A Republic -- If You Can Keep It

A Republic –- If You Can Keep It

As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 drew to a close Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman who asked “Well Doctor, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?” The answer, of course, has become famous: “A Republic madame – if you can keep it!”

Whether or not we can keep it is becoming more uncertain by the day. Every day there is yet another news story reporting how politician after politician is trying to disassemble a piece of the government that displeases them in some manner or another, usually by refusing to do their bidding. Thomas Aquinas once said:

If the will is perverse, the movements, namely, of the passions, will be perverse also; but if the will is upright, not only are the passions blameless, but also truly praiseworthy.

This is a sentiment that our Founding Fathers would have understood implicitly, yet one, that is today subject to intense debate.

The framers of the Constitution built upon centuries of history starting from ancient Athens and Rhodes through Rome and ultimately even England. Scholars of the time were already well aware of the failures that brought the first Democracies to their knees and did their best to avoid those same mistakes. They constructed the Constitution based upon principles of government and freedom espoused by men such as Locke, Hobbes, Thomas, and Montesquieu. They looked deep into the human soul and foresaw attempts to suborn the freedoms they had paid such a high price for and in the foreseeing, they attempted to avoid those pitfalls also. They designed the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights to withstand a great deal of abuse. They interlocked and reinforced each other; but even so, removing enough pieces can cause the entire structure to fail.

That is precisely what is happening.

America is being attacked from within. By attacking our Civil Liberties, the Electoral College, the Judiciary, the essence of what makes America what it is, they attack the very foundations of Democracy. It is tempting to ascribe these attacks to simple naïveté, or political party intrigue, but to do so would be an abrogation of our responsibility as citizens. They seek to undermine America at a fundamental level, rewriting history if needs be to sustain their cause. Why now? What has happened to make this time and this place the focus?

There has been a change not in America, but in the American people. Not all the people, nor even most of the people, only a small yet powerful minority of disaffected “progressives” that seek to upend what it means to be American. They decry the Constitution as outmoded and seek ways to change it without the consent of the majority. Yes, the Founding Fathers foresaw even this, but in the foretelling, the warnings they left for us are lost upon Americans two hundred years later. We shall see that the Founders recognized the greatest danger to our Nation.

In his treatise "Spirit of the Laws" Montesquieu maintained that the form of government must be driven by one of three principles that act as ‘springs' or ‘motors' to guide the behavior of the citizens and drive them to support the government and make it function smoothly. I prefer to think of these principles as the ‘heart’ or ‘soul’ of the nation, but remember that word ‘spring’, you will hear it again later. According to Montesquieu, for democratic republics such as America, that principle, that “spring” is “love of virtue.”

Now in our Founders' day, they considered themselves, and the vast majority of the citizens of the new nation, men of virtue, just as certainly as they believed King George III was wholly lacking in such virtue. What is virtue then? What did the Founders conceive this virtue to be? A typical dictionary definition would say it was “behavior showing high moral standards”, but is that really enough? Certainly King George was of high moral standard, after all, he issued the “Royal Proclamation For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality” (1787). It is hard to conceive of more morality (for the time period) than that.

So it obviously was more than just a simple definition of virtue as morality. Consider this definition from Our Ageless Constitution, by Stedman et. al.

America's Founders knew that it takes more than a perfect plan of government to preserve liberty. Something else is needed — some moral principle diffused among the people to unite and strengthen the urge to peaceful observance of law. They recognized that the raw materials of a free government are people who can act morally without compulsion, who do not willfully violate the rights of others, and who love liberty enough to demand that government's power is very limited. They used the word "virtuous" to describe such people.

So now we have a more concise appreciation of what the Founders considered virtue to be. Perhaps a better understanding can be gained by looking at the words of some of the Founding Fathers to gain a better sense of their beliefs.

In his Farewell Address to the Nation, George Washington said:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.... It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Again from George Washington:

[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

From Samuel Adams we hear:

We may look up to Armies for our defense, but virtue is our best security. It is not possible that any state should long remain free, where virtue is not supremely honored.

From John Adams:

Virtue must underlay all institutional arrangements if they are to be healthy and strong. The principles of democracy are as easily destroyed as human nature is corrupted!

Again from John Adams:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only Foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater measure than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.

This last statement written in 1776 is prophetic. We gain from this statement and those which precede it a consensus that the Founders did, in fact, understand implicitly the value of virtue and morality to the existence of the new nation and what that virtue consisted of, as well as a sense of the danger to our nation if Virtue were to be found wanting.

