Month: May 2021

When people on our side talk about what’s going on today, they sometimes make analogies to historical situations.  The circumstances in 5^th Century BC Athens, Late Republican Rome, the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War and even Stalinist Russia are all used as analogies for our present-day situation.  But in order to be helpful it’s just as important to understand clearly how our situation differs from these analogies.  Otherwise, decisions will be made based on faulty thinking.

I don’t intend to make an exhaustive comparison between our situation and all these others but I would like to make a few points that I think are useful.

The first comparison I’d like to make is to the American Revolution.  The point of comparison is that in each case there is a side that is chafing under misrule and denial of freedoms.  And especially since these freedoms were specifically enshrined in the Bill of Rights, we look at our situation and feel that maybe the same remedy applies to us.  But let’s look at how our situation differs.

When the Americans kicked the British out of Boston, they were able to make it stick.  England was thousands of miles away across an ocean.  Boston was a port town that possessed a shipbuilding industry and a well-established economy that drew on a well settled countryside that had been growing and expanding for over a hundred and fifty years.  And the outcome of the French and Indian War meant that the American Colonials understood the power of their own military forces versus what troops the British were willing to commit.  And their participation in these earlier wars had made the settlers less dependent on the British for military aid.  Finally, New England was far from an inviting place for the British to fight a war.  The cold snowy winters and forested landscape would provide enormous logistical problems to an occupying army.  That explains why Boston was free of British encroachment throughout the war.  The British probably assumed that they would be able to hold onto at least some areas of the colonies after a protracted war but the Americans also knew that once some areas, like New England, were free of the British, over time the cost of holding onto the others would become increasingly expensive.  So, for the colonists it was a war of wills with time on their side.

Now look at our situation.  Our enemies have reinforced possession of both coasts of the United States including the national capitol and all the major ports except on the Gulf of Mexico.  They have at least as many citizens on their side as we do and they also own the banking system and many of the largest manufacturing corporations.  They also control the communication companies and currently command the military apparatus and all the intelligence services.  They are not going away.  To imagine that we can free ourselves from their grasp quickly and easily is delusional.  They will use all available means to maintain control over the institutions that define life in the United States.  The Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare systems are as fundamental to normal life in the Red States as they are to the Blue.  The banking system is so important to the commercial life of the country that it is hard to see how we would ever disentangle ourselves from it.  But if we were to try to separate from the Blue States, that’s exactly what we would have to do.

So, in the sense that our enemy is not half a world away and not limited as to how much military might it can dedicate to a war, we are much worse off than the colonists.  But in terms of what kind of war we can fight we have much more flexibility and therein lies our best hope.  We do not have to put troops in the field.  We are looking to win hearts and minds and demoralize our enemies.  In that sense what we are attempting is a lot more like what Gandhi and the Indians did to force the British to abandon their Indian Empire.  We are working to destroy the legitimacy of the Progressives’ right to abrogate the constitutional freedoms we have been deprived of.

The specifics of this kind of strategy are figuring out what tactics add cost and misery to the lives of your opponents.  And these tactics will have to change whenever and wherever conditions change.  This type of war is completely familiar to the Left.  This is the Alinsky playbook.  They have used it to dismantle every organization and power structure in this country and make them their own.  We will have to do the same thing in reverse.

In a way our ability to use the Alinsky rules will actually be easier than what the Left originally did in the sixties.  If we can coordinate with Red State governments and protect the protestors from the federal agencies then it should be possible to neutralize federal control over large swaths of the country and return normalcy to those areas.  For instance, suppose Dementia Joe gets the Supreme Court to legitimize gun grabbing.  A countermeasure might be for the governor of a Red State to deputize the whole population as peace officers and allow them ownership of assault rifles as a perk of that office.  Another example, if banks start de-platforming the deplorables the states could punish those banks until they stop.  And if that fails the state can form a bank that can take the place of these enemy institutions.

So, whereas the analogy of our situation to the Revolutionary War is not particularly helpful the common underlying problem in both cases does still have real world solutions.  Just different ones.

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 2 – Civil War Analogy