Divorce Is Always Hard . . . But It Doesn’t Have To Be Violent
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division” (Luke 12:51).
As revolutions go, the preambles take more time than the main event. The revolution we are currently witnessing has been percolating for years. The actors are bipartisan: as M. Stanton Evans once put it, “The Democrats race towards the abyss; the Republicans obey the speed limit.”
The Evans Principle has ruled since Democrat Woodrow Wilson, with Cardinal Gibbons’ blessing, launched the United States on a messianic campaign to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, and the direct election of senators, all adopted in 1913, contributed to the diminution of local communities, including the states, in favor of the federal government.
“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne at the time. In the hundred years since, he’s been proven right with every war.
It wasn’t long before the Supreme Court picked up the radical standard, eviscerating the Tenth Amendment (as well as the Ten Commandments) from our public life. In 1913, most lawyers paid little heed to federal law. State laws governed most aspects of daily life. “Don’t make a federal case out of it” was a jibe, once upon a time, invoked to silence a nagging provocateur.
Now everything is a federal case and everybody is a nag, especially the radical lifers safely ensconced in the bunker of the Federal Deep State. We now know that they very nearly pulled off a coup that would have brought down the duly elected president of the United States. Whether they are brought to justice in this life is still an open question.
The racist eugenicist Woodrow Wilson has now been banished from polite society, as well as from Princeton, where his name has been canceled and politesse reigns no more. But his zeal for the Messianic endures today in both party establishments.
A sidebar: Wilson’s ego knew no limits, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau came in a close second. After sitting between them at the Versailles Conference in 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George sighed that he felt like he had been “seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.”
The Hour Is Late: Leaders Are Few
“Conservatives coming to Washington know that it’s a sewer. Trouble is, most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub” — M. Stanton Evans, 1981.
War, government, and messianic egos have grown together, from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Obama. Government has grown with them. FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, Bush 43’s Big Government Conservatism. The Establishment has prospered, and plundered. Today, the five richest counties in the country are those surrounding the nation’s capital. And Big Government is the feed bag on which they all feast, all the while splashing in the Washington Hot Tub.
Over the years there have been furtive attempts to stem the “Big Mo” (to borrow G.H.W. Bush’s term) of the federal juggernaut. Some enjoyed temporary success — Ronald Reagan avoided war, but funding Tip O’Neill’s welfare state was the price he had to pay. That deal allowed him to rebuild the U.S. military and join St. John Paul II to bring down the Soviet Union without firing a shot. Some ten years ago we saw the dawn of the Tea Party, a genuinely grass-roots movement arising to counter the establishment’s consolidation of power.
In 2010, Dr. Angelo Codevilla published a manifesto posing as an analysis. When the “ruling class” made it clear that the people would be ignored, he wrote, the “majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously.” While this majority, which Hillary Clinton later christened the “Deplorables,” lacked organization and leaders, they had staying power. “For the foreseeable future,” Codevilla wrote, “American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class.”
Today the Country Party is led by Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran against both Democrats and Republicans to win the presidency. Since then, some Republicans have come to their senses, or pretended to. For the rest, the Ruling Class is throwing everything it’s got at Trump whom they hate, and his supporters, the Country Party, whom they mortally fear — and thus hate all the more.
The current riots wracking major Democrat municipal strongholds are a party operation. Most radicals of the sixties and seventies didn’t join the Communist Party like Angela Davis did; they became an indispensable arm of the Democrats, and are sealing that alliance with their destructive rampages in blue cities. Long ago Socialist Bernie Sanders operatives predicted violence this summer.
After all, chaos is central to the revolutionary. The left thrives on it, because violence invites a strong response. Failing that, civil war erupts.
Strong response or civil war. Either way, the Democrats consider themselves the victor. First, the riots. Second, in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland, Democrat officials do nothing to stop them. Instead, they restrain police and blame Trump. Of course, they are goading Trump eventually to intervene, as he has in Portland, so they can immediately attack him as “another Hitler,” and they now have. But they desperately want him to act so that, when they succeed in November, they will be free to cite his precedent when sending federal agents to confiscate guns in red counties whose authorities will refuse to do it themselves.
“Trump sent troops in to kidnap innocent demonstrators,” they will lie. “We will use them to address a truly grave security threat to the nation — guns privately held by millions of potential criminals and agitators.”
Democrats already have power in their own jurisdictions, and we’ve seen what they’ve done with it, riot after riot. But that is not the power they want. The Ruling Class now deplores Codevilla’s Country Party even more than Hillary Clinton ever did. And they want to put us in our place for good.
Divide? Or Be Conquered?
That is the strategy behind the well-organized, well-funded Marxist campaign of violence has engulfed Portland for weeks. They taunt Trump, daring him to stop the rioters before they burn down the Mark Hatfield Federal Courthouse. According to plan, once federal marshals began arresting Antifa terrorists, the media designated all of them “peaceful demonstrators,” and local officials, all Democrats, resonated the charge.
But not everyone in Oregon did. Outside of Portland lies a beautiful, peaceful, and largely traditional state that has not yet been overrun by fugitives from California. Residents of two rural Oregon counties have begun the Campaign for a Greater Idaho. The group advocates a peaceful transfer of eastern Oregon counties to the state of Idaho.
The campaign’s website quotes Mike McCarter, of La Pine. McCarter is president of Move Oregon’s Border. “Rural counties have become increasingly outraged by laws coming out of the Oregon Legislature that threaten our livelihoods, our industries, our wallet, our gun rights, and our values. We tried voting those legislators out, but rural Oregon is outnumbered and our voices are now ignored. This is our last resort.”
Mr. McCarter speaks for many in the 5,000-plus red counties in America. Portland is one of fewer than 500 blue counties and municipalities. If these two Americas can agree to separate, more widespread violence can be avoided. Like Mr. McCarter, many in the red counties would welcome such a peaceful division; but the blue-state Marxists are unanimous: they want it all.