Herein lies the problem. In constructing this government, they discovered no way to protect it against a loss of virtue, beyond exhorting Americans to treasure it. Their exhortations have been headed by the majority of the People, yet some have not only turned deaf ears to them, but actively reject the very existence of these warnings. While there have been many minor assaults upon our virtue over the years most met with little success. The Civil War of the 1800s was our only serious trial, and at great cost in blood we surmounted it and continued as a nation, stronger than before. However, just as the wind and the rain can grind down the tallest mountain, so too can the roots of Democracy wither.

In the early 1900s psychologists and behaviorists such as Walter D. Scott and John B. Watson suggested that:

Man has been called the reasoning animal but he could with greater truthfulness be called the creature of suggestion. He is reasonable, but he is to a greater extent suggestible.

This escalated rapidly but it was not until after World War 2 that significant cracks began to appear.

Paul Harvey made it clear in his 1965 monologue “If I Were The Devil” that virtue itself was under attack:

If I Were the Devil,

If I were the Prince of Darkness I would want to engulf the whole earth in darkness.

I’d have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree.

So I should set about however necessary, to take over the United States.

I would begin with a campaign of whispers.

With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve, “Do as you please.”

To the young I would whisper “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that “man created God,” instead of the other way around. I would confide that “what is bad is good and what is good is square.”

In the ears of the young married I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be “extreme” in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct.

And the old I would teach to pray — to say after me — “Our father which are in Washington.”

Then I’d get organized.

I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull, uninteresting.

I’d threaten TV with dirtier movies, and vice-versa.

I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing, less work. Idle hands usually work for me.

I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could, I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction, I’d tranquilize the rest with pills.

If I were the Devil, I would encourage schools to refine young intellects, but neglect to discipline emotions; let those run wild.

I’d designate an atheist to front for me before the highest courts and I’d get preachers to say, “She’s right.”

With flattery and promises of power I would get the courts to vote against God and in favor of pornography.

Thus I would evict God from the courthouse, then from the schoolhouse, then from the Houses of Congress.

Then in his own churches I’d substitute psychology for religion and deify science.

If I were Satan I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg

And the symbol of Christmas a bottle.

If I were the Devil I’d take from those who have and give to those who wanted until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. Then my police state would force everybody back to work.

Then I would separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines and objectors in slave-labor camps.

If I were Satan I’d just keep doing what I’m doing and the whole world go to hell as sure as the Devil.

Paul Harvey was addressing the very same Virtue we have been discussing, the one that built America, and now 50 years later everything he predicted, and everything that John Adams warned us about, has come to pass. Paul Harvey composed his monologue during a major paradigm change in advertising theory. Communication of information (and misinformation) had just become practically instantaneous. Society began to change rapidly in ways that traditional institutions had difficulties in adapting to. Some institutions were actually suborned in the change. Paul Harvey understood at least some of what was to come, and he was right to fear it.

A generation later ushered in the information revolution. We, the programmers who were there on the ground floor, in our naïveté thought only of how this was going to free mankind. How little did we understand the reality of what we had done. Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely regarded as the inventor of the Internet, has himself now come to regret it. He once envisioned that “in the wrong hands, it could become the destroyer of worlds.” It has found those hands.

Thanks in large part to social media, delivered courtesy of the Internet into every American household virtually for free, the psychology of advertising that first began to appear in Paul Harvey’s day has now been weaponized as a political tool and mass dispersed to an unsuspecting audience. The results have been nothing less than catastrophic. Unable to tell truth from falsehood Americans, nay, the World, follow their feelings or worse, believe what they are told to believe. No more rational decisions. No more contemplative answers. Virtue? Morals? Reason? Civility even? Gone with the wind. The Internet did not save us. It has doomed us.

Today we have not just citizens, but even influential politicians attacking the very structure of our government. Some wish to abolish the Electoral College because it displeased them in the last election, never mind all the times it worked in their favor. Some wish to threaten the Judiciary to destroy the separation of powers by subjugating a branch of government to their will, again, because it currently does not do their bidding, never mind all those times when it did. Some wish to repeal civil liberties that are the very cornerstones of our nation, because these freedoms are antithetical to the exercise of power. All of them are in service to a personal accretion of power. And every single one of them has complete access to a bully pulpit.

