if it does, why should the responsible man concern himself with the freedom of people who will only use it to take from others, shirk responsibility, or indulge their vices…all via the democratic process, and all too often at the expense of the responsible man?

We must not allow the base elements of society to define who we are or where we are going, and we must not be blinded by utopian promises of democracy, which will only make us all serfs to a new Liberal oligarchy if we will not be bound by what is right.

Prudence, justice, temperance, and courage are sovereign goods. Democracy is not. It is but a tool. And the burden of proof must lie on the shoulders of those that claim otherwise. The Founding Fathers certainly did not consider democracy a sovereign good, which is why they attempted to bequeath to us a form of government that would both bestow the blessings of democracy but at the same time protect us from it.

Suffrage has been expanded too far and needs to be contracted.  It needs to be limited to those fit to bear the burden of liberty.

I know a businessman about my age who has a large acquaintance of other businessmen across the country who, like him, are directly or indirectly involved in real estate or banking. These are red, white, and blue alpha-males and entrepreneurs who have lived the American dream. Most are upper middle class in income, many are rather well off, and a few are just stupid rich. They, like him, are more or less Conservative.

My friend laments that after last November, this group by and large did nothing and have since just kept their heads low and their mouths shut. Like him these entrepreneurs were horrified by what they consider a coup, and they fear they may be losing the country that was gifted to them. But as a group they are more afraid of being singled out by Cancel Culture, preferring a cowardly silence to risking losing what they have.

Methinks that any Middle Class anywhere is by nature both defensive and complacent. The system in which these folks exist has worked for them and thus they are inclined to protect the status quo as well as to embrace a historical perspective that justifies it.

Plus, being human they tend to be shortsighted.

The Bubbas and Joe-Sixpacks of the world possess all of the Middle Class’s shortsightedness, but not its stake in the game. Yet, like the Middle Class, Bubba can be deeply rooted in the land and have a powerful sense of tribe, and if he does, it is because he inherited and embraces the myths of his people.

Neither the Middle Class nor Bubba know their history but they do know this is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and the best country ever because Granddaddy’s granddaddy said so. The difference is that Bubba, with less to lose, is ready to fight for it. The problem is that Bubba, by nature, looks to the Middle Class for leadership, and that has been slow to come.

​There is a class in this country that I call the Carnivorous Sheep. By his nature as a Sheep, his power does not reside within himself but rather rests in the hands that can both feed and protect him, a class that we can call the Wolves. What makes him carnivorous is that through no power of his own he has the right to vote, and, driven by his appetites, via this vote, he eagerly seeks to consume that which others have produced. Once fed, via this same vote, in all other matters he gladly supports the Wolves that feed him.

The Carnivorous Sheep has no inner voice or guiding light that compels him to deny himself or do for others, at least not at his own expense. He does not feel guilt or shame. He has no sense of history or tradition that restrains or elevates him. His great vices are gluttony, sloth, and envy, but also pride, for he delights in being told by the Wolves that he is beautiful and powerful and, on the other hand, cannot bear having his vices pointed out. He is the sheep in wolf’s clothing, and for the Carnivorous Sheep the illusion is the same as reality.

I despise the Carnivorous Sheep, not for his weakness, because that often cannot be helped. I despise him for his ignorance, arrogance, and selfishness that make him a tool of the Wolves who are, with malicious intent, unraveling the fabric of our culture and poking holes in our ship of state.

I say this to the Carnivorous Sheep. By all means continue to feed for as long as you can. But make no mistake, you are the new American peasant, weakness is nothing to boast of, and your vote will not satiate the appetite of the Wolves. If they ever manage to bleed to death the producers that you feed on, they’ll come for you next, because like you, they will be fed at all costs.

But this remains the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave until we, the free and the brave, are all dead or we have allowed our descendants to become like you. Until then, ‘This land is our land, this land is not your land.’ So boast not of the country into which you were born and on which you feed. Stay seated during the anthem. Furl your American flag. For you, the 4th of July is just another day, because for you to act like a patriot is cultural appropriation. You dont get to have your cake and eat it too.

