"Harry Jaffa vs. Willmoore Kendall Redivivus" Part I

This piece of D29's is too long to respond to in one sitting, so we'll break it up a bit for ease of discussion. 

The first things I want to go into, before we get into his discussion of the factions he opposes and what he thinks is the right way forward, is his argument about what his real opponents are doing. This whole article is essentially an unfriendly fight among friends, as it were; debates among members of the right wing about a problem and how to address it. It's being conducted aggressively, this debate, but it's a debate with a common set of goals assumed, including restoring the American republic and preserving its principles. 

His real enemies are the ones who are intending the opposite -- and they, he argues, are the people actually in power.

If America cannot recover the understanding of the founding in the way the founders understood the founding, then the crisis we face will forecast the destruction of the regime. But what right-thinking person can deny that America is truly the “last best hope” for the preservation of free government against the Biden Administration’s full-scale attempt to establish despotism in the name of preserving “democracy?” 

Every would-be despot knows that the quickest way to despotism is to promote anarchy: The reason is simple—anarchy is insupportable. Anarchy is the state of nature; civil society and the rule of law is designed to end the state of nature and the anarchy that makes human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Almost any rule is preferable to the state of nature and anarchy. People will choose any rule—even despotism—to prevent anarchy. 

Yet, we see the Biden Administration deliberately promoting crime and race war. It undermines the nation’s sovereignty with its policy of open borders, which promotes illegal immigration—itself a crime leading to further crime. The Biden Administration is also clearly working to destroy the middle class, a long-standing goal of Democratic administrations. Its politicization of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies is evident, as is its use of government agencies to interfere illegally in American elections. 

Skewing the economy by inflationary pressures to benefit ruling class elites and corporations at the expense of the lower and middle classes, and ensuring that the same ruling elites benefit from corrupt dealing with China are but a few of the myriad ways the administration actively promotes anarchy. 

The author (Edward J. Erler) is not very coherent in his remarks on the subject of anarchy, though I get where he's going with the idea. Anarchy is not 'the state of nature,' for example; it is still a form of human organization, just a voluntary one without coercive leadership. It may or may not be sufficient to hold back the dangers of the state of nature, and certainly faces challenges when it comes up against human forms of coercive organization. (Even on his own terms, the argument doesn't make sense; if the state of anarchy were the state of nature, it would not need to be supported in any case -- being natural, it would sustain itself.) We have to recognize that he's adopting a Hobbesian framework, and being imprecise in his discussion of alternatives.

In this framework, the aim of his enemies is to destroy the republic by destroying the order it establishes. This will cause ordinary people to fear the chaos around them, and therefore prime them to accept new despotic terms of rule instead of the constitutional republican order. 

There has already been a long discussion of whether this view is plausible. Throughout the Obama administration the watchword was, "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence." We were, of course, assured of the intelligence of the President and his chosen band of friends, but the media assuring us of that intelligence would not know intelligence nor competence if it were bitten by them. (And that was the administration's opinion too:  Obama's right hand man, Ben Rhodes, described journalists as '26 year olds who literally know nothing.')

Some reasons exist to think that the series of crises of the last few years were at least partly effected in order to create opportunity for political changes that would cement the power structure in ways that would insulate the elite. These changes did in fact rise nearly to the level of chaos, and they came from several directions at once. I can understand how some might even think that the COVID matter was a planned excursion, given that it most likely occurred from a lab leak (which could have been on purpose), followed years of war games on how to deal with pandemics (which should have been the mark of reasoned planning by officials, but which a paranoid sensibility could see as preparation), happened to coincide with riots actually abetted by the government at several levels in order to weaken the police response and which led to frightened citizens, and which pandemic was used to justify a number of changes to election systems that coincided with fortification efforts that resulted in Biden's election. 

Yes, it all does look very suspicious; that doesn't mean the suspicions are accurate. Watching this crew handle the Afghanistan withdrawal, I am convinced they couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag. Even their military leadership seems somehow to have failed to learn how to plan a military operation. As weird as it may seem, veniality and senility, panic and in-group-thinking may explain the chaos better than any planned conspiracy. I don't think they have it in them: they may have sufficient ill will and evil intent, but they haven't the competence or intelligence. 

If that part is wrong, it doesn't make the rest of the analysis wrong: he might still be right about the argument he's having with his friends. It does lower the temperature of the overarching conflict, though. America is not being strangled by an evil elite intent on destroying it; America is dying of old age, as its once-vital institutions ossify, fail, and dissolve into incoherence and disorder. That is a natural process, one that states suffer even as men.