I mentioned earlier that some of our institutions were suborned in the changes. This is where that becomes relevant. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights is partly about “freedom of the press.” What does one do when it is the Press itself that has lost all virtue and is actively engaged in pulling the nation apart? What then? What do you do when the last bastion of a free people is now complicit with those who are attempting to tear down the very fabric of the world they report on? Does that sound like Paul Harvey? Of course it does. If our virtue were intact, this would not, could not happen. When John Adams became President, he was quoted as saying:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The people attacking America are nearly devoid of virtue, of reason, of principle, everything which drives and sustains a Democratic Republic. They have renounced religion, most especially because it does not countenance their immorality, and yet these same people represent themselves as paragons of virtue and morality. What was that Paul Harvey said?

What is bad is good and what is good is square.

America has not yet lost its heart, its soul, as a nation. But it is sorely beset. If we lose this battle, we may survive, for a time, but not as a land of freedom, but rather a land of oppression, America in name only. The path these attackers would lead us down, is one of fear, fear of the government. Virtue is now replaced with a different “spring”, the spring which according to Montesquieu is the spring that drives despotism. Our heart will have become black, our soul lost.

Is America doomed to despotism? Or is America simply doomed? Time will tell, but Lincoln once said: "a nation divided cannot stand", to that I would add, "a nation that has abandoned its heart and soul cannot stand.” One final thought, from Alexis de Tocqueville. In his travels across America, he wrote:

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

Make America Good Again

Russia Did It...

The CIA has purported that the 2016 election process was subverted by Russia. Social media is aflame with claims and counter-claims that all revolve around unnamed, anonymous sources. I spent a lot of years in the network security business and, to be honest, I don't have a lot of confidence in the abilities of our government employees. But I have a solution.

I propose a panel of thirteen experts on network security, most of whom either already possess a top secret clearance or should be easily approvable for one. The CIA only needs to hand them the data and then let them tell the World whodunit.

I even have a proposed list of candidates:

1) Joanna Rutkowska, Founder, Invisible things Lab

2) Charlie Miller, Principal Analyst, Independent Security Evaluators

3) Sherri Sparks, Co-founder, Clear Hat Consulting

4) Joe Stewart, Director of Threat Analysis, SecureWorks

5) Marc Maifftret, Chief Security Architect, FireEye

6) Greg Hoglund, CEO, HBGary

7) Robert Hansen, CEO SecTheory, Ltd.

8) Dino Dai Zovi, Independent Security Researcher

9) Dan Kaminsky, Director of Penetration testing at IOActive

10) Zane Lackey, Senior Security Consultant, ISEC Partners

11) HD Moore, Chief Security Officer, Rapid7

12) Christopher Tarnovsky, Research Principal Engineer, Flylogic

and as Chairman...Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer, Resilient

These 13 people represent the cream of the crop in White Hat Hacking and Internet Security. There are others with reputations as good, but none better, certainly not within the employ of the CIA. If they cannot tell us the election was hacked, no one can.

Of course the most this will accomplish is to determine what hacking group, if any, perpetrated the hack. It still leaves open the whole question of whether it was ordered by the Russian government or not. Some questions are best left unanswered.

The Death of Democracy (as we know it)

My previous post compared the American election to a Three-Ring Circus. Well, the rings have now narrowed to two, and the circus has morphed into a House of Horrors. Which prompts me to once again remind everyone that what you see and hear in the media are the fringes, the ten percent at the far left and the ten percent at the far right (in so far as the "media" will report the right at all, but that is another story.) I want to talk to you about the center. I am a member of the center.

Like my father and my Grandfather before me, I am that most rare of people, neither fish nor fowl (nor good red herring)...I pick and choose my issues and my candidates based on the criteria that matter most to me. Some are to the left, some are to the right, some are even above or below the center. You could call me eclectic or you could call me "American". My political affiliation is so close to the dead center I might as well be the definition. There are lots of others like me, we are, in fact, the majority of Americans. We are not the ten percent that rant on the left, nor are we the ten percent that rage on the right, we are the eighty percent in the middle.

Now that you know where I am starting from, my approach to this election was, "that if nothing else, this election would be entertaining and amusing". Many months later I have had occasion to look back upon those words and reflect just how wrong I was. Seriously wrong. Really, really wrong. Certainly, it was entertaining, and even amusing at first, but as the list of candidates pared down and the field began to narrow, amusing was the first casualty, replaced by worry; and entertaining was next, replaced by horror.