All peoples everywhere have mannerisms, traditions, habits, and customs that will cause an outsider to form a stereotype, and this includes Southerners. We are particularly well known for being friendly, and, having seen some of the world myself, I think we deserve this praise. It is one of our great cultural legacies.  

I am 54 and I give thanks today to the one true God for bringing me to the light of day amongst those that I consider my people. I am thankful to those generations now dead and gone whose kindness, good manners, wit, and back slapping laughter so formed me when I stood a yard off the ground. I am equally grateful for their backbone and their disinclination to be told what to do.

​It bears repeating (and I am painting with a wide brush here) that the religion of Progressivism despises the past and tradition. The past because it was imperfect and tradition because it carries the imperfect past into the future. Progressives after all are utopians at heart and mean to create heaven on earth. You know, since there is no actual heaven.

I think this is at the root of why Progressivism spends so much energy on controlling what we remember and believe about the past and as a consequence, why they are so determined to eradicate its physical symbols.

Its war on all things Confederate will of course come to mind, but after 2020 we see that Mr Bojangles, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben have got to go as well, to say nothing of tyrants like Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

If monuments and syrup bottles cannot be spared, architecture certainly cannot be either since as a reminder of both the space and time in which it was erected its shelf life can be extremely long depending on the materials used. Consider the pyramids of Egypt which continue to evoke…errr, well, what? My point is, they will remain safe until such time as whatever ideas they evoke run contrary to whatever future Progressivism is imagining.

Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm remain must-reads for Conservatives because they speak so simply and clearly on Progressivism’s core value of human reform via controlling memory, but also because they were written so long ago that we now have the immensely valuable benefit of hindsight that show them to be prophetic.

Progressivism rejects human nature and believes that if man can simply be made to forget, he will be a white canvas upon which to paint something new and better. To be rebuilt and made into a better mousetrap… I mean man… I mean androgynous human… I mean androgynoid.

Thus all reminders of the past must go.

Several posts ago I posited that the second most consequential result of the coup in 2020 will be the great awakening of the Right. A friend of mine asked me where I saw the signs of this. This is a good question and I’ve been stewing on it. In a nutshell, I view what is happening on the Right as a rising tide or a river basin that has been poorly dammed, overfilled, and badly managed for too long. Something has to give.

In hindsight, 2020 will be placed by historians in the same category as years like 1968, 1941, 1860-1865, and 1776. There was what came before and then what came after. It will be a break in the timeline. The events of 2020 were so remarkable that they cannot but produce a reaction, and that reaction must come from the Right in direct and proportional opposition to the initiatives of the Left that made 2020 what it was. For every action there must be an equal reaction, right?

The dismay, anger, or even fury of the Right must manifest itself in some way.
​
While we Conservatives hardly agree as to what we mean by the term, Conservatism has been growing since the 1960’s at least. It is increasingly articulate and was powerful enough to create a titan like Rush Limbaugh and then put an odd-duck like Trump in the Oval Office against massive institutional resistance in 2016, and only by wholesale fraud was he defeated in 2020.

In my view Conservatives today are vastly more conservative than they were yesterday because we have 50 years of hindsight. And I believe that the hardcore Right is growing and getting harder, and it is the hardcore of any movement that guides and propels it.

So I think signs of the awakening of the Right are everywhere. They are as numerous and visible as the little bubbles on the side of a pot of water set to boil, my little blog here being but one of those tiny bubbles.

I believe that the water will in fact begin to boil. Whether or not it boils over is anyone’s guess.

​It has been famously said that there is nothing new under the sun. It was true thousands of years ago, and if the intervening years are any indication of the future, it will be true thousands of years from now. It is also true that there are certainly new things under the sun, such as alphabetisation, paper, optical lenses, the printing press and the list could go on and on and on, but obviously new inventions could not have been what the ancient writer meant because man had already been developing new ways of doing things since Eve developed multi-tasking and sometime later someone invented the wheel.

