How serious is the current political situation in the United States? In the last ten years we’ve seen:

A concerted campaign of subversion against a sitting President involving the national security state, a compliant media, and foreign intelligence agencies.

Ongoing lawfare and smear campaigns not only against Donald Trump and his allies but also Elon Musk, independent journalists, intellectuals, and artists.  

Mass hysteria, suspension of constitutional rights across the United States, incalculable economic destruction and the largest upwards wealth transfer in history, all related to a pandemic that may have originated in a lab funded by the U.S. government.

Media incitement of riots that caused billions of dollars of property damage and dozens of deaths, followed by increased crime rates across America.

Ongoing political perversion and racialization of justice and collapse of law and order following election of pro-crime district attorneys across major cities.

A wide-open border.  Record and growing national deficits. Endless funding for unwinnable foreign wars.

Taken together, all of this seems pretty bad.

No wonder, then, that there are powerful motives for pretending things are not so bad. Indeed, the worse things get, the more powerful these motives become. And this attitude is also part of what we’re facing: not merely a political situation but a psychological and moral dynamic, in which a destructive reality is being exacerbated by a collective refusal to face it.

I argue the best paradigm to grasp this dynamic is the paradigm of revolution, in the classical sense of the term. What we are experiencing is not only an ideological phenomenon or a social phenomenon but a total phenomenon and a natural phenomenon unfolding in the cracks of broken intellectual and political structures. As a result, corrupt, incompetent and psychopathic individuals have been elevated into positions of authority which they are totally unfit to exercise, their promotion has created a ratchet effect which has led to further destruction. Essential social, political and cultural organs comprising academia, government, media, medicine, the military, and the judiciary are increasingly dysfunctional: society is in a situation of organ failure.

Revolution is a social expression of the logic of entropy which the science of politics consists in holding at bay. The revolutionary crisis which irrupted in France in 1789 didn’t come out of nowhere, but can be traced back to forces that began to coagulate under the centralizing, absolutist regime of Louis XIV. The contemporary revolutionary crisis can likewise be traced back to the establishment of the progressive, centralizing administrative state by FDR, and especially to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The common factor in both cases was the destruction of organic authority by a centralized, administrative power animated by a new ideology serving to justify its expansion.

Hypnotised by the slogans of this same ideology and its proclamation of victory over the forces of evil and ignorance, today we are blind to the radicalism of what the Civil Rights Act really entailed. As Christopher Caldwell shows in Age of Entitlement, the Civil Rights Act established a new constitution on a revolutionary model that functionally suspended the original constitution in the service of a diametrically opposed philosophy. The original constitution was based on the principles of natural law, and the recognition of the need to restrain government within certain limits to prevent tyrannical overextension, and ultimately collapse. By contrast, the new constitution was based on a crypto-religious conception of history in which the administrative state acquired a redemptive, quasi-messianic, and ultimately totalitarian function, as the protector of the marginalized of the earth.

With this altered conception, a regime came into being which was no longer limited and secular, and has become absolutist and theocratic. Many have noticed the presence in contemporary culture of symbolic thematics resembling what Eric Voegelin called gnosticism. This theme extends from the fact that the regime (“our democracy”) we are living under is not merely a political reality, but a metaphysical reality which has instituted a vast machinery of opinion-formation to propagate the light of its message, alongside a subtler system of social incentives and relays.

Our problem is not only empirical but conceptual. We need to rediscover the basis of a science of politics that is able to accurately describe the realities that dominate us, rather than mystify them. The urgency of this need is evident in Richard Reinsch’s argument that the Civil Rights Act represented a case of noble intentions gone awry. This same argument is applied to every revolution in history. What is at work here as well is the confusion between religious and political thinking which the revolutionary spiral enacts. One can grant arguendo that some of the intentions of some of the people behind the Civil Rights Act may have been noble. But intentions are irrelevant. The political problem concerns political and legal structures that create a space for abuse which in the long run is inevitable. This what the Civil Rights Act has achieved.

How the Civil Rights Acts did this is made clear by Patterson. (It is worthwhile noting in passing that his essay demonstrates the degree to which self-identified conservatives have adopted the habit of policing intellectual sources for traces of reactionary political contamination and the habit of confusing dogmatic assertions for arguments.)

Patterson’s relevant point is found in his comment that opposition to the Civil Rights Act risks “undermining legislation needed to protect historically marginalized groups.” What is an historically marginalized group? What determines one’s membership in a historically marginalized group? How does one measure historical marginalization? Can one be a member of more than one group? What are the groups who have been doing the marginalization? What should be done to them, and the individuals who compose them?

These questions, and infinite others which could also be posed here, are not just rhetorical. Today progressive activists argue that everyone from “transgender” individuals to “minor attracted persons” to the “undocumented” and the “unhoused” and the mentally ill are historically marginalized groups and they/them demand legislation to ensure their protection? Where would Patterson himself draw the line? And on what basis exactly should other activists agree with his evidently marginalizing judgment?

The point is that the vagueness of this concept and its absence of axiomatic delimitation makes it unworkable as a legal and political form. What it in fact represents is the carte blanche justification (“There is no right to injustice”) for the (self-identified) protectors of the marginalized to legally intervene against their “marginalizers” at any time: that is, a warrant for terror.

This is the legal system we are currently living under. Against this reality, Patterson summons the specter of violent populist uprisings, which is also the image that the regime itself propagates, but Andrew Beck’s response comes closest to grasping what a counterrevolution actually means: as de Maistre says, not a double of a revolution, but the contrary of revolution. Revolution is a spiral into anarchy and chaos. The aim is not to accelerate this spiral but to stop it by restoring real authority, and genuine political coherence.

The problems that we face are being generated by a political failure of leadership extending from and reinforcing cultural and social failure. We need to understand how we can contribute to a culture of virtue from which a true leadership class can emerge. As Beck fully recognizes this process must happen organically and regionally; ultimately it can only happen spiritually. Louis de Bonald, for his part, speaks of “two worlds within the moral universe: the world of error, of vice, of disorder, and of darkness” coterminous with the material world and the “world of truth, of order, of light.” These two worlds are counterposed against each other, everywhere and always, in the soul of every man.

For the memory of David Martin Jones.