There is a good reason for the worry and the horror. America was founded upon ideals that were at the time, to say the least, revolutionary. That the government should be subservient to the people was wholly without precedent. Even earlier societies that had embraced some form of democracy still held to egalitarianism of one sort or another. For the first time, a nation had arisen that insisted that all men were equal. (Yes, I know that isn't *quite* true, don't kibitz.)

As time went on, these "United States" weathered many trials, growing stronger and moving inexorably towards freedom for all in fact. the Civil War that resulted in emancipation, the Suffrage movement, etc. Life looked good. Then in the 1970's things began to change. Those of you who are students of history know what the cause was, but it is not really material to my point, so...

Here we are, back to an election where an old homily told to me by my Grandfather has come back to haunt me. You have all heard this in some form, "If you cannot vote for a candidate, then vote against". Well, that hasn't worked out so well for me in the last few elections, which should tell you a good bit about the last few elections and where I wanted them to go. But this one is different, we now have an election where the entire voter base is literally "voting against". If it wasn't enough that there are there no good options, the future of Democracy and the American dream is quite literally hanging in the balance also. The outcome of this election will change the entire World for decades to come.

Halfway across the continent, I can hear my Grandfather laughing at me from the grave.

The Death of Extremism?

The hoopla surrounding the current American Presidential race is reminiscent of a Three-Ring Circus. We have a ring master in shiny boots with a megaphone announcing the acts, each more astounding and unbelievable than the next, we have trained performers, clowns, wild animals, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! The announcer is of course, the Media, in its never ending pursuit of ever higher ratings (and market-share) inciting the audience to a fever pitch of political fervor, and yet...some of the audience is left cold.


America, is really a two-party system. Never mind the dozen or so splinter groups such as the Greens, etc. They have neither any real power nor any real effect. This is for all intents and purposes being cast by the Media as a black and white election. Even within the respective parties there is little focus on nuance or shading, you are either for a candidate, or you are a baby eating monster. 

I am here to tell you that most of America therefor consists of baby eating monsters! The citizens in the middle, I am going to use a very un-American term here and call them “Centrists”, Centrists care little for the extreme politics of either the left or the right. Most of them even find the antics of each of the party's more center leaning candidates too outre for their tastes. The middle, the Centrists, are what used to be termed the “silent majority”.


I have bad news for the Media, the political caucuses, the pundits, the talking heads, and the analysts; the Centrists are still the majority and they are not the same voter as the silent majority of a decade or two ago, they are no longer silent, and they vote. They are not swayed by your rhetoric, your leaping in the air, and your balancing balls on the tip of your nose does not impress them at all. Nor do I believe that current socio-political theory accounts for them. Surveys and polls pass them by. 

The seeds were planted last election and are beginning to sprout, change is coming, it may be this election, it may be next, but media hype and party politics are both walking into an era they never anticipated seeing: a well informed, angry voter. Trust me, it is a mine field.


My friend Emlyn recently wrote a piece in response to a political column in The Guardian. While he was addressing the neo-liberal left, I think it is appropriate for the far right as well. I think it expresses what is happening far better than I can, prose not not being my long suit. With his permission I have re-posted it here in its entirety:

Emlyn O'Regan

Shared publicly -15 April, 2016, 9:04 PM

The Invisible Revolution

George Monbiot wrote this great article:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

describing what neoliberalism is, its problems, and its modern failure. At the end of the article, he bemoans the failure of the left to bring forth an ideological replacement for it.

But that’s not going to happen. Left and right are dead. Go home old man!

The next great movement isn’t a top down system of political and economic organisation. It is barely recognisable as an ideology.

Instead, the next great movement is a decentralised, almost instinctive mass rejection of ideology, hierarchy, elite power in all its forms.

It is characterised by the rejection of paternalistic domination in our private lives; censorship, IP, drugs, and the regulation of bodies and genitals and the bedroom.
It is equally unimpressed by pre-existing economic organisation; careers, unionisation, utilities, monopolies. We cheer as apparently fixed points of our world order crumble.

This movement is toward networked self sufficiency. It is a space of artists and artisans, an adhocracy of power tools and pop up businesses. It’s solar panels and fruit trees, ride sharing and craft beer and home made CNC machines.

It’s Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, but only as proxies for a mighty Fuck You to the powers that be, because really, top down government and corporate control can go get fucked.