No, we understand what he meant. There is nothing new because man’s nature does not change, and all that is of man is born of this nature. Human nature, as a rule, is a topic that popular media carefully avoids today, but the Common Man understands it or easily will when it is pointed out. No, there are no new emotions to be felt. There is nothing new that compels man to this or that. There will be no new history in which past paradigms or precedents cannot be seen. History will continue to be made and no new state of affairs will be permanent.

The Radical Left stole the election in 2020 and we are heart-broken because we see cherished institutions and ideas being savaged, much like a great battleship lost in flame and smoke because its escorts turned their guns on it. But it’s a battleship. The crew can recover, extinguish the fires, and the smoke will clear. It can then blast the treacherous escorts out of the water.

The Left has been winning the war for a long time, but it is war that it cannot win here in America any more than it did in the former Soviet Union or any more than it can be said to have won in Cuba or Venezuela. This is true if for no other reason than that Progressivism, with its rejection of human nature, is inherently destructive and will destroy itself eventually. In a nutshell all that we on the Right have to do is NOT bend the knee and raise up our wee bairns so that they will not either, and who then in their turn will raise up their wee bairns so that they will not either… etc.

However, if we want to speed the pendulum of history along, in the meantime we need to fight, fight, fight!

Years ago I went to the Co-op in Cottage Grove, Tennessee, to fill up. A grain truck was already at the pump so I pulled up behind it and waited. The driver was sitting in the cab. I kept waiting. He kept sitting. I was getting aggravated.

What I did not do was honk, or gesticulate my displeasure, or give him the finger from my open window. Such rudeness would have been vastly worse than his rudeness, so I did what I believe the vast majority of Southerners would have done. Nothing. I was not in a rage, rather just put out at this rude man before me who just sat there rather than either filling up his tank or pulling ahead so I could fill mine.

Eventually, he finally pulled forward. I did the same and stood by my truck while it filled. I then noticed that the man had parked his rig and was walking across the yard straight at me. When he arrived he apologised for making me wait. His truck wouldn’t start.

He did so because he, as a Southerner, did not want to be thought of as being rude.

I did what I believe the vast majority of Southerners would have done. I told him as good-naturedly as you please, ‘Oh! No problem!’ And I meant it. It was now no problem. Any angst that I felt had vanished because he was in fact not being rude and showed me respect by acknowledging the inconvenience that he had caused.

​I have seen enough of the world to greatly value what I believe to be one of our people’s greatest qualities, namely, the regard that we have for and the kindness that we show to each other.

At all times around the world there is the Common Man. He is the archetype of his people. The Common Man by his nature is historically illiterate or almost so. He knows the myths of his people and the tenets of his religion and any basic history that permeates his culture. For him to function as a member in good standing that is all he really needs to know. If he delves too deeply, he will cease to be the Common Man. 

It is noteworthy today, and a source of fodder for comedians, just how little the American Common Man knows about his own past or anyone else's past for that matter. This ignorance is an intentional result of a Progressive movement that has aggressively captured all forms of media and education and sought to erase and/or rewrite memory.

Memory directs the present and propels us into the future, and Progressivism means to control the future. We are, after all, but blank canvases, and if we can just be whitewashed, we can be written on anew. 

The future is why the work of the historian is so vitally important and why we who would resist the new world that Progressivism would create must force the Common Man to see basic truths about the history of the world in which he lives. The history that would circumscribe our future. 

So painting with the widest possible brush let's look at the two oldest and most dominate roots of American history. America was born of two principal seeds, Jamestown and Plymouth Rock in 1607 and 1620 respectively. They grew, and by 1865 Plymouth Rock had defeated Jamestown militarily and economically in a cataclysmic struggle that reshaped our young republic. Since then America has been dominated politically and culturally by the split personality of Old New England, its political manifestation today in 2021 being the Democratic and Republican Parties, the former representing New England's old religiosity and the latter its industriousness. 

Looking at it cynically, on the one side is the religious bigot, self-righteous, intolerant, and toxically evangelical worshipping the Progressive trinity Freedom, Equality, and Individuality. On the other side is the money-grubbing industrialist motivated by profit; capitalism his moral code. 

Food for thought.