It is an eschewing of money in favour of a sophisticated, heterogeneous, tech mediated interaction between individuals. It is organising something between friends on messenger, and no money changes hands.

It is a movement with few leaders and sacred texts. Instead it is instinctive. It is the world’s billions feeling their way into a new space of potential.

It doesn’t think in long form text; instead it thinks in pictures and symbols and memes. It is emotional.

It is heterogeneous and decentralised. It is uncounted and uncountable. There are no statistics, no colourful graphs. It’s adherents don’t share a language or an ideology, and aren’t really adherents after all.

It is the slow shaking off of tyranny.

It is invisible to the previous order. If neoliberalism is the ideology without a name, then the new movement is almost entirely without form. The current elites watch their ideas stall, the numbers turn bad, and no evidence of an alternative appears in their metrics. But I think they know in their guts that something is up.

Something is up, fuckers.

Bread and Circuses

It has never been said better than it was by Robert Heinlein, although H. Beam Piper did a pretty good job as well. This is where America stands today, and before someone starts screaming "their" party line, "you" are part of the problem. I give you:

Bread and Circuses

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”


― Robert A. Heinlein

As H. Beam Piper wrote in one of his stories, "the barbarians are at the gates". 

As you ponder the upcoming election year I want to urge you, each and every one of you, to do something that has become far too uncommon. I want you to stop and try to think like your opponents. Put yourselves in their shoes and and try to understand why they think as they do. Stop belittling them and creating caricature enemies to ease your own guilt. If you do not ever really consider your opponents' point of view as being just as valid as your own, then your point of view is equally worthless.

 If, and only if, you can manage that, then read Heinlein's words again.

Now go out and "vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all."

Having enjoined you to think for yourselves as competent human beings I am now going to sit back and watch in premeditated horror as you ALL do exactly the opposite. Because I am as old as fuck and know better than to expect any better of you.

You Can Lead a Human to Knowledge, But You Can't Make It Think

i·con·o·clasm
īˈkänəˌklazəm/
noun

1. the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices.

2. the rejection or destruction of religious images as heretical; the doctrine of iconoclasts.

I am going to talk about the first of these definitions and how the last hundred years of progress has been anything but progress. The Internet was initially hailed as the savior of freedom and Democracy by bringing truth to the entire World. But has it, really?

When I was growing up there were very few people who had television sets, somewhat more that had radios, but we all had access to newspapers and magazines. Our primary source for news of the world and events was of course, those newspapers and magazines. The seventies had not yet arrived and therefore the revolution in advertising that permitted the rise of manipulation of the masses had not yet occurred. Still, we had bad journalism.

We had a name for this journalism, it was called "Yellow Journalism" a pejorative term for certain and one that would not be permitted in today's uber politically correct world. The institution persists to this day though no one dares call it that.

Frank Luther Mott defines yellow journalism in terms of five characteristics:

1. scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips
5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

Sound familiar? It should, because these five characteristics apply to almost every single post on social media. We once believed that the Internet, by simply bringing information to those who did not have it, would solve the World's problems. “Informed reason, according to Plato, is the faculty best suited to make all the right and necessary decisions in a person’s life. “Unfortunately, Plato ran smack into another platitude:

“ You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. “

The Internet has indeed provided vastly improve access to information, but it has done nothing to expand upon the human capacity to reason, in fact, it almost seems to have had the exact opposite effect.

Rather than enabling iconoclasm by providing access to multiple viewpoints and ideas, it has resulted in an entrenchment due mostly to human nature. Instead of expanding our horizons with new ideas, we have instead focused ever more narrowly on our cherished beliefs, picking and choosing from an ever more vast sea of “information”; much of it of dubious value, to support and defend our cherished beliefs, institutions, values and practices.

We post on a social media site and someone of opposite viewpoint posts back. Do we listen? Do we objectively consider the validity of his or her arguments? No, we do not, we delete the offending post and ban the author from our sight forever more. We use our new found access to build ever larger walled gardens around our beliefs admitting of no disagreement with our cherished point of view. Only those who agree with us and hold the same beliefs we do are permitted within our garden and woe be unto the unbeliever who dares to intrude.

Instead of a spirited discourse, an exchange of ideas espoused by Plato, we instead become ever more intractable, ever more entrenched in our ways, defending dogma behind a wall of refusal to think.

“You can lead a human to knowledge, but you can't make it think. “